What Living With PTSD Feels Like

No one tells you how the trauma makes a liar out of you. That eventually everything that comes out of your mouth is like the black ash smoke from a dying smoker’s exhale, the only difference is, you are the only one who can see it. Everyone else treats the rotting things that are falling from your lips like they are sugar spun soft as cotton candy, because people don’t want to see something ugly when it is more efficient and less painful to see something pretty and acceptable inside their heads.

So you take to uttering words like “I’m okay” and “I’m better”, because it’s pointless to explain to someone who has never known what drowning feels like that the ocean in your head is so deep and so dark that a thousand versions of you have already drowned in it, it’s where you go to bury your nightmares…or are they your memories and your worst ever secrets? They blend so well together you cannot tell where the line is anymore, and even if you could, a part of you doesn’t really know which terrible version of the many truths inside your head you really lives.

That is why the mirror in your room puts you on edge so much, that is lives under a cloth so you don’t have to look at hollowed eyes that feel like someone has cut out from an old magazine and stuck haphazardly to your face, after taking away your real eyes in a swift and brutal act of force. And honestly, you can’t remember the last time you laughed and I mean really laughed, the kind that exposes how pretty your soul is to the world, because ever since it happened, your soul has gone into hiding, it won’t even say hello anymore.

The thing is, you’ve become so good at hiding that your soul is currently missing with no sign of ever coming back, that no one realizes that there is a blank space and a question mark where the person they loved used to be. If you stay silent and outwardly still enough, no one notices that you are a car crash waiting to happen because no one is in the driver’s seat. 

For more information about PSTD, read PTSD And Complex PTSD: What Happens When You’ve Lived In A Psychological War Zone.