I was watching this show the other day where a man was in a military rehab center recovering from a stroke. And as no show is complete without the obligatory love story, he meets a girl there who is recovering from depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
In one scene this man is potting a tomato plant, or at least trying to. His new love interest walks over to help and tells him they give you tomato plants because they don’t die easily. She says she’s seen grown men cry over a dying sunflower.
PTSD will do that to you.
And it will also shower you with the bonus gifts of anxiety and hypersensitivity. Anxiety and sensitivity about anything and everything, including a dying flower.
I’ve cried for flowers–for my impossible to kill succulent that is somehow defying impossibility and for my struggling orchids that I wish could talk and tell me what I’m doing wrong. I cry if I accidentally kill a bug while trying to save it by putting it outside. I cry for that dead deer I passed on my way to work.
I cry easily. Cry over happy things, sad things and especially over dead things, yes even a flower.
I cried watching this TV show. The main character was a real douche before his stroke. Afterwards, he turned into a kind, sensitive man. He went from fighter to lover.
More precisely, he went from lover to fighter then back to lover. The back story shows he was a gentle, compassionate kid then life and an emotionally abusive father changed him.
*Spoiler alert!!! —-> But the part where I cried the most was when he recuperated and was released from the hospital. I bawled my fucking eyes out.
Why? Hey, a good movie or TV show will make you cry, laugh, rage, feel all the feels. But for us hypersensitive people we don’t just watch things and react, we feel them and absorb them. Emotions from a fictitious character become real-life feelings for us.
And real-life situations like that poor, accidentally squished bug and that oh so unfortunate deer on the side of the road are even more intense. My mind wanders and thinks “does that insect’s family know it’s gone? Are Mr. Deer’s wife and kids sad wondering why he hasn’t come home yet?”
Yeah, I think of shit like that.
I even feel bad for inanimate objects. Will this pen miss me if I just willy-nilly give it away to someone without a care in the world? Bizarre I know.
People think of PTSD and they usually only think of war veterans and military trauma. But trauma can be anything from outright abuse and neglect to major life changes like divorce, moving, separation, hell even your grandparents’ dog dying on your 11th birthday. And what’s traumatic to me may not be to you and vice versa. It’s relative.
It all nonetheless sucks, and we all deal with it differently. My sister can’t remember shit from childhood. I think that’s her subconscious’ way of protecting herself. She is sensitive and caring, but I don’t think she would necessarily cry over that abandoned BIC ballpoint.
Yeah, I put human characteristics onto inanimate objects. There’s an actual word for that, anthropomorphizing. Say that five times fast. I think us people with PTSD do that more, just a guess. Maybe it’s just me.
So to me EVERYTHING has the potential to be a traumatic loss because that’s how PTSD changes the brain. It rewires your thinking so that you learn to feel bad for everything, even a pen.
It’s also rewired to be in a constant state of fight or flight. Always on edge, waiting for danger lurking around the next corner. A life lived on tiptoes, scanning the shadows and jerking our heads. So much ingrained internal stress to carry around every single day. And we don’t even realize it.
Weird thing is is that I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t like this. Was I always this way?
But that’s not how we are born. We aren’t born scared and suspicious. That’s what life experience did to us. And often we just sit there and take it, throw our hands up in the air and go “oh well, that’s just how I am.”
But does it have to be that way? Who were you meant to be before life’s struggles, pain and heartache got in the way? Before the jadedness set in. Before the doubt took over?
The Universe gave me all of this trauma for some reason, some lesson. But I wasn’t meant to live in this lesson forever, and I wasn’t meant to be defined by it. Trauma and PTSD have been hurdles on my path, but they aren’t me. And I don’t have to carry these hurdles with me all the way to the finish line, sobbing for any withering dandelions I may spot along the way.
I can accept that flowers, animals and people die, hey it’s part of life. And I can accept that I will cry and mourn for them. I can also accept and be grateful for what PTSD has given me–a new found sensitivity and awareness of such things.
But I don’t have to lament, ruminate and obsess (though my brain often has other ideas). And I don’t have to berate myself into believing that every death and loss is somehow my fault.
We PTSDers sure are responsible. We feel like we’re responsible for any and all bad things. “But I watered and fed and cared for that orchid and it still died!” It’s death is my fault.
We feel we are at fault for everything. We also have trouble living in the present. We’re too busy perpetually punishing ourselves for the past and pre-blaming ourselves for the future.
Too busy worrying and stressing about the next threat lurking in the shadows.
Too busy biting our nails when the phone rings. Too busy tending to our worn down fingers to even dial a phone at all.
And magnificently too busy predicting how much we’re gonna fuck it all up.
So so busy.
Too busy to stop and just be fucking happy for one fucking day.
And just be.
Yeah, I’m busy as shit with all this busy bullshit, but I’m fucking woke as the kids say. Of course I don’t mean it in the cool way they do.
I’ve been awakened to how fragile life is. Something I may not have learned if I hadn’t been blessed to trip over these clunky track hurdles and drag them along for 40 years.
I’m oddly thankful for my PTSD. Wrap your head around that one.
I still have really bad days, weeks even where I’m just a walking, talking, working shell. It happens.
But overall, PTSD has taught me to appreciate life and find one, just one, happy thing in every single day. Well, honestly my therapist taught me that. I highly recommend the journal “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin. I know, I know, people hate journaling. It’s only one sentence though. You write just one sentence each day about something that made you happy. Even if it’s only “I woke up today”–that counts. Hey some days that may be all you got. But these single sentences have helped ease the swirling psycho-tornadic mess in my head, at least a little bit.
So thank you PTSD. Thank you for awareness.
Awareness of how fucking delicate this thing called life is. Awareness of how everyone’s struggles and traumas are different. As they say, “you never know what someone is going through”, even your friendly neighborhood Wawa cashier.
So with new awareness of these personal hurdles that have been tucked tightly under my arm all this time, I’m trying to lighten the load. Slowly dropping them one by one and stopping to smell that rose, dandelion, or struggling-to-make-it orchid along the way.
And learning to be proud to cry for a sunflower.
❤️
CM
5/3/24
