I’ve got a lot of posts in the queue. I want to write book reviews (Hell Bent. The Starless Sea. The Expanse); I want to write about language acquisition vs language learning and the struggle of ADHD either way; I’ve got a post in the queue about why it’s harmful to say you’re having (or have had) a Panic Attack (or attacks) when you mean Anxiety Attack — and what the differences are both symptomatically and physiologically; I’ve got a post coming on how the metaphors used to describe chronic illness on a physical level work really well for adults with CPTSD and stress and their environment and how you can love and support your emotional spoony.
All of those posts (and others) are already partially drafted. That’s a lot of incomplete thoughts.
And yet…
here we are.
I have to get this out while it’s fresh. It’s April 10th, 2023. I’ve just come back from the marriage of two friends of mine — The Best Wedding Ever™. I felt like I was surrounded by family and love and friendship in a way that I never have with my my immediate family and rarely with my extended family.
Which makes it difficult in its own way,
That’s kind of what this post is about. How good this wedding was. How screwed up my head is.
And…
the way I almost messed everything up this weekend, but because these people are so emotionally healthy, I didn’t. So I guess maybe it’s also about how I can’t even self-sabotage right anymore.
(I’m kidding. Mostly.)
And now I realize “I almost screwed everything up” sounds suuuupeeeer drams and possibly lascivious, prurient, manipulative, or at best very high-school-ish, and it was none of those things, because I have made a lot of progress some amount of progress
arguable progress.
Anyway it was that I went extra goth. That was all. I went Goth AF© even though I was the only goth-presenting person in a very large group of mundies.
At the time I convinced myself I was just having fun, but in hindsight, I realize I was trying push people away / put on armor.
I have to warn you, This post gets dark. I’m trying to make you understand CPTSD even if you don’t have CPTSD, which is going to require recollections of emotional abuse. But then this post gets really, really happy. Stay for the ride?
Enough pre-amble. Let’s go.
American Airlines switched the flight staff *after* we were already seated *before* they had a replacement. The plane was hot. People were coughing and I wasn’t sure that my mask was sealing adequately. I don’t know why the flight-attend left nor why we had to wait an hour for a new one.
I knew I was going to miss my connexion.
That’s not a metaphor. I’m not being clever. I really was going to miss my plane.
But we live in the future, so I used the app and found there was one more flight out of DFW to PDX that night. If I missed that one I’d be spending the night in a tarmac seat. I kept thinking about the way-too-many-butts that sat daily in those seats, which pretty much guaranteed I wasn’t going to fall asleep, chronic fatigue or no.
I wanted to go home.
My luck started to turn around when two new friends from the wedding showed up in DFW waiting for the same plane. We didn’t talk much — we were all exhausted. But it was a comfort to hang with them.
By the time I got home, it was after 2 am pacific. 5 am internal-clock time, after spending a week in Miami. It was murder for a boy with CFS/ME.
But the trip? So worth it.
Funny thing though. When I got home I couldn’t sleep. I was too hungry. I’ve been ravenous ever since.
In Miami, I went the whole week and I didn’t fuck anything up. If you’re asking if there’s a reason I would be likely to fuck everything up, there isn’t. But it feels like there is. That’s the first thing about CPTSD. You go to normal things and think normal thoughts. We go to normal things and assume we’re going to ruin it.
Anyway, I think my found-family would actually say I added value. I think that because they actually said it to me. Several times and several people said it. And they used a lot more meaningful words than “you added value” — I sound like a drive-through value meal.
My value as a person was never in question for them. But for me it will always be a question. Welcome to the wonderful world of CPTSD. If you have it, maybe this post will give you comfort. If you don’t, maybe it will help you to better understand someone in your life.
Let me explain. No, that will take too long. Let me paint you a picture.
When I was seventeen, in 1993, I signed up for the Army. It was a poor choice, but I didn’t know that yet. That’s not this post. Probably no post. I thought it was my only option. I signed up early. Eleven months before I was to go to basic. Eleven months before graduating from high school. So I’d be eighteen before I left (as required.)
Nine months later in April, 1994, I was still following the plan: I was going to turn eighteen at the beginning of May, graduate from Lincoln High in June, and ship out two weeks after that. I’d be leaving a job that I loved at the daycare center. My two young bothers spent their days there too, as attendees. After work and before The Parents picked us up, I got to hang out with them and fill them full of Coffee People milk shakes. I have fond memories of that place and of them.
