Category: Trauma, PTSD and Bipolar Disorder

I spent two years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me. That I could catch my breath.

But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.

I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms. Without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him.

When my father was in my life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. What has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised. But he is still the father who raised her.  

Dear Kris,

Life was miserable. It’s not now.

Keep reading this. Don’t be impulsive and rip it up. I know that’s what you want to do. You want to quit again. You’re tired of trying. Tired of fighting. Too many demons.

Keep reading. Look down at your wrist. Feel that pain, that desperation. Acknowledge. Remember. Remember where you went after that night. Remember the pain you fought through. Remember the grieving.

But also remember the growing. Remember the confidence you gained. Remember the power you held once again. Remember the countless people who helped get you back on your feet. Remember the process, and remember the anticipation you had to begin again. That anticipation, that power, that fight – they always come back. Each and every time. Don’t quit. Get help if you need it. Reach out. Ask. But don’t do irreversible damage. Every time you have gone through something like this, every time you have come to a place where you didn’t think it was possible to go any lower, you fought your way through. You are a survivor, and no-one can take that away from you. You may feel worse than you have ever felt in your life, and you may need help again. And that is okay. Get that help, before it’s too late. And know this – you will make it out of the darkness once again. I promise you.

–Kris

I would rather die than take this pill. 

Typically, I would write something inspiring about what the mountains have taught me, or something the forests and the trees have helped me accomplish. 

But right now, I want to tell everyone who wants me to keep trying, to fuck off. You haven’t been in my shoes. You haven’t had to carry my bag. You just don’t know. That’s not your fault. But it’s the truth.

I’m holding myself too tightly to manage one step forward. I’m afraid the demon that seems to be living inside me will explode out of my stomach and cause a rage that I have no idea how to tolerate. If I don’t move, if I lie very still, the demon doesn’t wake. If I stay, safely within the walls of the present moment and pretend nothing else exists, I am safe. I feel protected. But don’t ask me to stand up. Don’t ask me to look ahead. Certainly, don’t ask me to make a decision. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I can’t. 

If I lay very still, the demon thinks he has defeated me, and that he can rest a while before his next attack. If you’ve ever read stories about how the approach to being attacked by a bear is different depending on what type of bear it is, then the next few paragraphs might make some sense to you

Who am I kidding? I don’t want to write. I just want to have this all be over with. I feel like I have nothing to live for, but no reason to die. Things just feel stupid. And I hate stupid. More on the bears later.

I promise I haven’t forgotten about the bears. To put it simply, if it’s a black bear chasing you, you fight. If it’s a brown bear trying to maul you, you play dead and hope for the best. My demon seems to be a grizzly. Which is brown. There you have it.

As it turns out, the demon is bipolar disorder. And the demon is a widely raging tornado that is determined to obliterate everything in its path, including both my own past and my own future. How can two simple words make me question my whole entire life to this point? How can two simple words make the here and now seem so intolerable? And how can those two little words make me so afraid of the future? 

Two words. Words don’t have power, but the symptoms that make up those words absolutely do. The diagnosis makes sense, but with that diagnosis comes more pain than I ever thought was possible. Acceptance is usually met with a profound sense of relief, but I am not there yet. There is way too much to sort through yet. For me, all I feel is pain. It feels like my body is going to explode from all the hurt and bitterness and anger and sadness and grief and loss, and that all of these emotions are going to swallow me up whole so that I’m left with just a shell of a person that might as well not even exist anymore. Either I’m flat, emotionally cut-off from myself and everyone else, or I am crying so hard I think my chest is going to explode or my stomach is going to rip apart. What do you do with this? What? Pop me full of pills and send me on my way. I understand the pills. It’s not the medications that I’m fighting. I’m fighting the pain and the loss that I cannot seem to tolerate. I look back at my life and if feels like 25 years of wreckage and sewage. I have made so many bad choices, I have been so impulsive at times, I’ve lost relationships and I’ve lost time. I know this is the start of a way to move forward, but right now, all I can see is pain. I know this is meant to be a hiking blog, but I can’t, for the life of me, come up with an analogy. Nothing related to my experiences with hiking and backpacking can compete with this. Trying to compare hiking to this deep-seated pain seems sacrilegious. Hiking brings out the parts of me that I am proud of, and the deep sense of grief has no business here.

