a description of some difficult things

I’ve been thinking about how to create a cheerful-enough introduction to not be off-putting and also impersonal enough to not be something that could be used against me (checking all the possible failure modes) but there just is not a way to stick to those guidelines and say anything really honest right now, so lets just dive in and see how long it gets.  Short summary: hypervigilance is a bummer.  I’m supposed to be completing a lot of work from home right now, or at the very least sleeping, sounds like as good a time as any to begin.

I have had a tough couple of weeks.  I mean, I have been carrying around some sad and will probably write some gloomy stuff about that later, but this is not what I mean.  I’m having a PTSD flare-up, and it is just difficult to get to the other side. 

I have had PTSD for all my adult life and maybe some of it in my childhood. Hard to tell, it took years to build the self-awareness to identify some of the things as symptoms.  It was the worst right after I graduated from college (I experience a few different types of privilege most of the time), something about being totally financially independent triggered it in an intense way and threw my whole world of kilter.  I lost my job, was failing grad school and tried to stay in with help from disability services but then had to drop out mid-semester anyway and just leave the rest of the department scrambling to find people to teach my lab sections, was having many flashbacks a day, sometimes visual but mostly auditory and sensory, wow just describing it feels a little risky, remembering sensory flashbacks will drop me back into them pretty reliably and they can last a long time and then leave me worn out and weird for hours or maybe days.

Ok took a breath and a minute away and am ok. So where were we. Right. That period in my life was … extremely uncomfortable.  It seemed like I was constantly feeling like I was a little kid being assaulted while trying to go about my day, either my skin was crawling away from some sensation or my spatial awareness was reporting that I needed to make it stop or it just felt the way it does when some gross threatening jerk is all up in your personal space on a bus and everything in your body is trying to pull away and get some personal space, it would feel like that only there was no actual thing to move away from, I was just stuck feeling like getting away was what I desperately needed. I felt out of my skull, like my brain was on fire and my skin was crawling and my hackles were raised and I was busy.dealing.with.danger all the time, even though that danger was actually years in the past.  

So during that time I put together enough focus to figure out how to get another job and keep living in the room I rented.  My housemates were wonderful, they covered me for a full month (until I could pay) so I could stay, and they tolerated all kinds of weirdness as I tried to figure out how to feel ok.  I just wanted to crawl out of my body for long enough to catch my breath, it didn’t matter that it felt like it would take a lifetime of motionless silence to truly catch my breath (is that a sort of depression?) I still would have killed for a single moment of not feeling tormented.  And then another moment, and another of course, that kind of panic never really settles into ‘normal’.  I had tried drinking it away and that helped some for a while, and when that stopped working and I was still awake for days at a time and begging my stronger self to have the strength to put me down and still just living through it even more miserable than before was what finally drove me to get some professional help.  And the therapist that I found absolutely saved my life.  And then she taught me how to save my own.  I think she is a bluegrass/folksinger now, it has been over a decade and facebook still suggests that I might know her every now and then. 

So why start here?  I am so much more functional and self aware now, living is so so so so much better and I am able to manage symptoms and recognize triggers and heal through some things and just sit with other things and I have had nice romantic relationships and healthy practice setting boundaries and moving them only when I want to and recognizing and respecting other people’s boundaries, and I get to enjoy sex and feel ok about it and I developed the coping mechanisms necessary to be able to sit in the flamingskullcrawlingskin awful times and not need to kill myself or rage or drink or destroy or self-destruct.  It is only when they get really frequent that I get discouraged about living through more of it, and my current therapist is great at reminding me of what it is like on the other side, why it might be worth it to live through it again.  Mix that with the depression and isolation and broken familial relationships that kind of go along with this mix and it is real easy for me to introvert more and let life feel smaller and smaller until it just feels pointless and probably nobody would miss me.  I have been struggling with that on and off for at least a year, but I’m winning.  Lucky doesn’t even start to describe it, but luckily the job I have is so fulfilling and engaging and full of good people and straightforward reward cycles that do not depend on understanding social cues and then trusting your interpretation of it (that stuff is so stressful, I am so tired of fucking up again) luckily my job keeps me going.  Some weeks I really do live for it, it is something that I can understand and do and get a clear fully fixed in reality result even when nothing else makes sense.  Maybe co-workers will be friendly, maybe someone will say good job, but if am doing what I am supposed to do and getting unambiguous results then there is the gold star training kibble lever full of grapes, you do this and you get a good. It is a thing that I can do every day to not feel like a deeply horrible disaster. I can lean on that so hard that it keeps me living until I can feel for myself why living is worth it.  I am so lucky.

