Flashing Back

Warning: language and subject matter for adults. Trigger warning.

It just doesn’t stop. I’ll be outside smoking and if I’m not careful to be observant, to stay alert,

it’s 1967 or 1970 or 1972. I mean, I’m really there, back in that cursed House of Pain in Pasadena. I don’t know, it just happens. The reality is crystal clear, I’m back there, reliving nightmares that actually played out in real life.

It could be a particular lashing with a thin leather belt; my mother atop me, moving up and down with no expression, like a robot; my sexual desire for girls my age because I had been “trained and indoctrinated” for sexuality while other guys in 3rd grade thought of nothing but toys, baseball and TV.

Going back hard always makes me sick. If I can’t pull myself out of it, I’m going to spend days recovering. And recovering is just the word I use; it’s really nothing of the sort.

Why does PTSD remain so powerful all these years later?

What I mean is, why me?

And the technical answer is, trauma changes the brain. The damage even shows up on MRI scans. But the other answer to this question is, nothing is fair.

I never imagined that I would live this long. God knows that I didn’t want to. I courted Death for decades. Almost 5 of them. Too much of a “pussy” to kill myself and just hard-headed enough to live through heart attacks, open heart surgery, strokes, 35 or more traffic accidents, having a .357 held to my temple and refusing to surrender, 3 bouts of covid-19, industrial accidents, being shot at with a Machine gun, falls, being knocked out and thrown down stairs, and, I’m sure, more.

When I finally got round to suicide, 3 times in two months, I screwed even that up. Failed romances? Shit. Girls laughed at me, called me names, gossipped. By the time my one and only marriage was over, I knew I was going to be alone until death. It was not all my fault, but I certainly screwed up my fair share. Then, the two people who mattered most, my children, died.

It’s been a real shit show and I’m sick of it.

But I ain’t quitting.

I have faith that God has a reason for interfering in my death. He’ll send for me in his own good time.

I hope that someone like me has read my posts, and in so doing, learned enough that they have sought help and intend to keep fighting the unfairness of life.

If you are reading this and you have been troubled and afraid, or know someone else who has, I want to reassure you that there’s hope. That maybe you will never heal, but bits of sunlight will come to you, that your life, horrible though it may be or has been, is still precious and of a value nobody can put a price on, and that your experience can help others. You have a story to tell, and people need to hear it. So many survivors think that they are alone; yet there are more of us than can ever truly be known.

PTSD is often a disabling mental illness and it can cause a lot of bad things to happen. Do whatever you need to in order to stabilize the symptoms. Familiarize yourself with the different effects of it, seek out competent proffesionals for treatment and remember, there will be days when you won’t even want to get out of bed. That’s okay. I worked 30 years until one day it became unbearable. In that time I had so many jobs I’d be hard put-upon to remember them all.

The bad days, with treatment and faith, will always give way to better ones. Until we draw our final breath, God can be called on to forgive us. There’s no better reason for hope.

If you, or anyone you know is suicidal, please call the suicide hotline at 988, text SMS to 988, or go to the website and chat.

Once the thought of suicide enters someone’s mind, they’re a third of the to doing it. The next part is making a plan, and the last is the act itself. Sometimes it is done on impulse and all that’s needed is time to think. People dying by their own hands often regret it afterwards. Sometimes they pull through. Sometimes they don’t. Take time to catch your breath and calm down. You are worthy of that. Believe it.

God bless you.

Endangered America

On October 31,1880, in Denver, rioting broke out and Chinese people were attacked, one killed, although I believe more died but were hidden in the reports. White “superiority” had always been around, but this event was something that needed an apology for.

More irresponsible decisions over mask mandates have come from major air carriers like Delta. It’s also a drop in mandates for Uber drivers and passengers. A federal judge struck the mandates down in a show of classic superiority from a bench. It also reflects political corruption. Judges are expected to be informed but fair and impartial. This one is neither informed nor impartial. Someone got to him. We’re talking bribery. No, don’t act surprised or as if my accusation is farfetched.

Florida’s problem with CRT is getting way out of hand.

We’ve never been more aware of the problem with Republicans and racism. Now it’s way out there. Approximately 41 math textbooks reviewed in the Sunshine State have been rejected because they use references to CRT. I think the hypocrisy here tells us all we need to know about Republicans. They scream about “cancel culture” when CSA monuments are removed, but banning books and the word “gay” are more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee being relocated to a museum. Florida has become a place where bigots, homophobics and women-haters can take refuge with their own kind.

I hope this summer, you will remember this, and boycott the entire state by traveling elsewhere. A country with so much to explore can certainly provide you with plentiful fun, from breathtaking scenery to amusement parks and hiking, camping and fishing or bike riding. Florida doesn’t deserve your hard-earned dollars. Carolina beaches are every bit as nice, and some nicer, than any in Florida. From the Florida state line to Massachusetts, there are awesome beaches.

Fentanyl overdose that killed Mac Miller in 2018 was sold by a dealer who just got sentenced to ten years. It isn’t enough. Ryan Reavis dealt counterfeit oxycodone that contained fentanyl. It killed the rapper. His attorney says he’s sorry (that he gets to see his family and Miller does not). That statement doesn’t work when a man is dead.

Miller died the same year as my son died, from the same drug. The rich and the powerful have caused people in pain to search for opiods on the streets — an inexcusable result of wrongful death and malpractice cases directed wrongly at honest physicians (and also at) pharma corporations. Recreational use and responsible use by individuals with chronic, debilitating pain are two different things, and overdoses, especially fatal ones, from drugs like oxycodone were either never tracked or were incorrectly classified. In fact, I can’t find specific numbers for any group except teens, and fentanyl overdose fatalities weren’t even tracked until recently. The rise of fentanyl as an additive to counterfeit drugs does coincide with the loss of accessibility of pain medication to patients who really needed it.

In other words, the restriction of pain treatment drugs caused desperate people to look for relief elsewhere, with high mortality rates being the result. And tracking those deaths is impossible because it was not done or it targeted teens only. I’ve read no source and seen no data I consider accurate in the least. The NIH reports are centered on teens. The CDC is preoccupied with COVID-19 and if they have been tracking fentanyl overdose deaths, I found little evidence of serious research.

People I know are currently suffering unbearable pain, myself included, and are being denied relief. They are labeled “addicts” and if one should have a mental illness listed in their file, the answer will always be, ” no, it’s all in your head.” The compounded stigmatization is humiliating and shameful and can cause people to end their own lives. Better that than lying about, useless, embarrassed and groaning in pain.

Meanwhile, deaths from China White climb. No one wants you to know this. If you know, you can take that information and throw it in the faces of the men who control prescription drugs.

We are a nation (United States) of barbarians and corrupt leaders. Republican politicians get all the pain medication they need. All the kiddie porn their jaded souls can take. Even street drugs are no problem: give them all drug screens and watch them howl in protest. They’ll refuse. But let an everyman or everywoman have a verified medical condition. One that keeps them in pain so intense that they go to street dealers. They’ll all die, of course. No one sheds one tear. Better to have them off the Medicare rolls than give them legitimate treatment, right?

