At least Sisyphus had a rock

I have PTSD.

Dealing with my PTSD is a Sisyphean battle. It’s one version of myself, the one that wants to be happy, pushing that boulder up the hill. Then when I get to the top, there’s another version of me there, the one that thinks I don’t deserve happiness, ready to kick that rock back down the hill. But, because there is no other option, all I can do is pick up the stupid rock, set it at the base of the hill, and push it back up to the top again. I just have to hope that one day, I’ll get to the top and that negative version of me will give up and go ‘Fine. You win.’ and let me pass on by with my rock.

It’s a constant fight, day in, day out. But how are you supposed to fight when your biggest enemy is your own mind?

I’m fantastic at pretending to be fine.

I probably had the beginnings of my PTSD all the way back to when I was a fairly young child, but I only got diagnosed when I was 27. Saying it’s hard to manage is like saying water is wet. I’m introverted. I’m guarded. I’m untrusting. I spend a lot of time in my own head. And my head isn’t always a nice place to be. I’m fantastic at pretending to be fine.

I’m sometimes so good at pretending to be fine that I believe it myself. Those are dangerous times. Those are the times when all of the little tics and quirks that I’ve slowly been training myself out of, come back. Keeping my back to a wall at all times (so nobody can come up behind me to hurt me). Always knowing where my exits are (so I can escape from anyone who is trying to hurt me). Judging potential friends based on how badly they could physically hurt me first, then emotionally hurt me, before I let them get close. And so, so many others. They all build and build and I have to pretend harder and harder, until one day I just… … can’t.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done is admit to myself and others that I am not fine. That I need help. Because that means admitting that I am not perfect. That means admitting that I am burdensome. Because I am not supposed to need help. I am supposed to be the help that others need.

I’ve spent the majority of my life simultaneously trying to please people and trying to protect people from myself. This was a habit I had before I even knew what PTSD was. And there’s one of the Sisyphean aspects of my PTSD again. Constantly trying to push that rock up the hill. Constantly trying to be the person, the sister, the friend, the daughter, the granddaughter, the employee that everyone else wants me to be, but at the same time never quite getting there. And because I’ve never quite achieved that perfection, there’s an unending guilt and shame that makes me believe that my very existence must be a burden to those around me. Which causes me to try harder, and give more of myself in order to please people, to reach those impossibly high standards I’ve set for myself. To ease that burden I inevitably place upon the people in my life.

It’s a vicious cycle.

I’ve thought I was legitimately insane.

I’ve been suicidal, many times. I tried to follow through with it once, but ended up thwarting my own attempt because I couldn’t handle the guilt. I was trying to die, but I couldn’t handle the guilt and shame that came from the belief that in death, as in life, I would be a burden to others. The inner negative turmoil that I was trying to escape was ultimately the thing that stopped me from escaping it.

I’ve thought I was legitimately insane. I’ve been fighting my PTSD for so long, that a lot of the time it feels like a war between two entirely different people in my mind. The one who wants me happy, and the one who wants me to suffer. It creates this cacophony of noise and emotion inside my mind almost constantly and makes it hard to focus, hard to think. It also makes it hard to feel anything outside of the internal chaos. It makes other emotions dulled and grey. It has made me wonder, more than once, if I am actually insane. If looking out at the world like this, with such grey and dulled emotion, with no feelings towards anything positive or anything negative, makes me as crazy as I’ve been accused of being.

I still struggle with the idea that I deserve happiness, or love, or friendship.

Like so many mental illnesses out there, PTSD is invisible. It drags me deep inside my own head and forces me to struggle upwards, weighted down with memory and pain, to achieve any kind of happiness or love or friendship. It forces me to fight against concepts and abstracts, against myself, against things that nobody can see, not even me.

Sisyphus, at least, had a rock he could see.