 Hello there my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Today we are gonna be going on a little bit of a journey, a journey that has concluded today and has a lot of ups and downs and I still don't feel super great about, but I think it was a necessary one. Today I am taking you with me to Puebla, Colorado, which is a place that I have had a pretty much phobia of for eight years now. Many of you guys know that I am a survivor of sexual assault and a very very abusive, manipulative, miserable relationship and the crux of that, the most of that happened in Pueblo. And that city has meant the trauma that I went through. Like so many memories are tied up in that place. The person who did everything to my knowledge is still living down there. But I've really demonized the city in my head for valid reasons and a couple weeks ago I decided it was time to try to form better memories there to try to kind of face that fear in a healthy way and man, it's not an easy thing to do. So let's go back in time to a couple weeks ago, the first time that I went back down there in a very long time. Good morning, my beautiful internet friends. I have a tell. A tell is, you know, when in poker you do something that kind of gives your secrets away. Well, I have that for when I get nervous. I'm gonna go get some coffee. I do this every time before I go to counseling and I have something I have to do today that is simultaneously something I really desperately don't want to do and also something I really do want to do. But last time I did it, it ended really badly. So let's go get some coffee and I'm gonna tell you about what's happening. I did this about a year and a half ago and it ended with me being disassociated for two days. If you don't know what that is, I'll pop the definition up on screen, but it was not great experience. I went down unprepared. We are going down to Pueblo, Colorado, which is about 45 minutes from the area that I live in. I have a work meeting in Pueblo in two days and I didn't want to turn that down and I didn't want to go down without any preparation. So what I'm gonna try to do today is we're going down for brunch and we're gonna try to make some positive memories in Pueblo, Colorado. Places have really strong associations for a lot of people and that is the case for me. So driving down there, like the way that the air feels and the way that the buildings look and just all of that is not great for me. It's a place I've avoided. But first I'm gonna get some coffee because coffee calms my nerves. I know that's counter-intuitive, but I think it's like the warm beverage thing. Safely home, coffee in hands. Our friends are arriving in a couple minutes and we're throwing some jeans and we're gonna do this. So we came to the river walk. Look at all that beautiful water. Getting stared at for people by having a big old mic on my camera. It's good. As my leg flies off, that'd be really good on it. I like how it looks like I'm an important person right now. Camera, everyone else behind me. We just got brunched down here by the river walk. It's really weird to be back in a place where your life changed so dramatically in such a negative way. I think we're gonna head back up to Colorado Springs. We just really wanted to like get down here and make some more positive memories. I think we've done that and I think I'd like to not come back here. So we got down there and I was okay, which I kind of expected because I can sort of disassociate from situations as needed. Not sure how healthy that is, but it is pretty effective sometimes. So I was fine when I was down there. But as soon as we got back to Colorado Springs, as soon as I was like within city limits, all of the anxiety and a bunch of really awful memories started hitting me. So we're back in Colorado Springs and I got home and I left the house with my dog who's in the back seat and drove over to my old apartment complex, my old town home. I lived right over there when everything happened. And every once in a while I get this weird urge to come back here and to drive around the streets that I used to drive around on when my world was broken, when my world was falling apart and sometimes I really appreciate looking at the contrast and I so clearly remember the absolute hopelessness and despair and a feeling I can't describe to you that was so encompassing and so suffocating and so bad. I look at my life now and I'm really proud of it. I've built something that that matters. I have an incredible husband, which I never thought would be possible, and I'm doing so much better than I was before and and how I feel on a daily basis, so it's not perfect. I have really dark days. I struggle with mental health. It's a lot different than it was. I couldn't really see barely to the next day. I spent so much my time wishing I wasn't here anymore and to come back here eight years later and be looking at the place where all of that was contained. Sometimes is a good reminder to me of what I can get through, of what I've gone through and the days following that trip were challenging. They weren't the worst but going back there made it so much more real to me that all of that actually happened. I think I keep it at an arm's length a lot of the time because the details of what occurred are not fun to think about but actually being physically present there brought so much stuff up. But then I kind of equalized, I normalized, and then a couple weeks later I had the meeting down there which happened today. Well guys, the day has finally come and I'm heading back down to Pueblo, Colorado in a snowstorm for that work meeting and I've just not thought about it all day. I don't feel great going down there, but the impact is lessened a little bit. So that's something and we'll see how this time goes. So as you could see Brian came with me because the roads weren't great in our neighborhood so he was sweet enough to drive me in his car down here and I went to drop him off at a coffee shop before my meeting and we got to this intersection and I looked up and I felt like getting punched in the gut because the place that the guy who hurt me used to work was right there very unexpectedly. Like we were just following map directions so I didn't really know where we were and then it was like right there and it's just it's just really weird. It makes it hard to breathe and I don't even know why. So I'm out of red light right now and I'm looking directly at the place that he used to work. I have memories there and I don't like it. In all my conversations with counselors, they always say that trauma is primarily physical and I feel it. I feel it a lot. I am looking forward to getting out of the city. It's done. I did the thing. I went to the meeting and now I get to go home and not in Pueblo. Thank God. So I'm sitting in my house now and it's done. I have done what I needed to do. I got things completed and I don't have to go down there again if I don't want to probably ever and I'll be honest I never really want to go back down there. I'm really glad that I chose to do this, that I chose to face what I wanted to face but it doesn't do good things to my brain. Like when we came back from Pueblo we sat in a coffee shop for a little while and all of the like paranoias about people that I know and trust started like popping back up. Like thinking that everyone I know is secretly a horrible abuse of miserable human being who's probably a sex offender and it's hard for me to break that mindset. It's been really hard for me to trust people again. I think being back down there triggers PTSD for me and just brings up icky things and I get very fearful and very jumpy and very scared and I know that that's going to die down. I know that I'm going to be okay. One of the hardest things for me is that he is still walking around free. Nothing really happened to him and it wasn't just me that he hurt. Nothing significant happened. He's still living down there. I know where he lives. It's really painful to me that he just gets to live life. He just gets to exist. He just gets to hang out with his family. He's actually no longer on the sex offender registry because in Colorado if you get on it, it's not lifetime which I don't think should exist for certain kinds of crimes but it's the case and so he's walking around free. If you google his name, which I'm not gonna say here you'll find nothing. You will find nothing about the horrible things he's done. The actual crimes he has committed that he's been convicted for not just accusations. You won't find anything and so the next girl that he meets that he charms that he tries to date if she tries to look him up, she's not going to find anything and I think that that is such a tragedy. I'm grateful to be back home and safe and warm and protected but man it's weird to travel back in time. The person that I am now and have so many things come back up so I'm gonna do my very best to take care of myself the next few days to focus on doing healthy things and calming things for me and my nervous system which is a little bit fried right now but all in all I'm proud of myself for going back down there and doing it in the best way that I knew how. I feel like this was more just like of a vlog and a story time that I normally do so if you made it this far, thanks for watching. I really appreciate it. This isn't an easy subject for me to talk about but it's one that I feel like is important to share sometimes so thanks for listening. A big thank you to all of my patrons over on Patreon for supporting me. If you're interested in what that's about, I'll leave a link on the screen but thank you for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me. I truly appreciate it. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.