I've been delving into various threads here and experiencing both recognition, relating to situations even when the surface details might be different, but also finding some aspects alien. I think it's worth commenting about this because it may be that some aspects of PTSD or at least of our condition if we haven't seemed to earn the term aren't actually negative as such.
I'm not happy with noise, even noisy music that people seem to enjoy, or bright lights. My employment options are limited because I couldn't begin to imagine the slightest amount of power or responsibility - it feels absurd, the thought of years and years of putting on an act, of investing will in being a would-be authority in something that doesn't mean anything to me except by paid agreement to perform. Relationships I've retreated from, and the fact that there is so much meaningless, neurotic noise in the average relationship, arguments that are based on nothing but neurosis and game-playing, is why. That noise seems to fuel people and fill lives, though it is also the flip side of divorce and part of domestic abuse.
Many would harshly say that I simply 'can't hack it' as if the way the world is is natural and inevitable. If I start to imagine now being 'trapped' on a desert island, eating berries and fish, reading and re-reading twenty books, sitting thinking, I feel quite happy with that. If I could tunnel to that life from where I am I would. I admire people I read about who've 'gone off grid'. They have won something. I admire people enough who downsize and people who've been famous who walk away from what they 'achieved'. I don't see them as casualties at all.
It's a cliche that could make some over-tolerant, but suffering does teach us, and that's not merely and only slavish, submissive, masochistic thinking. If suffering regular Western life has led me to this frame of mind where I want to 'retreat' that really feels like some kind of privilege to me, something hard-won that I want to defend. When I can't stand in a room where there's loud music, where you have to shout to be heard, I'm not failing to be a fun person - when I walk out of the room I'm protecting a self I've evolved.
I can differentiate between that and something that happened extremely briefly last night, where during one of the pre-sleep judders in bed I had this flash-frame image of someone grabbing me with violent intent. I've been assaulted and fear being manhandled by police - which may happen soon - and this is obviously dysfunctional and rooted in memories of assault, including by my dad and my brother. There's no up side to that and it takes discernment to know the difference.
I don't miss being at the front in a noisy gig surrounded by drunk or stoned people, hundreds of faces of self-involved and often fully narcissistic, abusive people, or humming along to a mentally lost drug addict's self-involved and neurotic lyrics. I once stood in front of a particular very well-known singer, maybe two metres away, who was dead a few months later because of self-indulgence and nihilism. He could 'hack it' up to then, he was fun, he was a face of success. I'm not in good shape but I feel at least lucky there that I'm not so chaotic and blind that that fate could have been mine. The first friend I had as an adult has been dead twenty years. We had diverged a few years before his death because I would to him I was boring, as I began to retreat. He's dead, I'm not. Rock and roll.
This takes a bit of the sting out of being unwell whether PTSD is a fair term for how I am or not. If it was all negative, objectively, that really would be overwhelming. Do you really need to be that overwhelmed and regretful of your situation? I am a failed musician myself, and it once hurt that I had to accept the failure, but if I got into a lift with one multi-millionaire guitarist and someone who covers his songs in a pub, and the lift broke down so that we were chatting for a couple of hours, I wouldn't envy either of them or feel inferior. I sometimes discover things on an instrument, create short passages of music, which are strong, professional-grade, that millionaires chasing material success simply aren't capable of. Maybe you painted something comparable, or maybe you had a thought or a feeling about a friend that had a sparkle of sincerity to it, depth, that a game show host isn't capable of. We got burned by Western life - but should we just want to get back in the saddle, or walk away?
The regular world is a mess of nonsense and vanity. To succeed in it isn't so great. If I've failed in life in the eyes of many and if my condition as a victim of violence and traumatic misconduct is part of why, I do not feel ambivalent regret. We could say I'm consoling myself, with 'lies' and self-deception, but that only sticks if material success in this particular collective psychosis, as I see it, is all there is. Twenty books on an island, fish and berries, seems beautiful to me - if I were offered both at a fork in a road, I'd take the island.
I'm not happy with noise, even noisy music that people seem to enjoy, or bright lights. My employment options are limited because I couldn't begin to imagine the slightest amount of power or responsibility - it feels absurd, the thought of years and years of putting on an act, of investing will in being a would-be authority in something that doesn't mean anything to me except by paid agreement to perform. Relationships I've retreated from, and the fact that there is so much meaningless, neurotic noise in the average relationship, arguments that are based on nothing but neurosis and game-playing, is why. That noise seems to fuel people and fill lives, though it is also the flip side of divorce and part of domestic abuse.
Many would harshly say that I simply 'can't hack it' as if the way the world is is natural and inevitable. If I start to imagine now being 'trapped' on a desert island, eating berries and fish, reading and re-reading twenty books, sitting thinking, I feel quite happy with that. If I could tunnel to that life from where I am I would. I admire people I read about who've 'gone off grid'. They have won something. I admire people enough who downsize and people who've been famous who walk away from what they 'achieved'. I don't see them as casualties at all.
It's a cliche that could make some over-tolerant, but suffering does teach us, and that's not merely and only slavish, submissive, masochistic thinking. If suffering regular Western life has led me to this frame of mind where I want to 'retreat' that really feels like some kind of privilege to me, something hard-won that I want to defend. When I can't stand in a room where there's loud music, where you have to shout to be heard, I'm not failing to be a fun person - when I walk out of the room I'm protecting a self I've evolved.
I can differentiate between that and something that happened extremely briefly last night, where during one of the pre-sleep judders in bed I had this flash-frame image of someone grabbing me with violent intent. I've been assaulted and fear being manhandled by police - which may happen soon - and this is obviously dysfunctional and rooted in memories of assault, including by my dad and my brother. There's no up side to that and it takes discernment to know the difference.
I don't miss being at the front in a noisy gig surrounded by drunk or stoned people, hundreds of faces of self-involved and often fully narcissistic, abusive people, or humming along to a mentally lost drug addict's self-involved and neurotic lyrics. I once stood in front of a particular very well-known singer, maybe two metres away, who was dead a few months later because of self-indulgence and nihilism. He could 'hack it' up to then, he was fun, he was a face of success. I'm not in good shape but I feel at least lucky there that I'm not so chaotic and blind that that fate could have been mine. The first friend I had as an adult has been dead twenty years. We had diverged a few years before his death because I would to him I was boring, as I began to retreat. He's dead, I'm not. Rock and roll.
This takes a bit of the sting out of being unwell whether PTSD is a fair term for how I am or not. If it was all negative, objectively, that really would be overwhelming. Do you really need to be that overwhelmed and regretful of your situation? I am a failed musician myself, and it once hurt that I had to accept the failure, but if I got into a lift with one multi-millionaire guitarist and someone who covers his songs in a pub, and the lift broke down so that we were chatting for a couple of hours, I wouldn't envy either of them or feel inferior. I sometimes discover things on an instrument, create short passages of music, which are strong, professional-grade, that millionaires chasing material success simply aren't capable of. Maybe you painted something comparable, or maybe you had a thought or a feeling about a friend that had a sparkle of sincerity to it, depth, that a game show host isn't capable of. We got burned by Western life - but should we just want to get back in the saddle, or walk away?
The regular world is a mess of nonsense and vanity. To succeed in it isn't so great. If I've failed in life in the eyes of many and if my condition as a victim of violence and traumatic misconduct is part of why, I do not feel ambivalent regret. We could say I'm consoling myself, with 'lies' and self-deception, but that only sticks if material success in this particular collective psychosis, as I see it, is all there is. Twenty books on an island, fish and berries, seems beautiful to me - if I were offered both at a fork in a road, I'd take the island.