So that is the background, a description of some aspects of what it is like to live with PTSD from childhood trauma.  But that is not where I have been lately.  Sure, holidays are difficult and I spent thanksgiving alone and didn’t talk to anyone for days and was happiest on the day before going back to work, so sure I might cry a lot more but it doesn’t feel intolerable.  And also I have a lot of optimism.  I have relationships with people that I am going to figure out how to maintain, people who have shown me that they aren’t going anywhere just because I get weird.  I have put together a stable life, a warm calm safe home and lots of plants teaching me how to turn toward the sunlight and some wonderful furballs to keep me honest (is that what that means?) and even better, lately I have had this feeling like somebody loves me.  You know that lightness in your step when you are going home to your sweetie or even just knowing that they are out there and holding you in their heart with love, lately I have been feeling that glowy light a little.  My friends are great and my extended family is a wild and interesting mix but this is like that you love your person and your person loves you feeling.  So things had been on an upswing.

Then something triggered a ton of hypervigilance.  I thought I was having heart problems for a while, all sweaty and breathing fast and shallow and shoulder or neck or back or chest pain.  Lie awake for hours every night running through all the things I need to do right now or all the different ways I fucked up (remember that thing you said during that one-night-stand 12 years ago? That was awful, you’re awful, be horrified/embarrassed right now.  You’re a jerk, self. But also pack a go-bag or you won’t be able to run when ICE raids your house tomorrow. But you wont be safe until you do these 80 things, you need to figure out the right order to do them in right now.)  During the day my heart is pounding, I’m stuck unable to focus at my desk, then racing around and then getting dizzy from all the shallow breathing and pausing to breathe more and in that moment feeling that tense vibrating panic rise up and wrap around my ribcage and then all they way up to choke me.  I spend all day with my body feeling…feeling like that moment when you are alone at night and absolutely sure that there is someone right outside, and it is just after the initial adrenaline hits (when I get too much adrenaline hits then I get ragey and pick fights at work, some days that trips when anything goes wrong like being cut in line or forgetting something at my desk or dropping a cup of tea. Today I had to keep telling myself don’t be a bitch its not a big deal don’t be a bitch) so imagine the moment right after adrenaline hits, so you can move again and think a little but your heart is still pounding in your ears and all of your muscles are tense and quivery and you crouch next to the bed running through your options, should I wait it out here, or hide are they coming inside, or do I have time to grab my keys and flee out the front, can I make that much noise or do they maybe not know that I am here, can I get to my phone, can I use it without giving away my position?  That level of panic. But the options are what order should I do my work tasks, what house chores are the most important for when it all starts, what do I need to do what do I need to do I hate you you are awful you are beyond awful you should be ashamed for every single interaction you have ever had you don’t deserve safety you should just curl up and die you should die of shame.  Right, so people tell me that I look tired at work, and I’m extra tired by the end of the day and don’t always walk the dog or eat dinner or brush my teeth or change out of work clothes. I take my ptsd sleep meds and get a little calm and drowsy, maybe my muscles relax a little. But when I close my eyes I can feel the panic about what should I do and how can I even live with myself rise up in my body, I try to talk calm to myself but I can feel it building up and shortening my breath and pushing loud my heart and drowning my ribs in tension. In tense alertness.  So I tell myself to be calm and breathe some more, and then lie awake for a few more hours, and then am really tired the next morning when it is time to do it again.  And when I am tired I am (like most people) less resilient, closer to crying or shouting or getting hit with another flood of adrenaline.  So that is the cycle that I am on.  I really need a lighter workload and more time flexibility right now, but instead I have the opposite, at least until the end of the year.  Last week I was falling asleep a little earlier but having tense dreams where I would wake up in the middle with my body so stiff it felt like I was hovering above the bed, and then jolting awake at 4am to start thinking about what to do and what might have changed.  So it turns out I am less resilient to external stressors than I thought, guess it is good that I’m not an astronaut.

This isn’t really the introduction I was hoping for.  I was trying to wait until a day when I was feeling most ok and connected to the world, so that I could talk about the garden, or how I come to religion, or philosophies of science and the mind, something friendly, something easy.  Maybe I’ll edit this one day to make it into something that is actually meant for other people to read.  But for now, for you, if you made it this far, it has been an honor to have held your attention. Bienvenidos a mi cerebro, una ves mas.