I’d had other jobs before that.
Like a lot of teens I’d worked retail and before that food service. I started working when I was 14 — thanks to a waiver from the city of Portland and signed by The Parents. The waiver was required for anyone who needed to work under 16. And according to the fine text, the waiver was “needs based”. So if you’re wondering why I had to get a job at fourteen you’re not out of line.
My family was the opposite of poor. The Stepdad had inherited over three million dollars from his mom. When he spent all of that, he borrowed over a million from his sister. He’d taken all of the social security checks from my dead dad that were supposed to be used for the care of my brother and sister and me, and even just those checks was a pretty sizable amount of money. (Over a thousand bucks in 80s and 90s dollars for nine years.) And on top of all that, The Stepdad liked to brag that he was “the twenty-fourth highest paid lawyer in the entire Pacific Northwest including Northern California and Canada, both associates and partners.” 1Yes. He really talks like this.
If you asked him why he was so highly paid, the vague description of what he did would basically boil down to this: he was Right. Right about what? Right about everything.
And now he’s a lonely old man whose own kids won’t talk to him. So I guess he wasn’t right about that. They never even had to experience the joys of wall-to-wall counseling.
So when I turned fourteen and he said it would teach me self reliance and be good for me if they were to stop paying me, other than letting me live there and eat food while in the house, he was Right.
And The Mother (my birth mom) thought it was a brilliant idea. Any clothing that I needed as a grew. Any coffee I drank at a café. The supplies I needed for school — that was all on me. If you’re wondering if maybe I got nice presents that supplemented that, when Christmas came around they gave me a vacuum cleaner. So I could better do my daily chores.2When I left four years later, I was not allowed to take the vacuum. So no.
Fortunately for my siblings, the ones that were allowed to remain in the house, they didn’t have to go through the same “formative process”. Though he did give my older brother a black eye when he used the stereo,
My sister had had her own problems. She ran away. They caught her. They sent her to one of those terrible, abusive mormon camps in Utah that Dateline did special interest stories on, and then she spent a short time in a less terrible, less abusive mormon boarding school where she smoked a lot of pot. And then my grandparents took her home with them. Her life got a lot better there in Coronado. Better than mine in Portland. But her end was a lot more tragic than mine. That’ll be a different post. Or maybe it won’t. We’ll see.
Back to the narrative. It was late in April 1994. I was reading a book in my room in the basement of the ancient, crumbling Mediterranean pseudo-mansion we lived in, in the west hills of Portland. The Mother came into my room and told me to come upstairs, because Bert (The Stepdad) wanted to have a talk with me.
(oh shit)
So up I went.
In the corner of their bedroom my parents had two grey chrome-and-leather chairs next to a chrome-and-glass coffee table. My step-dad saw himself as a sort of Japanese version of the latino Lt. Martin “Marty” Castillo, the katana wielding detective in 1984’s Miami vice (as played by Edward James Olmos). If you didn’t know that before walking into their room, you’d know it from those chairs and that table and the “art” in the house.
We (the siblings) were not allowed to sit in those chairs. That was one stupid rule that didn’t both us.
Their bedroom was one of three rooms we were not allowed to enter in the house without invitation. That was a stupid rule that did bother us.
The Stepdad sat in his chair. The Mother sat down at the edge of the bed instead of the other chair.
That was unusual.
For a moment they left me standing there and looked at me.
And kept looking at me.
I was about to sit on the carpet, as was normal in their room, when The Stepdad indicated my mother’s chair and said “Sit down”.
In the nine years since my mother had married him, they’d never invited me to sit in their chairs.
I sat. It was… an intensely uncomfortable chair. I did not get the appeal. How the hell did they spend so much time sitting in these things? Not the point.
He said they were proud of me.
(That was a surprise.)
He went on. They were proud because they hadn’t thought I was smart enough to graduate from high school and they’d just gotten the schools invitation for the ceremony. 3True story. Because of the classes I’d failed when they kicked me out of the house (at gun point) just after I turned fifteen, I was actually half a credit short for graduation. They’d refused to sign the waiver that would let me graduate anyway. The school told them they’d made a mistake and found the extra credits necessary. When I got my diploma, it came with a waiver “signed” by them. Except it wasn’t their signatures, and it was the same handwriting for both names. Someone in the administration office liked me, or at least felt sorry for me.
