I Like Watching You Learn How to Be Alive [PTSD Series: Part 5]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

1

Change happens in an instant.

The process of recovery has taken me years, and is still ongoing.

But the epiphanies that push me forward seem to happen in a single moment.

They strike like lightning, and you can cross a room and be a completely different person than the person who came in on the other side.

I find that I can put in months or even years in trying to understand a concept, or figure out what I want for my life, but once all of the pieces interlock and fall into place, that's what when the change occurs. It's like a machine at once perfectly coming into shape.

2

[Diary Entry]

He said, “I like watching you learn how to be alive.”

I was seeing this therapist to try and deal with my trauma, whose specialization was somatic experiencing. She gave me this exercise to do - it involved trying to make yourself aware of two different things at once. The first, was internal - a heartbeat or a headache, or the way your fingers felt. The second, was something external. A leaf, or a piece of grass, or a beam of light. Then you tried to hold those two feelings at the same time.

The reason for this is because trauma doesn’t exist in reality. The only way for trauma to affect you is for it to exist outside of chronology. The exercise was an attempt to re-calibrate your senses, to stop disassociation.

I had been practicing that for about a week.

I remembered that I was feeling panicked and lonely and like everything was impossible - sitting on the bed with Robert, feeling like I was going to be devoured from the inside. And he was telling me that I could get through this, that I didn’t have any choice to get through this. I was holding this 8 lb exercise ball that I’d been using as a way to try to connect to reality, and with my other hand I was touching Robert on the chest and feeling his heartbeat.

It was something about the heartbeat, and my hand against the ball, and the realization - hmm - I didn’t want to do this shit anymore. I was tired of living a life in perpetual crisis. I wanted to live, and I wanted to live the way I wanted to.

Then I broke through.

At first I thought I was having a panic attack - it came on like that, a loud noise that blocked all other noise, a blood rush, heaviness flowing outward. Breathing heavy. And then reality exploded. It’s difficult to describe, the sheer NOISE of existence. But it was so heavy, and so overwhelming, that for several moments I thought that I’d gone insane. Everything felt fast, even though it was staying still. It was like up until that moment I had been living in this dull, empty void of a house and someone RIPPED THE CURTAIN AWAY SO THAT ALL THE COLORS COULD SHINE THROUGH.

Robert opened the window and told me to look outside. It was like the sky was a river of static. Each leaf on the tree was glittering, so that everytime the wind blow it revealed a new dimensionality. “That’s been there the whole time?” I remembered saying, crying because it was so beautiful, whole, and it’d been there the whole time.

Existing alongside me.

You get used to living with the hole inside of you. To the part where maybe you feel like it makes you a better person, to feel pain, that the particular composition of your chemicals synergizes well with that sucking feeling that tears at your chest. The feeling of the world falling apart. You get used to waking up and falling because you’ve forgotten gravity exists.

But it’s not working with you, it’s actively destroying you. Because in order for it to exist, you need to be small. And you need to have your eyes closed, your back turned to the cliffside, so that it can take your hands and move them for you, take your heartbeat and twist it so that it pops out on your tongue.

I saw the city that weekend. Rushing and alive. I was dancing at a club several stories up and drinking whiskey, but I was more interested in leaning over the balcony and staring at the way that cars moved along the grid of downtown as if I’d never seen them before. Never seen glass stacked on top of glass.

I didn’t know what it meant to stop disassociating until that night. I had seen glimmers of it, but never knew the sheer amount of unrelenting waves of reality that I had been missing.

For weeks at a time I was crushed. I’d take the puppies for a walk and feel miserable, surrounded by flowers and sunshine. I had recurrent, compulsive thoughts of killing myself. Finding a nice comfortable hole and drowning myself in dirt. Masturbatory fantasies. Didn’t do me any good, but to provide me some kind of relief. Some way out, without getting out.

I had always gotten to this point in my life before, and time and time again I had self-destructed. Become withdrawn, blew up my relationships, staying out all night finding new ways to hurt myself, cheated on whoever I was with, lashed out in anger, cut myself, ended up shivering in the office of a mental health facility desperate for relief.

But there was a whisper, a thread. I could feel it in the sunshine that made its way down to my skin. A soft gloss of a promise. It hadn’t been there before, but I felt it now. There is something here, it said, if you just keep going. I know that you can’t see it now, because your patterns won’t let you, but there is something here.

So I didn’t self-destruct. I wouldn’t let myself. Not this time.

I kept going.

And I knew that I’d been right - when not a few months later reality exploded outwards and I was able to see for the first time.

For the first time in years, to breathe without a heaviness in my chest.

In the summer of 2016, I made a promise to myself. I would not run from the things I was afraid of anymore. I would try to build a life for myself instead of tearing it apart. I would challenge every bad thought, every fear, every shiver, every dissonant image, every dream, every desire.

In the summer of 2016 I have felt some of the greatest pain that I have ever experienced. Emotional pain so heavy and intense that it felt like it was tearing my skull out of my head, tearing my insides to ash. It left me paralyzed with such engulfing, overwhelming fear. I could viscerally TASTE what abandonment felt like. It was WARM. It was made out of gray fire and it was flaking off of the inside of my damn skull.

I was not letting the hole inside of me rule my life anymore, I was not side-stepping my fears, taking little sips of pain, going through the comfortable routes that I’d become accustomed to. It was so bad that at times, I was paralyzed with terror when I tried to leave a room and felt like I “shouldn’t.”

I began to really examine all the things I had done that were wrong, why I had gotten to that point... with a lot of help from Robert. I had been blocking out the knowledge that I had been hurting people for a long time, and once the guilt hit me I wanted to do really extreme things - images of setting myself on fire, chopping my fingers off.

