Tag Archives: featured

PTSD, Thoughts

Golden Dream

1 Comment

For over a year my life has been frozen. I’ve been wading through a world trying to not only erase who I am but drive me into the shadows. Every day seemed to bring a new effort to shrink my existence and take away my rights, Being a childhood trauma survivor, the effect is multiplied, pushing me back into anxiety, fear, and disconnection. I’ve been wandering through life mildly triggered and disconnected, once again questioning whether I can have a meaningful life in this world which feels so unsafe.

There are three typical reactions to a traumatic situation. The first two, fight or flight are colloquial knowledge. The third, the freeze , is less well known outside of the psychological and mental health professions. It can be a precursor to fight or flight as the body prepares to take one action or the other. It can also be a defense mechanism in and of itself, like the snow hare who freezes against the backdrop of the white, drift covered forest floor when the arctic fox trots by. As a trauma survivor, I often get caught in a freeze like that hare when there is no clear path to safety.

As a queer woman in The South married to another queer woman, we stood out. As a married girl couple holding hands or kissing or just being together we were intensely visible even in our small queer friendly town. At first it was validating to be seen, but as the culture war on queer folk turned to a legislative attacks being seen made us a visible target.

“Don’t Say Gay,” Drag Bans, Bathroom Bills, and other laws passed around us in Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee. I disconnected from knowing more.

I had grown up in hot, humid central Florida, where Disney World visits were just part of life. Every major holiday, visit by a family member, or significant life event seemed to call for a trip to Disney. The joyful escape into a world of fantasy had become woven into the fabric of my life. As an adult I continued to find joy in its embrace, first with my son, then later with my wife. But suddenly Florida was a culture-warrior on the front lines of battle. The state of my long adopted hometown was feeling less safe. My days got fuzzier. I vacillated between compulsively checking the news and actively avoiding it in competing efforts to be informed and to avoid obsessive immersion.

Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World just before Enchantment, my happy place.

Then on a trip to Disney World we stopped for gas in Gainesville, FL. As I stood pumping gas into the car, my wife opened the passenger door and held out a bag. “Hey, Babe – could you put this in the trash can for me?” with synchronized precision, three other customers around us all turned and stared at me, at us. It had suddenly become personal and intensely uncomfortable. We flew to Orlando on our next trip.

Just wishing things would get better, that the world would come to its senses, seemed hopeless. So, filled with helplessness and unsure of a path forward, I slipped into a traumatic freeze. Falling back into the coping skills I’d learned as a child, unable to protect myself or run away from what was happening, I became stuck – frozen. My home, my career, my life was in a place which was becoming increasingly unsafe and unwelcoming. Suddenly, intrusive memories from my past were coming up unbidden again. I was going backwards. I struggled to enjoy or even live my life because I felt unsafe most of the time. My little progressive book loving town no longer felt safe enough anymore.

Then early this year, my own state joined in legislative culture war with 14 anti-LGBT bills during the legislative session and a ban on DEI in higher education where my day job is. Sure the ban was disguised as protecting academic freedom, but shortly after it was enacted anything with diversity in the title was canceled or cut. Somehow the threat getting so close, right on my own doorstep, helped get me unstuck. I caught up to where my wife had been for a while. It was time to leave before things got worse, before something bad happened to us, before we got trapped and couldn’t go.

Even though I had been stuck over the preceding year, we’d managed to explore places we could move to. Travel helped keep my mind from falling into the darkest places, so we checked out Albuquerque, Denver, Albany NY, Southern California, and Chicago. They all had their charms and challenges, but Chicago seemed to fit us best. It was the city of my young childhood and my beloved Cubbies. I’d always loved it. The towering skyscrapers, the expansive lake, affordable homes, great restaurants, and lots of culture just felt right. So as the need for action unfroze me some, we started planning a move by looking at houses and jobs. It seemed destiny was showing us a path forward, and things were working out. We were going to the Windy City and the safety of its warm midwestern charm.

The Windy City is alive.

And yet, fate still wasn’t done with me, I just didn’t know it. We flew to Chicago for a long weekend and picked the suburb we were going to live in. We met the Realtor we were going to buy through. We explored and got comfortable. Out of the blue, I got a call for an interview in San Francisco…then a followup interview.

