Little Bit (Post) Traumatic
Trigger warning: for almost everything. Avoid reading this if you’re even remotely weary of any TWs and/or not in an okay space.
Sometimes I feel I’m constantly spewing labels in regards to my “being.” But you just gotta name your demons so you can exercise them and move on, man. I never mean to wear something as a badge of honor, but I do find being unafraid of the darker parts of who I am is certainly important, especially when so many of us share those parts. Sure, telling my story is therapeutic for me, but my cliche hope that it’s equally so for even one person whose eyes land here.
That said, diving right in: I suffer from PTSD. “Wow. SUREEEE,” you mutter with a little eye roll. And yeah, it is sure. Unfortunately sure. Me and PTSD being together seems unfathomable because PTSD is always illustrated as this frenetic behemoth of chaos that fills up every room it enters, but it’s just another one of those life things. We all encounter bullshit along the way. Some of that bullshit happens to be monumental enough to cause PTSD or PTSS.
Post traumatic stress disorder occurs, as teased quite obviously by the name, after trauma. And traumas are tricky. We, as a collective group, tend to think traumas are always HUGE and highly visible. But lemme tell ya, that’s simply not the case. Frankly, while war trauma is fucking horrific, unfair, and unparalleled, it is not the only trigger for PTSD. Car accidents and being a frontline worker (even pre-COVID) can cause PTSD. Experiencing a natural disaster or a man-made disaster such as 9/11 — PTSD. Violent events, such as robbery, sexual assault, rape, molestation, and domestic violence are, without question, causes of PTSD. That’s not even the full roster of triggers, so hopefully this paints a decent enough picture of how and why so many people have it… and why they don’t all talk about it: because what they experience doesn’t *look* the way it’s “supposed” to.
PTSD presents very, very differently. There are four types, which I’ll let the folks at the MayoClinic break down for you better than I. Sometimes it’s linear and goes away; other times it comes and goes for years. There is no one way to get PTSD, so of course there is no one way to experience PTSD.
Mine stems from the combination of opioid overdose, death itself, and finding a dead body; those stay my triggers. I’m not gonna sugarcoat the experience. The combination zapped the fuck out of my brain, and my amygdala and prefrontal cortex have never been the same.
If you know me, you know the story. Even if you don’t know me, you may have been reading long enough to know the story. If you don’t know the story, I honestly don’t wanna tell it all the way through for the 1,000th time. I’ve experienced too many instances of “Look at her with her dramatic sob story”s and “UGH, get over it already!”s, so I hesitate to talk about my own damn life even though I have every natural right to do so. (More on that in a bit.) So while I feel it offensive to both myself and to his memory to whittle this down to such a snippet, here’s the Twitter-length version:
I found my high school boyfriend dead after he accidentally overdosed on opioids. I loved him almost too much, so I didn’t see any red flags leading up to the moment. That trauma cocktail led me into a horrendous vortex of PTSD, starring one of the worst symptoms: survivor’s guilt. It did not help that, despite having a surprisingly large and supportive inner circle, everyone else was pretty shitty in terms of gossip and blame. Actually, pretty shitty doesn’t even cover it… more like horrifically hurtful, selfish, and hateful, not to mention painfully, DREADFULLY un- and misinformed.
That toxic reaction paired with my survivor’s guilt is my “this why it’s so hard to talk about my PTSD experience out loud” reason. Despite knowing I’m allowed to; despite knowing being open with this shit is important as it’s dangerously shrouded in darkness otherwise. Luckily as I’ve gotten older, every time my brain tries to chicken shit out of speaking my truth, I am able to remind myself he always told me he wanted the best for me, to never hold me back… and stifling my truth and pain for others’ sake holds me back, so I do what he’d want me to do.
PTSD is consuming. I used to have panic attacks just going back to my home town. (I can still barely go back.) I would do something as simple as shower when my sight would literally just become a flashback; yes, the actual scene in front of me would legit disappear, and I would be right back in that room. I was terrified to go to sleep because he did and never woke up. Sometimes I could barely remember what happened, which alternated with remembering everything in the most vivid of detail. I had to medically withdraw from the first college I went to because I couldn’t stop having someone-drive-to-the-ER-level (and they did) panic attacks. Songs, smells, words, and even just stories could send me into a panic or a flashback or both. When I did sleep, I would wake up already sobbing and shaking/freezing. I would focus so intensely on my guilt of the one being alive that I would spiral into a literal dark place, especially if I made any mistake or any choice that would make people question “why him and not her?”. And of course—the classic—I numbed myself with drinking (but no drugs because I couldn’t even be around them anymore), partying, boys… whatever distracted me enough so I wouldn’t panic or go to sleep or hurt or remember. I can’t even type this right now without shaking, and my heart is pounding, too. Most of these trigger responses are largely in the past, same as the tense in which they were listed. But off-and-on, especially lately, they still take over. There is no pattern; I have no control over when it happens and what I will experience when it does.
Therapy helped kinda, but I never found a great therapist. The workbook one of them gave me was helpful until halfway through when I decided I hated everything it said. (To be fair, I still have it on my shelf and upon a quick skim, it really is garbage.) I tried my own form of immersion therapy by watching a lot of documentaries on the opioid crisis once people finally started acknowledging it and investigating it, but my response was always a crapshoot. It still is. (I just watched The Crime of the Century and thought I would be okay, but I was … not.) Researching PTSD on my own while pushing through to touch big life milestones did and has helped the most, but I still feel largely alone in my experience. I think a lot of people who have PTSD feel alone.
When I search for answers about that feeling of isolation, the only culprit I find YET AGAIN is our society’s shit attitude toward mental health. That stiff-upper-lip, man-up, pain-is-weakness, no-negativity attitude gaslights people into thinking their depression is wrong, or worse, fake. But the behemoth that is PTSD? Forget about it. Shut up. Don’t mention it. It’s your problem, not anyone else’s. We don’t talk about it at the dinner table because this is America, land of your-problems-are-invalid. With that slant, why WOULDN’T I only know maybe 2 people who have ever actually spoken about their own experiences openly? Why wouldn’t there be studies confirming an increase in deaths by suicide and suicidal ideation in PTSD sufferers. (There’s nothing linked here because there are also studies that report no connection, and I have no proper training to delineate which studies have better data.) Why wouldn’t finding meaningful resources just to write this be harder than it should have? Just look at the way we portray sufferers of PTSD in the media. The stories are all the same and always about the same people, and those people are always illustrated as crazy. The way we hide PTSD only to demonize it when we DO acknowledge it is nauseating at best but mostly just grossly irresponsible.
As usual, I’ve kind of hopscotched from one box to another with no true idea of how to tie everything together with a beautiful bow, but it’s kind of fitting here. PTSD is just a series of ups and downs, left and rights, I dunnos, and wtfs. It’s all over the place, just like my disjointed thoughts and writing. Maybe that’s why I can’t quite glue everything together the right way. Or maybe I’ve just always sucked at picking a thesis and having to conclude it at that. Probably both. ANYWAY…
June 27th is PTSD Awareness Day, which I didn’t even know until I was researching. While stumbling across something so “big” felt par for the shitty course, it also felt like a sign reinforcing that it truly is time to write this to acknowledge and share my experience, as well as bring PTSD out of the shadows. I hope it helps you if you need it. I hope it helps you to be kind because you never know who needs kindness. I hope it reminds you to check in on people. I hope it helps you understand. I hope it inspires you help someone else whenever you can. I hope one day all the right people are writing about this instead. I hope soon there are adequate resources readily available for any and all PTSD sufferers…