[Journal] A Monster Wants To Be A Girl // Healing From PTSD
A therapist earlier this year asked me, "How do you imagine your ideal life to be?
I said, "I want my emotions to be appropriate to the situation I'm in. I don't expect to wake up with no problems, but I want those problems to be real, not something engendered by my PTSD and trauma."
I am 27 years old, and I’ve been telling myself that by the time I’m 30 I want a new set of problems.
I’d like to do it sooner, but I would settle for age 30 to not wake up every day like I’m falling to pieces. To have more good days than bad days. To not feel like I keep failing people I love because of all the abusive patterns in my heart that makes me so scared of abandonment. I want to have one of my most difficult problems to be what I should write for my next novel, or what I should do that day to make myself more happy, or what I can begin to build to have a more fulfilling life with the people that I love.
Over the course of the last several months, the ineffable monster inside of me has begun to slowly transform into something of a manageable problem. Not an inevitability, not a wellspring of sadness gushing out of the inside of my stomach. But a problem, like anything else.
To change the course of a life with mechanisms built so tight - with sadness like a desert - is one of the most difficult things I think a person can do. But I know it’s possible.
I’ve had days now where I’ve felt the weight of -her- like a dead cicada shell. And I’ve felt happiness, because I could see the substantial weight and the reality of the things that were built around. It wasn’t an illusion, and it wasn’t a trick. It was real.
I can feel her now. Nameless. The alter-ego. The abuser. She’s blinking a little on my right shoulder, with heavy breath and frozen teeth. She tells me, “I’ll take everything you love until you learn to love losing.”
It has to be possible. Because I have things I don’t want to lose now. And I have gotten very close to losing them. And what is the point of being alive, of trying to build a life, if everything that you ever wanted, everything that you ever built, every scrap of happiness or warmth, is destroyed right in front of your eyes.
Not by fate. Not by luck. But by your own hands.
That’s the worst part. There is no consolation that things were just “not meant to be”, or “you’ll do better next time.” or “That guy was a jerk anyway.” There’s no consolation for someone like me that the hands of fate are going to land me somewhere better, or that it’s all collapsing around me because it wasn’t built to be sustainable anyway.
It’s because I was terrified of being abandoned, and I was scared of being unloved, and so I stuck my hands deep into something beautiful and tried to tear its heart out.
People like me with that kind of attitude don’t get tea and cookies and condolences when they screw up. People like me either get killed or outcast or go to jail. Because there’s no excuse for being so horrible, no matter what kind of heavy, impossible pain you carry.
It’s not acceptable to me anymore to be unhappy. It’s not acceptable to me anymore to keep tearing the hearts out of lambs and dogs and uprooting trees so I won’t have to accept their sudden loss. I’m never going to be God. I’m never going to predict the trajectory of the movement of the universe. I can’t mitigate loss. But I can stop myself from being the thing that always makes me lose.
People keep telling me that writers are supposed to be sad. That misery is the only way to create good art. But that is the most unacceptable, lazy attitude about the process that I've heard. It allows inaction as an acceptable course. Not only it is untrue, it is a tacit acceptance of sitting in front of a midnight ocean wave because you feel like you can’t stand up and get off the beach. It is a refusal to even look at the problem that brought you to that moment.
I keep thinking of how difficult it is to write. Not difficult in the sense that I just need to put brute force into. To get it right requires skill and finesse - it requires knowing what to do at each moment, knowing the language and the context - no amount of ramming your head against a wall and “trying” to get it right next time is going to produce a great novel.
It starts with seeing. And in the middle is work. And the seeing, and the context, and the work, never really ends. Not if you want to be great.
So it is the same with being happy. With taking care of things that you love. And if it’s important enough to you, you’ll do it.
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Stock photo from Pixabay
Self portrait by me canon t51
Some of my other posts you may be interested in:
Nine Things I Learned From Reading A Lot Of Books
[Short Story] CrystalMouth: An Excerpt from My Book Ecstatic Inferno
[Short Story] The Azalea Girl and Her Paingod
[Fictional Memoir] In The Palace of Bones & Champagne
How to Have Fun Writing Again
[Journal] How I Broke Through The Barrier of Dreams // Cognitive and Disassociation Techniques
[Short Story] You Don't Get To Fall In Love
I'm quite old and have been through much and processed much. All that means is my perspective may be different than one younger and still in the crossfire of youth. I was fortunate enough not to be traumatized as a child by my two decent parents, such was not the case with many of my friends in the years I went full Kerouac (and Bukowski, Kesey, etc.) Most of those 'souls' are long dead now by self-inflicted wounds. I remember Steve who froze to death in The Ottawa Valley hitch-hiking; at times I would visit him in his rooming house and he had the most macabre art work on his walls from the blood from shooting up......
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On a positive note, an old friend from those days dropped into Vancouver recently...He's one that is alive and doing well...As I hope y'all are, too:)
You're amazing. Please keep writing--I'm so glad you're here.
