Waltzing With Fear In Our Hearts

I am everywhere and nowhere, today. This has been coming for a while. Too much work, not enough breathing.

I responded to an inquiry from a concerned mother, yesterday. She wrote in saying that she didn’t serve, but had close family who did. She said that her son suffered from a traumatic brain injury. That he was very smart and loved technology. She wanted to know how much our program cost.

We’re a small startup with only a couple of programs. We don’t have a program for vets who are out of the service, yet. We’re learning that will be important. It’s something we plan to develop very soon.

The mother didn’t leave a number, just her email. I replied. I told her that I am an Army vet. I told her that my mother would do the same thing. I explained that our flagship program doesn’t charge the student anything and went through the details of how we make money without charging our students. I encouraged her to contact me, just like I do with all of our inquiries. I gave her a link so that her son could enroll in our program and would know as soon as we had an application for him available.

She did. My mother. She did the same thing. Mostly. I was recalled while I was still a student. I was set to leave, resigned to be a Spanish linguist in the Middle East. She wrote letters and called. She contacted my friends and had them do the same. When they said that the recall would be delayed because I was a student, it gave me the spirit to fight. I stayed in school and tried to find a way around it. I appealed decisions and kept appealing the appeals. Finally, there was nothing to do. I was set to leave again. The day before, I got a phone call and they told me that my recall had been rescinded.

Maybe a response from me is enough for this mother’s son to feel he can fight, too. Maybe he will not feel as so overwhelmed, so used, so unfit for everything else. Maybe he will know that there are people who care, that there are people like him. He will start to see that he has a place in the world, too.

I pull the blanket up so that I might feel her flesh against my flesh. The cold air from outside comes in. It does not come between us. She warms me.

There is light through the window from the city. There are voices through the window from the courtyard. People I don’t know tell stories about themselves. I have heard them before. The streetlamp. The bathroom light.

The places her skin touches mine; hers; ours. She talks in her sleep.

I don’t really speak directly to my PTS(D) much.

(Movement to take the “D” out: http://is.gd/Yxkro8; relevant point: The general doesn’t like to use the word disorder. “It’s not a dirty word, but I think it’s misused here,” he said. “I don’t think that the post-traumatic stress that soldiers experience is a disorder. It’s not something that happens just to weak people or people that are somehow inclined to be affected by horrible things that they see or are required to do. I think it causes an actual injury to the brain and how the brain works.”)

Partly because it is hard to know where the depression ends and where the PTS begins, if such distinctions are even possible (less linear, more wibbly-wobbly?).

It is hard for some people to accept that I suffer this way. I do not know why that is. I think that it is hard for people to understand that, certain days, the hardest thing for me to do is simply to get out of bed, when the day before they watched me tackle complicated problems with apparent ease. For the observer, there is a disconnect between these two events. And, while they cannot explain the disconnect, the “why” of it, they refuse to accept major depression and/or PTS as an explanation. There is something about me, something that they just don’t understand, a way of doing things (or not doing things) that baffles them. Perhaps mental illness is too simple of an explanation. Perhaps the disbelief is the product of a generation that refuses to accept certain mental illnesses, just as the generation before them refused to accept certain physical illnesses. Depression as a way of denying personal responsibility for laziness/lack of self-confidence/cowardice.

I don’t enjoy non-fiction the way that I enjoy fiction. I feel that, if you want to experience something, understand something, the best way to do that is through fiction. This is why I have chosen not to speak directly about these things. Instead, I try write stories (often based, sometimes more loosely than others, on real events) that portray the emotion, the feelings, of it.

It hasn’t been working. So it goes.

Look at this, instead: http://is.gd/HglGfy

Look at the symptoms. Look at my posts. Remember what you’ve said. Count the symptoms. Work backwards. Don’t look for an event. It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Look at what is going on, now. Move forward. With me. Not against me.

therestisbullshit:

Before,
When people had secrets they didn’t want to share
They’d climb a mountain,
Find a tree and carve a hole in it,
And whisper the secret in the hole.
Then cover it over with mud.
That way, nobody else would ever discover it.

2046

This is what I would like. Why I wrote. When I wrote. Someone to whisper to. To cover over. So no one else ever knows. Secrets. To say. To find the words. Again. To speak. And, to hear.