January 15, 2023
My books are jokes. Mosaics of jokes about serious matters, about death, about disease, about war, and that sort of thing.
Kurt Vonnegut
Recently I started going to therapy. I wasn’t really planning on going to therapy–been there done that (six times), expensive, embarrassing, etc. But pretty much everyone in my life, including my mother who has never been to therapy herself, expressed their concern with my “situation,” for lack of a better word. It’s hard to describe the inner workings of the human mind, especially when you’re not quite sure your inner workings are working according to outside realities, but, long story short, I have post traumatic stress disorder.
Disorder is a disconcerting word to use to describe something, but sometimes it is the only way to properly get an idea across to people without said “disorder.” Many people still doubt that your experiences and perception of life are any less disorderly or abnormal than theirs. I myself am not a champion of assigning names to patterns of thought or behavior, but I do recognize that sometimes a proper diagnosis–or adequate description of a group of thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors experienced by an individual–can be beneficial in helping people understand their position amidst life a bit better.
However, I feel like I am admitting defeat. Like I am waving the white flag of mental capacity for fucked up feelings. I feel like I should be stronger, more resilient. I feel like I should be a better partner, better friend, better family member. I feel like if I don’t address this soon I won’t live long enough to know again what it’s like to live without it. That sounds grim but I’m afraid it’s the truth.
I find it incredibly ironic that I chose Perpetual Present to be the name of my art entity. I read the phrase in a scholarly article when I was a senior in high school. We were reading Slaughterhouse Five in AP English class, and I found an analysis of Billy Pilgrim’s character. There has been debate for decades about why Billy experiences reality in the fragmented, “schizophrenic” manner that he does, and many of my classmates subscribed to the schizophrenic diagnosis of Billy Pilgrim. However, it is quite clear to me, and hopefully any other scholar of mental health or literature, that Billy is experiencing PTSD. The paper talked about how people with PTSD feel as though they are living in a “continual present.” Billy’s imaginative narrative is not schizophrenic in the sense that he suffers from schizophrenia, but in a way that uses wild imagination and vivid descriptions of unrealities to provide a framework for individuals unfamiliar with such thought patterns to cling to and follow. Past, present, and future meld together into an undistinguishable fabric of time and events.
Anyway, my first tattoo was a paraphrased quote from the book. It says, “trapped in the amber of the moment there is no why.” It references a part of the dialogue that juxtaposes time and meaning. When I got the tattoo I was 18, and to me it was going to serve as a reminder that I shouldn’t look at life moment by moment and ask why, that I need to consider the whole picture–past, present, and future–no matter what happens. And I still believe that. But now I am 24, and I am struggling with PTSD, and my understanding of what Vonnegut was truly saying has shifted out of necessity. Sometimes there just is no why; it can be maddening to try and explain illogical and unimaginable experiences in rational ways.
One time someone told me we are a magnet for our own chaos, that I asked for certain things to happen, that things happened to me as a result of my own powers of attraction. When I think about things like my tattoo I think about that. I named myself Perpetual Present because I realized what that really felt like. It’s only gotten more pronounced over time. I drew a bubble chart on my white board with PTSD at the center and symptoms I experience spidering off from that. Then off of those bubbles in magenta I wrote the ways that manifests in my daily life. For example, one line leads to a bubble that says “anticipatory anxiety,” and off of that bubble is another bubble that says, “fear of things ending in disaster,” and so on.
The chart kept growing until I ran out of room, which was quite eye opening. I honestly have no idea how the hell anyone would be expected to function as a normal member of society with all those thoughts bubbling under the surface. No wonder Billy seems schizophrenic, because schizophrenia and PTSD are just one or two elements from being the same thing–one being reality. These thoughts don’t stem from a detachment or split from reality, they stem from visceral interactions with extremely unpleasant aspects of reality that sometimes cause rifts in time and perception.
So, recently I started going to therapy. Supposedly talking things out will help. However, therapists are excellent at small talk, which is morbidly boring, so everytime I go I get fed up with the small talk and start talking the big talk–like about childhood abuse and getting stabbed and accidentally killing someone on the way home from the store, which is why I started the therapy in the first place. And then I feel strange, like they were doing the small talk thing to back me into a corner and get me to disclose what I’m really thinking about. And then I feel weird for constantly thinking about bad stuff and bad things happening. Then I leave therapy with it all fresh in the mind and can’t have a normal conversation with my boyfriend because I’m way too self aware about the impact of the events I was just talking about.
I love, but I’m not patient. I’m sometimes far from kind. I feel emotion so intensely sometimes that I fear expressing it, and then I numb myself. I drink or smoke, or just flat out dissociate myself from the thoughts I’m having. I suffer from amnesia because of it. I don’t remember the arguments I start or the sadness I fabricate. I don’t remember a lot of bad, but I also inadvertently erase the good. The funny thing about coping with weed and alcohol is that you don’t get to choose which memories stay and which memories go. I have lost countless hours of memories with my loved ones, when all I was trying to do was erase the memories and feelings that turn into unpleasantries.
Vonnegut said, “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” Perhaps at one point I experienced life linearly, but that diegesis has been disrupted and replaced with a disjointed amalgamation of past memories and present events that fall together like a deck of cards being shuffled. A memory of imaginary play in the back yard of a baby sitter all the sudden becomes intimately entangled with a conversation with the grocery cashier, which shuttles on– baggage from all layovers in tow–to a vivid memory of splitting someone’s skull open with my windshield. Carrying groceries from the check out line to the car accidentally becomes a reenactment of a tragedy in my mind because I see the outcome of events that are never played out. I know where I am, what I’m doing, all the basics, but I’m not there.
That sort of questioning of time and place reminds me of this one time playing soccer in middle school. One of my friends got a concussion during the game, and after she was taken off the field the medic was asking her all kinds of questions so that he could see how bad the concussion was. Questions like “who’s the president, what year is it, do you know where you are, what’s your name?” Her answers were not unrealistic, but they were untimely and disconnected from the present moment. That is what it feels like to experience PTSD.
Listen. Billy pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Kurt Vonnegut