faux pas

Sometimes I feel fake.
Sometimes I feel like people read my blog and say things like so what and big deal and what's so hard about that? I've been inside of my head for so long that this life feels completely normal and I have a hard time convincing myself that I'm different and that what I go through on a daily basis is not in fact normal at all and I have to remind myself that just like Marla did for me, my writing could be helping others to feel like they're not alone. It could be helping someone understand PTSD. Understand me.
So I trudge on.

I ran across this article today: What is it like to have PTSD? written by a veteran.
A large majority of people know what PTSD is because of the amount of soldiers who have come back from this war with PTSD. A large majority of any new articles or findings or tools for people with PTSD are geared towards soldiers.

I'm exhausted today. I didn't get any sleep last night...none at all. I had horrible nightmares that didn't stop intruding in on my thoughts until well after 1pm today. I'm tired, so my thoughts are becoming drained and irrational and I thought "I'll read this man's blog and then I'll see what it's really like to have PTSD, he'll put me to shame."

So I read it. And he has the same type of PTSD I do and he's saying the same things I've said all so many times.
He fought in a war, I fought in my life.
No, it's not the same, but a trauma is a trauma and we can't say that one person deserves to be labeled traumatized or having PTSD and another doesn't. Trauma can still break you, all the same. Leave you fearful of every minute of every day.

His words, are important, so I wanted to share them with you.
They might help you. They might help you understand someone you know.
They might make you think twice before you tell someone to "get over it" or label them as crazy.


What is it like to have PTSD?


I thought I would write a personal entry today on what post traumatic stress disorder is like for me. We all have our own unique experiences in life so my example may not be like others. Besides, I don’t just have PTSD. I have agoraphobia and depression alongside with complex PTSD. My story might be very different from your own. If it is the same as your own, I would like to hear from you.
When I get up in the morning, my goal is to not leave the apartment. I feel safe inside, I have established my own safe house in what appears to be a combat zone outside of my door. I know where my trusty knife is, I know where people will exit and enter the apartment. I will not be surprised by people coming and going. If the shit goes down, I am in a good position to defend myself because this is my turf.
At any moment a loud explosion will go off and shatter my sense of peace. It will cause me fear and anxiety. My adrenaline will pick up, like it always does when there is a explosion. I will have to look around and act quickly so I can see how many survivors there are to this blast and hopefully I will be able to find the enemy that set off this explosion. I don’t have any real weapons though so it is difficult to execute a proper defense. All I have is my pocket knife and this scares me. I wake up in a panic some nights because I cannot find my M-16 rifle. For years it was right next to me, but it has been almost a decade since I have turned my weapon in to the United States Marine Corps armory on Camp Pendleton.
When I am on the bus or train in this city, I am always looking around. Over my shoulder, I take quick glances at what is behind me. When I am not looking over my shoulder, I am looking straight ahead, to the right and scanning to the left. I must assess who is a friendly and who is the enemy. At any moment I will get hit by incoming fire so I must remain vigilant. I just hope this bus doesn’t run over another metal construction plate in the road. Last time it did that, it triggered panic so bad that I was put in the hospital last year. This year’s goal is to stay out of the hospital and I intend to reach my goal.
I hate surprises. I get agitated when accidents happen, when loud unexpected noises are created. I don’t like being surprised by people, phone calls and the like. I haven’t called my family at all this year and I know they are worried. They keep calling me but I don’t pick up the phone. I feel terrible for it but I just don’t want to talk. 
When I look at other people, I often see the faces of my Marines amongst the crowd. I’ve been through this for years now and I know that those faces are just an apparition, a ghost of my past. Sometimes it is comforting to see those faces but today it is not. It makes me fearful.
The explosion will come. I know it will. Just like that one night in the desert, where it seemed to come from nowhere. The peace has been shattered but I must continue to fight and protect myself and those around me. The only problem is that there are no explosions here. There is no enemy. There is no cause for concern. This fear and panic is all self created and is crazy to others. So I should keep my mouth shut about this so others do not think I am crazy. I have already been to the hospital more than a fews times and I do not want to go back. It’s scary being there...being held against your will. Having family and friends to come visit you and the whole while feel like shit for being in that situation.
I know I have to get a job soon or there will be trouble. I am living off of my $970.00 disability check in an expensive major city and I am barely making it. Yet I cannot explain my gaps in employment because if I had to be honest, I would have to reveal my disability, my hospitalizations, my medicines, my fears and everything that I want to be kept a secret. My family wants me to ask the VA for more disability money but I am so ashamed. I don’t understand why I have to go through this. I didn’t do anything wrong yet I feel like I am being punished. At times I wish that explosion took my life. I wish my body had been turned into pink mist spread across the desert sand. 
I’m not suicidal today and that is a great feeling. Tomorrow the thoughts will likely return but for now I am going to hold on to this feeling and try to get it to stay. I need to keep moving forward instead of treading water in my apartment. I don’t know what I am moving forward towards but I must keep moving.
Some people will read this and think, “What a nightmare.” Well it’s not a nightmare. It is my life. It is the way it is and it is, what it is.

