Note: Due to their nature and to protect the privacy of those involved, traumas mentioned from Sarah's past are not disclosed, but to preface this post, it is worth mentioning that she is safe and is getting the help she needs from her parents, loved ones and counseling. To protect individuals' privacy, names have been changed, and no specific locations have been given. If you suspect yourself or a loved one as having symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, seek professional/medical help immediately, as this is a serious, potentially harmful disorder. If you are in the armed forces, we thank you for your service and sacrifice; if you have been diagnosed with "Complex" PTSD (referring to those not in the armed forces who have endured recurring childhood/adolescence trauma), know that you are not alone and that there is coping help available via support groups and counseling. You can get better, and you will get better. "You are free; you are yours alone."
As I embarked on the project of writing a novel deeply inspired by my childhood, adolescence, pursuits and dreams, I never knew how much it would rip open my heart and spill forth a fortitude like none I thought I had. It's been a couple years since I started, and I have relived the good and the bad in the privacy of my thoughts, suddenly meeting a raw and calloused part of myself lain dormant, now evoked by the analysis of my experiences.
When I was officially diagnosed with CPTSD a few months ago, I had shown a movie scene that closely resembled a recurring trauma I'd experienced in secret for many years. When the clip ended, my counselor cleared her throat and exhaled, letting the silence in her office settle as a fog. I was quaking, sweating and flushed. Then she looked to me and said, "Whoa." I could tell in that moment she would never look at me the same again; she gave a steady nod, breathing, "What are you feeling right now?"
The daze did not dissipate. I stammered and touched my clayed skin, taken aback by the magnitude of the breakthrough that just took place. "Numb," was all I could say at first. The counselor straightened, nodding. "But... I survived." She agreed, yet cleared her throat to continue, saying, "And you still are."
"What?"
"You're still surviving." That statement slammed into my soul, causing a moment of ragged breath. "And Henry..." The mention of my dear friend's name swept over me as an ointment, "if Henry hadn't been in your life... Sarah, you probably wouldn't be sitting here today." Memories overpowered the present ache, memories of thanking God and my parents for allowing such a cherished friendship to be built between us.
"But he is not here," I wheezed.
"I know," she whispered, her eyes mirroring the pain within so that I could feel it. "Are you feeling this?"
"Feeling what?"
"This," she waved her hands in the space we were in, "the density of what you just showed me on that screen. Sarah, do you know what survivors do?" I shook my head, feeling God embrace my body in a hug.
"They survive. Survivors survive. I have no doubts now that PTSD is what we're dealing with." Images of soldiers in a war zone flashed behind my eyelids as fire flames striking throughout the core of my being.
"I am not a solider."
"Doesn't matter; wars aren't just fought on the outside." Flashbacks invaded. "Sometimes they are invisible." She relaxed.
"So... What now?" What now? Strangely relieving, I now stood before another fork in the road, with my bags of crap at my ankles. And a smile crept across the canvas of my weathered brown eyes, bringing out the remembrance of a previous counseling session in which I'd said, "turn that shit into fertilizer." You stake yourself into the place you're meant to be in and you cultivate it in preparation for nourishment and beautiful growth.
I came home that day and spent an hour alone driving in circles. This was a visceral method of taking flight ever since Id received a power wheelchair, and the sentimental value of it that evening in particular staked deep within the place I was at. I looked up at the sky, and cried, "Oh, mama!" Somewhere in this world was a woman plagued by drug addiction who had brought me to this earth nineteen years ago. While I once thought she gave me a "life of illness, heartache and dreadful irony," on this evening that I'd found the soldier in me, I knew she'd given me life in all its naked reality: life is merely an Autumn where one's greatest shine is seen when they are invisibly dying inside, awaiting an invariably inevitable spring. I sobbed heavily, "'Dear God, I want to hold my baby!' Had you ever declared that, mama? Oh, Lord, how I know your plight, mama. I know the burn, the blur, the electric sting of what shouldn't be, being." A confession awakened, my shoulders trembled and the veins in my temples surfaced. "God, You know this fight. Give me the strength I'll need to stand."
