- gradenko_2000
- Oct 5, 2010
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HELL SERPENT
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Lipstick Apathy
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I don't know how big of a deal this is, or even how true it is, but I've noticed a sort of blowback against this kind of narrative after the coverage of the Pitt and Jolie's break-up that the media's been way too quick to blame this either on Jolie, or on any of the actresses that Pitt has allegedly had an affair with, when reportedly the "irreconcilable differences" in the divorce claims were more about essential disagreements on how to the couple was and would raise their children, and specifically Pitt's consumption of drugs and alcohol being a bad influence on them.
To wit, in these divorce stories the wife is all too often portrayed as the flawed, even crazy person, or that the mistresses are all too often portrayed as seductresses.
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Sep 22, 2016 11:46
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May 9, 2024 16:40
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- gradenko_2000
- Oct 5, 2010
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HELL SERPENT
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Lipstick Apathy
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I wanted to share this piece on What PTSD is, in the wake of Trump's comments about that subject:
quote:PTSD isn’t a disease, it’s a world view.
War, disaster response, police work, these things force a person to live in the spaces where trauma happens, to spend most of their time there, until that world becomes yours, seeps through your skin and runs in your blood. Most of us in industrialized western societies live with feeling that we are safe, that our lives are singular, meaningful, that we are loved, that we matter. We know intellectually that this may not be the case, but we don’t feel it.
PTSD is what happens when all that is stripped away. It is the curtain pulled back, the deep and thematic realization that life is fungible, that death is capricious and sudden. That anyone’s life can be snuffed out or worse, ruined, in the space of a few seconds. It is the shaking realization that love cannot protect you, and even worse, that you cannot protect those you love. It is the final surrendering of the myth that, if you are decent enough, ethical enough, skilled enough, you’ll be spared. The warriors that the media ascribes so much power are the first to truly know powerlessness, as death becomes commoditized, statistics that you use to make an argument for promotion, or funding, or to score political points.
Warrior cults (and, heck, most religions) were invented to give death meaning. Even if you look past the promise of immortality, they offer a tremor in the world, a ripple of significance in your passing. You do the right thing knowing that, somewhere down the line, you have a meaningful death. PTSD is what happens when you realize that you won’t, that your survival will be determined by something as random as the moment you bent over to tie your shoelace.
Diseases are discrete things. But how do you treat a change in perspective? Joe Abercrombie captured it best in his description of Ferro Maljinn’s final revelation of the world of demons just alongside our own. Once seen, the creatures cannot be unseen. When you’re quiet enough, you can hear them breathing.
Nobody talks about this. Nobody talks about the boredom, the impossibility of finding meaning in 8 hours work in an air-conditioned office after you just spent months working 18 hours a day on a battlefield where your touch altered history. Nobody talks about the surreal experience of trying to remember how you got excited about a book, or clothing, or even a car or house. On the battlefield, in the burning building, the ground trembled, we felt our impact in everything we did, until the world seemed to ripple at our touch. Back home, or off shift, we are suddenly the subject of sympathetic glances, of silly, repetitive questions. The anonymity of the uniform is nothing compared the anonymity of comfort. We drown in it, cut off from what makes it worthwhile for others, unable to carve out a piece of it for ourselves.
Time helps you to shift back, but you never shift back all the way. You develop the dreaded “cop’s eyes,” where you see the potential threat around every corner, where you ask the waiter for the chair with its back to the wall. Where the trust essential to build relationships is compromised, because in the world you live in, everybody is trying to harm someone.
And this is why so many of us, even post diagnosis, go back to work in the fields that exposed us to the trauma in the first place. Because the fear is bone deep, and the only thing that puts it to sleep is the thought that you can maybe patch a few of the holes in the swiss cheese net under the high wire. Because we are frightened from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep, and if we can stave that off for someone else, well, then maybe that’s something to live for.
And that’s for those of us who get off easy. In the worst cases, people aren’t able to find meaning in a regular job, or in wealth-building, or relationships, or any of the things that modern societies tell us charts the course of a life. These are the people that PTSD takes, as they flail their way into suicide, or crime, or insanity, desperately trying to carve meaning out of a world where all the goal posts have suddenly moved, where the giant question that no one can answer is, “why bother?”
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Oct 5, 2016 13:50
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Sep 22, 2016 11:46
