cheesecloth brain
I got kicked off-balance, so I decided why not fuck it all up? Why not let go of all the excuses, burn all the complacent habits? Be a person who keeps their room clean. A person who reads books, who makes plans, who works nine to five, who quits smoking, who drinks seltzer instead of Diet Coke. I put plants in my room and hung art on the walls. Dressed it up for the person it wants, not the person it has.
“That sounds like a lot,” my friends keep saying.
People think you should be careful with change. Parcel it out. Ease into it. I say if the house of cards is really so damn fragile, let it fall and build a new type of house. Change doesn’t scare me. I’m desensitized to it the way I am desensitized to news alerts or bad jokes.
PTSD makes no sense. It callouses you to some experiences, wrenches you wide open, tender and screaming to others. All at random. I can ask for a raise. I can move across the country by myself. I can tell someone they are wrong. I can look the people I’ve hurt in the eye and say the truth, that I am sorry. I cannot tell someone I have feelings for them. I cannot call my mother. I cannot drive cars or use metal flashlights or have a conversation in a parking lot.
I can start a new job and change my entire lifestyle. It’s not a big deal. Done it countless times already. When I’m lucky enough to find an equilibrium, I will guard it breathlessly and cry every night because I am so grateful to have it. But I know, I know, that when it’s gone, it is gone. To mourn your old life is to waste your own time.
My memory is all-or-nothing. I don’t know if that’s the PTSD or if it’s just me. I can black out whatever I want to. Throw out whole subsections of my history if they don’t serve me. I held a job for three years that I recall very little of. I make no space for monotony. Stretches of my adolescence are unaccounted for. I learned nothing when I was dead. But the pieces, happy or horrifying, that made me this short-circuiting superhuman I can replay every second of. Every word. Crystal clear.
I fell in love with someone bad. I know I was happy with him sometimes. I know I was. But I poked away at my brain with a white hot skewer until all of those sometimes were lost. Relegated to linear time. Unpermitted to live on using me as their host body. I remember every time he hurt me, though. I remember them on the big screen, in surround sound. I remember them so they never happen again.
Nostalgia is foreign to me. I do not keep memories for pleasure. I keep them like instruction manuals. How-to guides. It’s not that I am never sentimental. In fact, it is one of my downfalls. I am sentimental for the gifts I hold in my hand right now and for the future gifts i tell myself are just past the horizon. There is nothing behind me to wish for. And even if there were, to yearn after your old life is to waste your own time.
Sometimes PTSD will solder you to your past. Sometimes it will purge it from your body entirely. Either way, the timeline is fucked. That’s what outsiders don’t seem to understand. I don’t see time like you do. I have no line. I have a cluster of points, of emotional events. New ones growing all the time. I pinball frantically between them all, and that is Time to me. Therapists try to teach me to connect myself to the current moment. They want me to see life as a past, a present and a future. They try to show me where I am on the line that does not exist.
It is so exhausting counting days. I’ve taken to memorizing the dates of each of my emotional events so that I can try to put them in order when I explain myself to outsiders. This day is in April of 2018, and nothing bad has happened to me recently. But I am devastated and aching because right now I am stuck in the point labeled “December 9th, 2017”.
It may not even matter if I get what I want in the future. I may always cycle through my losses. I’m told that when I find Stability, when I finally build the right kind of house, that I’ll be able to see the line. I am trying. I am. Because I’m supposed to. And I guess because I want to.
If trauma is the reason my brain has been turned to cheesecloth, then it’s possible that I can catch my breath, mend the holes, find the line. But standing still with my heart wide open, counting my breaths and naming the things in front of me is not working. I can ask for that raise, but I still cannot ask for your love. Maybe it’s not my trauma’s fault. I could’ve just been born with a whistling teapot for a head.
Terese Marie Mailhot wrote, “I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from my heart,” and I cried for an hour when I read that. Maybe my brain has gone bad, but it’s been bad for so long it feels like me. I could get better and start to see things the way you do, and it could turn me into someone else. I could want to go back.
I lack the necessary martyry obliviousness to say I think so much pain is worth it to be Different. But I cannot distinguish the symptoms from my heart, and screaming mess that I am, I do love me, my spinning cluster and my cheesecloth brain.
