I’m not sure who this is for. Myself, maybe, though I feel as though I’m nearly “over it,” somehow. But with beasts of this kind, there’s no such thing as “over it.” There can only be “with it” and “through it” and sometimes even “despite it.” These things don’t go away, even if you learn to accept them.
Still, maybe there’s someone out there who will read this and feel for a while that they aren’t alone. That’s the best I can hope for. But let me be clear: nothing I’m about to say to you is meant to romanticize the real. It’s gritty and grounding and awful. Make no mistake.
How it Started
When I was 14, my father had a stroke. His high blood pressure had popped something inoperable in the center of his brain. For a while, he was on life support, but he started to breathe on his own soon after they decided to pull the plug. He came home after plenty of asset-draining and house-rearranging. My mother quit work so she could take care of him.
My father was not the kindest of men. He was the Invincible Man, the type who made fun of Dick Clark on New Year’s. The type who, when I was born sick, said he’d rather stick me in a shoe box and float me down a river than pay for my funeral.
“It was like God had punished him,” my mom once said after Dad’s stroke.
I guess that stuck with me, because soon I felt like God was punishing me, too. I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I wouldn’t go to school. I got so nervous I’d throw up.
Worse was what it did to my family.
I knew I was a burden and that no one knew how to help me. I thought about death once or twice. I never hurt myself, but I’ll admit it: sometimes kitchen knives looked at me real friendly.
The Old Testament didn’t help. What little I knew about God then lodged itself into my gut so far it was hard to shake it all out. I visited my pastor and signed up for therapy, where I learned that how I felt wasn’t insanity: it was PTSD, and I had a long haul ahead of me.
What It’s Like and How I Get Through It
I spent the summer in therapy that first time and I’m at counseling now, trying to piece my life together. I’m more excited than scared, now, but sometimes I feel like there’s more than one skelton inside me. I swear there’s something shuttered in my bones. Ghosts, or ink. A black river, maybe. Lukewarm and slick as it waits to pull me under. When I’m not bathing, I’m locked in its closet.
Sometimes it’s all I can do to turn on the light.
Talking helps. So does church, and learning about church. I have my faith now because of all this. That helps, too, except when it hurts.
It rises in relationships, you see. It likes to darken the things I love. Romance, family, even God. I have an inordinate amount of fear of them all. But at last I’ve come to accept that; my abyss has nothing I haven’t already seen.
It’s really not so bad. Not when compared to the pain of others. That’s what I tell myself, at least. A little sympathy never hurt anyone, and I’ll be damned if I become a burden again.
I give a lot, or try to. I latch onto my hobbies and do little too much, which keeps me happy enough to believe I’m okay again. That’s when it hits hardest; I swear its mating call is stress. It’s sucky, but it’s the doable kinda sucky, you know? It’s like crossing a street with your eyes closed. You have to know if the rumble you hear is a car coming toward you or the echo of one that’s passed by.
A friend of mine once told me they weren’t a survivor. And that was true: neither their trials nor mine can ever really be over. Instead, they called themselves a foot-soldier: marching forward in the half-dark, pack slung over their shoulders.
I’m a footsoldier, too. I think we all are. Running around in our closets waiting to turn on the light.