I’m Going to Die at 38 (& Other Pieces of My PTSD Puzzle)

 

It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I just couldn’t see myself living.

In the dusk of 2014, I sat at an auntie’s table and screamed, “I don’t know!” in answer to each of her questions. What do you want to be? What do you what to do? What would make you happy? I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that dying was the only answer I cold come up with. It was all that I could see. It wasn’t just that I was depressed. Dying wasn’t a way out for me. It was a certainty.

I remember playing outside when I was nine and suddenly feeling a pang of sadness as the brown leaves sprinkled from the sky and gathered around my legs. I was going to die soon. And I was going to leave my sister, who sat tossing the leaves in the air, behind.

I used to fantasize about the freak accidents that would take me out: a tragic car crash where I was t-boned by a drunken truck driver, a stray bullet in a robbery, a sudden brain aneurism, a coma of any kind. Everyone would gather around my casket at the funeral and say, “she had so much potential.” And I, having died, would have dodged a bullet.

Thirty-eight became my decided number. I couldn’t see the years between nine and thirty-eight, but somehow, I was going to make it there. I’d live long enough to marry a man, have some daughters, and then I would die and leave my babies motherless.

I thought maybe I had a simple, open-and-shut case of childhood death obsession. After all, I was no stranger to funeral etiquette or how to breathe around a grieving person. You’d think death was my cousin the way we were acquainted. It kept showing up to our reunions, climbing the family tree and picking my favorite people like apples.

But I didn’t. There was nothing simple about the way I always foresaw my death. There was nothing open-and-shut about “knowing” I would die young without any evidence or reason. My death was never a source of anxiety for me. It never intruded upon my thoughts or disturbed me in any way. It didn’t consume me. It was a certainty, as sure as a blue sky in July.

As I got older, the excuses for my absent future evolved: I was too young, I was unsure, I was inexperienced, I was depressed. That day at my auntie’s table when I insisted that I didn’t know the answer to any of her questions, that I couldn’t see myself in five years and that I had a good hunch that I’d be dead soon, I realized this thing in my head was more than an odd certainty, and more than a childhood obsession.

After my assessment in the early fall of 2015, Esther showed me a piece of paper. I can’t call the format to memory. It may have been a chart or a checklist. All I can see in my mind’s eye is the moment when it clicked and the diagnosis branded my face with four letters: PTSD.

For the record, here are the required Qualifications to be diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You’ll note that PTSD does not require US military Veteran status, army fatigue, an IED, or a deployment overseas. People who suffer from PTSD look a lot like you. And me. Hopefully you can accept those facts faster than I did.

PTSD symptoms are all the pieces that I don’t want to fit into the puzzle of my life, but I can’t help but see how they complete the big picture.

As explained by a 2014 study, traumatic events, especially those that are deliberately inflicted by other people, can lead to a loss of “trust” or “confidence” in the world. Thus, people with PTSD sometimes lose sight of our future commitments and cares. We don’t think of things like where we want to be in five years because we literally cannot envision ourselves five years from now. We see ourselves dying young because we don’t trust the world enough to keep us here that long.

It’s called a sense of foreshortened future. That is the proper term used to describe my “obsession” with my impending death. And it’s only one of the grab bag of puzzle piece symptoms that make a little too much sense in my life.

With PTSD, my fear of living up to my potential translates to a fear of living. Period. My refusal to commit to a best friend or boyfriend or favorite connects with the notion that people like me don’t trust the world enough to invest in it. My “protective nature” and insistence upon walking behind people as opposed to letting them walk behind me translates to hypervigilence. My jumpiness and easily startled nature fits into hyperarousal.

It’s taken me a few months to swallow my diagnosis, and some days it seems like it still isn’t all the way down. But today feels like a good day to let you in.

Here’s what I don’t want:

• to capitalize on my story with blog traffic or internet popularity because its mental health awareness month.
• To gain your pity, or sympathy, or sad stares.

Here’s what I do want:

• For you to hear me out.
• For someone, like myself, who may be afraid of that label, of those menacing four letters of PTSD, to be honest with themselves about their struggles.
• For someone, like myself, who may be akin to Wonder Woman, but may also be living with mental illness, to consider getting help.
• For someone, like myself, who may be coming out of one way of thinking and into a better one, to take from my words whatever she needs and to know that my inbox is always open.
• For someone, like myself, who is afraid, but not ashamed, of the cards she’s been dealt, to finally begin playing her hand.

In light of May being Mental Health Awareness Month, I wish you all the light you can handle. Take care of yourselves.