And.. I really support the process you're in. It takes courage; you're courageous to admit all of this, and to keep fighting. Please keep fighting! I understand the writer's sadness, and due to some of my own traumatic events in childhood have often wondered if I have some form of complex PTSD as well--you describe pieces of me very in this, although my experience has been less acute. My trauma has manifested, I think, primarily in physical health issues, and I always assume there is a connection there.
Anyway - really glad we connected here, and looking forward to your work.
Thanks so much @kayclarity. PTSD can definitely induce physical health issues - I have a lot of issues with sleep.
Great post! Just followed! Follow me, too? :)
Somehow you read this in 41 seconds of me posting it, eh?
I still don't quite know how to talk about my own experience with PTSD, but maybe reading this got me a step closer. Thank you.
It took me a long time to figure out what was even going on with me. I just assumed I'd go through periods of insanity unaware that I was experiencing a flashback. It took even longer for me to write about it.
Yeah it took someone incredibly close to me with psychological experience telling me. I don't think I would have figured out on my own because I don't think I ever guessed I'd be someone with PTSD.
You wrote recently about the difficulty of describing an authentic epiphany, and I think singular moments of realization depend on countless quiet moments of reflection that cumulatively change the course of one's life.
You described how: "Over the course of the last several months, the ineffable monster inside of me has begun to slowly transform into something of a manageable problem." I think that type of slow transformation is often indicative of an incipient epiphany.
Lastly, I can relate to what you wrote about feeling that it's no longer acceptable to be unhappy. In my case, I became so nauseated with the constant self-indulgence of unhappiness that I finally experienced a cognitive breakthrough from my former patterns of behavior.
I've really appreciated your writing since you joined Steemit and I look forward to your next piece!
Definitely agree with you. Our brains have to do quiet work to culminate into revelations.
It is interesting to describe sadness as "indulgence", but that's often what it is. It can often come from deep-seated egotistical issues and a resolve to not be unhappy. It's a displacement of responsibility.
I'm glad you enjoyed - I'm definitely going to share more.
My favorite Ani DiFranco quote: "Happiness is the best fuel."
nice post bro.. upvoted you :)
u can also read my posts if u like @manoj7
@snowmachine, your post made the daily @ocd compilation today! Check it out on the @ocd profile page :-) Congrats!
I don't think any reasonable person makes it their goal to be a perfectly healthy person. Chasing after purity is an exercise in futility and neuroticism.
It is enough for me to have identified my own demons. I know the location and dimensions of the parts of my psyche that have acted out in the past in ways which hurt people I care about.
That I am comfortable with their presence within me startles some people because they imagine they do not have any demons of their own. Of course they do. They are just unaware of theirs. Demons which remain hidden can do a lot more damage.
I have mine figured out and constrained. They are predictable, as it goes with the banality of evil. They are a narrow part of me and have correspondingly narrow, tedious desires which I can now reliably deny them, having discovered what they are.
I am a mix of good and bad, because I have had many good and bad experiences and I suppose I am as much a product of those experiences as anybody else. Being self-aware about that does not seem to empower me to self-purify, though.
That's because when I try to remove the bad parts, there is always some deeply compelling reason why it ought to be there. "Why does the world teach you that when you are mistreated, you may not retaliate? Doesn't that effectively mean I am the only one it is permissible to mistreat, and that I simply have to endure it?"
Seductive voices of apparent logic that prevent me from ripping out these spoiled parts of myself as a surgeon excises tumors. But another voice tells me that those parts are just my fear, sadness and anger. That they should be embraced and nurtured back to health, not brutally destroyed. They are, themselves, reactions to brutality in the first place.
But is that voice the good part of me? Or more of the appealing, seemingly airtight lies whispered by my demons?
I think psycho-analysis only goes so far in helping people with their mental health. Knowing what is wrong doesn't dispel what is wrong, that is only a portion of it. I get upset when people ask me to rehash old stories. Not because they hurt me so much anymore - they really don't - just that I find it useless past a certain point to pull apart the past. It is the present I'm interested in because that's what I live, and that's what's important.
I want to get rid of my demons because they hurt other people, and keep me from forming a lot of relationships because I am so terrified of letting those demons out. Maybe I can't get rid of them, but I can redirect their energy. Right now they have the ability to ruin my life and isolate me, and that's just unacceptable to me.
Your description of the writing state, and it's link to the steps toward a sense of peace/happiness struck me:
The PTSD you speak of is one I can relate to. And it's physical ramification. Exploring writing flowed naturally for me (not the skill, just the desire) from wanting to explore/heal that state.
I think that is why your writing has appealed to me. I find a stark but grounded sense of beauty in it.
I remember something Philip K. Dick said once about how if a tenor is stabbed, his natural reaction is to sing, and a writer will write. We all have different propensities for how we deal with the way life happens to us and how we process it. Sometimes without even really understanding what we're doing (Trying to heal and understand) until years later.
I think writing is such a great healing tool - it doesn't really solve anything on its own but gives context to our lives and what's important to us. And with reading too - bridges the gaps of loneliness that is consciousness. I'm glad that you found something here that spoke to you.
The words of Philip K dick have given context to a lot of the various strands of my life. I think I am still computing a lot of them. He was well ahead of his time. I think I need to go read VALIS again. Thanks for the reminder.