course, one of the more common results of a psychotic break. Alternately, you’ll be able to convince yourself that you’re acting rationally...which means that you’re delusional.
A ssuming you’re still standing when the dust clears...generally the chaos subsides and normality returns. Now comes the unavoidable, intolerable aftermath...where you piece together the parts that you couldn’t remember and begin to account for the damage done. And...y’know...there’s always damage. Even if it takes awhile to find. Even if it’s just on the inside.
To avoid the collapse...vigilance is key. Vigilance, and the assumption that – sooner or later – the inevitable will happen. So you strategise how you’ll react if...and you plan for how you’ll respond if...
And then you wait.
You wait like a soldier at a watch-post in enemy territory and you just never stop waiting . Because you have to. Because you can’t not. Because once...a long time ago...someone – or some thing – did something to you. It left you...different. Fundamentally. On a good day, you think they broke something inside of you, or took something away from you. Not necessarily something that you needed , but...something that contributed to the greater whole; something that made you...you.
On a bad day? Well...it’s more like they left something behind.
And so you wait.
I’ve found that other people who spend their lives dealing with situations reminiscent of mine, typically try to insulate themselves from exposure to things that might trigger them. Just like I do. They cordon off those places in their mind as best as they can, and avoid letting people too close. To the uninitiated, it can seem like almost anything other than what it is. Self-involvement; emotional coldness; apathy; laziness; closed-mindedness; introversion; extroversion, too. Almost anything other than what it is: Self-preservation.
Some achieve a balance. Some lose themselves completely. Inevitably...eventually...we all toe that line between control and chaos. We do so, either because we convince ourselves that we’re ‘better’: that we’re ‘healed’...or because we find someone – or some thing – that seems to be, approximately, worth the risk.
Or, for some of us...we do it because of something inside of us begins to wake up.
For the adventurous among us, there are other...‘options’. Some seek, for example... to ‘cauterise’ the wound through over-exposing themselves to triggers.
To be completely blunt about it...I’ve never had the stomach for that. Or, from another perspective...I’ve never been that incredibly fucking stupid.
But then...I would say that.
Everyone’s experience of the aftermath of trauma is different. The unifying commonality is the scale of the wound: the degree of the damage done; the significance of that damage. Beyond that...various stratifications of shared experience draw us together...but...ultimately, keep us fundamentally apart. A long time ago...perhaps a year after my parents died...I started to have these...‘encounters’, is a word I’ve heard used to describe them. And it seems to fit. They led, initially and since, to a fairly strong suspicion – nascent, originally; understood only on the most basic possible level – about which ‘cohort’ of trauma survivors I, most likely, belonged to.
It came, as a rule, at night. It still does.
Sometimes...lying in the dark, I’d feel – like a slow, creeping , fever-like feeling engulfing me – a building awareness that I wasn’t...quite...alone. I’d be there...under the covers. Just me. It’s hard to describe, but...it’d be as if there was some other person in my mind. A complete and coherent parallel structure of consciousness, co-habiting me. In beginning to succumb to sleep, it was almost as if the wall between myself and that Other began to lose its integrity...allowing inter-drift. Overlap.
The progression was always the same. The more awake I became,
A ssuming you’re still standing when the dust clears...generally the chaos subsides and normality returns. Now comes the unavoidable, intolerable aftermath...where you piece together the parts that you couldn’t remember and begin to account for the damage done. And...y’know...there’s always damage. Even if it takes awhile to find. Even if it’s just on the inside.
To avoid the collapse...vigilance is key. Vigilance, and the assumption that – sooner or later – the inevitable will happen. So you strategise how you’ll react if...and you plan for how you’ll respond if...
And then you wait.
You wait like a soldier at a watch-post in enemy territory and you just never stop waiting . Because you have to. Because you can’t not. Because once...a long time ago...someone – or some thing – did something to you. It left you...different. Fundamentally. On a good day, you think they broke something inside of you, or took something away from you. Not necessarily something that you needed , but...something that contributed to the greater whole; something that made you...you.
On a bad day? Well...it’s more like they left something behind.
And so you wait.
I’ve found that other people who spend their lives dealing with situations reminiscent of mine, typically try to insulate themselves from exposure to things that might trigger them. Just like I do. They cordon off those places in their mind as best as they can, and avoid letting people too close. To the uninitiated, it can seem like almost anything other than what it is. Self-involvement; emotional coldness; apathy; laziness; closed-mindedness; introversion; extroversion, too. Almost anything other than what it is: Self-preservation.
Some achieve a balance. Some lose themselves completely. Inevitably...eventually...we all toe that line between control and chaos. We do so, either because we convince ourselves that we’re ‘better’: that we’re ‘healed’...or because we find someone – or some thing – that seems to be, approximately, worth the risk.
Or, for some of us...we do it because of something inside of us begins to wake up.
For the adventurous among us, there are other...‘options’. Some seek, for example... to ‘cauterise’ the wound through over-exposing themselves to triggers.
To be completely blunt about it...I’ve never had the stomach for that. Or, from another perspective...I’ve never been that incredibly fucking stupid.
But then...I would say that.
Everyone’s experience of the aftermath of trauma is different. The unifying commonality is the scale of the wound: the degree of the damage done; the significance of that damage. Beyond that...various stratifications of shared experience draw us together...but...ultimately, keep us fundamentally apart. A long time ago...perhaps a year after my parents died...I started to have these...‘encounters’, is a word I’ve heard used to describe them. And it seems to fit. They led, initially and since, to a fairly strong suspicion – nascent, originally; understood only on the most basic possible level – about which ‘cohort’ of trauma survivors I, most likely, belonged to.
It came, as a rule, at night. It still does.
Sometimes...lying in the dark, I’d feel – like a slow, creeping , fever-like feeling engulfing me – a building awareness that I wasn’t...quite...alone. I’d be there...under the covers. Just me. It’s hard to describe, but...it’d be as if there was some other person in my mind. A complete and coherent parallel structure of consciousness, co-habiting me. In beginning to succumb to sleep, it was almost as if the wall between myself and that Other began to lose its integrity...allowing inter-drift. Overlap.
The progression was always the same. The more awake I became,
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