complex ptsd blog (Patreon)

This is a glimpse into an aspect of my life that no one sees. The thing I could never get through to anyone. 

The room is dim. I've spent the past 17 hours in darkness, sleeping on and off. I woke up once at 2PM, then again at 4. But I didn't feel ready to get out of bed. For the past week, I haven't quite felt ready to get out of bed, but I had plans. I'm blissfully oblivious to my system's needs sometimes. After a long week of almost nonstop work, I spent the past 3 days absorbed in my game. So much so that I didn't shut it off when it was time to sleep - because who looks forward to the prospect of a good half hour waiting for it to start up again? At this point, it's much more efficient to sleep on and off while waiting for clothing categories to load in Create a Sim. I remember gaming like this for days on end when my mother was in Russia and I finally had room to breathe around the apartment. Just me and the pets. It was the best time ever, I cherish it. Yes, even with the responsibility of regular walks no matter how I was feeling, I cherish it. The feeling of being alone, I equated with not being monitored, not living in constant anxiety, not living in fear of someone who was supposed to be taking care of me. I liked being alone. Being alone was freedom. Now that I know what it's like to be loved, being alone feels lonely, not complete, like separation. 

I try to have a regular sleeping pattern so I can get as much time in contact with my love as possible. But sometimes my needs catch up with me. I have moments when I break down and can't function anymore - pretty frequently. I don't have any coping mechanisms to deal with stress apart from dissociation and when it gets too much I end up randomly fatigued, not knowing what's going on, when I should have been aware that I was pushing myself too much. I get sensory overload from just hours of being out in the world. Why is this happening to me? Autism spectrum? Or just highly sensitive? People say sensory deprivation is torture, inhumane, makes you go insane... For someone like me it sounds like heaven. Feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing... Nothing but the static in my brain and I wish I could turn it off because it's loud. Too loud. And the world is bright. Too bright. And the air feels like razor wire brushing across my skin if I'm not wrapped up in the softest blanket to protect my nerves. You know how when your body is sick it rejects any fabric except pure cotton? I've had a few colds bad enough to not be able to handle wearing anything but cotton. The same way, when my emotional body is sick, I can't handle anything that's not exceptionally soft and gentle. Trying to get up at 8PM had me on the verge of tears. I've been sleeping so much I'm not even sure what day it is. My best guess is that my system is resetting itself and my emotional body is processing all the overload that has been accumulating as a result of me trying to function like a normal person. Time seems slowed down lately. I look at the clock in the bottom right corner of my screen and only about half as much time has passed as I had estimated. It's usually the other way around. Hours go by and it feels like 20 minutes, but now 20 minutes go by and it feels like hours. I have permanent earplugs and I wish I could have permanent darkness, too. No, unfortunately a sleep mask or sunglasses won't cut it - I can feel the light on my skin and in my aura even when I'm completely covered. And I wish I could have anesthesia. Anything that makes me feel less sounds like relief. I've heard other people say it - that being alive hurts - so I know I'm not the only one who experiences this amount of pain just from existing here in this world. Everything is so intense and I have a seriously hard time shutting out all the noise. Going outside... to me has become a symbol of health and normalcy. I try to go outside because then I feel healthy and capable and like I'm part of society. But I think I'm fooling myself in those moments because of what it ends up doing to me. In my mind I think going outside every day or every other day is healty and good for me, but in reality I can only handle facing society a couple of days out of the week, tops. In nature I don't have the same problem - but unfortunately people are everywhere here. There's no safe place except hidden amongst the trees... People avoid the trees. 

(Photo was taken in my happy place)

Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by my own ideas that I literally can't move forward. They all seem equally important. I know I have to work on etsy orders but I also know I have to work on the cyberpunk video so I can publish it this month, but I also know I have to clean my apartment because I damn near kill myself everytime I have to cook something... Everything is so overwhelming that I end up short-circuiting myself and can't even think about it anymore. This is why I always say I bite off more than I can chew - I can really only chew one tiny mouthful at a time and having multiple things going on trips me up a lot, however ambitious and well meaning my reasons for starting what I did. People always got mad at me growing up - for not meeting their demands. I could never make them understand what is happening inside me that causes me to shut down. I need periods of sensory deprivation sometimes just to be able to function again. I need extra sleep sometimes just to be able to process the excess of sensory impulses that flood my being on a daily basis. I need to fast sometimes so my system can reset itself. Fasting does more for your emotional, mental and spitirual bodies than for your physical body, in case anyone was wondering. I can't take part in the world sometimes - because it hurts. It doesn't mean I'm bad or lazy or don't want to, it just means that I've done more than I could handle leading up to my regular meltdowns. It means I've pushed myself as far as I could and lived life as fully as I could. So sometimes I can't talk or I struggle to talk - because mustering the energy to say something when I'm overloaded, hurts. I may seem irritable if I force myself to talk anyway. My system is doing what it can to nope out of reality for a while to reset and pushing against it hurts. I wonder if anybody here is going through the same. I don't wanna be told I "just want attention" again. People have been very dismissive of my struggles and I'm trying to take them seriously despite that negative reinforcement. Like a flashback, I recall my mother's threatening voice telling me to "act normal" whenever something like that happens in public. It's one of those moments when I actually recognize the PTSD aspect of the C-PTSD clusterfuck my psychiatrist said I have. That and when I lie awake at night in my bed and hear footsteps in the hallway and my heart starts racing because the sound is just close enough to how it sounded when my mother walked upstairs to the apartment, after work at 11PM, and I don't know what mood she's gonna be in and I'm scared she'll hurt me. Those moments make me want to curl up and die. It's sad to think that the people who did this to me will never understand what they did. And even sadder that I have to defend my own experience of reality and my internal world from people who want to argue that I'm "getting it all wrong" and "this never happened" or "this doesn't exist". The best I can do is hold onto what I'm feeling and try to explain it to people. Hoping someone will take me seriously. Because this is what I live with and denial doesn't change a thing about it.

//Ally