Simply Simon
MyPTSD Pro
This should probably maybe be in my diary, but I don’t know. I feel too rudderless to dump it there. But I don’t have the energy to write it in its totality, so I suppose this is part one. I’ve always been a person of extremes, I’m told. My writing doesn’t seem to land anywhere between short and long form. Besides, I’ve always been about 90% preamble. Maybe this is a prologue. Good luck getting through to the topic... but I need to write it out. This is my flare gun. I feel like I’m drowning so slowly.
#
“Promise me you won’t be like them.”
That’s what my father would say, like a mantra, all the time but especially if he happened to put me to bed. It probably started before I even recognized the meaning. I don’t remember him not saying it. He probably stopped when I wasn’t being put to bed anymore, but I’m not sure. The words echoed through my everyday thoughts like an ear worm far beyond his own verbalization.
When I got my master’s, I didn’t walk. I gave people practical reasons why, but the truth is that I wanted to deprive my parents of two things: disappointing me as usual and surprising me by fulfilling what I’d been promised.
At 13 I’m standing on the tiny porch that would accurately be called a stoop if we weren’t too balls deep in Jersey suburbia to use such language. There’s impossibly white concrete beneath my feet, and I’m wearing a polka dot halter top I’d saved for this occasion. Not wearing a perfectly structured halter top that illustrated what I had come to deeply understand as my worth to the world at the club first, waiting instead for this particular day, seemed like plenty of fuss for the occasion. But behind me there are cars lining up along the property filled with relatives as far flung as California.
The halter top and the relatives showed up for what even then felt like an event that was at best inane and at worst existentially depressing. My brother, the f*cking music prodigy, is graduating from an associate’s in graphic design. He was an okay artist on the page. He was commendable as an actor. He was a god of music. I knew this whole f*cking degree should have been triple dipped in shame and wrapped in grief. But that’s what it would have been if it were me. This was the moment I fully grasped it. This is when it became both lucid and reified.
My mother is standing next to me, jostling with her keys. She was always late and yet in a rush.
“I know [my brother] is graduating,” I said, “But isn’t this kind of a lot for an associate’s?”
My mother chuckled—and I f*cking hate that word, but she did!—conspiratorially, like we were sharing a private joke. “Oh, well, we’ll probably be this excited when you get your master’s.”
Grasped. Lucidity. Reified. Realized. Manifested whole, right in my gut like a ravenous parasite that suddenly woke up.
It ate me alive for the next 15 years.
In my second-to-last semester of grad school, I had a really bad PTSD meltdown. Reality wouldn’t stay still. I was having flashbacks. I was in the basement with him. I was naked and begging.
When J finally snapped me out of it, I don’t know what precipitated it, if anything at all, but the words I don’t ever recall thinking jumped out of me like a spirit called out of my body by a priest: “My parents won’t love me if I don’t have my master’s.”
But I did graduate. I did get my master’s. And I knew what I’ve come to appreciate as a theory tested enough to consider it factual, like gravity.
If I felt accomplished in any form, my parents would find a way to whittle that feeling down to disparate atoms no longer strung together significantly enough to be considered anything resembling substance.
#
“Promise me you won’t be like them.”
That’s what my father would say, like a mantra, all the time but especially if he happened to put me to bed. It probably started before I even recognized the meaning. I don’t remember him not saying it. He probably stopped when I wasn’t being put to bed anymore, but I’m not sure. The words echoed through my everyday thoughts like an ear worm far beyond his own verbalization.
When I got my master’s, I didn’t walk. I gave people practical reasons why, but the truth is that I wanted to deprive my parents of two things: disappointing me as usual and surprising me by fulfilling what I’d been promised.
At 13 I’m standing on the tiny porch that would accurately be called a stoop if we weren’t too balls deep in Jersey suburbia to use such language. There’s impossibly white concrete beneath my feet, and I’m wearing a polka dot halter top I’d saved for this occasion. Not wearing a perfectly structured halter top that illustrated what I had come to deeply understand as my worth to the world at the club first, waiting instead for this particular day, seemed like plenty of fuss for the occasion. But behind me there are cars lining up along the property filled with relatives as far flung as California.
The halter top and the relatives showed up for what even then felt like an event that was at best inane and at worst existentially depressing. My brother, the f*cking music prodigy, is graduating from an associate’s in graphic design. He was an okay artist on the page. He was commendable as an actor. He was a god of music. I knew this whole f*cking degree should have been triple dipped in shame and wrapped in grief. But that’s what it would have been if it were me. This was the moment I fully grasped it. This is when it became both lucid and reified.
My mother is standing next to me, jostling with her keys. She was always late and yet in a rush.
“I know [my brother] is graduating,” I said, “But isn’t this kind of a lot for an associate’s?”
My mother chuckled—and I f*cking hate that word, but she did!—conspiratorially, like we were sharing a private joke. “Oh, well, we’ll probably be this excited when you get your master’s.”
Grasped. Lucidity. Reified. Realized. Manifested whole, right in my gut like a ravenous parasite that suddenly woke up.
It ate me alive for the next 15 years.
In my second-to-last semester of grad school, I had a really bad PTSD meltdown. Reality wouldn’t stay still. I was having flashbacks. I was in the basement with him. I was naked and begging.
When J finally snapped me out of it, I don’t know what precipitated it, if anything at all, but the words I don’t ever recall thinking jumped out of me like a spirit called out of my body by a priest: “My parents won’t love me if I don’t have my master’s.”
But I did graduate. I did get my master’s. And I knew what I’ve come to appreciate as a theory tested enough to consider it factual, like gravity.
If I felt accomplished in any form, my parents would find a way to whittle that feeling down to disparate atoms no longer strung together significantly enough to be considered anything resembling substance.