Like the images of suicide - they were self indulgent. I couldn’t take back what I had done. I could never make up for the things that I had done. It was scientifically, literally impossible.

Robert kept saying that I didn’t need to punish myself, that I should do things that make me happy. So I pushed myself to go out - to swim with the puppies, to go running, to walk through the forest, to watch movies. To eat ramen, or go to parties, to meditate or drink bubble tea or write or read a book. Sometimes doing things that I knew would make me happy was more painful than being self-indulgent in my misery. I wanted to lay in bed all day, but I’d force myself to go take the puppies for a long walk, or take a run.

My mind does not control my body, my body and my mind work in synergy. If I make my body do those things, the mind adjusts. I can use my body to change my mental state.

I began to meditate. It allowed me to see how my thoughts influenced each other. How I could go back to the origin of a thought and see how it changed form. Control it.

My focus was coming back. My will. I saw how much anxiety was shattering my focus and making me ineffective.

I tripped on acid for the first time at a party. It allowed me to have an emotional connection with some thoughts that I felt I understood only intellectually, especially on what love meant, and I was able to act more thoroughly and decisively on those thoughts. I began taking more (1plsd, ald-52) about a month later. That too, allowed me to see how much my thoughts affected my perspective. How a bad thought set off a chain reaction of chemicals and if left unchecked could eradicate everything else. And I was just having fun again - like staring at the patterns on the bed. Or playing video games. Listening to music. And that carried over when I was sober.

I began to enjoy music again. I stopped drinking so much, because I was enjoying reality more than escaping from it. I had trouble sleeping, because I often felt just excited to be alive, my mind racing with all the possibilities of existence - something that had not happened to me since I was very young.

I am a burnt out damaged husk but there is something growing inside of me, and every day I nurture it it gets bigger. So I feel like a child and an old person simultaneously. A thing on the inside, and a thing on the outside. One is grown and accustomed to the world, but moves through it like reality is a burden. The other is new, and fragile, and trembles with eyes uncovered, but with a lot of work has become strongly rooted.

The old thing... so burnt, so damaged, that even the idea of getting tequila and making margaritas frightened me. Like it was this huge monumental affront to the universe itself to do something that I enjoyed, something that would cause harm to no one.

But I did it. I made margaritas and I woke up the next morning with most of my skin still intact. And so the new thing grows, just a little bit.

I grow. Sometimes I breathe, and it feels like I’m breathing sideways, but still I grow. This last summer was the best of my life, not because I waited for external factors to shift around me, because I made it so. And no matters what happens next - I will carry that with me for the rest of my life.

In 2015, I could not have imagined what I was capable of now. The only possible momentum is forward. I’m going to school, I’m working on my book. I’m reading more. Listening to the universe more. The other day I sat outside at the park listening to Chopin, and when I realized I was happy I did not feel like the bottom was going to fall out from underneath everything.

I’m not sure how to end this except...

I used to imagine the inside of my body as a dark place. Cold. Organs inert. Like if someone cut me I would spill out like an already dead lamb, collapse into cooling skin like meat refrigerated for too long.

But now when I think of my body, it’s bursting with momentum and color. Nerve wires sizzle through blood, catching fire. Even in the dark, it’s vibrant, organs inside a forest of patterned, shivering life. It touches the world in spasms of electricity. It builds cities made of molecules and tears them down, second by second, so that I can look through my eyes, feel with my fingers.

It is not only an alive thing, it is everything.

Last Saturday I stopped disassociating. I’d been working with my therapist - something about the way that I was touching the ball and feeling its weight and Robert’s heartbeat at the same time, shocking myself out of years and years of repressed sensation.

This Saturday we went to eat ramen at tatsuya and I could feel the city breathing, expanding, the realization that it was ACTUALLY RAINING, and maybe rain has never entered my consciousness before - not really - not like this, and seeing the stretch of highway and realizing how infinitesimally small it was. How huge it was. Expanding and contracting my consciousness. Noticing the lights for the first time, in this ramen place that I’d been in half a dozen times or more.
Closing my eyes. Feeling the rush of noise. The people talking to my right and left and behind me. The way wood grain smeared, like it was being scratched. The holes in the chairs, wondering why they existed. (To stack them)

While I closed my eyes he took my hand.

I’m here with you.

Each motion spilling into every motion and the people that surround me and the lights and the hush of non-noise and noise. The world is coming to me It’s sitting in my life. It’s contracting outwards. I am inside the dance of atomic particles.

After sex last night, said, “can I just be not miserable from now on?”
“Always,” he said.

I have cried, but the crying is different. It doesn’t cut me so deep.

It is not the crying of being abandoned.

There is some mourning - but also awakening.

I will kiss my own tears away, but he is here with me.
I am not alone. I can come home.

3

In case you forget, here are the steps to changing your life:

First, you stop panicking.
Then, you remember that you are in control and that it is possible to get better.
Then, you do what needs to be done.
Repeat these steps for the rest of your life.

Close your eyes and force the chaos of your brain into stillness.
Repeat as necessary.
Swim through the channels of blood to get where you need to go.
Repeat as necessary
Build yourself armor out of resolve and ferocity.
Craft weapons until you realize that you own the monsters, and it is no longer neccesary defeat them.
Turn your newfound power back into the world.
Repeat: I am strong.
Repeat: I will be who I want to be.
Sleep, eat, and dream while holding onto the purpose that you've set for yourself, and never forget it, even in your worst moments.
Repeat as necessary.
Find ordinary joys from ordinary things, the smallest thing you can find.
Scrape together joy until it grows into something big enough to sustain a life.
Repeat as necessary.