(There it is.)
I nodded. He glared. I realized I’d missed my cue, and started thanking them both profusely. He cut me off by telling me not to interrupt. He said they were also proud that I was going into the infantry, Which they also thought I wouldn’t be doing since one either needed a high school diploma or a GED for that, and they didn’t think I was smart enough to pass the GED exam. I had surprised them. I was going to graduate from high school. And they were proud.
(kewl. kewl.)
They waited for me to thank them again. I didn’t feel much like it. The Mom told me to thank Bert. I did. He told me not to interrupt him.
He said that as a graduation present, they were going to let me stay in the house until my deployment date two weeks after graduation instead of kicking me out on my eighteenth birthday as was their right.
I had to unpack that, mentally.
I hadn’t even thought about it, because according to state and federal law, they actually were required to let me stay until after I turned eighteen or graduated whichever was later. So I’d just assumed…
But I also knew my stepdad loved to flex his ability to break laws when he could get away with it, and there really wasn’t anything I could have done about it.
They’d already kicked me out once when I was fifteen. That time it had taken more than six months using social services and a Portland based non-profit called Harry’s Mother to get back home. (And harassing The Parents constantly.) In hindsight, I shouldn’t have gone back. But I didn’t know that. I wanted to go to college, and they made me believe I needed them for that. They made me believe none of my other relatives would take me. And that if I fought it, I’d be put into the foster system. The foster system does not take you if you have relatives capable of taking you. The Parents were hiding the abuse.
So when they kicked me out at fifteen, I lived on the streets that whole time.
If they kicked me out again, five weeks before graduation, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. I would have been fucked. I’d miss finals and then I really wouldn’t graduate.
And that had been their plan.
The unpacking continued. They were implying a threat. They wanted me to know that kicking me out early could still happen. That if I did anything they didn’t like, I would find myself on the curb faster than you could sneeze.
They had done it before. They would do it again. So don’t fuck it up, kid.
I looked at The Mother. She smiled at me. She was enjoying this. She told me to thank Bert. I did, but not well enough. He waited. She told me to thank him like I meant it. I did. Profusely. He told me not to interrupt him.
I wish I were making this up.
I started to get up, but this wasn’t over. It gets better.
The Parents wanted to have a little chat about happiness.
Because they wanted me to be happy.
The Stepdad said that he knew I chose the infantry for the G.I. bill. And he knew that that was a mistake. He wanted me to understand that it was a mistake.
Because they wanted me to be happy.
He said that different people were meant for different things. Some people were meant to be doctors, and those people were happy as doctors. Some people were meant to be lawyers, and those people were happy as lawyers. And some people were meant to flip burgers. I was meant to flip burgers.
Because they wanted me to be happy.
He said that when people tried to do more than they were meant for, they failed. And when they failed, they became sad. And they didn’t want me to be sad. They wanted me to be happy. If I tried to go to college, I would fail. That would be embarrassing for me. That would be disheartening. I shouldn’t try college. I should flip burgers.
Externally I was smiling. Don’t fuck this up or you’ll be homeless again. Internally I was roiling.
I knew I wasn’t stupid. I’d been in the talented and gifted program since I was nine. When we moved to Portland, because of my standardized test scores PPS wanted me to skip third grade. The Parents had decided that was a bad idea. In the summer before high school, I’d taken an advanced course and learned the entire years worth of geometry in three weeks. In high school, while working a part-time job and dealing with the abuse at home, I’d gone to nationals with the Constitution Team, and I had dominated. We’d taken second. Nationally. And the next year in Mock Trial, we went to state and took third place. I handled cross exam.
Hell, even in the job sphere, I’d already left behind flipping burgers. I did so well in retail they left me to manage myself at the train station for the zoo gift shop. And now at the day care, they loved me. Not just he kids, the teachers, the administration.
When I took the ASVAB 4Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery I scored so high the Navy wanted me for their nuclear engineering program, and the Army wanted me for ANYTHING other than infantry. But I picked infantry because it was a shorter enlistment and came with money for college.
