Happy Memorial Day, everyone, but this message is especially for those who have served in our armed forces. Thank for your service whether it is in the past, or the present. If you are all having a great day of barbecuing, or sports, family reunions, whatever makes you happy then take my thanks and go back to your day.
The rest of this blog is those of us who aren’t having that great day. You can walk off the battlefield bleeding, but fixable. The wound heals, maybe you have a scar, maybe not even that, but you survive. You survived, and part of you is happy to have survived. Embrace that part of you that enjoys life, celebrate it! But it’s okay that theres that other part that feels, why did I survive? Why did I crawl out of the mess and stink and the chaos? Why did I make it and my friend, my brother, my sister . . . Why didn’t they make it out? Why couldn’t I save them, too? Why didn’t the person who saved me, save them? Why me? Why not them?
If I had an answer I would give it to you, but I don’t know. I know that sometimes you leave people behind, because you can either drowned with them, or live without them. Is that the worst guilt? Maybe? Or is when everyone lives, but they come back in pieces broken beyond the ability to have a normal life, let alone a happy one. And you feel guilty about that too, how dare you have family and happiness when your friend, your brother, your sister, is a ghost of what they could have been. Why are they the walking wounded and you aren’t?
But here’s the real secret, just because we walked away, bandaged, healed, old scars, doesn’t mean we aren’t still wounded, too. We walked out of the chaos, we survived, but every day is a choice to keep surviving. We survived, the wounds healed, but the haunting of it calls us back again and again, and we know that we choose every day to keep surviving. Sometimes just continuing through the memories the sounds, the sensations that wake you from a sound sleep into a cold sweat. That you have a heartbeat to remember that this person beside you loves you and would never hurt you, and isn’t the nightmare that tried to kill, so you double check that they are your spouse, that your kids are asleep down the hall, and your dogs, your house, you life is intact, and sometimes you can go back to sleep, but sometimes that flash of remembering haunts too hard and you sit up waiting for the dawn, because you don’t trust what awaits you when you close your eyes.
What do you do? I’m contacting my therapist again, because I will survive. I will keep surviving, and I will try to explain the survivor’s guilt, the choices not taken, and that feeling of throat closing terror that the smallest sound, the lightest touch, a smell, a moment of seeing something out of place and you’re right back there in the bad place. We don’t remember, we are haunted, as my best friend said today. He’s a non-practicing Marine, and ex-cop. I’ve never worn a uniform this lifetime, my bad stuff was all as a civilian, but we’ve discovered that it’s given me a unique perspective into the after effects of certain things. PTSD isn’t just for uniforms, and neither is survivors guilt.
If you read this blog and think I have been impertinent, my apologies, but if one person reads this and understands that it’s not just them, that you aren’t alone, then that’s what’s important. We survived, and it’s okay that we did, don’t let the guilt, or the confusion take away the victory of just surviving. Now, our next battle is to thrive, to succeed, to let ourselves be happy. There are moments when being happy seems harder than any of the rest, doesn’t it? But if we survived all the rest, we can conquer the hardest thing of all, ourselves, the ghosts, and enjoy that we lived.