Because that’s what it comes down to. Making millions suffer because they’re afraid of lawsuits. Looking up the arses of doctors and preventing them from actually being doctors.

And whether you like it or not, corrupt judges exist and corrupt politicians are part of our reality. Our focus should be on those who clearly don’t care about the people who voted for them, or anyone else. Republican politicians routinely challenge or violate the Constitution. And where do you think it will end?

I’ll give you a hint: you won’t like it. Please consider this when voting. Heartless Republicans — or Those who have fought them. Fascism or liberty? Humanity or barbarity?

You have to choose.

Take “Positive Thinking” and Shove It

CAUTION: this post deals with sexual abuse and suicide. If you are feeling suicidal just scroll down for information about help. Some readers will find this post disturbing.

All my life, I’ve heard — no — had — Norman Vincent Peale thrown at me. In case you don’t know who he was, he was a religious hack who wrote a book about how to change your life with “The Power of Positive Thinking”. He probably got a lot of people killed.

I’m not going to give a boring recap or critique of the book. I am not in the habit of regurgitating pseudopsychological bullshit.

Nobody throws that positive thinking doctrine at me and gets away with it. I’ll throw curse words at you that you’re never gonna forget. Please don’t make me do that. I really don’t want to.

“Dr. Peale” made a name for himself. He wrote more bullshit in his life than anyone else besides Billy Graham. At least the latter had the honesty to solicit your cash after his crusades. I’d rather someone be a thief and be up front with it; at least they aren’t guilt-tripping you like Pat Robertson or selling plastic buckets as life preservers the way Jim Bakker does. And at least he wasn’t overtly antisemitic like John Hagee (my auto spell doesn’t have your name, Pastor Hagee, jeez. I wonder why? You should sue!)

Pseudochristian writing is as old as the first Easter. And with it comes all the bullshit you know and love: Medieval demonology, the execution of witches, the thievery of the Templars.

Then the bloodshed of the Crusades stained the roads from Europe to fallen Israel, then we just had to let them get into our heads with writings that led to the 20th century and beget idiots like Peale. Not so much an idiot about making money; but definitely a man out of his league with psychology. And why, you ask, all this animosity, and why my claim that he took lives?

Because he, like so many other straight, white conservatives was a preacher who “reformed” his church, thus perverting the doctrine of Christ, who taught that true evil is real and that in our lives, we would suffer. He never promised an easy path, but instead warned against false teachers and fake messiahs. Peale had an answer for that: Think positive.

His first book was absolutely torn apart by critics in the mental health field. In fact some were outraged.

My mother bought me a copy. Fucking ironic, isn’t it? I mean, she and my dad would come into my room on Saturday nights (Saturday was always my night) and take me into the den so she could mount me on the sofa while my father watched TV or read the newspaper, or joined in. Perverts.

My father berated me every single chance he got. He called me a retard, threatened to send me to two different mental hospitals (Crownsville State or Spring Grove, whichever was on the tip of his tongue). He called me stupid. Then, so many names I can’t remember them all, he criticized everything I did, tore it apart, made me feel like I couldn’t do anything at all because I was such a retard. He damaged with his words whatever his whippings, that left me bloody, or the sexual abuse hadn’t fucked up yet. In the end he turned me into a scared shitless little kid who hated himself. The days I could venture out to ride bikes or play football became more rare. I’d lie by my window and listen to my friends, way down the street, playing at dusk, and cry myself to sleep. No child should go through that, okay? Not one.

This verbal abuse combined with trauma from being flogged until I was bleeding or tortured in ways none of my siblings ever knew because of all his kids, he hated me the most. After he could no longer control my older brothers and sister, he took out his rage and need for control on me.

He did a fucking number on my head. Years of this went on. I sit here now, and can barely believe that one man can live who survived all that. And when I began to show signs of having been through too much, my mother thought I might benefit from good old N.V. Peale.

It was such crap that I couldn’t read it. The world, I knew, didn’t work that way. But I started to feel guilty. The people he wrote about, they were so much stronger than me. There was something wrong with me.

Because my world worked the opposite way. I didn’t take him for the crank he was until I learned more about mental illness.

I remember when the trial of the State of Maryland vs. Ralph and Betty Smith (my parents) was over. How people said, “Now you can move on” but never told me how to. I was angrier every time I heard it but knew that if I told them what a mess I really was I’d get a lot of flak. I held my tongue when I just wanted to scream, “What do you know? Fuck you! Walk a mile in my shoes and you’ll scream to be let out.”

And that’s the problem. Some things cannot be magically forgotten, no matter how positive I think.

It’s not over. Never will be, not for me. There’s too much damage and too much pain. Trauma isn’t a skinned knee that you put some Neosporin on, then bandage and go skipping merrily on your way.

Since then I worked years in a union job. I was good, but still very sick. Focus isn’t easy with trauma and the dissociation that goes with it. I had accidents and injuries and sent out product that couldn’t even be used. After that I wound up in a dollar store, three hours a night, four nights a week. I had come full circle. A total loser like my father had predicted, because I had trouble getting through those three hours. I was growing worse and didn’t understand why. Because I knew by then about PTSD. I thought that I knew everything about it. How was it getting worse? How could the Universe be that cruel to one man? I began to drink, cognac, whiskey, rum, vodka, you name it. Just make sure it’s the whole bottle; I wasn’t a bar fixture. I drank while walking home or in private. Because, fuck everyone else.

When I tried for the third time to kill myself I came damn close. I was given the chance to have a bed at Springfield Hospital (which was one my father never mentioned; one last joke on that piece of shit). I was told it used cutting edge trauma therapy. I grabbed that bed up.

Nobody there told me to think “positive”. They didn’t call me lazy or a failure and not once did I hear the word “retard”.

First, the doctors and my therapist allowed me to be sick. They didn’t tell me I had to move on. In the Men’s Trauma Group there were no comparisons; we were all encouraged to tell our stories and we were given treatment. Gently, one step at a time, each of us being on different levels of capacity for effort. One day one of the two women who ran the group saw me outside and said I could be the “poster boy” for PTSD. And so I could be.

I loved my time there. Being treated as who and what I was, I felt somehow liberated.

Since then, in ongoing treatment and assisted living, I’ve made a serious mistake. I tried to be more than what I am, and someone I’m not. The old thinking I was programmed for has never left; I feel like a freak and a failure even though my monstrous parents are long since dead and buried. That’s not fair, but it just doesn’t wear off. I feel that more intensive treatment is called for, but physically I’m running out the clock. So I say “What’s the use?” The tendency to give up is so pervasive that I may never again seek that kind of help.

***

I used to be able to draw and paint. I walked away from it; nothing I ever did was good enough and none of my work was spared the bins. I don’t think I can do either anymore what with my left hand shaking all the time.

In my mind I know it could be caused by lots of things but I go straight to Parkinson’s disease, one of the worst case scenarios. Negative thoughts not from pessimism. From trauma and learned behavior.

Personality disorders are learned behavior and thinking. They are most difficult to treat, and positive thinking isn’t part of that treatment.

