Flashbacks, Dissociation. Because.

How do you waste the most time every day?

Hey, I wish I could say that I don’t waste time. We would all like to be efficient and productive, wouldn’t we?

Life happens, and when it does, it comes with good and bad. Well, for the longest time, I had too many bad things happen to me.

Those things weren’t just bad, though, they were evil, harmful and traumatic. And those things never go away.

All it takes is a flash of reflective light, an odor of something associated with traumatic events, a taste, a word…

…or a song.

Then what? I can be walking and not see where I’m going. Lots of times I drove places I didn’t remember getting to. How many times did I cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge to get home from work, but walking into my house without realizing I had actually arrived, and did not remember crossing the bridge, paying the toll, and exiting I-695?

How many times had I stripped down for a shower, because my work uniform was full of lime, silica and grime, and not gotten into the shower for two hours, never knowing where I had been, even if my body had not moved?

Flashbacks lead straight to a dissociative state where you involuntarily enter the past, reliving pain, terror, humiliation and violation.

There are medications that they say can help, but looking back over the past decade, I have to wonder if they were truly efficacious. Because it keeps happening, over and over and over again.

Many times I’ve been accused of staring at someone. If I was facing their way, I did not see them. Few civilians understand the two thousand-yard stare, because it’s strange to see. It’s highly disconcerting, thinking someone’s staring at you. The blank look can be taken as threatening, or worse, the mark of sheer madness. Insanity, like they’re trapped in some fever dream.

They have no clue that you’re not even there. You could be in a POW camp or building. You could be back at the house you grew up in. Reliving things most folks would puke like mad if you described them.

The worst part of all this is that nobody will believe you. After a while, you don’t try anymore.

That’s why I started this blog. I didn’t want to shut up. I believed then, as I still do, that if you tell your story to the world, someone – even if only one person – can gain knowledge and insight from it.

And maybe you help them, even if just to tell them that they are not alone.

Incest is the fastest growing category of porn everywhere you go. TV commercials hint at it. In the past, women posing with dogs was the thing. During the Afghan and Iraq wars, one “heartwarming” commercial, I think it was for dogfood, featured a returning woman in uniform reunited with her dog. Touching, but one shot had her in the driveway, on her back, knees bent, with the dog on top of her. Classic missionary position: sex sells.

Since then, a lot of father-daughter themed ads left no doubt that they were “selling sex.”

It’s as old as TV itself, older than newspaper ads, magazine ads, and probably in other media.

But the reality is not sexy. The reality is a fucking nightmare, one that never ends, long after abuse is over, usually because a parent died or the now-grown child has moved out.

And physical abuse? The kind where you’re tortured? Beaten bloody? Knocked unconscious twice in less than ten minutes? What about that?

Though physical scars may fade with time, the ones on your heart and soul never do. Never.

I have siblings who look for all the world to be well adjusted, and I am the one cheering them on in silence, secretly jealous, and yet knowing that they, too, must still hurt. Unfortunately, I have never escaped that past. I’ve lost the illusion that I can.

Instead, despite CPTSD and flashbacks and a textbook selection of attendant maladies, I do the best I can. When I am able, I pray to God to forgive me for my sins, and sometimes I selfishly ask for strength.

Maybe God says, “Mike, I didn’t abuse you. I didn’t want you to be abused, yet here we are. There’s only so much I can do to help. The rest was always your problem to face and defeat or to run from and have it chase you for the rest of your life.”

Maybe I believe part of that. Maybe I believe that life is a blessing and a miracle. A gift.

And maybe I even believe that while we’re here, part of our trials are our burden, and ours alone.

On the other hand, that hardly accounts for all the times I’ve been spared, accidents I survived, heart attacks I survived, murderers I’ve dodged, and so much more. Because I have faith that if asked, God does help. And sometimes He helps even when you’re a second from death and can’t pray because you’re terrified.

Anyway, the time I spend in flashbacks or total dissociative separation remains the thing I waste the most time on every day.

How I wish it was not so.

How I wish that you, too, did not suffer so. Yet there are more of us than we can know. Because life happens, and there’s good and evil. You fight. You resist. You do the best that you can. God bless you.

Just A Walk In The Dark

How often do you walk or run?

I don’t walk as often as I should, which would, at my age be about a mile a day.

But I can’t. Depression often has me nailed to the bed, and yesterday I hadn’t gone out.

It occurred to me after sunset that I was almost out of smokes.

I’m going to quit that crap. Quitting smoking won’t save my life, but I may last a few months longer.

But last night wasn’t, I decided, the right time. So I had to take a walk.

That’s pretty stupid considering that my prescription glasses are also sunglasses. And to get to the shopping center, I walk through the woods on a narrow asphalt path and it’s really dark. I can’t see the path and my flashlight quit on me so I’m having zero visibility. I keep stepping off into the grass, which is okay, but in darkness is disorienting. Hard to find the path again because I can’t see. It’s total blindness instead on the brink of functional blindness, but that’s no better. Not in the dark. But, nothing happened, so I made it to the store and I bought a pack.

Inside, the cashier said, What did you do to your hand?

I looked and it was bleeding. No reason, just an open wound. It’s sad, but it happens a lot.

It really wasn’t until I went back into the darkness that I’d got into trouble. Almost at the bottom of the path, back-lit by a streetlight about 40 yards further on, I saw a silhouette which I knew to be out of place.

My mind took a little trip.

I was back in the jungle on a trail. What I was seeing was the shape of was a man, with twigs for camouflage sticking out from the band around his boonie hat.

I reached for my stiletto but it wasn’t there!

I was unarmed. The forward-leaning camo guy was waiting until I was closer. I knew he had a bayonet or a kukri blade.

But just as fast, I saw that he was gone, replaced by a shopping cart!

I haven’t slept since. I can’t. The nightmares would be horrible. Eventually I’ll crash. Until then I dread sleep.

Not much I can do about it, though. When it’s enough, my mind shuts off and I crash.

All future walks, until the trees are bare of leaves, at which time the path isn’t as dark, will be in daylight.

All the stuff I’ve been through, and I’m finally reduced to Don Quixote tilting at shopping carts.

Shoot me.

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.