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#stage of recovery from ptsd in order to see myself as worthy of trying and able to find a relationship...
failed221b-chill · 3 years
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So uhh having ptsd really sucks!!!!! But I'm okay!!!!! Things that are affecting me now are temporary!!!!!!! That's the beauty and sadness of things - they're all temporary everything is temporary!!!!!
Everything is temporary is both a comfort and a tragedy, but I'm gonna try and relax because, hey, even the comfort and the tragedy of things being temporary is... temporary!!!!
Idk if everything genuinely is temporary. Maybe love endures maybe thats not temporary. Maybe kindness endures.
But I'll never get to hug my lil friend again. That was a temporary gift i was able to have for 5 years only. But I'll love and miss and remember him and his lil silliness forever. And maybe thats not temporary.
Maybe the complete sorrow ripping apart my stomach is temporary. Maybe my brain searching for every other pain I've ever felt to try and challenge the weight of this one and comfort me via distractions that are painful but less painful than this one, is temporary.
Maybe my brain is just bringing them up to show me that i survived them and i will survive this one. And it's working, but its also not needed, because i know this. I have known this for very nearly 3 years now: I have no doubt in my own survival. I'll never be temporary to myself. I'll be here and I'll survive as a constant presence to myself throughout growth and changes until one day, hopefully in old age, something will remove me and then I'll be gone and so i wont ever have a chance to be temporary to myself.
I wrote this after i wrote the tags rant so it doesnt even seem relevant but ahh thats how brain trauma processing goes.
#me: spends most of yesterday drafting dialogue for a story thats obvs just a way of me processing how i dont have to reach some fanciful#stage of recovery from ptsd in order to see myself as worthy of trying and able to find a relationship...#me: sees the rtd news and reactions all over my fucking dash.#me: gets triggered by a thing i ddint even realise or anticipate would ever need to be a trigger bc who tf could have predicted rtd who#being relevant again???#me: writes the story harder like... to cope...#me: has a dream that shows i am Not Coping and yeah actually no the ptsd is still very much a barrier to umm life as we know it.#me: still feels the need to overexplain my every choice and action bc of the ptsd so writes in the tags about why the fuck tumblr has#temporarily stopped being a safe space for me and i wont be as active until all the dw stuff has calmed down.#idk where this is going anymore im just... 😕 would be real great to NOT have ptsd thats specifically about relationships...#would be nice if i could legit convince myself for Longer than One Day that maybe im not so much more heavily broken and messy than most#and that if i can have empathy for others suffering and experiences that are different to mine#then i should expect that others might be able to have empathy for my suffering and experiences that are different to theirs#and i kinda manage to convince myself of that... sometimes. and then stuff like this hits and i go into ptsd triggered mode and everything#just stops. it just stops working. its not true. the average joe does not have ptsd and i do and it is hard to live with. it just is!!!!!#its hard sometimes!!!!! and reclaiming tumblr and cultivating this safe space has been so good and such a help!!!! and then!!!!!#random intrusive suddenly everywhere something i ddint know i needed to blacklist the tags of bc why would it be an issue but omg its a big#issue. i have far too many issues tbh its ridiculous and now im ranting in the tags and idk why. im at least better at not apologising for#existing so i wont say sorry but hey look by saying that ive said sorry!!!!! ugh!!!!!! hello relationship specific trauma fucking sucksss!!#and so does ummm growing up in a cult ptsd!!!!! and so does having been influenced and manipulated by narcissists!!!!!!#ahh and the root of it all being such a heavy hitter now is that im EXHAUSTED FROM GRIEVING MY LIL BOY AND HES NOT COMING BACK AND ITS SHIT#it just is. its shit. so my brain is trying to comfort me by bringing up other shit stuff to try and challenge that. and its like... pls no#pls let me just rest and recover and not think about all the horrifying things that are wrong with me!!!! and then normal days id be like.#no theres nothing 'wrong with me' that is an unhelpful phrase!!!! but today im still recovering from the after effects of dream that was#prompted by this fuckin rtd who triggering me and so im like... normal people do not have reactions as intense as this. but hey brain!!!!!!#im not normal!!!!!!!!!!! im me!!!!!!!!!! im okay!!!!!!!!! im gonna be okay!!!!!!!!!!! this is just temporary!!!!!!!!!!!!!! please relax!!!!#caitlin gets deep
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heartsofstrangers · 7 years
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What has been one of the most challenging things that you’ve experienced or are currently experiencing?
