Kintsugi
Sponsor
Hypoxia is one of my favorite words, because it is so accurate for this state.
Today my friend/co-worker asked me about what my symptoms were. I've known her for a couple years, and I've worked with her for much of that time. She's wonderful, but her kind of intelligence can feel elusive, and in her often generalized ignorance about the world, she just steps on something that I think she realizes afterward she might not should have stepped on.
I wanted to answer her honestly, because she is always so honest, so forthcoming, so trusting. She's known for many months that I have PTSD, and she's never said a thing, not even to respond to that knowledge, outside of a vague nod. I began shaking. My mouth went dry and clumsy.
"Nightmares every night," I said. I looked right at her. "Every day, I want to die?" Like that. With a little lilt at the end. Like I was answering a math question I wasn't sure about.
I stammered off some more symptoms. I didn't want to give away my trauma by being too specific, and I didn't want to alienate her by bringing up things she might feel were over her head, like dissociation.
The point is, though, I heard myself say those words to her, and I just felt a sense of some slippery and unsatisfying breed of immense relief. It felt like I was letting a horrible secret slide past my lips so that it could find a new home for awhile in her ears. Every day, I want to die?
I'm in a familiar and yet wildly unpredictable place. I've been on this path before, but it's always nearly impossible to know where it will lead. I'm in a state where I have a deep and urgent need to reach out to those I love and who have graciously loved me to say things they wouldn't understand. Thank you. I'm so sorry. Get away from me. Don't let me hurt you. Do you know how I love you? Please just let me go.
I've had a lot of stress increase steadily, exponentially, over the past several months. I miss Ronnie all the f*cking time, for those who may know of whom I speak. Like, all the time. It is so hard to walk in those doors and cook and clean and bathe and otherwise care for the client who has replaced Ronnie's "spare bed," as one woman crassly called it.
We still fight over who least helped save him. We sniff across old wounds caused by the high emotion before he died. Who did what. Who said what. Which had been our best decisions. Who made questionable decisions. His death continues to weigh on me daily. I still think about everything I failed to do for him.
I curse the circumstances that brought us our new client. He is uniformly disliked, but no one can agree with one another or themselves how much of our feelings stem from Ronnie being "replaced." After they're all asleep, I tell my co-workers, the universe gave us an angel among men, and now it's given us our very own devil to test the worthiness of our humanity.
It's just one of those things I do, though, when I'm like this. When I feel numb and inaccessible and spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if I'll ever get my karma straightened out, if I can ever pay my emotional debts to people, if I'll ever succeed to be someone whom I and all those who helped me when I struggled can be genuinely proud of. Someone who will make all the effort and pain worth it eventually.
I hate how many people I pretend to let in will never really know me, and I resent the ones who really really do.
I have these awful nightmares every night. I wake up and wonder if I have to live like that forever, waking up after nightmares that make me question whether living this daily grind is worthwhile.
It's just so much work, guys, and there's so much pain. People die. Things are unsaid. Wounds are wide open. Life circumstances scramble. Still, the nightmares are relentless. The dissociation crushes me when I'm already feeling sick. I wonder every day if it's really safe for me to drive. I feel like every other minute I'm entering a snap fugue where driving off the road seems like a perfectly peaceful act of curiosity and carelessness. I feel like my whole life, no matter what, there will always be forces conspiring with PTSD to put me in this drowning state.
It's gotten to the part where I go through the motions of my day, and I am so numb and inside myself that I find it nearly impossible to keep up the facade. Every day, I feel like I want to lay down and say, I just can't do it anymore.
I really do want to die, and I really do want to live all at once. It's just that the latter is conditional, and the former feels less conditional. That's the scary part, I think.
I try to warn those I care for about toxic people. I warn them to get away. You can't fix them. You need to just move on and hope they find their way to become enlightened about how and why they're toxic people.
But I am that person. I am that toxic threat. I feel that one day, I'm really going to need help, and no one is going to come, because I was just never a positive enough part of other people's lives for them to answer my plea for help when I really need someone.
I push people away, when I'm like this, and then I simultaneously claw for them desperately. I want to be alone, but I don't want to be alone enough to think in earnest about my willingness to continue living, about my quality of life and the prospects for my future. Sometimes I feel so detached from what is actually living that death seems almost irrelevant, like I'm already gone. I'm just a ghost, watching how things might have kept on if I hadn't become a ghost. It's the sort of depersonalization that makes me feel certain people can see right through me, and I feel like my very matter is slowly disintegrating into millions of tiny atoms floating off of me.