In the hospital I was taught cognitive behavioral therapy. It challenges one to not think positive, but to stop and think about what they are doing and saying. Since having covid, my memory has trouble with the list. It consists of various types of actions, responses and spoken words that indicate one is acting on learned behavior that is flawed. If I say “I’m going to fail” for example, cognitive behavioral rules tell me that I’m engaging in fortune telling, which of course I cannot really do. I’ll post a link below for the list.

Another part of cognitive therapy is being “mindful” and I like this part. One day in one on one therapy, my doc unwrapped one of the biggest, deepest red strawberries I’d ever seen. It was organic, he said, and I had never heard of that. He instructed me to take a bite (it was too big to eat otherwise). I was to slowly chew, paying attention to the taste, the texture, and to clear my mind of all but the strawberry. He explained that people often gulp down a burger for lunch, talking to a friend or coworker, never really tasting, fully, the food. And we carry that behavior into every facet of life, and it’s not merely flawed, it’s sad.

I’ve never enjoyed a strawberry more.

Cognitive therapy works. I have to get back to it and do as much on my own as I can. You’re not thinking positively or negatively; just concentrating on the moment. What you’re doing and saying. Particularly what you’re thinking.

One cannot undo a lifetime spent living with mental conditioning that has hobbled oneself and kept them reinforcing every bit of said conditioning (I would do things to sabotage my relationships or jobs because I was convinced deep down that I’d fail anyway).

But one can learn to live each second more aware of what that conditioning has wrought, and once there, changes start to happen. But that is far from easy. It is a tall fucking order.

One problem is that extensive damage can never be cured. Recovery is not complete. That’s not possible. I know this, know my limits and obstacles. But I can at least accept some of them.

***

The problem with positive thinking is that whoever attempts it will invariably fail.

It’s superficial and does nothing to address what lies beneath. The core behavior and thought patterns taught them from an early age when they were helpless and defenseless.

When the failure comes, and it always does, the first thing a person does is to get angry with themselves. They see weakness where a simple task, being positive, is too much for them. Some act out, angrily lashing out. Others, determined to get it right, keep trying…and falling short.

It is enough for me to know that suicides lay in the wake of Peale’s egregious con. You tell someone that simply thinking positively will get them a coveted job. They don’t get the job but they won’t blame you, they’ll think you’re full of shit, but they still blame themselves. With a string of failures already behind them because they need professional help, what do you think will happen?

You hear that his wife has left him.

Next thing you know you’re attending his funeral.

No one knew him well enough to give the eulogy. You surely didn’t. His wife, filled with guilt, stands to one side, sobbing.

The pastor does the eulogy. It’s generic and wooden. None of it needed to happen. But that’s lost on you because you believe you gave him everything he needed to succeed. “Think positive, Hank.”

You’re lying to yourself. You gave him a phantom tool, one that got him to commit suicide.

The human race is not made up of failures and successes. It’s not made up of dark, negative people and those who live charmed lives. Everyone has the same potential at birth. Sure, some have different talents and gifts, but it’s still potential for great things. When natural development is interrupted by evil acts and resultant trauma, the future has been changed. Not just for that person. The world suffers. A man or woman deprived of love and proper care as a child now has less to offer. They’re damaged. They need help. They rarely get it in a system that still neglects and minimizes them. Society still stigmatizes them. They suffer from attendant physical illnesses and it all falls apart. Born with incredible potential, they linger in a health system that isn’t staffed or funded to help.

We see a mass shooting. Suddenly we want mental illness treated, like yesterday. But it doesn’t happen. There’s no budget. Conservatives think mentally ill people are faking to get benefits. That’s when they use “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” and “they’re draining our budget” when both are lies and the worst of insults.

America eats its own. Men like Norman Vincent Peale only ever made money for lying and getting people killed. Self help books are a huge industry. Almost all of it is total bullshit. Don’t give charlatans your money. Seek help. Ask for references. Don’t give up.

If you’re stuck to your sofa and need a shower, but can’t make yourself do it, you’re not lazy. You need help. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you fail because you are too negative. They don’t know you. Tell them I said to fuck off. This is your life we’re talking about. You can be in real danger and not know it yet.

If someone tells you to “move on,” you tell them I said to go to hell. There are too many armchair and shithouse psychologists out there. Piss on them. Most of all be wary of church and “spiritual leaders” who all have agendas, and you’re not on it; your cash is.

Finally, don’t forget what I said. Seek out help from professionals with good creds. I don’t want you to suffer, and it breaks my heart that you do. There may not be a cure, but there is help. You just have to want it.

If you are feeling like a failure, not measuring up to the expectations of anyone else, and you are thinking of calling it quits, believe me, I know how you feel. But the best panacea I’ve ever found is in the act of helping someone else. The ways to do that are infinite; you don’t even need money. Just observe and the door will open. Knowing that you have made a difference, however small you may think it is, is one of the most magnificent feelings anyone can ever have. It cheers you, warms you in your heart and tells you that no, you are not worthless. You’re a decent person. But first, before all else, you need help. And there is nothing wrong with that.

IF YOU ARE FEELING SUICIDAL

For help if you are feeling suicidal, call 911. You need to be seen in a safe place by people who want you to live.

If you don’t want to go that route, call the (US) National Suicide Hotline at

1-800-273-8255 or click Here.

Thinking about suicide is a deadly sign. I can’t bear to think of the world without you in it.

For more information on cognitive behavioral therapy, click here.

Sources: Wikipedia, Google Search

Author’s Note to you, the reader:

I didn’t care until recently whether I had followers or not. Or whether I got “likes” or not. You’ve changed that. With over 60 followers, the other day I received 8 likes in one day. To most bloggers, a thousand is a disappointment. But for me, 8 broke my previous record. I found myself grateful and humbled and I want to say, thank you. To my new followers, I hope you have the chance to read all of my posts. Part of my goal here is for everyone who visits to get to know me. To hopefully find something you can use, learn or at least enjoy. Let me know in the comments section if you can’t access something and I’ll fix it. Feel free to leave comments and tell me what you’re thinking. I’d love to know.

I want to help others like me, to let them see that they are not alone. The only way I can do that is by telling my life’s story and being honest, not holding anything back. To show my damage in all of its ugliness as well as the decent part of me who empathizes, loves and cares about people I’ll never meet. I hope also that still others will gain something to simply think about. I’m not an authority on anything; I offer only a raw look at my feelings and my thoughts. A long life gives one many stories to tell, and I hope you’ll browse and read and continue to keep me company. I’ve realized that I need you, I appreciate you, and I love you. Until tomorrow, be well. Many thanks.

I Hate Myself And Want To Die

Warning: This Post Deals With Suicide. If You or Someone You Know Is Suicidal, click here . Help Is Available 24 Hours A Day.

Another day, wasted. I did nothing. I could not cook. Couldn’t take a shower. Don’t remember the last time I was out. Had to ask a friend for cigarettes. It’s bad, really bad.

This is in fact worse than I felt the last time I overdosed in the effort to leave this shitty world behind.

It is 03:15 on the East coast. I slept maybe two hours.

