Death By A Thousand Cuts
Living with Complex PTSD.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
I didn’t know. We have a way of normalizing all kinds of things, if they go on long enough. My childhood was weird and my adult life full of challenges, but that’s true for lots of people; many have it much worse. If I seemed to suffer more than some, I thought it was because I weak, or that I needed to work harder. “Get off your pity pot”, as my dad used to say.
But no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much therapy, meditation, exercise, or willpower I threw at it, there was always something lurking in the darkness.
When I was thirteen, I named it ‘The Monster’; it lived in my chest, and when it was awake it tore up my insides. That was about the same time my eating disorder started.
As I got older, it became the ‘Well Of Pain’. I picture the Well as an old thing, made of musty stone, hidden in shadows. It’s full of thick, black liquid. Sometimes it empties a little, and those are better times, but when it overflows, my life becomes chaos.
Getting the diagnosis was a relief. Finally, at the age of 48, my life was…not completely explained, not by a long shot, but at least it made sense in ways it hadn’t before.
