I felt a calm confidence about myself yesterday. I thought: I can do this. I can get my life back together. I can pursue a livelihood as a writer. The barrier to entry is pretty limited, or so it seems. Magazines claim to read entries anonymously, but I can’t imagine that some or even most of them don’t play favorites.

Well, whatever caused that confidence is gone. Today feels like I am under an ocean. I guess it will return. It typically does. The confidence, that is. It returns, and then it leaves again. It is such a beautiful day to feel depressed.

Someone emailed yesterday to see how I was doing. I did not respond yet, though I intended to. I finally got the fucking tax refund. It was a bit less than I expected. I must have misread the amended return. At least it is something, and maybe I can finally plan that little trip up north.

I’ve been having troubling and nauseating flashbacks to my father’s funeral. The crack of gunfire was the last sound he ever heard. The volunteer corp that performed the 21 gun salute at his service could have had no idea that my sister and I felt small vomits of horror rise up when we realized what was about to happen. The noblest intentions of the honorable ritual were completely turned around. It felt like a firing squad. I don’t know if a request to forgo the salute would have been honored, given its established place in the military funeral tradition. But I don’t think any of us would have had the poise to aniticipate making such a request.

Remembering it now I recall feeling like the guns were pointed at us. Firing squad, indeed. The moment ended and all I wanted was for the bullets to land. I don’t think they ever did.

Therapy has been turning up one forgotten trauma after another. I guess that funeral incident qualifies as a trauma. She said that traumas like this have been proven to register permanently in the brain. It doesn’t matter how old you are. Traumas induced at childhood are no less potent than those accrued later in life. If anything your adult defense mechanisms mute your desire to confront the horror of a moment, or the indignity of a humiliation. Versus the confrontation of childhood traumas, induced when you were too young to understand, and which take years to crystallize in their significance. It never wanes.

She told me yesterday that had been a dancer. I could have guessed from her waifish physique. She said she didn’t want to tell me on account of my having dated a dancer long ago. And not just that but she said she was intimidated by my possible reaction to knowing she had been a dancer on account of the way I described finally seeing that dancer I had dated perform. She was the worst dancer I had ever seen. She mostly stays professional but I get a pretty distinct sense that she opens up more with me than she does with her other patients.

But I don’t know if that is altogether good. This therapy has made me feel more vulnerable than ever.