If my grades were shoddy in High School, and they were, it wasn’t because I was stupid, it was because my home life sucked and I had a job. If I was short credits, and I was, it was because they kicked me out and I had missed an entire terms worth of finals before the end of my freshman year.
But I wasn’t stupid.
Was I?
He kept talking. He kept telling me how I would be happy.
There was a voice inside me screaming in rage. All of this was bullshit. These fuckers just kept knocking me down and I knew I didn’t deserve it.
But…
There was another voice too.
That voice was calm.
I heard it over everything else.
That voice spoke clearly.
It said, “They’re right.”
And everything went quiet inside me.
The talk went on for over an hour. There wasn’t any more substance to it. I recognized that some of the verbiage had been lifted from a talk my older brother had given me with my mom. Years before when he was in high school and I was in middle school, The Mother said we should go for a drive. As we wended our way through the winding, forested hills around Portland, my brother had told me all about how I was stupid, but I still deserved to be happy. And I was ugly, but I still deserved to be loved. And I had a small penis, but I still could have good sex. I really, really wish I were making this up.
So The Stepdad was using some of those same words. Which meant The Mother had fed them to him. But most of the content was his own.
At least he never said anything about my penis.
I got through it. When they were done, I said the words that made them believe I was grateful. And part of me really was grateful. That’s the part of me I hate. The part of me I can’t forgive.
In the next two months I didn’t do anything to get myself kicked out. I headed into the Army Infantry. I was transferred to the battalion’s S2 intelligence office. I deployed to Kuwait. I came back. I finished my enlistment and got out mere weeks before the Stop-Loss went into effect in 1997. I got lucky. I never saw combat.
That fall I matriculated at the University of Oregon.
And here’s where the adult imposter syndrome starts to take its toll.
Because They Were Right.
If I was struggling in a class, I didn’t have a problem. I’d work my ass off and get the A.
But if I understood the class. Or worse, if it were easy, or if the professor liked me?
That was bad.
Because They Were Right.
So if I was doing well… If I happened to be defining the curve or if the Prof liked what I contributed in class, I fucked it up.
I’d do the homework and not turn it in.
I’d write the paper and not submit it.
I’d study for the test, and then… just… not… … show … up.
I couldn’t.
I took the Incompletes and let them turn into Fs.
I fucked it up.
Because They Were Right.
Twice I made deans list. But only twice. Once I went on academic probation. But only once. At the beginning of my junior year I took a break to work for a fun little consulting firm. After two years, I kept the job and went back to uni part time.
While working full-time, I finished my degree. It took a while. But I did it. Thanks to self-sabotage, my GPA was not stellar.
So finally I was about to graduate with a BS in Computer Science5technically UO calls it Computer Information Science. It’s a degree in programming theory that every other Uni calls CS.
Of my siblings and cousins so far only my brother, the oldest, had graduated from university (also from UO). So I only knew what graduation meant to the family from that one point of reference. When my older brother had graduated, The Family made it huge. They all came. Even some aunts and cousins. Even Bert. There was a party. There was a celebration.
So I sent out the invitations, ordered ye old cap and gown, and paid the fee to walk.
By this time, The Mother had divorced The Stepdad and married husband number three. Michael. He gets a regular human name in this blog because he’s a nice person and he’s never treated me badly. Thanks Michael. I love you.
Anyway, I sent out the invitations and waited for the responses.
And I waited.
And I didn’t hear back from anyone. I phoned The Mother and asked if the family was coming. She ignored the question and cheerfully told me about how well my brother was doing in medical school. I tried asking a few more times before taking the hint. I wasn’t going to get the answer.
Graduation came.
The family didn’t.
Because They Were Right.
And Because They Were Right, I knew it was my fault. I just knew it.
I skipped walking. I didn’t pick up the cap and gown I’d paid for. I told myself that I didn’t walk because I didn’t care. I said to myself that it didn’t matter. I laughed it off. But of course the truth was I was too depressed.
A couple years later, The Mother and Michael were in town for some plant or mineral related event and took some time to visit me. I forget the chain of conversation, but we wandered into talking about my older brother’s original graduation from this same university. At this point he’d already graduated from medical school — where again the whole family showed up, self included. The Mother was talking about how beautiful his UO graduation was, how he always made her proud, and about how important it is to always have family at these events.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I asked why no one had come to mine.
