My brain has been boiled. It has been boiled by trauma, and by substances that I have “self medicated” on in the past to try to repress that trauma. I don’t have a gun because I have PTSD, and I know the truth about myself, which is that I over react to a lot of things. It’s embarrassing. I’m better than I used to be. Years of anger management have made a huge difference. And it also really helps that I haven’t binged on meth in almost ten years. I don’t take my limitations for granted.
What is obvious about what isn’t normal about me is that I’m a bit like Sophia on Golden Girls. My filter isn’t completely gone, but a lot of things come out of my mouth before I can stop them. “Thinking” and “saying” happen simultaneously too often. It seems like an impulse control issue, but it’s really a defense mechanism. It’s a way for me to take control of the situation when I don’t feel safe. It is hard for me to stop myself from using my mouth as weapon, or distraction, or whatever angle is needed to make me feel safe again. It’s a reaction not a response.
So bearing in mind that I already spend way too much time back peddling things I shouldn’t have said that came out of my mouth before I could stop them, imagine how much trouble I could get into with a gun. Not just the trouble I could get into with the gun itself, but the trouble I could get into with my mouth feeling overly self righteous and confident knowing that I had one. And another factor is at almost ten years free from meth, I still feel extremely vulnerable and don’t take a day of my sobriety from that substance for granted. Buying a gun seems like something my inner fear based addict self wants to do. My sobriety self tries to seek peaceful solutions. My sobriety self doesn’t need a gun.
But on an even deeper level, I don’t want to live in a world where I have to have a gun to navigate safely. Couldn’t we all just watch reruns of Bonanza and stay home? Call me a hippie, but I still feel that there is more heroism in civil disobedience and progressive action than running out and buying a death toy from manufacturers who are creating incentives for crimes, inspired by products that are merely being employed for their intended use. Furthermore, it takes a lot more courage not to have a gun in this society than it takes to have one, and I’m not giving my power away to fear based thinking.
This is my plan of action on a daily basis when I am overwhelmed by visions of bullets flying, children in cages crying, and hate crimes rising:
1. Face the day. I wake up from an entire night of horrible dreams that are combinations of the massacres and the events they trigger from layers of earlier traumas that go back to childhood. It’s hard to sort out what is memory and what is stuff I saw on the news, because dreams are hard to remember. I try to avoid too much news, but I can’t avoid hearing about the massacres even when I go offline. Everybody’s talking about them.
2. Write it down. I’m so used to flashbacks and nightmares, they don’t freak me out as much anymore. I write stuff down in my journal before I forget it, because it helps reintegrate the left/right brain connection that has kept my memory from functioning “correctly.” This way I can turn the flashbacks into a healing process, learning from the story that is bleeding out and taking time to integrate and heal instead of going off indefinitely like a broken fire alarm.
3. Take your medication as prescribed.
4. Meditate, investigate and evaluate. I meditate for at least an hour before I get out of the house. This helps me focus on where I am now. I may be afraid to go outside, because maybe something horrible will happen. But when I meditate, I can calm down, wake up and realize that “now, I am safe. Now I am alive. Now I have a dog who loves me, who needs a walk…”
5. Yoga Helps. Especially Kundalini yoga, because it strengthens the central nervous system and helps the body and mind become stronger and more prepared to endure through extremely stressful situations. Also great for arthritis and depression.
6. Get out of the house. Walking my dog, Darwin, is always a big event. In 2011, I had become so avoidant of any situation that might trigger me in public, I developed agoraphobia. If my dog didn’t need at least three walks a day, I never would have left the house. Some days are still like that, especially when there has been another mass shooting. I get out of the house and walk out the door on these mornings because my dog, Darwin needs to do his business, and because I refuse to live in fear, even though I’m scared shitless and usually too ashamed to admit it.
7. Socialize. I walk my dog to coffee, so I’m around people, because every day facing social anxiety and hoping I don’t get triggered in public and that no one will notice I’m different makes me want to go back home and hide again, and I don’t want to live that way. So I make myself break out of isolation.
8. Fake it till you make it. My mask is friendly, so people who say hello to my dog and me have no idea how anxious I am. They just think that I’m “quirky.” “Quirky” is me trying to act normal so you won’t know I’m “broken.”
9. Workout. Next I go to the gym, another exercise in breaking out of social isolation.
10. Get Busy. Work, work, work, but don’t go crazy.
11. Reach out. I’m starting to go back to 12 step meetings again, which is breaking me out of isolation even more. I still haven’t talked about how triggered I am, but everybody else there seems to be triggered enough in their own right. That’s when I start to remember I’m not special, and it’s a huge relief, because that means we’re really all in this together. We are all “Angels in America” when we reach out our hands to our friends and neighbors.
I’m writing about this because I am just another elephant in the room. You will see me and others like me, and notice that we’re different. We over react. We’ve developed outward personalities that mask our pain so you don’t see us. Because we don’t want to be different. And we don’t want you to ask us how we got this way. Because we can’t remember completely. And we can never fully forget either. And we wish we could. We just can’t.
I always think of John Goodman’s character in The Great Lewbowski as a perfect model, perhaps exaggerated, of the worst and most comical I can be as someone with PTSD. Hyper vigilant, martyred, too loud because the “bombs” are still going off in my head, judgmental, controlling, and frequently in denial of all the above, especially when it is true and happening in the moment.
Here is the thing that it seems most people who don’t have PTSD don’t understand. It is an extremely confusing and painful condition. Triggers cause flashbacks that activate dormant memories in the brain that haven’t been integrated. This causes the brain to oscillate between past and present, like a time machine off kilter. Let’s say I’m crossing the street and I’m triggered. My feet are on the street, but my brain is suddenly somewhere else, and my body is having a somatic memory of being somewhere else, and then I’m aware of where I am again, and then I’m gone again, almost like a strobe light flashing two timelines in my brain. It’s extremely disorienting. Sometime it makes me so dizzy I have to grab on to something for support. It’s a terrifying experience, because it feels like you are out of control. The only way I have learned deal with it is to breathe through it, and to stay grounded, and remember where I am in the moment without trying to repress the flashbacks. It is a lot of work. And I’ve been trying to hide it from everyone most of my life.
I’m not sharing this because I want sympathy. I hate that. The reason I’m sharing this is because I know that I am not alone. I know that there are millions maybe even billions of other people like me who suffer silently hoping no one will notice that we are trapped in the upside down and can’t get out. I’m talking about this because the hardest thing about PTSD is the alienation.
I wonder how many of the mad men who have perpetrated these massacres had PTSD, or some other mental “disorder.” I wonder how many of them were triggered and frightened and heavily medicated before they struck out. We see them as monsters, but the truth is, they are humans who fell through the cracks because they didn’t know how to reach out, and we didn’t know how to reach them either or we would have.
I hope that this confession of mine, which everybody who knows me already knows, helps open up a conversation about living with PTSD in turbulent times. Because when you look at the suicide rates, which are soaring at the moment, it isn’t hard to imagine that a lot of those suicides were people with PTSD who couldn’t hold on any longer. And what many people struggling with PTSD are hiding behind their distant smiles is the secret that they live sometimes daily and sometimes for long periods of time feeling at best, latently suicidal. Because living with PTSD when massacres are mainstream is hard for everyone, but especially for people who have already been through hell. We don’t want to go back. And when the world is so crazy you can barely put your shoes on in the morning because the fire alarm in your head won’t shut off, it’s hard to put one foot in front of the other once your laces are tied.
But the world is still spinning.
The sky is still blue.
And I will choose love over fear and try my best to be kind to myself and others today. And Tomorrow. And the day after that. And I won’t buy a gun.
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