Living With PTSD. . .

Your eyes are closed and the movie you hate the most is playing over and over and over again . . . you can’t pause it, you can’t turn it off and you can’t drown it out. You try to ignore it; you play the music loud and try to push it to one corner of your brain hoping to drown it out. . . and you move on. The blasted movie won’t go away. It’s as if it’s on a separate audio track. . . playing out of sync. . . in the opposite corner of your mind. . . this time in reverse. . . from the end. . . backward to the beginning, always spinning around and around. You can’t adjust the volume or stop it; instead it’s become the background noise that’s quickly becoming the center of your universe and you try with all your might to go along your day and ignore it. . . except, it’s your most hated movie. It snarls at you and grates on your nerves until they are tender and bare.

The movie never stops. You can read a book, watch your favorite move, turn to your hobbies, carry on through the day, have conversations. . . but the hated scenes are still going on deep inside your mind. When you are able to sleep, it just plays out the nightmares, never giving you a moment of quiet or peace. It makes the horrible mundane, and the mundane horrible and you wake up screaming a blood curdling scream. If you are lucky enough to find some balance, the scenes lay lurking and something will happen in life and another corner is waiting with another cycle of the damned movie. It holds on to pieces of your mind and makes you want to flee from yourself. Some moments are worse; some moments are quieter. . . but it’s never silent.

Take the PTSD and mix it well with Bipolar Disorder; the mixture is cruel and demeaning. People don’t see anything wrong on the outside so they just label you as “Crazy”. I live with unstable medical conditions that affects every system in my body which means. . . I am always in the danger zone. . . I’m constantly battling myself.

I can’t escape from the traumas that caused the PTSD, and I can’t fully put it in the past. It’s always there. Medications don’t work well for me as I seem to have many medicinal allergies that only make the hated movie worse. I have tried to learn to live with the fears and quiet them the best way I can.

I retreat deep inside myself, focusing on my own stories I have made up inside my mind just so I can survive. Rather than trying to think of nothing, I allow my own movies to run full into the hated audio track, and play them against the hated scenes in my mind. Sometimes, I remember new details and I try to make some sense of the fear, but it never leaves my mind.

I try to drown myself in what I love. . . music or writing or photographing things out in the world, or researching and studying. Does it work? Not entirely. . . the stress, or the feeling of complete unworthiness and deep insecurity seeps out of the cracks often in jokes to mask my real feelings from the world. I try to double down on the humor and try to make others talk around me. . . or focus on the task at hand until I can retreat.

I like being with people at a distance. . . preferring to interact in the dark corners and not out in the middle where all my imperfections are put on display. I feel like I have found rare treasure when I make someone spontaneously laugh. I am always willing to listen to other people and let them rid their minds of what troubles them. . . this helps me not to focus on the horrible memories I try to keep contained and locked away. It’s almost like if I listen and help others I can try to believe I am a worthwhile human being. I smile at the world when I least want to.

There is no “magic cure” that will chase away the haunting memories, but there is some small peaceful liberation when you can be vulnerable enough to trust someone enough to share the events which scar you. Sometimes I have to admit. . . it’s a ‘really’ bad day, and my anger is closing in all around me and suffocating me, so please be patient and don’t read anything into what I say. This is my way of trying to cope. . . recognizing how my emotions and actions can impact. . . so I warn people so no unintentional damage is done. . . these are not the actions of a victim; these actions are ones of a survivor. . . hopefully, someday a conqueror.