Sometimes, though, if I go too long without doing any of those things it will spasm up while I am sleeping, and cause a sharp pain in my chest, which always feels like a heart attack. It is very unpleasant. I have spent many hundreds of nights hoping and praying I would not die in the dark. This is over and above all my other adventures when I go to sleep. Last night was such a night.
I woke up this morning and decided to light a cigar, sit on my couch, and go more deeply into this whole feeling. It is a trigger point, a place where feelings congregate and attack, but it is simply an aggregator of feelings which emerge everywhere in me every day. It is like being in a boat which is constantly filling with water, and constantly needing to bail it out to stay afloat. It’s an exercise I am well used to by now. Some days I do it better than others. Some days, as with last night, I don’t do it at all, and sometimes I pay a price for it. The work I do for a living is pretty focused on my rhomboids and trapezius muscles, and they were very sore last night.
And it felt to me like some inner part of me feels like a soldier trying to cross a battlefield where shells are landing continually. It is impossible to know where to run, what to do. These “shells” are traumatic emergences, and I can see my parents on a ridge, shooting at me. My father is happy every time he hits me. He wants me to fail. My mother is much more angry. She wanted me to be her slave.
And it occurs to me that in the real world, the soldiers who get PTSD are those who, like me, suppress their feelings, who simply do what has to be done, while emotionally numb. Who are unable to engage with their fear, unable to engage with and focus on the task to be done with something even approaching confidence. Who go in thinking “I am going to die”–or even nothing at all–and who then simply watch a body go through the motions while feeling, consciously, close to nothing other than the raw sensations the body cannot but go through.
Every day is like this for me. I have learned, through the exercise of will, to get done what needs to get done, but there is no place, no time, no way for me to ever feel at peace with the world. There are no times where I feel “all is well. I am safe.” There is no other side, when the battle is within. You carry it with you, wherever you go.
Most mornings I create a plan for the day, and most days, I deviate from the plan nearly immediately. What really, truly needs to get done, does get done, but the line I had wanted to follow always comes to seem impossibly frightening very quickly.
And this image which came to me this morning, of running zig-zag through a field filled with the holes caused by detonating artillery, with shells exploding all around me, makes all of this make more sense emotionally.
The will is a powerful instrument, but it has limits. It does fatigue. You cannot spend every moment using it to its limit and not at some point run out of steam. So what I have managed to do is figure out a way to regularly use it in spurts, where it is really needed, and allow my fear to redirect me the rest of the time. It is not a good solution, but it has kept me alive.
And as grim as this image is, when I contemplate it, it represents a victory in itself. I am seeing more clearly my own inner world, what really makes me tick, how I really work. This would not have been possible, had I not been in a position where I can now begin to alter this inner world, in a positive and healthier direction.
Given all that I have been through, when I get myself to a position where I am able to form and retain positive habits, when I am not having to dodge or deal with head-on traumas popping into and interfering with my emotional life, then I will be capable of a great deal. In important respects, I have not yet begun to fight my main battles, but I am slowly reaching a point where I will be able to begin, and I cannot begin to imagine how much energy will be liberated when I am free, or as close to free as I am destined to get in this life.