Past Tense, Present Progressive

I'm an introvert and a bit of a homebody .  So during the early months of the pandemic, why did I frequently find myself pacing the perimeter of my home like an agitated and caged wild animal, feeling trapped and intensely desperate... as if I had suddenly been transported back into the severe social isolation of my teenaged years as a fundamentalist homeschooler ? As a mom of two high-maintenance kids with dramatically different needs from each other, I provide emotional support on a daily basis, for problems of all sizes... so why did my nervous system frequently react to their big emotions as if there were a true crisis, leaving me continuously drained with nothing left for myself? It turns out that these types of experiences are called emotional flashbacks, and they are a common symptom of Complex-PTSD.  Through some recent therapy, I found my way to a book that has been incredibly important to my childhood trauma healing process.  In fact, from my reading, I ended up with over

 As someone with a lifelong history of anxiety, also affected by the profound sleep loss that often accompanies new parenthood, it took years for me to realize that I was increasingly unwell and needed professional help.  I told myself: it's just that I have a very difficult baby who won't sleep (and who was diagnosed with autism years later).  That seamlessly transitioned to our second baby, two nighttime wakers, two in diapers, and two who needed constant supervision and exhausting emotional management.  Nothing on earth was more important to me than their well-being, and I was lucky to have a caring husband actively sharing that load with me.  But my sanity was cracking more and more, and I was stuck in a hyper-vigilant obsession, micromanaging the kids' environment, demanding the kind of impossible perfection from myself and my husband that doesn't just solve problems but somehow prevents them instead. Even then, an awareness in the back of my mind recognized that