Finding Your Way Out of the Proverbial Loop. (approx. 3-4 minute read)

Hello fellow warriors, how the heck are you? I know it’s been a (long) time since I’ve written a blog and it’s not because I haven’t been writing, because I have, I honestly never stop. The reason is that I haven’t been writing much about PTSD since I finished my book, instead, I’ve mostly been writing and doing research on covid because nothing about covid seems to add up…especially the numbers…but let’s get back to why I haven’t written lately.

I started writing weekly blogs in 2015 and I continued publishing weekly blogs until around April of 2018, and then I started to taper off. If you’ve been around since I started, you know that I wrote weekly blogs on how I was dealing with PTSD, as well as the way people like me are treated by the outside world. Then when we began building our previous house in May of 2018, my blogs started to taper off. Not just because I was busy helping Gary, my husband, complete the build, but because I was working on my first book, as well as dealing with a diagnosis of Lyme disease at the same time.

Fast forward to today and I’m reminded of a scene in my favorite Christmas movie, “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens and it has to be the version with Alistair Sim playing Scrooge. It’s the first version I ever saw and I was around the age of 3, so to me, it’s the only version. In this scene, Scrooge has just gotten a glimpse of his gravestone, and he’s absolutely crushed. He lies down on the ground, throws his arms around the legs of the last of the three spirits, and says, over and over, “I’m not the man I was, I’m not the man I was.” And I’m reminded of this particular scene because I’m not the person I was at just about any point in my previous life…in fact, I’m so different from that person, and each day seems to be like a new beginning for me. I’m confident, I’m stronger than I’ve ever felt and for the first time ever, I don’t feel fear towards anyone or anything. I still get triggers, I always will, but when I do get them, they just feel like a bump in the road, a tiny glitch.

Becoming this new and (I believe), improved version of myself was really slow in happening, and at times, it felt like I was moving at a snail’s pace, especially the first ten years after my PTSD diagnosis. I felt that I pretty much went around in a loop; like an endless loop on a Nascar racetrack, but then when I started writing my book, and my blog, back in 2015, things started to change. As I already mentioned, these changes were slow and they were so subtle that at times, I felt as if I was moving backward. Fortunately, when I read through all the blogs I wrote over the last 6 years, I can clearly see when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started working through my PTSD (You can really see the change in this blog, “Finding that One Thing.”)

Now I go out all the time without thinking about where I’m going because I just have this intense urge to get out and make up for the time I’ve lost. There is no fear around the thought of leaving my house or going anywhere and I believe that one of the most important things I did to help myself heal, was distancing myself from the people, places, and things that exacerbated my symptoms. Furthermore, I believe that if you, too, distance yourself from the things that exacerbate your symptoms it will help you start your path towards healing. This “Distancing,” doesn’t have to be forever, it just needs to be until you feel strong enough to be around those people, places, or things without compromising how you feel. Because when you’re constantly compromising how you feel and having to defend or the way you feel, healing will be that much harder.

It was hard to distance myself from my parents and most of their bio family, but after my older brother died 6 years ago, it felt like a necessity. Around that time, I had received a message from a friend of my older brothers to call the Ghana embassy because they’d found his body in a hotel room and they wanted my parents to go and claim his body. My parents didn’t want any part of their oldest son and told the embassy to keep his body; even though the Ghanaian government had told my parents he would be buried in a mass grave. This decision horrified me because not only was he left to be buried in a mass grave in a country where none of us could visit his grave, but it did nothing to help the rest of us get any closure because they never even had a funeral for him…and when I tried to write an obituary for my brother, I got slammed by my parents and their bio family.

Shortly after all of that happened, those same people started telling all kinds of lies and they turned a lot of people against me, including my children. Anyway, what is done is done. I would love to have my children back in my life, but as for the rest of the people that have wreaked havoc in my life…they can take a long walk off a short pier. I know my truths and opening up lines of communication with nay-sayers would put me back in that proverbial loop and I’ve become way too strong in my conviction to end up on that path again.

Stay safe and stay strong. Thanks for following.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG-zVSzHd4g