Living with PTSD

I was diagnosed with PTSD after a nearly successful suicide attempt.  I was forced to go to a psych ward for a 72 hour hold (which is standard) and then sent to a psychiatrist.
We talked about everything but what made me try to kill myself, which at the time was fine by me.
It was still too raw, you see. I hadn't really gotten my head around my own actions.
But we'll get to that later.
Being diagnosed with PTSD gave me some relief: I understood better why I did certain things or acted certain ways when things bothered me.
I was fully diagnosed with PTSD with Dissociative Disorder  (Not Otherwise Specified).
Basically it boils down to the traumatic event that happened to me as a child was incorrectly stored in the fight or flight center of my brain, instead of in the memory center.
So when I am triggered by something, my response is the same as if I was there, living it again.
The pain, humiliation, anger, despair...all roiling and writhing in my skull.
Often this results in the triggering of the Dissociative Disorder, which is pretty much reacting as I did when I was a kid: total shutdown.
Stress can trigger this, nightmares can trigger it (and I relive the events every night in my sleep), viewing things on tv that are similar to what happened can trigger it.
Sometimes I weep, sometimes I hurt myself (pain seems to stabilise my thoughts a bit...or at least shift focus), sometimes I sleep an inordinate amount of hours.
Then there are the times I just check out completely, like I did when I was being tortured. I just go blank.  Withdraw from the world into a blank state.
The thing is, without the triggers, I appear normal.
So friends and family don't see the bad parts, the parts I hide.
Some of my family doesn't even believe me, which is life. I don't actually care anymore.  But I did, once.
It's exhausting dealing with this every day.
It's hard to be productive when you have to fight your own mind just for some peace.
Toss ontop of that some physical infermities that people seem to enjoy making light of...
People take for granted the things they can do. And because they can do them effortlessly, they feel others should be able to as well. It doesn't work that way.  Just because Schwarzenegger can arm curl two Dulph Lundgrens, doesn't mean you can too.
You may not see my struggle, because I learned to put on a mask to cover it...but it's there, and it takes it's toll.

Losing a personal icon

Today we lost Stan Lee.
I'm not usually one to tear up at a celebrity's death (I'm sad for their families, but I don't know them. There's too much disconnect from their life to mine for mourning as some seem to do), but sometimes one does hit me.
Stan Lee is one such.
His creations touched a part of me that I can ill define.
Their deeper meanings informed my own thoughts.  Often mirroring how I felt about people, places and concepts not in my own realm of experience.
The characters he created with Jack Kirby  were ones I could identify with.
Particularly the Incredible Hulk.
The alienation Bruce Banner underwent because of the Hulk persona spoke to me.  As did his issues with mental health.  Though that was many years before I understood why.
I identified with the abuse Banner underwent as a child, the abuse that spawned the rage machine that is the Hulk.
I identified with the loneliness of both Banner and Hulk.
Banner longed for human companionship, but felt unable to because of the monster inside him.
The Hulk longed for peace...peace from other humans.  Peace from the rage inside him, even as that rage gave him physical substance.
Lee has said that the X-Men's Charles Xavier and Magneto were not based on Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, but as a kid...I drew those parallels.
MLKjr was another hero of mine growing up, so I guess seeing him in Xavier was natural. Though, by the time I started reading comics in the 80s, he'd shifted to a slightly darker figure, with a tendency to manipulate those around him.
But as a kid...I didn't see those qualities.
Stan Lee himself was an inspiration as well, as his views on equality and people's rights aligned fairly well with my own.
I didn't know much about the man behind my favorite comic books until I was about 12 or 13.
I knew the name from the credits in the books and the voice from the Marvel Saturday Morning Cartoons I watched.
But I started finding out about him in my early teens...them the internet happened when I was in high school and BLAMMO, suddenly finding out about him was easier.
He had his ups and downs (Kirby basically left Marvel because he didn't feel he was getting enough credit as a creator of these characters.  Which he really didn't...not until later).
Anyways, Stan the Man wanted these characters relatable.  He wanted them flawed.  He wanted them complex.
And he wanted to strike at past, current and future issues in society while also telling compelling stories.  He set the newly minted Marvel on it's course for the next 50 odd years.
The fact that Marvel stayed branded Marvel when it's predecessor Timely Comics had become Atlus, which then became Marvel over the course of roughly two decades says a lot about Lee as an editor and writer.
The universe he created with Jack Kirby is still going strong and being added to all the time.
From the start Lee wanted diversity.
But he was also smart.  The society he and Kirby birthed their creations into was a volatile one.  He couched racism and ethnic oppression in neutral terms.
Using "mutant" as a substitute for whatever ethnicity you wanted them to be, while showing minorities as equals within the books themselves.
Seriously, Forge is the first modern Native American I saw portrayed as intelligent and capable in really any medium at the time.
He also used Fantastic Four as a vehicle to show that family is not always blood, and even if it's dysfunctional sometimes, it doesn't mean you aren't family.
So, good sir.  I thank you for the world's of wonder you brought me in my youth when I needed it, and I can still enjoy as an adult.
I thank you for showing us the darkness while highlighting the good.
Until next time, True Believers...

Dealing with mental health and the People in your life.

Mental health...

It's a hard thing to watch someone deal with, and hard to be the one dealing with it.

So many people I know suffer from something.  Usually the result of childhood trauma.

From Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Clinical Depression, to Bi-Polar Disorder and Schizoeffective Disorder.

Dealing with these and other mental disorders are hard.  Dealing with them and people that don't believe in them...that's harder.

Yep, in this day and age there are people that don't believe in mental disorders, despite the living evidence in their lives.

I, myself, was diagnosed fairly late into my life with PTSD and Dissociative Disorder.

It's helped knowing what it is.  I'd struggled my entire life not knowing what was wrong with me.

Some people have been supportive and helpful, while others just...act like it's nothing.

I have an ex-gf who also has PTSD and she has Borderline Personality Disorder.  She is a single mom raising her kids as best she can.  She is a good mom.  She struggles with her issues and doesn't always win.  None of us do.  But she is pretty amazing.  Of course, she doesn't see that.

When your life is seen through your lense of mental problems, it's very distorted.  The lense is warped.

But if the people in your life don't understand how hard it is for you, you feel alone.  You feel like you let them down.  You feel worthless.

I honestly didn't know much about Borderline Personality Disorder, despite having been married to a woman with it, until I was with her.

That may seem strange, but at the time I was married, I kept confusing terminology.  Because the name Borderline Personality Disorder is pretty nonsensical and inaccurate (which the Psychology world agrees with me on and are trying to find a better term for it).

It still kind of confuses me, but one thing  I do recall from reading about it: most people with it see things in a very black and white form.

My ex-wife sure did.  And my ex-gf...yeah, I think so.  But that last is just my conjecture.

You also have people that believe only soldiers can have PTSD.  They will literally say stupid crap like "You can't have that if you didn't serve."

I wish that were the case, dipwad.  PTSD is an experience, a memory, that gets put into the wrong area of the brain.   Instead of being stored where we normally store memories, people with PTSD have a traumatic event memory stored in their lizard brain (also called the reptile brain).
The lizard brain is where our fight or flight response is, so when something makes us remember the event, it triggers the fight or flight response.
Stress can trigger it too.

Apparently this backwards sentiment has grown so much that they are now starting to use two terms for the condition.
PTSD and CPTSD.
The second one is Combat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The point is, those of us who deal with these things...we don't want pity.  We don't want group hugs.

We simply want people to understand how we struggle.  Failing that, at least acknowledge that we do.