“Oh gosh, that’s a rough one, because my entire life has been nothing but obstacles and challenges, and for someone so young, that’s a hard concept to understand: Your entire life has been nothing but challenge after challenge after challenge, and you get tired of it, but then there’s a point in your life where you realize that’s just how it is. You grow stronger after each challenge.
“For me right now, I’m growing as a person. That’s my own challenge. I’ve been standing in the way of myself for years, I’ve given myself bad advice. I haven’t been a positive influence on myself, and I’m desperately trying to work on that and change that, and it is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. In order to try to love myself, and show myself, look, you are worthy of all these awesome things in life—you’re not just a piece of trash on the side of the road—that’s really hard for me, because for so many years I was told I was nothing but trash, garbage, I was never going to amount to anything. So now I’m trying to teach myself no, that’s not true. This is who you are. This is who you’re gonna be. So as of right now, that’s my main challenge: me working on myself.”
I noticed before we got into this interview that you have some scars on your arms.
“Yeah.”
Do you wanna tell me about that?
“When I was really, really, really young—I wanna say about ten—my mom married to my stepfather, who became my legal father; he adopted me. He was a really nice guy in the beginning, and then we moved to North Carolina, and he became a really awful person, just horrible. To be frank, he horribly, horribly abused me and my mother, and I was in pain every single day. I was in pain to the point where I didn’t feel anything anymore. Nothing.
“By the time I was sixteen, cutting was no longer a release: It was an actual addiction. I could not live without the blade on my skin. The scars you see on my arms—I gave myself 147 in one day because I was in so much pain. My mom had just divorced my stepfather, and he was still trying to abuse her and trying to come after us, and she was petrified. She was lost and scared, and I couldn’t help her. My sisters were also in that same situation; I couldn’t help them. At that point in time, I felt like I had to protect everyone because my mother was unable to and my sisters were unable to, and I couldn’t do it, so I just started cutting. I couldn’t protect the people I wanted to protect, and they couldn’t protect me, and we were in such a mess that I didn’t know what to do.
“About 2014, March, one of my Tumblr friends, to be honest, she was going through some serious, serious depression. I mean, so bad she was really contemplating taking her life, and she made an attempt. I thought I had lost her, and I was broken. Completely, utterly broken. I thought to myself, if she takes her life via blade, that could have been me. That could have been me, and my mom could have found me, my sisters could have found me, anybody could have found me.
“I know that pain of what it’s like to lose somebody, but my friend? She didn’t take her life, which I’m so happy about, and now, here she is, doing so much better, healing herself, going on in life, and that’s fantastic, but that night that she was making an attempt, I made the ultimate decision to stop. I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t right for me to not only hurt myself, but to actually hurt other people and know that I was hurting them when, at the time, I didn’t think I was hurting anybody but myself.”
Did anyone say anything to you about the marks on your arms at that time?
“My junior year of high school was when it really, really got noticeable and really bad. My Spanish teacher was actually the one who kind of brought it up. She was very concerned and alerted my mother, even though my mother already knew. My junior year, I was hospitalized twice for serious depression and anxiety, PTSD, cutting—all the good, depressing stuff in life.
“After all of that was said and done, my hospitalization and whatnot, I started the road to self-recovery, really trying to better myself, because for so many years, I had been in such a horrible, dark place; I literally felt like I was in a sea of darkness and I was drowning all the time. I couldn’t live like that anymore. That wasn’t even living—that was surviving, and that was so difficult to do, day by day, every single day. All I wanted to do was be happy and enjoy life like I did when I was a child, but I was so depressed and so hurt by what had happened to me, I couldn’t even do that. The joys of life were stripped, and it hurt so badly, but then one day, I was like, ‘No.’ I made the decision to fight.”
What was that experience like in the hospital for you?
“The first time, it was scary. It was really scary. I was sixteen. I was driven in the back of a cop car to the hospital, because they were afraid that I was going to jump out of the car. I was petrified. It was all happening really suddenly—one minute, I was really not well, and I knew I wasn’t well, and I knew I needed help, and the next minute, I’m in a hospital surrounded by people I don’t know, I’m hooked up to several IVs, all this stuff is going on, they’re asking me questions. They’re analyzing me, and I can’t even function. It was a mess, and for someone who’s already psychologically messed up, all of that questioning and excitement in such a short amount of time was exhausting for me.
“The second time, though—I hate saying this—but the second time, I knew how to get out of there pretty quickly. You learn how to play the game to get out.”