I'm sorry for rambling. I just don't know. My head has felt so floaty.
Today my friend/co-worker asked me about what my symptoms were. I've known her for a couple years, and I've worked with her for much of that time. She's wonderful, but her kind of intelligence can feel elusive, and in her often generalized ignorance about the world, she just steps on something that I think she realizes afterward she might not should have stepped on.
I wanted to answer her honestly, because she is always so honest, so forthcoming, so trusting. She's known for many months that I have PTSD, and she's never said a thing, not even to respond to that knowledge, outside of a vague nod. I began shaking. My mouth went dry and clumsy.
"Nightmares every night," I said. I looked right at her. "Every day, I want to die?" Like that. With a little lilt at the end. Like I was answering a math question I wasn't sure about.
I stammered off some more symptoms. I didn't want to give away my trauma by being too specific, and I didn't want to alienate her by bringing up things she might feel were over her head, like dissociation.
The point is, though, I heard myself say those words to her, and I just felt a sense of some slippery and unsatisfying breed of immense relief. It felt like I was letting a horrible secret slide past my lips so that it could find a new home for awhile in her ears. Every day, I want to die?
I'm in a familiar and yet wildly unpredictable place. I've been on this path before, but it's always nearly impossible to know where it will lead. I'm in a state where I have a deep and urgent need to reach out to those I love and who have graciously loved me to say things they wouldn't understand. Thank you. I'm so sorry. Get away from me. Don't let me hurt you. Do you know how I love you? Please just let me go.
I've had a lot of stress increase steadily, exponentially, over the past several months. I miss Ronnie all the f*cking time, for those who may know of whom I speak. Like, all the time. It is so hard to walk in those doors and cook and clean and bathe and otherwise care for the client who has replaced Ronnie's "spare bed," as one woman crassly called it.
We still fight over who least helped save him. We sniff across old wounds caused by the high emotion before he died. Who did what. Who said what. Which had been our best decisions. Who made questionable decisions. His death continues to weigh on me daily. I still think about everything I failed to do for him.
I curse the circumstances that brought us our new client. He is uniformly disliked, but no one can agree with one another or themselves how much of our feelings stem from Ronnie being "replaced." After they're all asleep, I tell my co-workers, the universe gave us an angel among men, and now it's given us our very own devil to test the worthiness of our humanity.
It's just one of those things I do, though, when I'm like this. When I feel numb and inaccessible and spend an inordinate amount of time wondering if I'll ever get my karma straightened out, if I can ever pay my emotional debts to people, if I'll ever succeed to be someone whom I and all those who helped me when I struggled can be genuinely proud of. Someone who will make all the effort and pain worth it eventually.
I hate how many people I pretend to let in will never really know me, and I resent the ones who really really do.
I have these awful nightmares every night. I wake up and wonder if I have to live like that forever, waking up after nightmares that make me question whether living this daily grind is worthwhile.
It's just so much work, guys, and there's so much pain. People die. Things are unsaid. Wounds are wide open. Life circumstances scramble. Still, the nightmares are relentless. The dissociation crushes me when I'm already feeling sick. I wonder every day if it's really safe for me to drive. I feel like every other minute I'm entering a snap fugue where driving off the road seems like a perfectly peaceful act of curiosity and carelessness. I feel like my whole life, no matter what, there will always be forces conspiring with PTSD to put me in this drowning state.
It's gotten to the part where I go through the motions of my day, and I am so numb and inside myself that I find it nearly impossible to keep up the facade. Every day, I feel like I want to lay down and say, I just can't do it anymore.
I really do want to die, and I really do want to live all at once. It's just that the latter is conditional, and the former feels less conditional. That's the scary part, I think.
I try to warn those I care for about toxic people. I warn them to get away. You can't fix them. You need to just move on and hope they find their way to become enlightened about how and why they're toxic people.
But I am that person. I am that toxic threat. I feel that one day, I'm really going to need help, and no one is going to come, because I was just never a positive enough part of other people's lives for them to answer my plea for help when I really need someone.
I push people away, when I'm like this, and then I simultaneously claw for them desperately. I want to be alone, but I don't want to be alone enough to think in earnest about my willingness to continue living, about my quality of life and the prospects for my future. Sometimes I feel so detached from what is actually living that death seems almost irrelevant, like I'm already gone. I'm just a ghost, watching how things might have kept on if I hadn't become a ghost. It's the sort of depersonalization that makes me feel certain people can see right through me, and I feel like my very matter is slowly disintegrating into millions of tiny atoms floating off of me.
I'm sorry for rambling. I just don't know. My head has felt so floaty.