Months earlier on a lark, I’d submitted an application to a university in San Francisco — my favorite city on earth. It was someplace I’d always wanted to live, but believed to be forever out of reach. So I never expected my application would amount to anything or that we could actually make a move across the country to one of the highest cost of living regions in America. It was a pleasant fantasy, an effort to escape my fear and pain.

An offer arrived for that university job in San Francisco. After we’d decided to move to Chicago, after we had made plans, told people, gotten comfortable with the idea, and even bought new winter coats. Now the truly unexpected was in front of me.

This offer seemed good enough that we could make it work. My wife’s company even had an office nearby. There would be no frigid, snowy winters. I’d evolved from being stuck, to a hopeful path to Chicago, to having choices. These were not just the choices of desperation, but between things I truly wanted. We decided to follow our dream. After having only visited San Francisco twice in her life, for a total of 5 days, my wife took a leap and jumped aboard for the ride. We would move to the bay area and follow my golden dream.

Six weeks later with all of our belongings in six suitcases and a couple of moving containers plus our car on a transport truck, we left The South on a one-way flight to SFO. That was three months ago at the beginning of this endlessly sunny California summer. Those five-and-a-half hours in the air shifted my life completely from where I was. Here nobody notices the queer girl couple, we are simply part of the cultural tapestry. We see ourselves reflected in many others. The laws work to protect our rights instead of the opposite. As I find my place in our chosen home, it has started to sink in. I am safe here.

Today I sit in a coffee shop with my laptop able to write for the first time in almost a year. I am finally thawing enough in California’s golden sun to find my voice again, to be present in the world. I am alive again. I never want to lose the freedom I have found here.

PTSD, Writing

Writing Roadblock

Leave a comment

Over the last several months I’ve found myself stuck whenever I try to work on a few of the short memoir pieces I’ve started. It’s a repeating pattern. An idea, then great first line hook, a couple of paragraphs which flow out easily onto the page, and then a long slow coast to stuckness, followed by lament. My in-progress folder is now littered with a quartet of these.

Then suddenly in the middle of this writing roadblock, a complete flash piece pours out. I tweak it, get feedback, revise a bit and it’s ready for its next stage. All while the others still languish unfinished. Hoping the energy from completing something (anything!) will energize my efforts, I turn back to one of the languishers. Fizzle.

I think I missed this sign when starting on the road to make sense of traumatic experiences through memoir.

My work in therapy has also been at something of a standstill since the pandemic started. First being disconnected from a safe place ground work to a halt. Then working though every day challenges and finding a path forward for life in this changed world took over my sessions. When bits and pieces of traumatic memories come up from time to time, they are only worked with until they can be packaged and put on a shelf safely for later. Whenever that might be.

Earlier this week I was digging into a memory about a reflections book I’d used a decade ago. I was trying to make sense of what had happened to it, where it had gone. When my memory failed I turned to my journal. Sure enough I found the answer of when I’d used it and with prompting recalled why I’d stopped. Once I’d solved that puzzle I continued on to skim through a bunch of old entries, finding myself coalescing around the summer when memories of my childhood trauma started flooding back to me.

Field of Blue FLowers
So much was fuzzy during that summer of forgotten memories. I could only focus on one at a time, but each and every one got their moment in the sun before fading into the background.

My writing from that time brought back the mad, headlong rush to get down everything I was remembering – before I forgot it all again. In rereading, I found memories I’d forgotten again, and felt the bite of re-remembering horrors I’d not wanted to know. Now though, I can turn the page and move on, the memories contained for the time being in those pages. However the next next (likely disquieting) memory is just a page or two later. As I read through those raw memories of unprocessed trauma I experienced that summer, something tugged at a corner of my mind. I couldn’t quite see it, but I knew it was there just beneath the surface.

A few days later I recounted this experience to my therapist from the safety of the couch in her plant and book lined office. As so often happens in therapy for me, talking about my experiences allows the lines connecting parts of my past to take on sharp relief, becoming suddenly visible. In a moment I saw my writing roadblock in a new way – why some pieces sat unfinished, untouchable, and why others were essentially completed in a single sitting.