So it sounds like you didn’t necessarily—the hospital process wasn’t really what helped you heal or rehabilitate yourself.
“No. Not at all. If anything, the hospital made me feel worse about myself. It made me feel like I had all these things wrong with me—you hear ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ and it just made me feel like I was insane. ‘I have to be medicated to stabilize all this stuff? I can’t do this on my own?’ It was actually about that time that I really started the focus, shortly after the hospitalization. The cutting stopped when my friend made that attempt, but the beginning stages of self-healing were after the first hospital visit.”
How did you start to take the steps to begin the healing process?
“Every time that I looked at the blade, I really tried to not even think about it or go near it. I really tried to stay away from it, and that was the first step for me—ultimately getting rid of the physical weapon I was hurting myself with. So, when I finally did that, about a year later—it was hard. I didn’t do it as much, but after the first year, that’s when I was able to fully quit, 100% cold turkey, but trying to stay away from that blade the first year was very difficult, but I knew these were baby steps. I knew it wasn’t going to happen overnight; I knew it was going to take a lot of time. After being in a bad state for so long, trying to get to a new state was going to take a long time. That’s gonna take a lot of guts and courage and constantly pushing yourself.
“But where I am now, looking back to where I was then, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I really wouldn’t. The people who are in my life now are absolutely fantastic. Life right now is great. I can’t complain. In fact, on Saturday, I’m moving to Washington state. I’m so excited. A brand-new chapter in my life is about to start, and I’m a brand-new person, and I get to experience it 100% happy, whereas I wouldn’t be able to do that three years ago.”
What are some of the differences today from three years ago? What are some of the coping skills you employed to make these changes?
“I’ve surrounded myself, firstly, with much better people, more positive people and influences. I did have to separate myself from my family for a while because I didn’t feel that they were being a positive influence on me. It was very hard to do that, extremely hard, but the family that I was having some issues with, we’ve settled our differences and we’re now all good again; we’re working on a relationship. So that’s a positive right there.
“I’m engaged. I have my wonderful fiancé, who makes my life freaking fantastic on a daily basis. My big brother—he’s fantastic. He’s always supportive, always there for me. I wouldn’t have it any other way with the people I have in my life right now. The people I had in my life two years ago? No. Who I have in my life right now are the good people, the people who are going to help me be a better person, help me make a difference, to impact somebody else.
“It’s been said that it’s important when you’re trying to aspire to something or mold yourself to surround yourself with people whom you respect and admire, that sort of drives you forward. Another thing that comes to mind when you talk about the people who were surrounding you three years ago is that often the people that we’re surrounded by are our reflection of ourselves. So, if you’re surrounded by better people today, healthier, more productive people, that’s a great indication that you’re in a better place.
“It certainly feels like it. It really does. For the first time in my life, honestly, I’ve been able to wake up almost every single day happy. Three years ago, I couldn’t do that. Three years ago, I woke up and started crying, because I was awake, and I wanted to be asleep. I never wanted to wake up.
“Now, I don’t want to go to sleep. Are you kidding? I want to be up all the time. I wanna be hanging out with my fiancé and my brother, I wanna be playing video games, hanging out with my cat. I wanna just hang out and have fun, enjoy life. I don’t wanna sleep. I’m enjoying life as it is. It’s too good.”
It sounds like you are grateful, which I think is the key component to really being in the moment and taking advantage of the gifts that life has to offer.
“Life has so many gifts to offer; it’s just whether or not you choose to act on them. When life gives them to you, do you receive them, or do you ignore them? And sometimes, most of us ignore them. But I’ve been given so many gifts by life recently, I can’t ignore them.”
Is it fair to say that your adversity and depression and the abuse that you suffered opened you up in ways that may not—?
“100%. Most definitely, without a shadow of a doubt. Yeah. 100%.”
What advice would you offer to somebody else who’s still stuck in that feeling of not wanting to be awake, not wanting to get out of bed?
“The most cliché thing ever, and I didn’t believe it until one day, it literally slapped me across the face: ‘It does get better, and you’re not alone.’ You’re not.”
When did you realize that you were not alone?
“When I found Tumblr, to be honest. I found Tumblr, I created a blog page, I still have it—I don’t really use it, but I still have it, and I found so many people on there who were going through similar things. Some of them were going through much worse than I was, and those people who had it worse than me, they were helping me, and I couldn’t comprehend that. You have it ten times worse than I do, but here you are, comforting me, somebody who has it ten times better than you do. But the way they saw it was: She’s in pain, too.
