Today my husband called me, apropos of nothing, to tell me we are pre-approved for a mortgage, our first step to home ownership. Those who know me will understand this is a subject so…

Hailin’ from the edge

Hailin’ from the edge

Today my husband called me, apropos of nothing, to tell me we are now pre-approved for a mortgage, our first step to home ownership. Those who know me will understand this is a subject so close to my heart, it’s practically part of my soft tissue. 

All I’ve ever wanted to be. is. 

Safe.

tags: mortgage

Photo by xymonau courtesy of stock.xchng

Today I have been suffering an IBS attack as a result of seeing a man’s head explode yesterday. I suppose that’s something one doesn’t hear every day. A few days ago or so, Richard saw an ad that…

It Hurts

It Hurts

Today I have been suffering an IBS attack as a result of seeing a man’s head explode yesterday.

I suppose that’s something one doesn’t hear every day. A few days ago or so, Richard saw an ad that reminded him of the movie Starship Troopers, from the novel of the same name, and asked me if I had seen it. I had not, and so he resolved that I needed to see it. My old friend Marvin is a huge Heinlein fan, but I have never read any. I’ve heard the negative criticisms, that Heinlein’s fiction is written at a juvenile level and doesn’t include any “hard” science, merely the imaginings of a schoolboy. I’ve also heard that his wit bit very hard. Richard remembered the movie as satirical and thought I would appreciate it. We were about thirty minutes in to it, and I was about to give up because I was getting bored, when, during a basic training sequence, a member of Rico’s squad falls down, and her weapon fires, blowing apart the head of a fellow solider whom Rico had told to remove his helmet.

The moment was visceral, disgusting in its ultra-violence, which was the point, of course, but it hit me in the intestines and the esophagus. I could barely breathe, and had to forcibly remove my eyes from the screen, the room. My skin crawled and my brain felt like it was on fire. I could not catch my breath and I felt a real physical pain throughout my body. I kept seeing the head shatter, splinter, over and over, in a quick flash, as it had happened on the screen.

Not in slow motion. Not in 3D. Not in Hollywood hyped-up hypersound. Just the visceral sound and sight from the screen, the flash. I still see it, and it still hurts. I ended up in the bathroom, the smallest room in the house, wanting to climb into a small dark hole, wanting to shut my eyes, my ears, and stop my brain from seeing this thing. The psychological pain of that moment was overwhelming. There was no time. Just that moment.

I came up for air enough to realize I needed water and I needed refuge, which would require a trip back out of the bathroom through the kitchen, and exposure to the living room where the movie was. I put my fingers in my ears, walked quickly. Richard muted the television, I think he apologized. I got my Blistex, my twenty-four hour a day oral comfort, and my water glass, and stepped quickly to the bedroom where I curled into a ball. Richard followed, he apologized, he stroked my hair. I wanted to stop breathing, go back in time, be in a realm where I did not see that image.

But I’m not. It’s not Richard’s fault. There was no blame, is no blame here; in the bedroom I could look at my pictures of the sea and imagine the sound of the waves rolling in, rolling out, rolling in. I remembered my first glimpse of a sea, in Florida at the Gulf of Mexico, the water warm like the bath, and being able to swim out so far I lost sight of my mother but could still see the bottom through the clear blue water, the sand bar still far out to the horizon, nothing but the sound of the waves and the bright sun and the gulls overhead. I would hold on to my inflatable raft and spin in circles for hours, and there was no time, there was no pain, there was no fear. I wanted to be there, be her, not be me, not be the person who can’t face the evils of this world without falling apart.

But I’m not. So today I have bowel spasms and diarrhea. What a fitting topic for a blog post that is. The pain in my abdomen has been excruciating today, and it’s been hard to concentrate on information for the sales comm. I am working on; like thinking through sludge. And that image is still there, in my mind. I know it will return. It will lie in wait, just like the car accident that brought me here, the devastatingly wrong left turn I made on Walnut Street onto I-40 that turned my car into scrap metal, my neck into ropes of scar tissue and left me with a permanent tic every time I turn left, when I expect that this will be the left turn that will kill me.