She looked at me pityingly and embraced me in her arms. She released the hug, and dug her fingers into the gap between bicep and tricep in my arms. It hurt a lot and I tried to shake free. I was a former infantryman four inches taller than her, and she could still reduce me to a petulant child. She held on. She said she and my brother had talked it over and decided that of course they shouldn’t go. Of course they shouldn’t respond to the invitations at all. Because of course I was lying and wasn’t really going to graduate — hadn’t really graduated — and they wanted to spare me the embarrassment. It was for my own good. These fuckers just kept knocking me down. And they did it —
Because They Were Right.
I didn’t say anything. I went to my file cabinet and got out my diploma, at which point she screamed in caricature happiness. She congratulated me. She told me how smart I was and how wonderful I was, and how proud she was, and how proud they all were, and how she’d always known I would graduate.
Now — I know it’s called love-bombing.
Back then — I just knew it was bullshit.
She didn’t say anything about what she’d said before. We never talked about it again.
I didn’t have much to say. I put my diploma back in the file cabinet. They bought me a cat tree that looks like a real tree as a graduation present. I still have that cat tree. I still love that cat tree.
Obviously these are just a sampling of vignettes that were my childhood. This kind of shit was constant.
I have to say that there is one thing I’m glad for. All of their… abuse… was this heavy handed. They were not subtle. They were not clever. Which allowed me to argue internally against it to a degree. To limit the damage.
Which allowed me to keep a part of myself. It wasn’t until my thirties that I lost the rest of me when I fell victim to a real monster.
It’s probably not going to surprise you, those kinds of childhood events do something to your internal landscape that make you easy prey for a certain kind of emotional abuser. In my thirties, I dated a younger woman. Let’s call her C. Early on the relationship was amazing. We were in to all the same things. And then two months in, we weren’t. Those weren’t the things she was in to. She had been wrong, and if I wasn’t OK with that, then I was the jerk. I didn’t want to be a jerk of course. And a few months after that, everything I was into was either stupid, done wrong, or disgusting.
After the first time that she gave me the silent treatment, when she’d started talking to me again, she said I hadn’t done anything wrong (and I hadn’t). She said her therapist had explained to her that she had a pattern. She did something that was too nice, nicer than her partners deserved. They were unable to appreciate it adequately. Then she got angry at herself for doing too much, and she had to withdraw to deal with it.
At the time that sounded reasonable. Except she hadn’t done much, just cooked a meal we shared, and I’d already cooked several that were both more complicated and more expensive, and I’d I had definitely shown her more enthusiastic appreciation for her meal than she’d shown for anything I’d done. Aaaand I was familiar with withdrawal. It’s where you shut down and clam up. It’s not where you go out with friends, live like normal, and give just one person the silent treatment.
Eventually, I’d learn that what her therapist had done was give her a diagnoses. That pattern is called Idealize, Devalue, Discard. And what it does, over time, is destroy the victim’s ability to generate self worth, and replaces it with the abuser’s opinion of them.
And unlike my family, she was subtle. She was smart. She knew what she was doing.
The first time I had an anxiety attack while dating her, she told me “that sounds like something you should have dealt with before getting in a relationship.”
She used all five types of gas lighting — she constantly lied to me; when caught in a lie, it was my fault she had to lie, and I was the bad person for making her feel like a liar; she always remembered my reactions but never her actions that I was reacting to, which made me look crazy; whenever I tried to talk about issues she diverted to it being my problem, and, of course, she was calling me psychotic behind my back as I learned later.
When she broke up with me, she admitted she’d never actually liked me, she had only dated me because I was kind, fun, and easy to manipulate and she had used me to get over her ex who she really liked.
In other words, first she destroyed my ability to generate a sense of self worth and replaced it with her opinion of me, and then told me that her opinion was that I had no worth. Credit due where earned. It was diabolical.
And then a month after that — I found out my mom was dying. I told C. C told me she hoped I was having fun. That’s taking it out of context, which is a little unfair, but the context actually makes it worse. Also longer. This is already too long, but you can ask me if you want the whole context.
If I was damaged after a long childhood full of crude abuse, I was broken after a short relationship full of crafted manipulation.