“That’s how I now see everyone. You could be sitting in there. You could think my life sucks. Does everyone else’s suck? I mean, his might suck. His might not. You never know unless you start a conversation with somebody. Change, you know.
“That’s pretty much how it started for me, with the Tumblr thing. I just started talking to someone. They shared something that would just kind of offset me, like—this doesn’t seem like something they’d normally post. Let me see if they’re okay. And I would be like, ‘Hey! Are you okay?’ And they’d be like, ‘No,’ and they’d open up. I learned to listen, and I learned to comfort, and it feels so amazing to be able to help other people, to do what you do, except without the photography and travelling. I do my empathy and conversation with other people behind a computer screen, but I love doing it, because that’s real connection. You know you’re helping someone, and you can feel that you’re helping them because they’re really listening to what you have to say, and they’re really putting it into their life, and that makes me feel fantastic. Even though I’ve been through all this crap, and I’ve been hurt so much, I’m able to take my pain and my story and help somebody else get through their crap and help them be a better person, so they can help someone else.”
Sounds like it’s given you a lot of tools, the experiences that you’ve been through.
“Back to my friend who was making an attempt—shortly after she did that, I started helping her recover, like, with herself as a person. She asked me, ‘Why are you helping me?’ And I said, ‘Because my job on this planet is to help people. That’s all it is. If I can help you and make you a better person, and help show you that life is some beautiful thing and not something horrible that’s going to hurt you, then I’ve done my job. Go enjoy life.’”
Was it hard for you to remain open after being hurt so much? I think our instinct as human beings is to shut off, shut down, close off to prevent that pain from ever happening again. It takes courage and an amount of vulnerability to put yourself out there and expose yourself and say, “You know what? Yes, there is a possibility that I may get hurt again, but life is too important to miss out.”
“Well, to be honest, it really depends on the person, if I’m open with them or not. For some reason, I can kinda tell if I can be open with someone, or if I can’t be. When it came to my fiancé, when he and I first met and became friends, I felt like I could tell him some things right off the bat, but I had to gradually ease into everything else. Now my best friend, I told her everything right off the bat, because I just automatically knew that we were going to be best friends, no matter what. She knew everything. It really just depends on the person.
“But as of now, if someone wants to hear my story, I’ll share it with you. I have nothing to hide. My story made me who I am today, and I’m proud of who I am. I’ve come a really long way. There are so many people who have done the same, and I’m so proud of them.”
What gives you the hope and inspiration to keep going and keep helping other people?
“That’s an excellent question, and I don’t think I’ve really ever thought about that. I guess it’s just ’cause I don’t want anyone to ever feel the pain that I’ve felt, so I do this on a daily basis. Whether or not I actually connect with someone, the fact that I work at a coffee shop and I can just smile and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing today?’ can make somebody else smile. That might be the first smile of the day for them, and it could be 12:30 in the afternoon, but I made someone smile. I feel good.”
That’s important. It could just be that simple.
“It really is sometimes. It seriously is. You don’t have to get someone a big, elaborate gift; sometimes the simplest thing of giving them a hug, or just saying, ‘Hey, how are you doing today?’ Having a conversation with them means more than a giant gift you got them, because you’re listening to them. You’re taking the time to talk to them and hear them, and they might not have been heard before.”
That’s huge. You touched upon something really important that I think a lot of people are struggling with, because their voices are not heard.
“And it’s so important to be heard. When you’re in that depressed state, I feel like—it’s not like you’ve been ignored, but it’s almost a feeling where you feel you haven’t been heard. You’ve been heard, but you’ve only been partially heard. Your true meaning or true intent was not heard. Sometimes you are just blatantly ignored. For me, though, it was only partially heard, and it infuriated me because I had more to tell and more to share, and then after a while, I was blatantly ignored, and it hurt. I didn’t want anyone to ever feel that way again.
“Unfortunately, in order to get where I am today, I’ve had to hurt people; I’ve had people hurt me. It has not been easy, but I am in a state now where I know that what I have done to some people was absolutely wrong, what they have done to me was absolutely wrong, and the people that I have hurt, I am trying to make amends with every single day. I am trying to forgive the people who have hurt me every single day, and it’s not easy. It’s not at all. The people who can forgive me—I am so thankful for those people.”
How important is forgiveness in the healing process?
