My Ghosts

(I'd like to preface this by stating that while my demons are horrible, there are thousands of troops in the Iraq war with worse. I count myself lucky to have only been in during peacetime, and my pain is in no way comparable to theirs. It troubles me daily that if I find my memories painful, men and women barely of age are experiencing worse.)

I have chronic, complex PTSD. When I try to sleep at night, or when I am staring off into space, I end up being visited by horrible glimpses of past trauma...sometimes my own, sometimes that of others.

There's a girl from basic training who tried to chew her wrists open. I remember the way the latrine smelled as I came in. The sound of sobbing. The way she looked at me when I came around the corner into the shower room...and hurriedly tried to chew deeper and faster before I got to her and yelled for help.

An 18 year old red head in Texas with the thousand yard stare she shouldn't have had yet. She broke down on me in the latrine when I asked her if she was ok. She wasn't, thanks to the three Sgts who got her drunk and raped her two days previous.

Myself, backed up against a wall by a 6 foot man with a baseball bat. Myself, fending off a man who stalked me and attacked me. Myself, testifying in court against the man who molested me as a kid. Myself, telling the Department of Social Services woman that I wasn't a bad kid, I had just rinsed the cocaine down the sink because it was bad for my mother...and now she wanted to adopt me out, so she could indulge in more. Myself, finding my boyfriend of 6 years was cheating while I was in the middle of the molestation trial. Myself, always alone, always outside the pale, always feeling that my life was never, ever going to get better. That the pain never ends, and there's always someone else waiting to hurt me.

To sleep, I tell myself "it's ok, you're safe, it's over, it's ok, you're safe, you're SAFE now.' But I never really feel that way. I always feel tensed, waiting for the next horrible thing to happen, even though it's been 5 solid years of keeping myself safe and antisocial. I'm a hermit. If no one gets close enough, no one can hurt me.

This blog will be my confessional. No one knows who I am. No one can identify me. But it's my place to let loose all these ghosts. Maybe if I write them out, it'll be a way of exorcising them.