I’ve had a couple of Marlboros but they didn’t help. I’m just starting on a cup of Colombian coffee but it is denying me the rush of brief euphoria from caffeine.

My left hand trembles, making it difficult to type. It does that a lot lately. More all the time. This time I seem able to work with it but usually it renders my left hand useless.

My back has a slipped or herniated disc. It fucking hurts and I’ve yet to get the X-rays. Worse, 43 years of lighting up has caught up with me. I’m out of breath after doing simple tasks. How stupid am I. A true asshole.

Everything done to me haunts me. If you can’t get that, good for you, you’re blessed. Be thankful.

I can’t get anything from the past outta my fucking head. It’s all there, every day. In my dreams I’m tormented. There is no comfort in anything these days. Shit like cigarettes and coffee are all that sustain me on some days. I can’t do jack shit.

Sometimes I’m amazed that I’ve managed to get up and piss in the proper place.

My heart is broken, has broken so many times that I wonder how much one man can take.

I miss my children so much. I would give anything just to have been able to say goodbye. If they had to go, why couldn’t I have just had a minute or two to tell them how much I loved them, how empty I’d feel when they left, and how sorry I truly was to have failed them so many times?

Because that’s not fair.

I take no comfort in my belief in God. I can’t pray. I can’t do anything but cry, write about my miserable life and smoke the cigarettes that nearly killed me over a decade ago and will finish the job soon enough. What the hell have I become?

Cry, you loser, you asshole. Every good thing you have had you fucked up. Every job you had, you failed. Go ahead. Cry like a baby, loser. You’ve been cursed by God or the Devil and you never had a destiny that was better than this. You were born to suffer. Go ahead, end it, you chickenshit. You aren’t like a real man. They all laugh at you. Everyone does. You’re a joke to them. Do it. Kill yourself and be done with it.

I hear myself say these words on nights like this. And I’m tempted. No one will find the body. I’ll be reported missing. Nobody will care. They’ll forget. I’m not worth remembering. I left Facebook. I’ll bet money everyone’s already forgotten me. I was never anything to them anyway.

I miss talking to my friend. We used to talk a lot on the phone. It got to where I was too sick to do it. Always so fucking miserable. I could barely hear her in the end. My mind was too broken. I was all pain. I would have brought her down at a time when she needed to be strong for her kids.

If this post is bringing you down, don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt myself. God cursed me with a hidden will to survive. Besides, I can’t avoid whatsoever is coming to me. I feel it creeping toward me.

Fear not; there are still stories to tell, and like the Ancient Mariner, I’m doomed to tell them. The bad…and the good, when I can remember good. Tonight, I can’t remember good.

I long for peace. For rest. God promised to wipe away my tears. I have to believe that; if I didn’t I would not still be here.

God, are you seeing this? I believe you. If suffering is your will for me, I’ve had enough. But I guess I can hang a little longer. You know my pain. Can’t you help me just a little?

Nightmares Of A Different Kind

Look. I’m a wreck from head to toe and it was already bad enough before I got sick. By my count I’ve had the flu four times since Christmas, or the same one with relapses, I can’t really tell. The fever, cough, diarrhea, headaches…. Running nose.

But lately the worst by far would be the runaway nightmares. Not quite like PTSD nightmares, yet the same except they’re jacked up on steroids and LSD. Because they are vile.

Do you ever dream about being chased or trapped? Of course you do. Almost everyone experiences those, maybe not regularly, but at times in their lives when they are most stressed, or feeling isolated. Beyond that thin requirement, no one really knows why our own minds torture us so.

In fact….No one even knows why or how we dream. It’s the Undiscovered Country. We still can’t figure out why we get sleepy and then sleep, although case histories have informed us that going too long without it can induce a myriad of horrifying symptoms, one of the worst being hallucinations. Go beyond that and the person simply dies. There is a specific disorder, Fatal Insomnia, and like the name says, you get it, you die.

That would be merciful next to PTSD nightmares which are augmented by fever, as I am finding out on my own. I do have insomnia and sleep apnea, a seemingly unlikely combination, yet it is so. And since Christmas, I don’t remember any nightmares being as fucking traumatic as those of the past week. They’ve been during deep sleep, however brief, and they’re some of the worst I’ve ever had.

I’ve talked about dreams before. In my post “Bolero Hats and Thunder” (see my archives) I described a particular nightmare that had prophetic elements to it. Oh, I lived to tell the tale. That’s not really all that good. The demon comes back.

Don’t start thinking I’m being hard on myself here or saying something controversial because I fancy myself some asshole who’s been through enough to know everything. I only have one reason I want attention. That is so you or someone you love never ends up like this. Early intervention with PTSD can ease some of the suffering. I recommend regular therapy whether single or in trauma groups by experts you must personally vet. I also recommend talking to your doctor about possibly taking certain medications and absolutely you must consider exercise and diet. See a dietician who can access your records, don’t rely on web sources and, whatever you do, please don’t buy snake oil from TV ads and infomercials. Those should be banned by the FCC. Nothing about them is proven. “Doctors” who endorse these fucking products are quacks. Remember what’s at stake here. Your mental health and your physical health are not separate things. This is your life we’re talking about.

I have no answers for PTSD dreams. The syndrome is an actual physical condition: post traumatic stress disorders cause multiple symptoms in people including eating disorders, panic episodes, flashbacks which can lead to a dissociative state of mind, resulting in the mental reliving of incidents that may have happened long ago (studies by hospital trauma teams have turned up a disturbing connection between PTSD and serious accidents in the workplace and on the highways because of “distraction” by episodes of dissociative states), nightmares and sleep disorders, coronary disorders including heart attack, blood pressure disorders, digestive system disorders including IBS and IBSD, severe depression and severe hypomania which resemble bipolar disorder but really aren’t, and behavioral changes of each end of the spectrum, notably a disinterest in sex or a promiscuous and risky hypersexual lifestyle. There’s more, but the combination of any of these are different in all subjects; no two people are alike.

Articles, books and papers by professionals have tried for at least a century to lay out what PTSD is and what causes it and how to cure it.

In ancient times warfare caused the same psychological effects as it does today. By the time of Alexander the Great, battlefields were strewn with bodies and body parts. Guts, brains, entrails filled the air with a stench any medic or close combat veteran or villager today knows and can never forget. The night would bring sieges of battlements by crude artillery, or it would fall silent except for the screaming and piteous cries of the dying. For some, one battle was enough. Others took longer. To even think PTSD wasn’t real is to overestimate humans then compared to now. What always happened was something recorded as far back as ancient Assyria. That’s not even considering what happened before. Hunters wounded in a violent battle in prehistory by a mammoth or an even worse animal trying to claim the kill would never be the same. It would not be called “PTSD” until late 1979 when Vietnam veterans were in- country one day, on a jet the next, arriving home in 48 hours. We can assume a little about veterans of earlier wars. Post-World War Two and Korean Conflict veterans were treated at Veterans hospitals stateside, and depending on their symptoms, kept for the rest of their lives or released. Others went straight home. One distinct difference between 1941-1945 and what followed is that returned soldiers could proudly wear their dress uniforms and be welcomed home by adoring crowds even in small towns. To some this and the travel time on a ship to the states could have been a help in transition. Buddies supported each other, some listening, some talking, but even with that, heroes always had problems. Artilleryman Frank Cunningham once had to take a Thompson or an M-1 Garand and charge a Nazi machine gun nest. The MG-42 was the heavy machine gun feared by allied infantry and artillery alike; it spat bullets at such a high rate that charging a position was considered suicide. The troops called it “the zipper” and there was rarely only one. A fixed gun in a bunker window was called a “murder hole”. The weapon had only one weakness: the assistant gunner had to change barrels because the rate of fire made them overheat. While the change and reload time could be fast, it did give infantry time to find better cover, or, in Frank’s case, time to get close and toss a grenade and eliminate the position. He was awarded a medal, one of several.