So that’s when I went into therapy and I’ve been going ever since. I’m a cliché. But a much more mentally healthy cliché.
I want you to imagine how these experiences shape a persons internal landscape. I want you to understand what I mean when I say “adult imposter syndrome”. The feeling that one will never really be an adult. I am forty-six years old now. In a few weeks, I’ll be forty-seven. And I never know what I can do. Worse, I always know what I can’t do — which is everything.
I’m the Senior iOS software developer at my company. Every ticket that comes up — every feature to add, every bug to fix — I “know” that I can’t do it. Even though I can. It doesn’t matter that I’ve done it before. It doesn’t matter that I’m a better developer now than I was then. I still “know” that I can’t do it. Every. single. time.
I have to ignore that I “know” that I can’t do it. And I have to ignore that calm, clear voice that’s still re-playing in my head from the weeks before I turned eighteen. I have to trust that not only can I do it, but I can do it well.
Because They Were Wrong.
My friend asked me to officiant her wedding. If I’m doing the math right, we’ve been friends for seventeen years. I’ll call her tango-bride for now, because we met at a milonga, and I want to ask her if it’s ok for me to use her real first name. I met her and her mom that night. She’s great. They’re both great. No, better than great. Fantastic. My friend literally has a group of friends so tight we’re practically a fan base. And her whole family are the best. I love them. And they tell me I’m family. I’ve been going to her mother’s Thanksgiving dinners for years. Even when my friend, who lives in Miami, can’t make it. And it’s always really really nice.
So my friend and her fiancé asked me to officiate their wedding. I had already officiated the zoom wedding of her older sister (the middle one). That was near the beginning of the pandemic. (The eldest sister still isn’t married, she’s living in a domestic partnership and I need her to get married because. I. need. to. collect. the. whole. set….)
If you have CPTSD, you know It didn’t matter that I’d officiated a wedding for the family before. When my friend asked me to officiate, I “knew” I couldn’t do it. But I ignored that knowledge and said yes. It was an incredible honor and I was so grateful for their trust.
I would have felt lucky just to be a guest.
Annnnnd here’s a thing about PTSD. Sometimes you think you’re happy but your body is doing that thing where your nervous system is acting like you’re depressed. I thought I was happy. But, at some point I stopped eating. I’m sure it didn’t help that I’d recently gone on Vyvanse, but this was more than that. And I didn’t realize this was the cause or even related until (looks at watch) this second. But now I know.
I was already skinny. By the time I got to Miami, I looked… possibly anorexic… which I… possibly was. (cue My So Called Life sound track). I am too old for these problems.
Being stressed was understandable. Officiating is big. A lot of people are relying on you. It’s easy to screw up. It involves public speaking. Which maybe is why it’s weird that I didn’t know I was stressed.
And of course, with CPTSD, it’s not just the big things CPTSD tells you that you can’t do. You also “know” you can’t do the little ones. I “knew” I couldn’t do something as simple as booking a hotel room. For that matter, I “knew” I couldn’t even figuring out how to pick which hotel to book.
But I have tricks.
People like me, adults with CPTSD, have all manor of tricks for handling these things so we can look like normal grown humans. One of those tricks, of course, is to put it off until you have no choice but to do it now.
I didn’t say they were great tricks.
Another is to send a light conversational sms like “I still haven’t booked that hotel room! 😅” when talking to tango-bride, so she’ll send back a comment like “I think <name-excluded-to-protect-the-innocent> is staying at the Selina.” So that now I don’t have to pick the hotel. The hotel is picked for me. All I have to do is book it. It still took me three times, on three different days, of filling out everything on the website including the credit card information, before I was able to hit submit to book the hotel. What makes this weirder, is this kind of problem is only a problem when I’m just doing it for me. If it were for another person, or for another person in addition to myself, everything would have been fine. More on that later.
And like I said, I “knew” I couldn’t officiate. I wasn’t smart enough to write the script. My speaking voice was too weird. I would try to make it about myself. I’d say the wrong thing. I’d offend people accidentally. The reasons start to multiply. There became so many problems they started to have names and grow families.
I ignored all those problems and reasons. I pulled out a bigger coping mechanisms. I schedule a zoom meeting with the bride and groom (he’s awesome too, btw).