Every piece I’d finished was about my experiences since I’d started therapy, since I’d taken control of my life and started working to live in the light of the present. The others? They were all from the shadows of the past, the before times. They were filled with the raw emotions and and unexplained experiences which pulled me to write about my childhood, to find meaning. This pull was also my downfall. I was writing about unprocessed traumatic events which pushed me out of my window of tolerance and straight into the floundering fields of numbness.

Window
Staying in my window of tolerance means working with things one drop at a time.

To write about my childhood experiences, I am going to have to do work in therapy with them. The memories I want to make sense of need to be processed, bit and piece at a time in a safe place. Some can be processed on the page, perhaps in my journal, and eventually as memoir, but much of my work will be done on that couch. I will explore with someone to guide me, to help pull me back, to give perspective. What I am writing about will guide my work processing trauma, and the work in therapy will help me to write. Interweaving the two means having a way finder to help me see the roadblocks, to point the path to through or around so I can make progress in both healing and writing. Because I now see for me, healing and writing are one and the same.

My road ahead is full of twists and turns to work through and around writing roadblocks- there is no map, but I have a guide.
Photography, PTSD

Strolling in the Light

Leave a comment

Over the last few months I’ve been feeling photography grow ever more comfortable. When I posted earlier this year about taking photography back from childhood trauma, about making the hobby mine again, I had reached a point where it had switched from being a trigger to a pleasure. Lately something unexpected has happened – photography has become solace.

Since memories of childhood trauma came pouring forth the best part of a decade ago, I’ve often found myself wondering how to make sense of my life experiences. Though I have explored the disjoint, terrifying memories in the safe embrace of my journal and therapist’s office, I wrestle with how to translate these experiences onto the page. I yearn to tell my story, yet how to do so without scaring my readers or befuddling them with disconnected slivers of memory has long evaded me.

Since the summer, I’ve been mentally rummaging in the junk drawer of my mind, going back over experiences trying to find a common framework from which to make sense of things. Unexpectedly I discovered photography showing up all over life, not just in my trauma memories. From pictures of childhood events, to family voyages photographically assaying the American West, to images of my own independent travel and those of my son, photography is the river that has flowed through my experiences. The negatives and positives of my life are all connected by an unending spool of film.

As I worked through all of this in my journal, I actually could give attention to it for the first time. Instead of shying away because of being triggered, I was able to embrace the idea of using photography, both mine and my father’s, as a way to understand my own story.

Bolstered by this framework of how the pieces of my life might fit together into a cohesive whole, I let myself slip more into photography. I let it envelop me, become part of how I see the world again. I finally looked back over my catalog of pictures from the last 20 years and beyond. I started to write a mixed media essay with some of those photographs. I began to read about photography and cameras, which I had never been able to do before. In daily life occasional images would impress themselves on me. Bright pansies in a planter surrounded by the browning world of late fall caught my eye one day, a Christmas wreath around a streetlight another, and Thurman with a particularly vivid background on yet another. Interesting images were all around me, I simply started noticing.

I found myself wandering around the neighborhood, camera in hand allowing my eye to once again see things as the camera might. I’d found something I never thought I would experience again: the countenance between light and dark, the sharp joyful spark of color, the excitement of the unexpected caught still. Small, even inconsequential things became my subjects and created a smile as I found life in the ability to represent things as I saw them.

A crossroads in the sky.

I am no longer only tolerating capturing an image. I’m finding joy and life in creating with my camera. I’m using photography as a tool to help myself now. When I go numb, disconnect or get anxious because I am overwhelmed by memories, a walk with the camera grounds me to the earth. These walks connect me to things waiting to be seen, to life itself because in order to capture the world as I see it, attention must be given to the present instead of what is going on inside. I am forced out of the darkness of images trapped inside my mind to instead experience the light of the world around me.

In the land of the pansies, the purple queen reigns.

Somehow moving toward instead of away from memories of my father the photographer has allowed me to work on accepting the duality of my relationship with him. In turn I have felt a peace develop around cameras, photography and how they weave into the fabric of my life. Once again photos are an outlet for me to express myself as an artist, instead imprisoning me.

There is still darkness in photography for me, but as long as I walk in the light, darkness lives only in my past.