In a report I once read, the authors claimed that mild cases of PTSD cleared up on their own or with minimal professional treatment. I dismissed it out of hand then and I still do. MRI studies have shown that there are actual changes to the brain and they’re not just real, they’re permanent injuries. Some images show profound changes while others seem minimal, and yet no matter what, the subject suffers from the same range of symptoms. That means that a dramatic change has taken place which disrupts everything down to the interruption of neurotransmitters and how they are used by their receptors. That’s really tragic. Soldiers come home different. Storybook marriages end, sometimes messy, sometimes deadly. Victims of domestic abuse, from battered spouses to sexuality abused children lose who they were. In the case of protracted emotional and violent physical abuse accompanied by sexual abuse, the surviving child will, at the instant of the first abusive act, cease to develop normally. Development is arrested and a new child evolves and continues to do so in progressively dysfunctional ways long into adulthood, even after the brain has finished development, in the late 20s. This is due in part to learned behavior, which is collectively known as personality disorders, of which there are many elements within each that can combine to defy any certain disorder being named. The resultant diagnosis is “Personality Disorder, Unspecified”. And it’s damnably maddening to treat just it is for a patient to cope with even if he or she understands the mechanisms involved. Later I’ll put it differently: the symptoms of personality disorders and PTSD often appear to be the same.

IN YOUR DREAMS

When he came home, no one really noticed anything about him that seemed to stand out. Frank Cunningham married, had one child and never spoke of his experiences in Europe under Generals Bradley and Patton. A few times, he told his daughter a small story. She became a nurse and came to know he had to have nightmares and other problems. So strong was he that there was never anything again that he was afraid of. That’s also a symptomatic response to the hell he endured and witnessed. After a war, what is there to be afraid of? Once, as a political figure, he threatened infamous mobster Crazy Joe Gallo, the man who was suspected of taking part in the public hit of mob boss Albert Anastasia, head of the Anastasia crime family. Crazy Joe even hired a black hitman to assassinate Joe Colombo, the head of the former Profaci crime family, now the Colombo family, after Colombo drew undue attention with his pronounced activities in Italian-American civil rights, as they knew it was a scam he used to make money from donations while calling out the FBI for carrying out biased operations to target Italians as gangsters. Colombo was shot at a rally and paralyzed, and died 6 years and change later. Between these incidents, Crazy Joe once badly frightened a schoolgirl when she was going home from school. When Frank Cunningham heard of this, he waited for Joe Gallo. When next he saw the mobster, Cunningham somehow put the fear of God into the man. He was one of very few Crazy Joe ever backed away from. To put this into perspective, Joe Gallo was as evil and dangerous a man as any other gangster in the Mafia’s heyday. Being a rogue and having earned his mob sobriquet, he was a loose cannon, and as such, perhaps one of the most dangerous men in New York. Gallo was shot to death while dining in Little Italy in 1972. He went out shooting and bravely drawing fire to himself by charging to the front door to protect his family. Now picture a man who towered over him one day and made a man like Crazy Joe Gallo walk away. He never did fuck with a civilian in Cunningham’s considerable jurisdiction again.

That’s just one possible outcome of PTSD. You fear nothing. You’ll protect anyone no matter who threatens them.

Along the same line as fearlessness is something far worse and far more dangerous: daredevil, disinhibition, compulsive risk taking behaviour. The exact mechanisms for this are still being studied, but what we seem unable to agree on is that thrill seekers and professional daredevils have a different and opposite set of key instigators than risk takers. Complications of the argument are that dopamine and MAO are certainly involved. But what’s the difference?

Academically, I cannot say. I disagree with some conclusions based on my own experience. A thrill seeker can be labeled with a “personality type” which frankly I don’t have any patience for. I see them as people who like the rush of hazardous sports and activities, with personal injury avoided with skill gained by experience. Racing accidents, downhill skiing matches, cliff diving and extreme sports are never without casualties, but that is hardly anyone’s intent.

On the other hand the risk takers are without such concern, usually acting compulsively or impulsively; consequences and hazards are put on the periphery or completely disregarded. When still a fairly new driver, I loved driving fast. But I had neither the experience, and therefore skill set, to perform at high speed. I came very close to dying or killing someone else multiple times. It wasn’t as if I constantly drove insanely, but at times and under certain conditions, something came over me that I have never been able to describe. A warm summer evening, a good rock tune on the radio, girls watching from another car…. Who can tell? When the light turned green, I floored it. Nuts. Who can really tell me what the hell that was? Because I was fearless unless I saw the bright blue bubble gum machine on my bumper. I started to be more aware and made sure those 1977 Pontiacs were not in sight before letting whatever chemical that took over loose. Chased many times, but in a high speed chase, never caught. Why that was a point of pride shames me now but I didn’t care then. Oh, I didn’t want to be caught; the risk was the fun. I even lost choppers twice, and that’s almost impossible.

Along the way though, I racked up over 35 accidents, including totalling the same car three times. I know, I know. Sounds like bullshit. But it’s true. It was a ’93 Mazda 323, a tiny but tough car. Eventually I was just too scared, as my condition worsened, that I had beaten the odds for far too long. It wasn’t a question of if I would kill someone; it was a question of when I would.

But also, there were accidents when I wasn’t speeding, doing donuts, cornering or ruining tires by burning the rubber clean down to the steel belts and kicking up sparks in the night. The dissociation that hit me without warning also made me ram several cars in the rear. But the risky, uninhibited behavior wasn’t limited to driving. It fueled my sex life, it egged me into dangerous situations and I never seemed to learn my lesson.

Be careful; taking risks, mood swings and serious depression, feelings of being worthless, suicidal thoughts, dysfunctional relationship history and other symptoms of behavior can be diagnosed mistakenly as borderline personality disorder, or BPD. You have to be clear when consulting a doctor. The overall behavior involved with PTSD can closely resemble BPD. The problem is how you proceed with treatment and the incredible stigma of BPD as compared to PTSD. People who are diagnosed with BPD are shunned very often. Although the disorder is treatable and has been observed to ease with age while PTSD does not, word searches for it have sad questions. People ask if a BPD patient is dangerous, is sociopathic, lies constantly or if they’re even capable of love.

