beakerless
New Here
I’m a 64 female USMC veteran. My PTSD goes back to early childhood and my brother’s murder by another US Army soldier when they were serving in Vietnam in 1970. His death literally silenced me for a few months. I was 12. My parents noted that I wasn’t talking but I was always drawing so they put me in oil painting classes. Art became a safe voice for my most painful emotions and I slowly stepped back out into the world. 7 years after my brother’s death I enlisted in the US Marine Corps. Back then there wasn’t any mechanism for even reporting sexual harassment. It was just a part of women being Marines and pretty much happened daily. I was stalked, verbally harassed, physically assaulted, woke up one night with a man dressed all in black with cammo paint on his face standing at the foot of my rack, and then 8 years and 5 days after my brother’s murder the body of one of my friends who was supposed to have gone AWOL with 3 male Marines was found in a ditch in another state with her throat slashed. We received no emotional support, there was no memorial service and my sister Marines stayed as far away from acknowledging what happened as they could. That was how it was being a female Marine back then, don’t be connected to anything negative. I don’t remember ever not being afraid again but I made sure no one knew I was afraid. The next two years I lost my parents within 11 months and had my first child alone. The best way to describe my life for two decades is it was a slow motion train wreck. It took 24 years to talk about my friend and a couple male Vietnam veterans I met while trying to better understand my brother’s death pushed me to get therapy and health care through the VA. That was 22 years ago. I don’t struggle as much with the PTSD and major depressive disorder but the fibromyalgia is difficult to deal with at times. Aging with PTSD seems like it may be challenging but I’m financially stable and will have access to civilian as well as VA health care next year. I up-cycle clothing and do torn paper portrait collage art. The art has always been a kind of active meditation for me. When the world is too intrusive I have headphones and earbuds that are sometimes streaming music and sometimes just discouraging people from trying to strike up a conversation. Music through headphones are really helpful to deal with vibrations which really put me on edge.