Piling it On
I’ve been having such a successful stint of good days that when the bad ones hit it feels like a massive failure.
I keep reminding myself that’s not what’s going on. That healing is not linear. That we build our strongest neural connections on the days that feel the hardest.
Nonetheless—I’m having a bad day today.
Furthermore, I’m shooting myself with a second, third, and forth arrow about it.
Oh you’re isolating? That’s healthy.
Oh, you’re going to eat that? No wonder you keep gaining weight.
Oh, you can’t help but check your email? You’re such a workaholic.
Oh, you’re paralyzed by going back to your regular life tomorrow? Why do you keep constructing a life that you hate? Why are you here at all?
What makes PTSD so scary is that once you’ve fallen off the cliff of despair once and felt the breadth and depth of how it feels to lie in the dark down there, every time your body catches a whiff of something unpleasant it seizes up and freezes as if that will keep you from sliding downhill face-first into the dark again. Not only is this counterproductive, but it’s also not true.
The only way to stay out of the dark place is to feel into and express the feelings coming up and let them out.
Assessing the Mess
Obviously the goal is to let the difficult feelings out in a safe way that won’t be re-traumatizing1. But this goal is much easier said than done. When navigating PTSD, the emotions that bubble up are substantially less regulated than emotions not connected to the event. They are more erratic—and honestly—more likely to hurt other people around us. Which, in turn, creates a lot of shame. Creates it’s own cycle of trauma. Off-gassing the very real and very valid emotions bubbling up from PTSD is precarious, and can often wreak more havoc on our lives than the initial event did.
For me today, this is showing up in the form of mental and physical clutter. If you saw March’s Our Dirtiest Word you’ll see that not only am I not afraid of clutter, I often can jokingly embrace it. While I occasionally feel that my lightheartedness around it is bringing a bit of levity to something that is also painful under other contexts, sometimes it slips back into that spookier place.
It took me most of the last few days to figure out that this was happening. I just had the most incredible week assisting a Four Shields of Dreams and Dreamwork program for the School of Lost Borders. I slept better than I had in months. I laughed harder than I maybe had in years. I got to connect deeply with others and the magical landscapes of Death Valley.
So why did I feel so fucked up and frozen the moment I got home?
Part of it is a longer arc of generally not loving where I live2. An easy place to pin the disease. But after one day of unpacking. Day two of putting things away. By day three before launching back into my regular life—a full god-damn paralysis.
On the fourth day, I found myself having a complete come-apart trying to figure out what was going on because when I looked around objectively, nothing was “that bad.” So in my frenetic scampering to find a way to avoid my own discomfort, I found myself scrolling through my YouTube account. Now, say whatever you want about the creepiness of algorithms and the self-numbing of watching a bunch of shit on screens—sometimes our search tendencies help give us little clues back towards what we might be looking up when we’re in a more grounded place.
For me, my YouTube recommended is constantly shuttling content at me around PTSD, recovering from narcissistic abuse, and how to navigate emotional regulation as an adult. Yeah it’s cringy, I know. Rest assured, there is plenty of hip hop dance videos and fan theories on the third book of The Kingskiller Chronicles3 interspersed in there for good measure.
Regardless, more than one YouTube videos had titles like “Clutter and Trauma, Why You Have A Hard Time Cleaning Your Space” or “Link Between ADHD and Clutter.” Now, whatever, whatever, I don’t think it’s useful to pathologize or make everything about trauma or diagnoses. However…it is useful to have a variety of tools despite what they are called.
I noticed what the algorythm machine was telling me and I started googling some shit.
Turns out…I found a few articles rather helpful in moving me through my slump.4
Cleaning It Up
After reading a few articles, I did the thing that I had mostly been avoiding—crying. I let myself get angry, grieve my productivity, wallow in my frustration and tenderness. I let the insecurities spill out all over the floor. I littered the room with every emotion that I had been trying to outrun.
And then, I did what we all seem to eventually do given enough time and space…
I started to pick up one piece at a time.
It was a shorter process than I anticipated and by the time the last piece of clothing was in the closet and the vacuum had sucked up all the goldfish crumbs from the carpet near my bed, I actually felt a little more clean and clear about what comes next.
Not a failure, I decided. Just a small, necessary rest stop my body keeps asking me to take when I get overwhelmed.
This has been the April iteration of Our Dirtiest Word.
On the second Thursday of every month substack segment, Our Dirtiest Word, is all about failure. We'll be exploring the story of something I ‘messed up’ in my life and what I learned from the process.
The therapeutic term for this is “flooding.” Ideally you express little bits of the emotion at a time so that your entire system doesn’t get overwhelmed.
Probably more on that soon.
This one was my favorite, and this one was validating but only really marginally useful. I had a bunch more but these two felt most accessible to a general audience without being too jargon-y