Any person is potentially dangerous, and there’s no use in denying it. How many times have you seen a reporter stick a microphone in some shocked person’s face after a neighbor shot and killed someone? Know what they say? “He was always so pleasant. He’d do anything for anyone.”

There’s no stone engraved that says only certain types of people can kill. Nothing, by the same playbook, says that a person with PTSD can’t perform a job, raise a family, be a good mother or father. In fact, people prove it every day. The same is true of schizophrenics, behavior disorder patients, those with OCD, autism and everything else. What remains to be solved and mitigated are the dark dreams of the sufferers of trauma.

We know so little of the brain and dreams, that nightmares are bound to be, as you’ve probably found out yourself, a mystery. Some sources claim a difference between stages of sleep and dream intensity. Some still cling to old school beliefs that people don’t dream except in the REM state, although we know by now that every stage of sleep can produce dreams. The data show several periods of dream sleep during a normal night, with dreams lasting seconds to perhaps even an hour. During the deepest sleep if a nightmare occurs, and people are awakened suddenly, sleep paralysis, that warm place which coming fully awake from is a long and frightful struggle, keeps one from moving or speaking. Experiences tell us of a history of”old hag attacks” during this time, when people feel a “weight on their chest” and see some witch or ancient demon sitting astride them. That would be fine if sleep paralysis alone could account for it, but it doesn’t even come close. The reason: a large amount of literature on the subject contradicts it completely. Not that sleep paralysis isn’t real. But cases go back as far as ancient history of other people witnessing the hag attacking someone else who was sleeping while the witness was awake. Last year I heard a first-hand account of such a case. A mother and daughter sharing a studio apartment: the mother, apparently unaware, slept. The daughter awoke suddenly and saw a hag attacking her mother. She of course woke her mother up and the hag vanished. What’s even more frightening is that the daughter swore adamantly that the “hag” was sucking energy from the mother’s mouth into its own mouth. Steeped in folkloric horror stories, this unfortunately seems quite likely to be very true. It explains why victims wake to feel weight on their chest and trouble breathing. Indeed, the realm of sleep is one of both delight and suffering. It also accounts for six to eight hours of sleep leaving one feeling sick and weakly lethargic.

AUGMENTED NIGHTMARES

There are many things that can cause nightmares to become so severe that they are actually traumatic in their own way. Factors such as health, diet, drugs (OTC, prescription and illicit), smoking, increased stress during the day’s work routine, the deterioration of a relationship, having a loved one gravely ill, financial situation and others all seem to play a part, like extras on a film set. You may not notice them, but they affect the quality of a film nonetheless. For a silly example, I give you Jurassic Park 2: “The Lost World”. It was a silly movie from the beginning to the end, but some of it had sillier moments than others. The extras made for some of the most hilarious bits, like when the T-REX was chasing its infant, carried in the back seat of a convertible by Ian Malcolm. On a street scene, some Japanese tourists are running away, in a tip of the hat to classic Godzilla movies. It’s so quick that if you blink you’re going to miss it. But all things considered, bit players are not so trivial after all.

Of all the bit players when it comes to PTSD nightmares, one of the most powerful is a low-grade fever. You don’t need much, but a fever tends to strengthen at night. When I’ve dreamt this last week, the result was always so bad that my attempts to stay hydrated during the day ended up with something getting drenched in urine during deep, dreadful dreams I couldn’t escape.

I don’t mind telling you this. These are things rarely addressed openly except for the distilled and impersonal websites that range from reliable information to medical myths. The internet is a digital minefield.

WHAT YOU DREAM MAY HAVE SIGNIFICANT MEANING OR NONE AT ALL, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU READ

I’m a believer that for every nightmare, there are infinite possible reasons, and none are simple. If I agree that the human brain is still the real Undiscovered Country, then dreams are important. They do carry significant meaning, no matter what experts want to fight about. Leaving their quarrels behind is easy for me; I know that ultimately, they tangle so because they don’t know.

LABYRINTHINE TRAPS: RECURRING

My first nightmare of the week was memorable. Influenced no doubt because I fell asleep watching TV, and was surrounded by electronic devices which affect the level of ambient electromagnetic energy (which is claimed by various studies to affect the brain), I found myself with Rachel Maddow in some sort of after hours setting. She was a really funny, charming and somewhat eccentric. Or she’d had a few drinks. We were alone for a second and she was dressed in her normal suit. Then the fever and my PTSD kicked in and ruined my brief time with someone I admire.

She suddenly had guests and she was kicking back. Somehow she had long hair and let it down. She got wild, and began showing strangers large flip cards which morphed into gifs with sexual acts. Different kinds, all graphic. Then she turned into a full figured blonde who was evil and menacing. She chased me, and the building was old, very old, with once stained wainscoting and hardwood floors, all now gone to seed; scuffed and dust-covered. The hallways stank of old urine long ago soaked forever into the hardwood by pets. In a building with no air conditioning. I was running, trying to escape her. To escape it. This place was a true labyrinth, dark, dusty, no way out, one hallway turning a corner and leading to another. I never got out, but toward the end, the corridors shortened, there was little room to move, and yet several doors lined the dim scene. I knew that none would lead to freedom.

Of course, I awoke with wet crotch to find that the second airing, which begins at midnight eastern time, was halfway through. Rachel Maddow was calmly interviewing a guest. I turned the fucking TV off and went to the kitchen to kill the fever. A combination of one Alka Seltzer tablet in half a glass of water chased two Extra Strength Tylenol. Fuck a fever, I thought. Fuck Rachel Maddow too. I’m never watching her again unless I have a pot of caffeine-loaded Starbucks Veranda brewing. No offense, Rachel, mon ami.

Two nights later, weary from the constant coughing that had my intercostal muscles either sore or excruciating, depending on whether they were upper or lower, and again with a fever that rose as the sun set, I fought sleep. I drank coffee and took Tylenol. You think it helped, right? Cause you really want this post over already, don’t you?

No. It didn’t work out that way. Never does, for assholes. Why on Earth would you have imagined otherwise? Did you forget whose site you’re on? Shame, shame on you.

And this time it was even more terrifying than the first. A long time ago I had a 1970 Mustang Mach One. It was white with black GT stripes. I was traveling, not in the past, but some weird-ass future, a road somewhere in Columbia, when it turned suddenly into a dirt track with steep earthen sides, a deep cut into the ground, if you will. I got out to search on foot for the way out, as one wasn’t visible and had to be hidden in the repeated colors of piles and cliffs of clay and dirt. I knew I had passed a yellow diamond caution sign but the symbols on it made no sense. Why had the road stopped? Why had I continued to follow the way forward into a trench? What the hell was this, anyway? Was some tunnel being built? That made no sense; but I found myself climbing a less steep part of the trench’s side and was horrified. Huge “Safety Yellow” construction equipment worked at digging and moving dirt and typical Maryland clay. Menacing things, more than double the size of anything I’ve ever seen. At the top I also saw that so much dirt had been excavated that towering piles of it like mountains prevented me from seeing the way out. I slid down to return to my car and a guy in a hardhat said it was gone. I looked back to where I had left it and it was gone. Looking around I could see part of the right side under a new steep pile of dirt. The hardhat dude handed me a large manilla envelope and a red file folder and said to file a claim later, but for now get out of the area.

