More therapy via YouTube :
I’ve ignored CPTSD until now because. besides my worries that it’s not really a thing and that other mental illness is getting mislabeled as a result. I also didn’t think of myself as a candidate because I have just the one majorly traumatic even, being raped when I was 4, and CPTSD, as far as I knew, required many severe traumas over a long period of time.
But then the video linked above showed up in my YouTube feed, and it occurred to me that maybe spending day after day incredibly lonely and isolated as well as many incidences of bullying might have the same effect.
So I gave the vid a watch. What the hell, I don’t yet have a single diagnosis that covers all of my issues. Maybe CPTSD would be it.
Let’s go one by one
I. Nothing is safe
Patient readers know that I got this in spades. There is no such thing as safety in my world. There is only anxiety in varying degrees.
What really worries me is that I can’t even imagine feeling safe. It’s an entirely alien thought to me, accessible only conceptually.
If I try to imagine feeling safe, I can only imagine that re-igniting my paranoia the moment I realized it was happening.
I got some serious fucking issues.
Because safety is the truth. I AM safe. It’s the paranoia that is the illusion. Nobody is after me. Nobody is waiting in the shadows for me to let my guard down so it can GET me. No wolf at the door, no barbarians at the gate.
Apart from my health issues, everything is perfectly serene.
Now if only I could convince my scared little animal….
2, We can never relax
Yup on this too. You’d think I lived in a war zone.
I don’t like being touched by strangers. But it doesn’t freak me out, I just consider it to be rude and presumptuous.
To me, touch is intimate, and therefore only for people I love and trust.
3, We can never truly sleep
Like the man says, I can never truly sleep. Even in deep sleep my mind is tormented and troubled and I can never truly one hundred percent rest, ever.
I don’t wake up anxious exactly. I am too mentally fried by sleep apnea for that.
4. Horrible self-image as the worst thing ever
Ayup, pretty much. I am getting better at remembering that I am, in fact, quite astonishingly awesome, and even when I fall back into self-loathing it is nowhere near as bad as it once was, but that horrible self-image is still there.
5. Drawn to extremely unavailable people
Um, nope. I like open and expressive people, actually. And cuddly.
6. Sickened by people who want to be cozy with us
Hell no. I’m starting to think some of these apply only to Brits.
7. Prone to losing our temper big time
Another big nope. I’m Mister Nice and Sweet pretty much all the time. I do have a breakdown everyone once in every ten blue moons but that’s it.
8. Being highly paranoid
Kinda. Certainly I expect people I don’t know to be unreliable and untrustworthy. To my great shame, I can even suspect people I know of turning on me based on some tiny thing, and the worst part is, I am not even mad about it.
Just sadly resigned. Eeyore. It figures.
More after the break
Winter’s bitter end
I was listening to a documentary where a man was talking quite candidly about his struggles with his Asperger’s, and the subject of a “cure” came up.
The question is, if there was a cure for Asperger’s, would you take it?
It’s a very touchy subject. People have formed a defiantly proud identity after a lot of painful struggle under the Asperger’s label. Often that diagnosis was and is a source of great illumination and relief to them. Finally they knew what was wrong.
And so the Asperger’s community formed their identity and made their own claim to the right to be acknowledged, treated with respect and dignity, and accomodated.
And now you are saying you want to take all that away? What’s next, a cure for being black? A tonic for Judaism??
And yet, my all rational measurement, Asperger’s is a disability, and therefore an illness. And illnesses get cured.
I imagine all disability communities wrestle with something similar.
Myself, seeing as all I have is a weak self-diagnosis of which I am not entirely convinced yet, I have nothing invested in the idea of being an Aspie.
I also have misgivings about the direction Aspie pride has taken. It borders on Aspie supremacism at times, and of that I do not approve.
I guess people always have to go to far in order to find out how far they can go.
I should stick that on a T-shirt.
So would I take this theoretical cure?
Yes. In a heartbeat.
Why? Because I am sick and tired of being so damn cold.
If this cure could bring me out of the cold and dark of my eternal Midnight Tundra by fixing my broken antenna and finally letting me connect with my fellow human beings in a warm and wholesome way, I am all fucking for it.
That would be. in a word, my salvation. I have been so cold and lonely locked away in my icy inner fortress for all these years. This bright light of reason and logic that I have spent so much time perfecting illuminates brilliantly but does not warm.
I know there’s something terribly wrong with me. There always has been. I’m not just “different”, I’m broken. That is crystal clear to me.
And if this theoretical cure could fix me so that I wasn’t so cold and lonely any more, you cannot possibly give it to me fast enough.
Same with my depression. Get that shit out of here.
Ironically, those might be the very illnesses keeping me from feeling any solidarity with my fellow sufferers.
Solidarity is for joiners.
Maybe after the cure, I could become one.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.