I never did have PTSD. Well, not that I know of anyway. And if I did, well, I was too stubborn or stupid to do anything about it. For sure, for a long time after coming home loud noises, crowded rooms and rooftops caused me anxiety (I wouldn’t even buckle up ever, just because I needed to feel like I could jump out of car quickly if I needed to). But those things have almost entirely stopped occurring. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to not thinking about war anymore (which probably sounds odd, since it is my platform as a writer to document combat and veteran’s struggles). Well, I don’t think about my experiences anyway. Sometimes, they almost feel like a dream.
I have my moments though. A good friend of mine in my profile and biography class at Johns Hopkins brought in a piece of writing about a Marine who suffered terrible PTSD as a result of his experiences in mortuary affairs. When we talked about the paper and critiqued it as a group, my body became warm, and mind felt like it floated in boiling water. I got dizzy. I almost walked out the room. But I refused to succumb – and maybe this is not entirely true, but that’s how I know I don’t have PTSD (or if I did I’ve gotten over it): I can focus up and through self-will and desire move past any issues the trauma of war might possibly cause me.
Still, I feel the effects of PTSD almost everyday. Many of my friends who served are only fragments of the people they used to be. You can see it in their eyes and observe it in their actions. It’s like their pupils are trying to focus through a fog when they talk about their experiences: what it was like to hold in the brains of an injured comrade with a bandage; how they sometimes blow up, out of their sleep and begin punching the wall; how difficult it is just to get out of bed, let alone work some dead end job. It’s personal to me.
An old roommate of mine, one of my former best friends and also a Marine, came to live with me when he got out of the Corps. He’d get in fights for no reason at the bar, cry in his sleep and call out the name of his dead friends, and struggle to hold down any kind of work. He disappeared on me after just a couple weeks when rent was due. I hadn’t seen him in five years until last week, when I ran into him in a parking lot. I wanted to be mad, but I just couldn’t be. After about only thirty seconds into our reunion he said, “Dario, I’m still not doing well. I’m an alcoholic. I need some help.”
Well f***, what the hell am I supposed to do?
Yes, this is personal to me. I’ve seen it too many times, and though I’ve tried my best to let it go, I just can’t walk away from people like him. There are a lot of people like him. And as long as these wars continue, those numbers will continue to grow: like a parade of sorrow marching through the night among a society that refuses to awake.
Connect with Dario online:
Personal Website (Free Writing, Podcast, Dario in the Media, Biography, Books, Blogs)
20 Something Magazine (Editor-in-Chief, Creator)
JMWW Literary Journal (Senior Nonfiction Editor)
The Veterans Writing Project (Instructor, Nonfiction Editor)
LinkedIn (Professional Stuff)
Facebook (Be my friend?)
No comments:
Post a Comment