And it hurts.

tags: ptsd

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, about a man who survives the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers (among other characters) only to find himself…" />

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, about a man who survives the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers (among other characters) only to find himself…">Two weeks ago I finished Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, about a man who survives the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers (among other characters) only to find himself…

DeLillo’s Falling Man

DeLillo’s Falling Man

Two weeks ago I finished Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, about a man who survives the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers (among other characters) only to find himself surrounded by an invisible emotional fog that cuts him off forever from other human beings. Although his first instinct after escaping from the imploding building where people died all around him (and, you find out just at the end, on him) is to seek solace and comfort from his estranged family, he cannot connect to them, and drifts among them untouched, like the bloodied shirt he had seen floating down from the towers that never landed on the earth, but simply drifted on in some invisible current. At the end, he is living a drifter’s life playing professional poker in casinos where there is never a night, never a day; no family, no connection, no responsibility, only the endless game, the occasional bodily need, noise, fog, white light. He will be falling forever.

When I closed the last page I understood this work explained PTSD, and it has sat in the back of my mind like a coiling snake waiting for the key to explain it here.

This morning I read yet another article about soldiers and PTSD by Mike Tharp, and Sergeant Seth “Doc” Musikant provided me the key when he explained his experience with combat fatigue after the Humvee he was in rode over a homemade bomb, resulting in the death of one of his fellow soldiers and the severe wounding of three others.

 “It’s like there’s an invisible wall,” Musikant said about the anxiety that temporarily troubled him.

DeLillo managed, in his excellent art, to define a state of living without the ability to connect. I struggle, continuously, with my own invisible wall. I desire a closer union with other people, but I can’t manage it, no matter what happens, as if there is an invisible gel between myself and others that prevents me from feeling any connection. I find myself in limbo between projects, jobs, groups, unable to connect. I slip away. I get involved in things, but I’m not all there. I’m a remote observer. I don’t talk. I’m around, but I don’t quite participate. Often, it doesn’t even occur to me that I’m not involved.

I’ve been described as remote, arrogant, full of myself, angry, pissed off, annoyed, and other emotional states during these times. I am almost always surprised by others’ conceptions of the way I feel, because usually, I feel absolutely nothing, and unfortunately, nothing which would enable me to feel empathy or sympathy with them, or in contrast, I feel quite happy as I am. While I’m puzzled by others’ struggles with me, I feel quite at a loss to correct their conceptions or help them feel more at ease, and the gulf widens. I can’t fix it.

In DeLillo’s parlance, I’m a falling man who will never land. I’ve read book reviews that claim that DeLillo’s falling men are ultimately saved, and they get it wrong. His men, who include one of the men who took over the planes that day as well as the shadowy lover of the main character’s estranged wife’s mother, who may or may not also be a terrorist, are never coming down to earth, never connecting with a savior, never going to join the larger swell of humanity.

I know now, although it is not a perfect knowledge, that this feeling, this invisible wall, this fog, is a function of the brain, a protective shield put in place when I was very young when things happened to me I did not understand, and it is a shield I cannot lift on my own. Paradoxically, the shield includes a powerful defense mechanism that makes me extremely vulnerable to certain stimuli, and when I am, suddenly, cast into a world of feeling absolutely ever leaf that twitches, I am thrust from the world of fog into a world where everything hurts. And the others around me cannot understand me then, either, because I seem to be someone who is made manic by stimuli that they are deaf to in most situations. In the case of terrorists and others who train to be killers, it may be an adopted shield, and in me, an involuntary one, but either way, it does not wash off.

I’m off balance. I’m falling out of a skyscraper every day, and most people are standing on the ground amazed at the event happening in the sky.

And that is PTSD.

tags: ptsd, combat fatigue, don delillo, mike tharp

Here’s another track from MC Azeem, at rawkkiddoh’s request.

MC Azeem: Trivia Terrorist