That put a deadline in front of me. Even though it was last minute which normally helps, I still failed to do anything productive before that meeting.
So then I was actually speaking to these two lovely humans whom I don’t want to disappoint.
Then and there, while talking to them, I started talking. I told them what we needed to do, broken down into easy steps. I included links and resources. Together we made an outline. It was all easy.
That was the trick.
I need you to hear me about this. I need you to hear this about my kind.
Inside my head, I have no fucking clue how to do it6 for any given ‘it’. There’s no voice that tells me how to do any part of it. There is a voice cleanly and rationally telling me that I can’t do it. But when I’m explaining it to someone else, the words simply come out. The knowledge was inside and the words to convey them. I manage to sound kinda smart and definitely competent and, you know, like a normal functional adult.
But without someone else to tell, I literally couldn’t do it. That’s the trick. That’s why some times we tell you how to do something you already know how to do, or we tell you how to do something for which you don’t care how to do. It’s so we can do it.
The nearest thing I can equate it to is Body Doubling an Impossible Task, except for CPTSD.
So I got the information I needed from the bride and groom, and I wrote the script, despite that I “knew” I couldn’t do it.
So I get to Miami.
And I “know” I can’t book a Lyft, so I book a Lyft.
And I “know” I can’t check-in to a hotel, so I check-in to the hotel.
And I “know” that no one wants to see me, because I’m the imposter. Because I “know” I don’t belong. So, I see people who want to see me and whom I want to see. And it goes really well.
The people I already knew were delights. The people I met were wonderful. Many of them already knew a lot about me. Apparently they’d heard stories. In many ways, my internal landscape starts to improve under the constant bombardment of love and support.
I start to gain weight.
So what do I do? I get my nails done. Matte black. Goth AF. And it’s fun and I like it.
Except…
I don’t realize that I’m trying to make myself more different, because I’m The Imposter and I wanted them to see it. And these fuckers just kept loving and supporting me.
And I need you to see that the whole wedding party and most of the relatives are fricken beautiful. (Hopefully it’s OK for me to post this)
Yet with my nails done, they still embrace me. People I’m already close to, I get closer to. People who are new want to be my friend.
I made it to the day of.
Everyone in the wedding party was given a robe we could wear while getting ready together. Kind of a fun uniform so we could feel like a team — or a family.
Each one was fun and floral with animals and birds and in a bright color. Except for mine, which was fun and floral with animals and birds in black, because they accept me as me and have no interest in changing me. They still can’t see that I’m The Imposter.
I get weirder. I have the make-up guy give me guyliner for the wedding.
because: constant bombardment of love and support == appetite.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And these fuckers just keep loving and supporting me! Can you believe that shit?
I get all dressed up and ready. I still “know” I can’t officiate. But I don’t need to get in my own way to stop it, since just by being me I “know” I’ll ruin it anyway.
But they don’t know that. They trust me because I’ve earned their trust.
When we, the wedding party, were waiting to get things started, I was fading. Nothing emotional, I have CFS/ME. Ironically, it’s pretty easy for me to deal with real problems. It’s the ones I make up that I can’t get past. I asked the bride for help. She had some good suggestions, but I decided to open a thyroid capsule and take some extra and the same for a Vyvanse capsule. The bride was concerned that it would keep me up all night. Afterwards it turned out I could have taken more. Still I liked her ideas. Another time.
I officiated the wedding. It went without a hitch. The audience laughed when they should. Apparently there was some crying when crying was right. The Bride and Groom looked amazing. We kind of nailed it.
After the ceremony, the weirdest thing happened. People went out of their way to get to me and compliment me. They loved the ceremony. They loved the script. They loved my handling of it. I hear stories about how their own officiant tried to make it about himself (I had multiple nightmares in the weeks leading up to the ceremony — in the nightmare I made the ceremony about me). People asked me, un-ironically, if this was what I did professionally.
More importantly, without having to worry about my duds, I got to hold the cutest baby in the world.
It’s wasn’t even my day, it was the bride and grooms day, and these fuckers just keep loving me and supporting me. And each other, because these people have love and support enough for everyone. That’s just the kind of people they are. Crazy, right?