Fast forward to now: a couple weeks ago, the whistle of a war beginning known only by those with PTSD was sounded within me. And I clawed my way from a trench of suppressed storm, into the battlefield of dissociative rage, flashback, visual/auditory hallucination, numbness and dissociation.
All at once my loved ones were suddenly faced with seeing a different Sarah, for when the rain of trauma flashback falls upon me, out comes an anger from its cave that reddens my face, drenches my skin in thick sweat and rattles my bones with a scream or a roar no one knew I had. Not even I. I am sucked into a blackhole of time travel that stretches me thin and drops me into an arena of subconscious terror, where the faces of those I love so dear are no longer the faces I see, where their voices are not the voices I hear, where the sunshine is a liberated fire and I am no longer aware of what time I am in.
At any given moment, a certain smell, noise, voice, sensation, expression, lighting, place or taste may pluck me from the present and send me literally spinning in circles, scanning my surrounding for a predator and an escape route. Rational thinking no longer exists within my mind when it happens, and much like a Velociraptor, I am focused solely on survival.
The other day, I was on campus, enjoying myself. I knew exactly where I was going and with whom: my two personal care aids and Daniel (pseudonym for privacy; one of my PCAs' sons) were following close behind as I eagerly made my way to my favorite building which housed the Science Department. But as I turned the corner, a child began to holler: "Where's Henry? Henry! Where'd he go? Henry?!" My chair halted immediately and my eyes were flicking back and forth, suddenly not observing campus, but rather my Henry and myself (as a little girl, onward), in the various places our friendship developed. I saw again, Henry holding me as a child against his shoulder, I saw myself lifting a hand to his beard and thinking, "You saved me". I saw again, Henry sitting beside me at a ball game; Henry teaching me how to dance; Henry looking at me in the rearview mirror; I saw him again, running to my aid when I collapsed in my walker and I heard again, his voice saying, "I got you, you're alright, sweetie," as I coughed up water in his arms. I could smell his scent as if he were embracing me all over again, telling me, "No fear"; I could see him as he was, the last day I saw him before contact was lost; I remembered the anguish of not knowing if I'd ever see him again, and the jubilance that I cried on the night we reunited 3.5 years later... And I remembered that he was gone again for a second time. All over again. The campus suddenly reappeared, the flashbacks having spit me back out.
And as much as I wanted it to be Henry's arms around me to pull me from the invisible war zone, it was not his wings that enveloped me, but my PCAs'. They had the suction tubing in my mouth to clear my airway as I have a delayed swallow that, when I'm distraught, causes me to be unable to breathe from the accumulation of excessive saliva. Reality was a biting winter, yet when the sobs eased, I knew God's had swooped me up and tore onward up the ramp to the building. Feeling mucus drip from my nose, present time warped again, and frightening hallucinations rushed at me. Without any concept of time, I startled to find my personal care aids clinging to me as if they themselves were my comrades. One of them was exclaiming, "Holy shit! Oh my gosh! Oh, baby girl... Daniel, I thought she was gonna drive off..." The panicked tone she used confused me until later, when I was told they had chased my chair down the porch because I had faced the edge of the staircase with my joystick clicking, still in drive mode.
"She did not see the stairs," Daniel informed her, telling her also of the "different reality" that PTSD causes. I learned then that Daniel was an Army Sergeant who'd endured some of the worst of the worst of traumas overseas. He too, had PTSD, but had overcome it, now driven to help others survive it. I was told he had known I was suffering from the disorder simply by witnessing its presentation in me. Daniel scooted closer to me once I was inside. His eyes displayed an understanding of how serious the disorder is. For just a few days prior, I sat in the counselor's office again, sobbing fiercely from a grief only I could carry, explaining that I was "afraid of the 'different reality' numbing me beyond what I could handle."
