“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, October 11, 2024

PTSD Every Day (Complex PTSD in Fact) or, Now I Know Why Succeeding Makes Me Feel Terrible (Really Terrible; Really Really Terrible)

 ...hello. If you've been reading this for a while (started in 2007) you'll know this has never occurred to me before. 

I used to think I was an introvert. Then I think introvert is a suspect category, and what this actually is, is exhibitionism plus a phobia of it. 

But I have a much simpler explanation for my feelings after I do a  lecture or, in this case, right now today, finish doing an interview. 

Whenever I succeed at a task, I feel bad. I mean I feel like a bad person. The sense of being contaminated or evil is in direct proportion to the magnitude of the task, how successful it was, what it churned up .

I just did an interview with a Czech magazine that was without doubt one of the best interviews I've ever done. 

And now I get to feel like I'm a terrible bad person, possibly for hours, possibly for the rest of the day. Like really bad. Like I keep saying to Treena, "I'm a bad person." And she keeps saying no. At least I've learned to verbalize it. And she knows how to hold it and respond. 

Sometimes the PTSD is so intense and all pervasive, you don't realize it is what it is. Actually, Complex PTSD, to get technical. Links are to National Health Service definitions. 

It's not that I feel physically exhausted. I feel morally terrible. Like evil. Really evil. Like I should be deprived of property and money and a life and killed. 

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