This began a frantic flight to freedom. First I found a shack for the construction company, entered it and found secretaries at desks like they were in a corporate building. What the fuck! Scared, but refusing to panic, I followed their directions through a door. I kept coming to places that got lighter over time, with a few windows to see the sunshine I had not seen at the beginning.

How long it all went on, I don’t know. Buildings seemed to connect through a single unmarked door. The doors gave way to new carpeted hallways and large spaces ranging from sparsely furnished and deserted to a doctor’s waiting room with sick children, all unaccompanied by adults. I got the hell out of there by asking a receptionist which of the many doors led to the street. I used the one she lazily pointed to as if she had to answer the question every day.

It went on and on. At one point I became aware that I was coming awake but I went right back to it. The next large space I found had a tall ceiling, full of big windows. The doors were big, leading out to wide, concrete steps and a concourse to a courtyard. All ultra modern, very pretty, but a dead end for me. I found that it was enclosed by tall stone walls with planters on top with ornate trees. I was able to hear traffic close by, but there was no way to scale the walls. They were at least a dozen feet tall.

I finally saw a highway through one section of a building but there was no exit. Two Russian women cursed me and said I was never leaving.

EVEN WORSE

Last night was a real ordeal. Fighting like hell to stay awake was useless. Somehow I found myself in a hybrid version of my childhood house in Pasadena and the worst house I ever lived in and still have nightmares about despite its demolition in early 2005. Parts of it were dirty and old, I found myself cramped onto a cot in a small modified section next to my older sister. For all intents and purposes we are enemies and have not spoken since summer, 1988. In the dream, we were close. A long time had passed and we were older. Our parents, now long dead, could be heard downstairs. Hurling curses and insults at both of us. My sister had a boyfriend but he turned out to be a real turd and left her. We were both desperate to escape the house. I climbed down an unfinished addition being built and I think I was scouting places to go for refuge. I’d seen the houses in real life but not since the 1970s because they’re in Greensboro, NC. But we weren’t there. We were in Pasadena.

Coming back with no ideas, I hugged my sister and cried. It looked like escape meant running with no place to go. I didn’t want that for her. But then it got really twisted. For comfort we became closer over time. Not in a good way, but not exactly crossing a line. One night I saw her getting dressed and holy shit, she had a penis!

What the hell? She’d managed to have a kid while being a hermaphrodite?

This wasn’t my sister! I knew who it was but there was no time to even cope. My parents were sex offenders but had passed some test and qualified to house orphaned children. They began taking up spaces until I had no choice but to leave. I frantically packed what I could in a backpack, but as the children settled in, they began to attack each other with extreme violence, including sexual assault and flesh eating. Before I could escape, I awoke, once again wet of crotch and deeply troubled. The sound of blood gushing through arteries filled my ears even as I gave up trying to forget my horror and revulsion. I took a half milligram of Klonopin, drank coffee, having washed and changed into my day clothes.

Interestingly I had not fallen asleep with the TV on. The power to everything was off. And chillingly, I awoke at the stroke of three, same as the night before: the third hour, the hour of shadows, or demons.

I have had evil spirits haunt my dreams and torment me many times. These experiences are not to be trivialized; they can do damage science denies. Have you ever heard of someone who died of a heart attack in their sleep and someone invariably says, “At least he didn’t suffer”?

How do they know that? If needing to find a restroom in a dream (as happened in the three dreams I’ve described) ends in either waking up a wet mess or making it to the bathroom in time and pissing for ten minutes straight, then demonic and torturous nightmares can certainly trigger a heart attack.

It’s a matter of contention, but the ancient Hebrews believed that nocturnal emissions (ejaculation during sleep) was a grave sin. Even the old testament relates the unlikely tale of a bride of several husbands who refused to impregnate the woman, “spilling their seed on the bed” or, in modern lexicon, “pulling out” instead. So God killed them.

So prevalent this belief in sin seemed that some scholars claim that the demonic succubus was invented. This was a female demon which sexually assaulted men in their sleep, thus accounting for the mess they awoke in.

Really? Like, everyone else automatically knew that a guy in their tribe or camp had a wet dream? Well, according to some interpretations of the law, he had to confess to it, and a succubus became the perfect reason to let him off the hook. Not being an expert on ancient Hebrews or their laws, I take the tale as true simply because incubi and succubi really do date far back to ancient times.

Then again, so do satyrs. The fact remains: there’s still so much we don’t know about the brain and the weird things it does. I’m so often amazed at what humanity has accomplished in the relatively short history it’s had on Earth. Pyramids that morons still claim humans could not have built, and therefore were erected by extraterrestrials. Angkor Wat, an enormous city surrounded by the largest religious structure ever built. So many wondrous things we as humans have done. Leaps in disease diagnosis and treatment, machines that can detect damaged areas of the brain, caused by great psychological trauma. We’ve sent men to the moon despite legions of idiots who say it was all faked by Hollywood.

Yet myths and false and dated beliefs are not going away anytime soon. We still don’t know why we dream. We guess. We do sleep study after sleep study. We can treat mental illness but not cure it. We can’t even cure the worst sleep disorder in existence.

All we can really know is what we experience and share. Eventually, who knows what we’ll find? Knowledge doesn’t come easily and usually not very quickly. We search. We learn from small clues.

All I know is this: mental illness sucks. PTSD sucks. Nightmares suck. Fevers suck. And PTSD nightmares combined with a fever?

Absolutely dreadful.

With the coronavirus spreading, let’s take a moment to remember that if you’re experiencing fever, you’re going to have your dreams change to black and terror-filled shit that no one should have to endure.

SUICIDE

Trigger Warning: this post deals with sensitive and disturbing subject matter. However, if you are feeling alone, feeling unloved or rejected, or that there is no way out of a horrible situation, read this. It’s for you.

You know that a YouTube vlogger from Brooklyn was just pulled from New York’s East River. He was very popular, with thousands of subscribers. He had posted a sad video that was the equivalent of a suicide note, then vanished.

NYPD asked for tips to help their search. Desmond Amofah, known to his YouTube fans as Etika, was soon pulled from the river. Evidence places him on the Manhattan Bridge, just north of the Brooklyn Bridge, and that he jumped to his death.

I’m so sorry to have come across this story. The 29-year-old young man from Brooklyn had his whole life in front of him. Gaining a following on YouTube isn’t easy to pull off, as many who have tried and failed can tell you. Etika had charisma. A presence. Something that made people watch his life above many others. He’d taken heat from employing some sort of homophobic-type of slur, and everyone famous gathers haters and trolls.

And we all know those are relentless and cruel, and unforgiving. Getting hateful comments isn’t something YouTubers just slough like a wet jacket when they come in out of the rain. Those comments hurt. How would you feel if you, claiming to take up for a group like the LGBTQ community, drove a man so low that he felt alone against the world? And by the way, that particular group isn’t interested in having someone hateful fight for them. They’d rather have someone disagree but with civility and peace.