Daniel said one of the most beautiful mantras I've ever heard: "You are free. You... Now and in every moment, are free." The significance lied in the unspoken. His words armored my soul. I was looking upon a soldier who witnessed terrors no human should ever have to, and yet he sat breathing before me, a warrior and leader. I met him in the midst of an emotional smog only someone like him could know the power of. He watched my eyes dart about the hallway at people coming toward me. He knew of the siren that wails when abruptly, your brain says everything you once knew to be lovely, may be a potential threat. His voice softened. "Who or what else besides us do you see, honey?"
"Danger," I typed in my computer. He nodded, having me look at him.
"Look me right here," he said, "There is an end to this, I promise." The invisible siren still screeched, and I had tensed, ready to fight against some threat that was not truly there. "You are free." While every cell in me clambered up from a roundhouse kick delivered by a hallucination only I saw, the sweat warmed my clothes with a stale dampness. Somewhere in the real world, I could still make out Daniel's echo: "You are here with me and Joanne and Diane. We are here for you, and we will help you." He knew that though I was sitting dainty in my wheelchair, in the reality I was in, I was crouched, fists clenched and screaming, "Come at me, dammit! With all you got, come at me!" Unlike I had when my traumas actually occurred, PTSD is the manifestation of preparedness and an adrenaline rush so strong it will make your heart cough. The numbness fills you so fully, you're hollowed out. So many times now, after an episode, I have sat still, my PCAs moving my body as if they were tending to a doll. I'll look around, but I'm not there, I'm not where my body is, because I'm somewhere wedged between flashback and reality, floating in a near separate dimension.
Yesterday, while visiting my grandfather at his retirement home, I witnessed another episode trigger, and eventually, the flashbacks became too real, that I actually put myself on the elevator alone (something I've always been too scared to do), and sped outside to a secluded sidewalk on the side of the building. Tears were churning in the pit of my stomach, and people passed me by, greeting me, totally unaware that behind my smile was a snarl. Almost too coincidental it was painfully laughable, another episode trigger tripped a wire just as I thought I'd relaxed. Completely drowning in flashback, I ran back inside the lobby, where I was met by faces I couldn't recognize. I knew I should've known who they were, I saw them all the time, but this time, amnesia made it so such familiar people became utter strangers. Time had left again, and when I came out of the wormhole, I was in the backseat of my mother's van. I cried breathlessly, leaning into her seat, and then I angrily yelled about the triggers. My mood spiked and then plummeted into tears again, trembling and tingling all over. The fear of not knowing who those people were - none of them - and not knowing who to trust, or what was real and what wasn't, came through clenched teeth as I apologized again and again about something I couldn't help.
But you are free, you are yours alone. That is a truth never changing. This is only the beginning, I know, of a new turn in my odyssey. But like Daniel, it is from this invisible fight that I will glean a bright shine specific to a pebble preyed by torrents. The invariably inevitable truth about life is that it happens over and over and over again, not just as a cycle, but as a recurring transformation of the individual. My strength is staked in knowing this is only a season, and in remembering all of the soldiers overseas or otherwise, who fight a war no human should ever have to endure. There is something so profoundly humbling about walking beside Daniel. The struggles that bind us, shall build us. So too, the fortitudes that are our gravity, shall free us. My hope is in Tomorrow, when I will look upon my child and see my soldier self staring back at me, tangible for the very first time, for that is how the Lord sees me down here, already. So was the case for Daniel when he married and became a father. Daniel fought this disorder with every bit of his being, so he could be there not just for his family, but for others like me, who need a hand in standing back up, so that we too, may come home.
Recommended viewing:
If you are interested in understanding more about the experience of CPTSD, Sarah highly recommends the TV movie, Birdsong available to purchase on iTunes or for rent through the library. Please be aware that it has graphic war depiction and explicit sexual content, and therefore is intended for mature audiences.
Also, a "simulation" of the emotions caused by CPTSD can be experienced by listening to this song "Honor to the End: Transformers" using headphones, volume high. May seem silly, but music is very powerful at explaining the unexplainable.