Twitching

Navigating the path from the head to heart

“Have you ever heard of something called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?”

The words from my therapist didn’t come as a surprise. I had done plenty of googling to know what was probably coming…but it felt nice, I finally had a name for it. I finally felt like I could start to understand what I was. I finally could start to understand the path I had been tumbling down for the previous 5-6 years.

C-PTSD is a tricky thing. It’s generally defined as a condition developed after one experiences chronic, long term trauma…in contrast to “traditional” PTSD which typically is a result of a singular traumatic event.

It can be the result of everything from experiencing torture, domestic violence and abuse to a variety of other extreme circumstances that occur over a prolonged period of time, repeatedly. The symptoms vary and include having flashbacks, night terrors, avoidance, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, issues establishing and maintaining relationships and a long list of others. It shares a lot of similarities with other conditions such as PTSD and BPD and can sometimes be hard to or misdiagnosed. It’s a fairly newer condition in terms of being recognized in the medical community and….

It’s something I’ve been told I have.

The ‘events” that initiated the long, hard, destructive road to my diagnosis are not what I will be expressing here. What I hope to convey here is a thought expression around the idea of what it means to be part of the human experience, what it means to be imperfect, how all of us are on a spectacularly unique journey through existence and most important to me, to communicate the idea that we are all in control of journey through life and that no dead end is truly an end.

These writings are also self fulfilling, they help me remember where I come from and where I want to go.

“You trying to shake water out of your ear?”

It was the first time someone had commented on my obvious ticks I had developed. I was on a long run with my training partner and as had become my norm, my body showed up but my mind did not. Over the previous few years since “my events”, I had experienced a cycle of physical manifestations of my internal turmoil. For a while I would blink hard, scrunch my nose, twirl my hair or clear my throat, but lately I had developed the worst to date, which was an almost constant shaking of my head as if I was shaking water out of my hair. Thousands of twitches a day, so bad that most nights I would go to bed unable to look left or right. I could visualize it, it was the entirety of “my events” exploding back out of my brain, looking for help, looking for a way out, because I had given it nowhere to go. I gave it no help. I gave it nothing but a cage…my thick skull…to explode inside of, and this was its way out.

I find it interesting how we avoid help. How we can be suffering so immensely internally but do nothing about it for so long. I wonder why that is. Why are we so convinced our own anguish is unique and unfixable? During the lowest of my lows, I was surrounded by love. I had family and friends and those around me willing to help, to listen and advise, but I refused at every turn. Instead I lived a life of intentionally more suffering than was required. My pain was worse than anyone else’s pain and you couldn’t change my mind about that (what a fucking joke). I was going to forever be a dark shadow navigating the earth, not letting anyone in and because of it, never being understood or able to be helped. I would quietly exist this way, losing bits and pieces of who I was until eventually the lights went out and I faded away to nothingness.

“I needed this pain to wake me up. I’m ready to fix this. I am ready to be me again”.

I had just finished the Teanaway 100 miler, a fairly brutal race in the mountains of Washington State with close to 30,000ft of vertical gain. I hurt, a lot. I came in under trained, had GI issues, was on the receiving end of three dozen hornet stings into one calf at mile 80 and generally just got my ass handed to me…all of which made me feel alive for the first time in many years.

I am a firm believer that the intentional discomfort we seek in endurance sports directly translates to our perception of the world around us in our day to day life. It reframes good and bad, hard and easy and makes the intolerable a little less so. Sure traffic may suck and your boss is being a dick, but at least you aren’t curled up in the fetal position at 3am 75 miles deep throwing up skittles so how bad can the day be? It’s easy to laugh at, but the concept holds up. When you’ve put yourself through levels of discomfort that your day to day life cannot provide, you grow, you evolve, you heal.

The pain from this race woke me up to what needed to be done. Out there, over the 100 rugged miles, Mother Nature gave zero fucks about my “events”, my brain or my trauma. It didn’t care if I was hungry, tired or being attacked by hornets, it persisted as my opponent and regardless of what happened along the way, I’d take step 1 and would be done 100 miles later. It was on me to navigate the issues that arose along the way. The concept was nothing new to me but the timing was what mattered this time around. Life is and was the same. I burst into the world one day and one day. I will leave it, it’s up to me to handle what happens along the way between those two moments.

For so long, I had let lifes hornets win. Every time something stung me, I gave up, I turtled in, I accepted the pain and wallowed in it and then acted surprised when it happened again and again. I emotionally limped my way through life hoping to just magically end up at the finish line where I’d feel better, but in reality I was lost in the woods. I needed to wake up. I needed to face the issues in front of me, I needed to accept them, fix them, make peace with them. I needed to do what needed to be done to get myself back on the trail.

And so I did.

The day after I got home from the race, I made a therapy appointment. I stopped drinking completely, I blocked every phone number I should have blocked, I moved to a new city so I could have a fresh slate of life and most importantly, I slowed down. I felt each and every moment I was living. I dove headlong into truly living each day as if it was my last, memento mori to the fullest. I deeply invested in myself, through therapy, reading, writing, strengthening bonds with those I love, I became a man I was proud to be. I let myself just exist in my own space, embracing the love of my family and friends, falling back in love with movement and exploration of effort, reducing the noise of the world and existing simply. The twitching was less.

Go to therapy. Let others help you. Seek support for problems large and small. It’s the strongest expression of self care you can take part in. You are not perfect and never will be, neither is anyone else. Let others fill the gaps in your life that you cannot fill yourself.

Then I fell in love. Real love.I embraced it. I let it in to heal me. It filled the holes I had left in me. I was whole.

And the twitching stopped all together.

Turns out, when you open yourself up to the world, when you combine taking extreme ownership of your actions with gratitude and love the world around you, you unlock levels to life that you could not reach otherwise. When you live for yourself, and in turn those most important to you, a calmness settles over life that is unmatched.

Life is not happening just to you. Everyone who has ever existed before you and everyone who will exist after you will all have/had a life just as important to them as yours is to you. You are equally insignificant in your existence as you are completely unique in your existence. It’s up to you to decide if you are going to dictate how your life proceeds, the impact you make and the person you see in the mirror every day. If you can draw a line between your heart and your mind and have them work in synergy together, you will find the life you seek.

An end is only an end if you let it be. Regardless of your fight, regardless of your pain, regardless of your darkness, you must persist. It is the only way.

Onwards, Always.