Relentless brain.

The peaceful quiet of the night is unforgiving and it’s during that silence that I question my reason of existence at all.

There are things about PTSD that we just don’t talk about.
We don’t talk about it, because people don’t want to hear it.
They actually don’t want to hear a large majority of it – but here’s the relentless truth: one of the symptoms of PTSD is suicidal ideation. There are some days when a person with PTSD simply sits down and says “What’s the point?”. Yes, the person who is in constant fear of dying from some horrible accident some days just sits down and thinks that the easiest way of getting out of their head is to end their life.
Most of the time it’s just that – a simple thought of “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I’m well educated on PTSD and I’ve been living with it for longer than I can remember (to be honest, I don’t know a time in my life that I didn’t have PTSD symptoms) so I’m well aware of these intrusive thoughts and I know the difference between the simple thought at the end of a day and when I should fear myself. I think the thought, most likely have a bit of an attitude for the rest of the day, go to bed, and wake up ready to face the next day.
I don’t actually fear myself in these moments of defeat, but in the chaos of our PTSD brains it crosses our minds.

I can tell you it’s exhausting to be in my head, but you’d never quite fully grasp those words unless you were in my head. When I was younger I struggled a lot with this thought. I knew that my thoughts were different than other people’s thoughts and I wasn’t ever able to explain myself in ways that people understood.
It’s not that bad, get over it.
I couldn’t. And it was that bad. And I used to spend my days distracting myself by envisioning this alternate reality where I had this power to simply grab someone’s arm and project the images and thoughts from my head into theirs, so they could see what I saw.
So they’d stop telling me to stop being a baby and to suck it up and to just leave the door unlocked or the window opened.

But my imagination couldn’t become a reality so I had to continue to muddle through life with my mouth shut, suffering through the attack on my brain that occurred on a daily basis.

“Dr. Jonathan Shay, a P.T.S.D. specialist, thinks that even calling it a disorder is misleading: P.T.S.D. is an injury. There are degrees of damage, ranging from standard combat stress, which can be treated with a few days’ rest, to full-blown complex P.T.S.D., which is very difficult to treat, let alone cure. It is best understood, though, as a psychic wound, one that can be crippling, even fatal, in its myriad complications.”


One time when I was out to eat at my favorite restaurant, I was triggered by a couple who sat close by that was having a heated argument. My brain was tired that day and my defense on my brain wasn’t very strong. I immediately recognized that I was triggered and had the other person I was with distract me, but sometimes, no matter how well versed in fighting my own battle I am – it’s not enough.
I kept flashbacks at bay, but my body still reacted. The world got loud and adrenaline surged through my body as if it were needed for survival. It became hard to concentrate and by the time I left the restaurant that night, I was 100% exhausted.
My brain grasped at that memory of a trigger that lead to a memory and stored it away as valuable information. Every time that I’ve gone back to that restaurant since that day, my senses are heightened and I feel the urge to run for my life.

My brain is relentless, unforgiving. It thinks it’s doing the job that it needs to do in order to survive. It’s all it knows. Some days, it’s really hard to see the silver lining. Some days, I feel like I’m just too damn tired to wake up and do it all over again.

