Happiness is merely a state of mind. This becomes especially and painfully obvious when one deals with the effects of a traumatic disorder like PTSD. When people talk about 'depression', they often refer to feeling a tad down. Not the crushing sensation generated by some part of your brain that makes you feel like everything around you is muted. From colours to sounds, to your own feelings, dreams and desires.
The expectation is that you interact... normally with others. You don't burden others with the things which you hear whispered from the depths of this dark Abyss that fractures your mind. This is okay. Everything is normal. Just smile, nod, share pleasantries and the moment you're alone again curl up and surrender to the pain and bleakness.
In some ways it's an attractive kind of bleakness. A happy kind of bleakness. For it tells you that it's okay to not care, to not worry. To just accept all the horrors in this world and to lose everything over and over while suffering punishment after punishment. Because that's just what this world is like. And that is okay. Everything is fine.
Once you have found happiness in this bleakness, you can stop caring. About dreams, about a future, about friends, about family, about anything. Because inside the bleak happiness, nothing matters. Nothing can matter. There is just this disgusting, decaying universe and the inevitable end of the universe and everything inside it. Caring is a waste of time and effort.
None of that is true, of course. And you know. At least during the moments that the bleakness doesn't pull you back under into the mists. Every day you fight to stay ahead of the bleakness, to appreciate the simple beauty in life, like the brightness of a beautiful Summer's day, or the flying insects buzzing about in the garden, doing their happy little things with happy little flowers.
But everyone carries their own darkness with them. And you cannot help but notice it. See how it corrupts everything that is good in this universe. Watch how it destroys lives and forces darkness into innocent souls, until they too have this seed of darkness growing inside their minds, where it can grow and blossom like a sickening flower.
That is possibly the most horrible thing about suffering from PTSD. One doesn't just deal with the horrors inside one's own mind, but also has become sensitised to seeing it everywhere else. To believe in the innate goodness of people. To trust that things will work out. To have faith in justice and fairness. None of that is possible any more. Because one has definitively crossed over that line.
What part of reality is truly what we think it is? How does one begin to live in a society which is confused about everything even more than oneself? Is the disorder part of PTSD solely in the mind of the person affected, or is it shared by the rest of society?
I want to feel happy. I want to feel carefree. Because the alternative is to hurt and feel pain. But I want it to be genuine. I want to feel happy and carefree because I have real reasons to feel that way. Not through lies, deception and/or brain state altering chemicals. Yet it feels like something which society has to allow for, too.
Where does PTSD stop and the healthy tissue of society begin?
Maya
1 comment:
I consider *you* part of the healthy tissue of society -- at least from *my* perspective -- because you help me learn things.
I hate when you're hurting. I hate when I see anyone else hurting (perhaps because I'm sensitized to it as you describe), and I hate it all the more because my own disordered brain doesn't always recognize what's going on with myself, let alobe others.
I suppose that's why I offer the hand of friendship so rarely... i only do so to those whom I can empathize with, for whatever reason. And then, at some point, I almost always have discovered that empathy alone is a really bad basis for doing so. The pain they feel finds its focus on me, and I'm hardly ever able to rise to the need to handle it properly.
But still I try.
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