And it doesn’t stop. As people start drinking the compliments grow. As do the stories of their own officiants. The party is wonderful. I don’t know any of the songs and everyone else does. That’s normal. I somehow blocked out songs from the seventies and eighties.
There were traditions that were followed, like the Jewish tradition where they lift the bride and groom on chairs, and then the mother., too
There was greek dancing.
The husband and wife cut the cake.
It couldn’t have been more picturesque.
I had a lot of great conversations. One of them was with a couple regarding my wedding present. I’d gone off the registry and gotten something personal that I knew I had in common with the bride and groom. They told two of their friends about it, who had the same interest. It was a bonding moment.
Everyone had a great time, and the dance floor wasn’t large enough to hold everyone who danced. I kept getting asked why I wasn’t dancing. Usually the person asking was an extremely beautiful woman who was happily married and not interested in me. I was wearing guy liner, so that probably explains it. Sometimes the person asking was a friend.
I had to answer them.
I told the truth when I said I wanted to dance. But I lied about the reason why. I said something like I was a terrible dancer. Or I was too self conscious to get out there.
I couldn’t tell them the truth even though I hate lying. The truth was, I “knew” I couldn’t. I still haven’t figured out a trick to get past that one.
I did have one very important realization. Remember C, the woman who managed to mess me up even more than my parents and without even using any physical violence? I realized I was glad my found family had never met her.
If my blood family had ever met her, the third who like to make me miserable would have hated her, the third who were neutral would be neutral, and the third who were supportive would be like her. And it would have nothing to do with her or with me. They would do as they always do regardless of the person.
But my found family? They don’t default. They engage. And they would have seen straight through her shit in a way that I never could. They would have forgiven me, but they would not have liked her at all.
That realization? It healed something in me that had cracked when C told me that I was just a tool she used to get over the guy she really liked, and that had broken when C told me she hoped I was having fun watching my mom die.
And I got hungry.
The next day had a really nice conversation with my friend the bride. And I realized I was glad that I met her and her mom when I did and not earlier. Because my immediate family’s idea of fun was to find something you wanted to go to, show up, and dump on it. We were negative about everything. And young me truly believed that was how you had fun together. Young me was miserable.
I may not have been good at it, but by the time I met them, I had been practicing appreciating the good things as good and not dumping on them. Sometimes I still fuck up. I still see my older brother do it, a lot more than I think he realizes.
And then I had to fly home.
I wished that I had scheduled two more days there. I was too used to my family weddings, where I might have fun — I do love everyone in my extended family — but I can’t really take any more of the jabs and passive aggression, and I can’t wait to get home.
That’s another reason I need the eldest daughter to get married and let me officiate — so I can plan better and stay longer.
I’ve already told you about the trip home. I hope you have some understanding of what goes on inside the head of someone with PTSD, and maybe I conveyed how, despite that internal structure, we can still manage to be good people to know, invite, possibly get involved with. Just don’t judge us if we can’t get ourselves on the dance floor even though we want to.
I’m home now. I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time. I’m still processing everything. Good things need processing too. I’ve made new friends.
I’ve made new family.
And ever since I got back I have been hungry — delightfully, deliciously, unable-to-satisfy-my-appetite, hungry.
It’s still a little early to be sure, but I think I managed to avoid Covid.
Now if I can just convince myself that I know how to do my job….
Oh! And I will definitely still get my goth nails done. And I may or may not get guyliner. But I don’t think I’ll do it to push people away again. And I doubt I’ll do it in mundie company. I like being basic goth. It’s… me.
See? I told you we’d end on a high note.
- 1Yes. He really talks like this. ↩︎
- 2When I left four years later, I was not allowed to take the vacuum. ↩︎
- 3True story. Because of the classes I’d failed when they kicked me out of the house (at gun point) just after I turned fifteen, I was actually half a credit short for graduation. They’d refused to sign the waiver that would let me graduate anyway. The school told them they’d made a mistake and found the extra credits necessary. When I got my diploma, it came with a waiver “signed” by them. Except it wasn’t their signatures, and it was the same handwriting for both names. Someone in the administration office liked me, or at least felt sorry for me. ↩︎
- 4Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery ↩︎
- 5technically UO calls it Computer Information Science. It’s a degree in programming theory that every other Uni calls CS. ↩︎
- 6for any given ‘it’ ↩︎