There’s no indication that it was Etika’s remark and backlash from it that drove him to such hopelessness. But I suspect it was part of a bigger picture. Suicide is a complicated subject. The victim may have one main reason or many. And they may or may not leave a note or video or audio message behind to give a clue as to their final decision and how they got there.

The WorldHealth Organisation (WHO) estimates that each year approximately one million people die from suicide, which represents a globalmortality rate of 16 people per 100,000 or one death every 40 seconds. It is predicted that by 2020 therate of death will increase to one every 20 seconds.

The video Etika left behind was particularly difficult for me. He said he had pushed everyone away, and that he was alone. I’ve spent a lifetime running away from people or being so cruel that I have made them run. I know how it feels. Except he didn’t do that. By all accounts, his video caused alarm in his devoted fans. Many were physically sick with worry when, following the video, he went missing. Now…he’s gone forever. And they’re grieving.

Suicide doesn’t have any boundaries. It is not something restricted to the poor and desperate, prison inmates, celebrities who see their careers going downhill or their fame and riches slipping away, business owners who have gone into bankruptcy, the terminally ill or anyone else.

Suicide is final. There’s no coming back from death. You can’t correct anything, can’t repair broken hearts, bring others back from death, you can’t do anything at all. You’ve taken every opportunity you had with you to the grave.

Etika also said one other thing, something that hit me in the gut with a powerful blow: “I guess I really am mentally ill.”

Damn it. I want him back. Right here, right now. I want to hold him and tell him that mental illness is not a death sentence, that there’s hope, that all the stigma around it is bullshit. That he has an opportunity and a platform to discuss seeking help and actually getting it.

I wish he had used his connection to his fans to open a dialogue about what was going on with him and letting them follow and support him on his path to wellness.

We were stronger with him than we are without him.

And that goes for you. You’re reading a blogger right now who barely gets a view a month. There’s a reason you’re here. Before you make any decision so horrible and final, you need to stop and think about this one thing: YOU matter. Your life is, no matter how desperate and alone you feel, no matter how persecuted or hopeless you feel, priceless. You may be replaced in a job, but your life is unique and special and can never be replaced. I encourage you to seek out help. Right now, because if left to second guess this moment, you could really kill yourself. I don’t want you to do that. We may never meet, never cross paths. But I want you here with me on Planet Earth. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen next. You can, given help and time, go on to be a rock star. You can do things no one else can do. Giving up now robs both you and the world of every good, every great thing, you have the genuine potential to do. And since you don’t know yet what those things are, deciding now to end your life is just not right. You are in danger. Even if you don’t have a plan, sometimes suicide is a spontaneous act.

Start here. A simple phone call that can begin a process that can take you to a better place, a more peaceful place.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Call 1-800-273-8255

Available 24 hours everyday

You’ll talk with someone who will give you their full attention. Someone who wouldn’t be answering phones unless they cared about people just like you.

And I want you to consider something really deep.

The “history” channel left real history behind in favor of pseudo science-and-history that make us stupid.
Aliens built Egyptian pyramids. Aliens in space suits visited meso-America.
You know what? That’s rubbish.
All of our stealth fighter tech and supercomputer tech came from reverse-engineered alien space ships.
Twaddle. What do you think that says about humanity in general and the people specifically who came up with those things? It’s an insult. It presupposes that we’re incapable of growing and learning. It says that those who gave their whole lives to improving the human condition never even existed. It limits, and labels us, at one and the same time.

In my career, I’ve seen men and women solve problems with simple critical thinking, dispassionate logic and experience. Tough problems, the kind that can cause serious damage to everything from a small transaction to a company staying in business. I’ve often been amazed at the cleverness, brilliance and durability of the human race. I therefore find ancient aliens to be pseudo science-and-history. And I submit to you that you are a part of an awesome species. The things you can do are without limits.

In hospital after my third suicide attempt, a doctor I usually didn’t see stood in for mine. He looked at my file and said “If you try again, you will kill yourself”.

In that moment, I realized the finality of what I sought. I was forced to think about where God would send me. I didn’t want demons coming to escort me to the afterlife.

And I’m sorry, but whether you believe in God or not, you have to consider whether there is an afterlife, and where you’ll go. Because once you’re dead, your life ends and you’re going to be judged. What I’m asking you to consider is, what if God is real?

One thing I’m not going to do is put a guilt trip on you. A lot of people respond to friends who talk of suicide by saying “think about the ones you’ll leave behind. How can you be so selfish?”

It’s not selfish, what you’re going through. It’s a lot of things, but selfishness isn’t one of them. You’re genuinely suffering and feeling hopeless. Like there’s nothing you can do to make things better. No way you can right a wrong. No one else who understands the fix you’re in.

But you’re not alone! There’s hope. Help. You might worry about the stigma around getting treatment for the things troubling you. You can’t allow that to stop you. Better to choose life and take risks than to die by your own hand.

The benefits of getting help are enormous and many.

Talk therapy is a great way to vent, and gain understanding of your feelings. When backed up by drug therapy such as a simple antidepressant which could be temporary or long-term, depending on your psychiatric diagnosis, you can feel better in a few weeks. Be honest, tell them what’s going on. Don’t be scared of 72 hours at minimum in a hospital. Don’t be afraid of anything. You’ll have every chance to get your life back, and decide to keep it. After a few months I left the hospital in summer, 2005. I’ve not been to a psych ward since, even though if I were in serious need of help, I’d go in a heartbeat. It’s been challenging. Hard. But I’m alive, here today to tell you that you are important, special and full of potential that you can’t see right now. That you matter. And that we are stronger with you than without you.

If you’re in crisis, you can call the number above. I recommend a visit to the emergency room if you actually have a plan for your death. That means you’re in serious trouble. Call 911. Or get a ride. Prepare to be stripped to a gown and restricted to a certain area. It’s protocol for your safety.

It will pass quickly. You’ll be in therapy sessions and see the doc every day. There’s occupational therapy which is a lot more calming and fun than you can imagine. When you’re released you’ll have a treatment plan. Probably some medications. From then on you’ll have a support system you can call on anytime. And you will get better.

I care very much what’s troubling you. What your past holds. The fear you’re filled with, the tears you’ve shed. I’m sorry you’re having so much hurt. You and I are forever brothers and sisters in heart and soul. Claim your life. Get it back.

Because together we can do anything.

Finally, if you are one of those who make fun of people in crisis, you need to know that your cruelty can kill. I know that’s okay with some of you. I’ve met the likes of you before. You could benefit from some psychiatric help yourself. You really want a life on your conscience because you said cruel things?

I leave a challenge with you.

Be kind. Say hello to people you don’t know. Show sympathy even if you have trouble feeling it. And when someone else says something you don’t like, then here. This song is for you.

Be the better person. It’s a tough challenge, I know. Try it anyway. One wave. One smile. One kind word…can save someone’s life. Oh. You won’t get to know. That’s how it works. But at least you’ll know you’ve done no harm. I have to tell you, that is an awesome feeling.

In Loving Memory

Desmond Amofah, “Etika”

1990-2019

Rest in Peace