The other thing we don’t “talk” about is our foreshortened sense of future. Obviously no one can predict what the future holds but some people with PTSD have a problem with seeing the future at all. I wrote the following on a discussion I was having with other people with PTSD:

I'm 27 years old. PTSD has been all I've ever known, so it's not like I yearn to get back to the "normal" way that life used to be or anything - but what I wanted to talk about/ask is in regards to the fact that I can't "see" past tomorrow. 
I know that there are many people who have been living with PTSD far longer than I have and I wonder: does it get any easier/what have you done to be able to "see the future"? I know I have to go to work tomorrow and that this weekend I may spend a night with friends watching a movie and that in May I'll be an aunt again... but in reality, I expect to die this afternoon. Or on my way home from school tonight. Or tomorrow morning. (Not by my own hand, but by some wicked twist of fate) I know that I have plans that are "future based" (like a set date for an event I’m attending), and I look forward to those things but I never plan on living that long. I actually spend a lot more time thinking about it than I ever let on to. It's not something I consciously decide, it's just how it is. I can't see ever getting married or having a family or watching children grow or being retired. I WANT those things, but they don't ever feel attainable. 


I can’t look forward to a life that I can’t force myself, no matter how hard I try, to believe exists. I want it to exist. I want to look forward to it, but I can’t see it. On the rare occasion that I do see a glimpse into what “could be” I grab ahold of it and store it away as a reminder to myself that it could happen. After all, I am 27, I’ve made it this far and that’s far longer than my 18 year old self would have predicted.

Now once again it’s midnight and I’ve avoided doing all of the things that I’m supposed to get done because this nagging at the back of my mind said “get this out”, so I did.

I recently saw a neurologist at a sleep clinic, hoping he could shed some light on the subject of PTSD sleep that most doctors don’t have the slightest clue about. He wasn’t too versed in PTSD but he did understand how the brain physically works in those who have PTSD when it comes to sleep. After drilling me with various questions (sometimes repeatedly) he assured me that he 100% believed that I had sleeping problems and in the same breath told me that I was fighting a battle that I couldn’t win.

He said “Your amygdala, the fear center of the brain, doesn’t sleep when you do. It’s over active during the day and you seem to have a good awareness around that and what you can do to counteract it, but when you sleep, it’s still going. It’s overproductive, releasing unnecessary levels of adrenaline into your system at unnecessary times. It’s watching your dreams and gathering pieces of them that it deems dangerous and it’s waking you up for protection. We can’t change that.”

We can’t change it, but we can drug it. So now, once again, Prazosin is added to my drug cocktail – normally diagnosed for high blood pressure, it’s supposed to reduce the amount of adrenaline that my dear amygdala releases while I sleep, hopefully reducing the amount of times that I wake up during the night.
I’ve been prescribed this drug before, but by a doctor who had absolutely no clue as to why she was prescribing it. No one could tell me why it worked so I wasn’t comfortable taking it. So this neurologist explained the how’s and why’s and then I asked the question that had kept me from taking the risk of a new drug the last time I had possession of it.

I was afraid to take the Prazosin last time.
Why?
I was afraid it would kill me. I was afraid to go to sleep and die.
It won’t kill you. You won’t die from taking it.
Are you SURE?
Yes, I’m sure.
Ok, I’m going to trust you on this.
Ok.
And I’m also going to blog about it, so you better not be lying.
I’m not.

Suicidal ideation, foreshortened sense of future, fear of death. Confused yet? Yeah, me too. 

For more information on PTSD sleep you can visit the website for the one and only sleep center devoted to PTSD sleep here. Unfortunately it's in New Mexico and requires (for best results) that you stay either at the sleep center or live near it in order to actually benefit from it so it's officially #1 on my list of things to do if I win the lottery/publish a book.
A podcast on iTunes relating to PTSD and sleep is what lead me both to the existence of the sleep center and the drug Prazosin but I can't currently find it (I'll keep looking).

Here is a link to the article that the quote used in this post was obtained from. It talks about the suicide of a Marine who suffered from PTSD.