After nine years of getting professional help, I thought nothing about myself could surprise me anymore. I have learned emotional regulation; I can talk openly about my life; I know my symptoms intimately. This morning, my therapist of four years finally dropped on me that I likely have complex PTSD.
Writing this now for posterity is me trying to make sense of my therapist’s professional assessment and the question that followed: who are you?
That question has lost its depth throughout the years. To be honest, it doesn’t make sense to me to ask anymore. The other night, I was updating my CV. I am on my fourth job in my fifth year of practice. Starting my dream career. I am my life’s work, the only thing I have control over. My life’s work, which I always kept to three pages, is set in fonts that get smaller every time.
This is who I am:
I used to love reading books. I used to want to write books. I used to love music. I used to want to play songs and maybe write my own. I used to not care about how much I make in a year. I now bill by fifteen-minute increments, mindful of how much I log at the end of the month. Because my time costs something now. I am a resource. I used to write about things I found even the slightest passion in—maybe at times foolishly so. I now write to persuade, to argue, to explain. But not to feel; never to feel.
I used to be young.
It’s easy to point to the passage of time and aging for what happened to me. We grow up and grow old. And what happened to me isn’t so shabby; not at all. There is now a steady hand guiding me internally. There’s now a certainty in my step. I’m not unhappy. And this matters now because I used to be very, very sad.
To be told that I have been collecting trauma responses all my life is still quite surprising. A mild shock I still can’t shake off. It’s been twelve hours.
Maybe I did lose a lot of myself. What can be said of my heart?[1] And when I die, what will I be leaving in this world? Perhaps nothing. The war rages on the other side of the world. We are burning and inundating ourselves to death. Why does it matter to answer who am I?
I no longer fancy myself a dragon slayer. I just want to be as good as my word.
[1] Sufjan Stevens, “John My Beloved”