“It is everything. Love and forgiveness are absolutely everything. That sounds so completely cliché, but unless you have been on a horrible journey and have decided to continue with your life just to see where it goes, you get to a point where you’re just like, ‘Wow,’ and you realize that love and forgiveness are the most powerful weapons you can have in fighting this. If you really are serious about never wanting to feel this way again, most of the time, you don’t want anyone else to feel that way, so you show them—‘Hey, here are your tools to fight this. Go fight.’”
Is it hard for you to forgive yourself?
“I still haven’t fully forgiven myself.”
Are there any outlets that you have today that you find helpful?
“Yeah, community is a huge outlet for me. In fact, most of the things that I wasn’t really into when I was younger, like community, communication, hanging out with people, fun things in general—that wasn’t me three years ago, because I didn’t feel like I deserved them. Now I’m at a point where I realize that community and hanging out with people and communication are very, very important.
“If anything, that’s my number one thing, community. I live with my big brother now. I also live with my fiancé. We all have a cat. That is our family. We all hang out together, we all talk with each other; every single moment, we are with each other, and we’re not bored with each other. We’re never tired of each other. If anything, we’re excited to hang out more because we know we’re all there for each other, and it’s fantastic to be able to find that one, small group that really gets you and accepts you for who you are, regardless of the stuff you’ve been in, regardless of the who you were before, regardless of what you’re going through now. They still love you enough to be like, ‘Hey, you okay? You need some space? You want to come hang out? What do you want to do?’ That’s everything, at least for me.”
Sounds like you have unconditional love.
“I do. I’m so happy to have that, because before, I didn’t have that. I thought I did, but I did not.”
Do you have a favorite quote that you’d like to share?
“A favorite quote . . . I have so many. I can’t really think of one right now.”
Was there something that someone ever said to you throughout the course of your life that stuck with you?
“Yeah. Dory from Finding Nemo—‘Just keep swimming.’
What does that mean to you personally?
“To me personally, it means keep going. Keep fighting, and eventually it will get better. When things started getting rough for me when I was younger, when it started getting bad around nine or ten, Finding Nemo was my favorite movie. It was funny to me. Blue fish can’t frickin’ remember crap after twenty minutes; that’s hysterical. But every time she said, ‘Just keep swimming,’ I’d tell myself that—‘Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming.’ And I think that’s absolutely ridiculous and silly, but that’s been one of the things that’s helped me before. ‘Just keep swimming.’ It’s gonna get better. This is not the end. This is just a temporary obstacle. Once you overcome it, you’ll look back and be like, ‘I did that. I did that.’”
And that gives you confidence, right?
“And that gives you confidence. That gives you power. It uplifts you.”
It gives you hope.
“It does. It feels like a weight is lifted right off of your shoulders, because when you’re in that depressed state, and I’m sure you know, you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders all the time. When you finally find that spot in your life where you’re actually breaking free from that, you feel it lifting, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize I had all this weight on me. I didn’t realize how much I was letting myself get dragged down.’ Life is beautiful. I mean, granted, we are not a beautiful world—there are horrible things going on—but life itself can be beautiful if you choose to make it so.
“When you described the weight of the world, I had this mental image of the weight is trying to hang onto every experience, or every bad memory, or every painful experience that we’ve had, and we carry it with us, day to day, and it weighs us down to the point where we can’t even move. When you begin to take inventory of that and recognize that some of those things are not useful, and to look at them and make peace with them, to let them go and make space for you to let the light in, to let the love in, and begin the healing process.”
I’m really proud of you, that you are in the place that you’re at today, and I think it’s very courageous of you to share your experiences with me, having just met a few minutes ago.
“Honestly, you wanted to hear a story; I gave you one. A story doesn’t cost anything—just a little bit of time. I have all the time in the world, and you wanted to listen, so thank you.”
How has it felt to talk about your feelings and experiences with me?
“It’s been fun. It really has. I didn’t feel uncomfortable or anything because I felt like this was needed, in a sense. I felt like this was fate, destiny, whatever you wanna call it. It was supposed to be.”
Do you think it’s possible that by sharing your experiences with me today and having others read it you could be helping someone else out there who may be struggling?
“I hope so. I know I’m not the only person you’re gonna interview, and I know I’m not the last. Goodness, I know there are several stories, but you bet your butt I’m gonna go home and look up those stories as soon as I get there. I’m gonna read every single one of them because I want to know what other stories people have. Maybe one of their stories can help me grow even more. I hope to God one of my stories can help somebody. If it helps just one person, that’s all that matters to me. Just one person. That’s one life saved. That’s someone who gets to experience another sixty years, instead of six minutes and then six feet under.”
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