It’s cloudy out today. This is quite a departure from the seemingly-endless stream of sunny skies, complete with their triple digit temperatures. And it’s okay.
The sun kept me Safe, before. Safe from the Thing, the unimaginable nightmare and trauma of what I’d helplessly witnessed–and what I had ultimately had to do–last year. No matter what he had been, it was clear what he was now: gone. Gone in a way I never would have wished for. Gone in a way that caused loss and pain and a whole mess of mixed feelings.
It happened in February (of 2022). During that time of year, it’s cloudy and chilly and you’re responsible for making your own light and warmth. Even as recently as two or three years prior to his passing, one of the ways I made my own warmth during the winter season was hanging out with him, being in his company. It felt comfortable, relatively speaking, not just in winter, but any time.
The variably-semi-amicable divorce proceedings of 2021 had indeed left room for at least some warmth, even if the warmth had changed, forever altered. He was still a fixture in my life, at times beneficial and at other times detrimental, but always familiar, and the familiar can also bring warmth.
Fast-forwarding to last year, when during the coldest, darkest, and cloudiest times, he’d gone into the hospital and never returned. Any and all warmth was gone, never to come back. A void was left in its place, with its intense, mixed feelings.
As many of you already know, the predominant feeling was terror. What to do now? How to feed myself and my kitties? How to make rent? Maslow was shaking his head, finger-wagging at me.
Whenever you feel that kind of primal fear that stems from a threat to your basic needs, PTSD sets in, establishing itself in a hurry. You’re in pure survival mode, literally fighting for your security, your life.
The mechanism behind PTSD is that your nervous system perceives a mortal threat, activates the stress response, and takes careful note of its surroundings, because it doesn’t realize which aspect of your surroundings is the actual threat.
So, it records everything – the voices of people around you, words they use, and their tone; your daily rhythms and routines and habits; where you live, the space you occupy, the furnishings there; the food you eat, the scents you smell, the colors you see, the music you hear; the environment, including the lighting and even the weather – where and how the sun rises and sets, the clouds in the sky, the temperature of the air. Your nervous system takes a snapshot of all the details and files them away.
Then, the PTSD becomes this uninvited companion you walk around with. It usually remains hidden, lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce when you least expect or want it. And you never really want it, per se, but it helps to have a heads-up about its possible appearance.
But warn you it does not. It seems to enjoy the element of (unpleasant) surprise. Any time an element of your surroundings begins to resemble an element of your “snapshot” of the traumatic time too closely, your system activates. Your emotions well up and melt down, coming from out of nowhere, and the pain or fear reignite as though the trauma (“the Thing”) is happening to you all over again.
Suddenly you are “back there”, re-experiencing the flood of images from memories and the emotions that went with them. It’s a full-force kind of event, over which you feel little or no control. And it’s called a flashback.
The triggers of a flashback can be anything, and they are different for everyone. A textbook example is the war veteran who comes home from battle and hears a loud bang, like the sound fireworks make. Their system likens the fireworks noise to the sound of a gun or cannon or bomb going off, and they go emotionally haywire as a result.
But there are many, many non-war examples; not everyone follows the textbook. And truthfully, you don’t have to, dear ones. Flashback triggers can be anything your nervous system wants them to be.
Historically, winter has always been a challenge for me anyway, due to the shorter, dimmer days and the colder temperatures. I’m especially sensitive to cloudier skies. As I mentioned, when he died, it was indeed cloudy and chilly. While he was in the hospital and more after his death, my nervous system had taken a snapshot of this and the LED Christmas lights strung around the balcony railing that we well-meaningly flipped on at night to avoid the darkness that had already become a trigger. Well, the lights themselves became a trigger, too.
So, the name of the game became, very quickly, to create something Other, to manufacture conditions that resembled the opposite of those that existed during the Thing. To take the Thing and fight back against it, defiantly creating a radically different environment. Those lights came down, and completely different ones went up. I couldn’t do anything about cloudy days, but…
…from there on, spring began dawning. Clouds and cold would give way to sun and warmth. The sun and warmth kept me Safe, away from the Thing, because it was the opposite of the “cloudy” and “chilly” elements of my “snapshot”. The images became smaller in my rearview mirror, and the smaller they got, the more comfortable and Safe I felt.
The more the year went on, the sunnier and warmer it got. The sun even rose and set at different angles, casting different kinds and lengths of shadows, and in PTSD, this can matter. Daylight lasted longer, which was important, too, since so much of my suffering had taken place in the dark, in the wee hours, bookending my days.
And the more the year went on, the Safer I felt.
At some point in the early summer, however, I knew that the tides would turn once again. There would be a zenith reached, at the six-month mark, during which I was the Safest, the furthest distance in the year away from the anniversary (and environmental conditions) of the Thing.
And, it would stand to reason that what would follow after the zenith and Safest point was reached, an end would be rounded and a descent would begin, a return, in which the conditions of my world would increasingly begin to resemble the Thing again.
I know myself well, and because of this, dread began to seep in. I try to make it a point not to inadvertently engineer self-fulfilling prophecies, avoiding the act of programming myself for negative events. But, since I know myself well, I had a feeling that it could–and probably would–happen – some kind of reliving of the Thing, in some way.
It did happen. The sun and temperatures waned, the winds shifted north, and the clouds returned. The calendar came too-close once again. The trauma of the Thing revisited, making an unexpected early appearance to jack with my head and emotions a couple days before the actual anniversary.
And then, it dissipated once again and I was increasingly Safe again with another journey away from that point.
I wondered then what would become of this year. Would the same thing happen again? Again and again? Year after year? Or would it get gradually better with time? Uncharted territory brings unknowns.
I felt the comfort install itself and I waited to see what would happen. It was later on, in mid-summer, that I realized that I didn’t feel the same compelling need to distance myself chronologically from the anniversary of the Thing. I didn’t dread the upcoming zenith, after which it would be all downhill from there.
The zenith came and went, and nothing transformed.
Summer gave way to….less-summer, in our parts, and finally to fall, later than it does in the rest of the hemisphere. Clouds announced their presence. My system almost doesn’t care. I don’t feel that emerging dread that was well underway at this time last year.
It helps that life is better now. There is much less anxiety during the bookends of the day. Sleep is more plentiful and solid and restful, with fewer anomalies and less unpredictability. Maslow has been appeased. His debts have been erased. I’m no longer having to recap the highlights of the Thing for creditors and other entities with whom we had accounts. I’m no longer scrambling to climb and claw and survive.
All of that certainly helps.
I never did put the deck lights back. I don’t sleep with a light on at night anymore. I’m finally okay in the dark. I can relax. Bills are paid and kitties curl up and purr around me.
For me, two telltale metrics of how I am are sleep and appetite. And both are usually fine. A year can make a big difference, especially from the first year to the second.
I’m curious about what the third year will bring. ❤
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Spitfyre Phoenix Rising 