PTSD has fuck all to do with the magical Tumblr 'disassociating' shit. When you have PTSD and you 'disassociate', you don't stand in the shower for half an hour, or make stupid memes about it, or cry type on Tumblr. You have a psychotic breakdown. This is probably power leveling, but the last time I lost it, I stayed awake for a week and half binging on alcohol and drugs, and ultimately ended up in the psych ward for a week. That's a good outcome for having an episode like that. People are routinely arrested, killed, or kill themselves during episodes. They're terrifying. You lose control of yourself, and you lose control over any rational thoughts you have. These people seem to think PTSD is a get out of jail free card, that it will somehow excuse their idiotic behavior. It's offensive, and makes it that much harder for real sufferers. We're already stereotyped as violent, we don't need to be thought of as melodramatic as well.
It's too late. This is the face of PTSD in our modern times.
I used to be roommates with a guy who had really bad PTSD. He came from an abusive home, was bullied at school, and got into some weird shit in his teens. He was a great guy, and normally he was pretty chill, but sometimes he'd just go a little fucking crazy for no apparent reason. He had these strange outbursts where he'd clean his whole house up in like an hour, insisting his dad was going to beat him if he didn't. If you told him he wasn't living with his dad anymore, he'd say he knew that, but that he felt like he was still there. Sometimes he'd just get incredibly upset for no reason and lock himself in his room, and if you tried to come in he'd get really freaked out.
He told me some of the stuff that happened to him a few times, when I got him to calm down enough, and god damn it was awful. I'd never seen him cry until he told me about those things. He was a big stout guy too, built like a lumberjack, with a beard and everything, and that just made it more disturbing because he'd be huddled up in the corner like a scared little kid. It was like he thought he was going to get hurt if he didn't hide. Eventually he started doing real heavy drugs to cope with it, and then he kinda went crazy and ended up in a mental hospital, where they diagnosed him with PTSD. He was a wreck then, but he's doing better now.
People have traumatic experiences all the time. I've had a few. I once had a nightmare of a trip on 10 hits of some really strong acid. It was indescribably horrifying--but I have to say I couldn't possibly equate it with the experience of this friend I have just told you about. For me, the trauma ended when I woke up the next morning, and though I still have nightmares about it from time to time, it remains in the past for me. My traumas, as with most people's, don't dictate my present life.
But for people with PTSD, things don't stay in the past. This man, this friend of mine, had a completely different thing going on in his head from what was going on in mine: he was always, to some degree, living in the past, immersed in it, waiting for it to strike; and I don't think there was very much he could do by himself to stop doing so. What happened to him was so terrifying, so painful, so far beyond the limit of the human brain to process trauma, that it just broke him. His mind, his emotions, his sense of safety and control over his life, were all permanently warped by these things that were done to him. That's real PTSD.
It's more than just a thing that makes you remember bad things or cry or get depressed whenever you get 'triggered'. PTSD is an insidious illness that changes how you react to what's in front of you, how you perceive and express your own emotions, how you fit into the world around you, how you function as a human being, how you relate to others, how you view life itself, and many other things. And it most certainly is not cute or desirable, especially as a simple tool to gain attention. If you have been traumatized enough to have PTSD, then something inside you has been broken, and most likely you're still trying to put it back together.
Having your tits groped at college is unpleasant, but it doesn't hold a candle to being beaten and abused all your childhood or being shot at for days on end or anything like that. This isn't just shaming; this is fact: our brains were built to handle unpleasant feelings like grief and fear and humiliation. But sometimes, things happen to people that go so far beyond the normal range of what we were naturally made to process that they are burned into a broken part of the mind forever. Getting groped is not one of these things; neither is getting harassed on Twitter, and neither is being told you're wrong over and over again, and neither is just about anything that is a normal part of life. We were quite literally born with the ability to handle these things.
I do believe that it's possible to have PTSD after simply witnessing or perpetrating horrifying events. For example, if you took a normal man with normal sexual tastes and forced him to watch violent child pornography for days, weeks, maybe even months on end--would you expect him to come out of this without an everlasting wound in his psyche? Similarly, there was an extremely high rate of suicide among the guards stationed at Nazi death camps, and the reason for this isn't hard to work out. The only requirement for PTSD, really, is that the person be susceptible enough to being emotionally injured and that the event be severe enough to overwhelm the brain's normal mechanisms for coping with trauma.
And, most certainly, being told that you aren't a trigender fox is not this. Being looked at by men on the subway is not severely traumatic. Being raped is severely traumatic, a violation of every personal boundary, but being groped in a high school hallway is not, nor is being awkwardly hit on by fat basement-dwellers who wear fedoras. It speaks volumes that these are the things which tumblr believes are the most painful; from this, we can once again confirm the oft-validated theory that such people have neither experience outside their suburban bubble, nor a sense of proportion.
If you are so terribly traumatized that you can't even look at a picture of yourself from earlier in the year, one must wonder exactly what it is that was done to you, because it must have been obscenely and ineffably painful, and you must now be incapable of even leaving your house's broom cupboard. You have surely broken all mirrors in the house, yes? Perhaps you were raped by your own extradimensional double.
I would find a picture of you and photoshop a little moustache onto it, but I have to go now.
