Long recovery

 I have recovered from covid. Yes, I don't have fever anymore, I don't cough often and I do smell even my baby's nappy.

However recovering will take some more time from chronic fatigue, anxiety and inability to focus. Covid attacks the weak points of the body. I am healing step by step from PTSD I am discovering the symptoms and effects of it day by day. By the way it is actually PTS, not PTSD as experiencing stress as a result of a trauma is not disorder. It means you have a healthy way of thinking.

One of such effects I have just discovered is the moment I have been deprived of my womanhood. Strange enough, it happened only a few months or weeks after my marriage, in a rather intimate situation. My husband practically said that I was not interesting as I am. Of course he sugar-coated it in a joke, but something broke inside me. I was not the woman he was blown away from. He had previously played to me the most romantic song, he wrote me poetry - inspired lines and talked to me every day for months. Yet when I left my promising future and chose him over my life in London, he was fantasising about others.

From that moment on I stopped being a woman. I became his servant, trying to please him every way. I accepted everything he told me and it has not been long when he explicitly asked me if he can remarry.

I felt wanting something different from him would be a tragedy. I wasn't strong enough to take a stand against him. And I think he knew that. I was fighting - but not against him, against myself. And the result was what I called "complicity". I felt that's the solution I can keep him: if I can't be the love of his life, I'll be his best pal, his good friend he can tell everything to. And that's what I became - just to be with him.

So we became "halal friends with extras" and we could have a great marriage as such... If I didn't have a heart and a soul that were starving. 

But I only know it now. 

Then I struggled to keep my feeling of being neglected down and took his physical closeness as my regular dose of emotional security and reassurance of being loved. 

Then God took this drug away from me. 

It was difficult and I went through all the phases. I was blaming everyone else, though inside somewhere I felt I wasn't right. I was fantasising about him coming back, but it was totally away from any sort of reality. I still wanted to keep the facade of this non-existent marriage in front of others and ourselves but it became less and less possible. To create a new home and security for my baby and my adolescent was hard enough, I couldn't carry more burden. 

Step by step I started to allow myself to be angry with him. There was no point in pretending anymore. Until one pink morning in a blessed month I decided to put down this burden. I saw myself and I realised how much alien I this life I had been living was.

Now I just want to breath fresh air into my lungs. To see the colours of the sky. To hear the singing of the birds. To laugh carelessly. To dream and to make it come true. To dance to my favourite tunes. 

And not to walk on eggshells.