“Exactly,” she said again. “You have to tell. It can’t be a secret. Secrets make everyone alone. Secrets lead to panic like that night at the restaurant. When you keep it a secret, you get hysterical. You get to thinking you’re the only one there is who’s like you, who’s both and neither and betwixt, who forges a path every day between selves, but that’s not so. When you’re alone keeping secrets, you get fear. When you tell, you get magic. Twice.”

“Twice?”

“You find out you’re not alone. And so does everyone else. That’s how everything gets better. You share your secret, and you change the world.”

“It’s not that easy.” Grumwald felt his lungs scritching to become one in his chest. “I can’t just share my secret. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to understand. It’s complicated.”

“Of course it is. It’s life.”

“So how do I do it then? How do I share my secret? What do I tell?”

“Your story.” The witch didn’t even hesitate. “You tell your story. That is what we all must do.”

“That’s not magic,” said Grumwald.

“Of course it is,” said the witch. “Story is the best magic there is.”

–Laurie Frankel, This Is How It Always Is: A Novel

I see your face in front of mine, so close I can see directly into your bluish-gray eyes. 

I don’t know what to do with this except try to punch you away from me. But no matter how hard I keep punching, your face keeps reappearing. It won’t go away. That face. I have no words to describe the look on your face only that it is inches from mine, and I know it shouldn’t be.

I don’t have a hiking analogy for this one. There is no part of hiking that invades your privacy as intensely as you did mine. It seems sacrilegious to even try to compare my Eden of hiking and mountains to the intrusiveness and perversion of your face. 

A map shows you what’s obvious if you know how to use it. It shows you the route you should go. It shows you which way to turn. It tells you when to ask for help. It tells you how hard you are going to have to work to get where you are going. It will tell you when you’ll get a view, when you’re above treeline, and how much farther you have to go.

If you know how to use it. 

Sometimes knowing how to use it is more terrifying than being blissfully ignorant. Sometimes knowing what is coming makes the effort you are putting in even more exhausting. Someone once told me that pain is what you are feeling right now. It is the fatigued muscles and the gasping for breath that you are having in the present moment. Pain is okay. Pain is tolerable. What makes pain no longer tolerable is suffering. Suffering is when you take the pain you are having in the present moment, look ahead to the future at all the pain you are sure is coming, and adding that pain onto the pain you are already having. In other words, you are piling pain upon pain upon pain that hasn’t even happened yet. You are looking at that map and looking at the elevation gain per mile you are walking, and you know that the hell is coming. This makes your level of fatigue and your racing heart feel unbearable and leads to doubt, exhaustion, and an extreme desire to turn around and quit. But if you focus on just the next step, and then the next one and the next one, bit by bit, you realize that what you thought was terrifying was actually just pain that eventually will subside.

I want to tear up all my fucking maps.

I know what I wrote. I know what map is staring me right in the face. But I refuse to follow my map. I follow another map. The one that says to protect your family at all costs. The one that says if what I wrote is actually true, my heart will break into a million pieces and the suffering will continue day after day after day. I follow the map that refuses to shatter the image of the perfect family we had growing up. I follow the map that tells me to keep running. I follow the map that allows me to be anywhere in the world except for where I am. I follow the map that tells me to keep secrets, to keep my mouth shut, to hide my trauma and addiction and pain from each person I meet, every day, every month, all year. I follow the map that says I’m a hero. And that is much easier to follow than my own map that shows me truth, reveals secrets, and offers freedom. 

Trauma. I’m so fucking sick of that word. Trauma, on its own, has a relatively benign dictionary definition: “A deeply distressing or disturbing experience”. Christ, I have that experience every time I see a spider inside the house or hear someone chewing their potato chips like they are the last meal they will ever eat.

The thing with spiders and potato chips is that those things are short-lived. The spider is there, and then it’s not. The chips are there, and then they are gone. And you can move on with your life. These things are also not a secret that needs to be kept hidden. Matter of fact, you can turn them into funny stories to entertain your friends with. 

Childhood trauma is not that easy. Childhood trauma is like you are inside a clear, soundproof box full of spiders eating potato chips and crawling all over you and you are screaming and pounding on the glass, but everyone just looks right through you and walks away. And then you realize, they are probably right. What am I creating all this fuss about? It’s just a god-damn spider sitting on my lap eating a fucking potato chip. Steal the chip, step on the spider and get out of the box. Problem solved.

I’m hiking up the Airline Trail on my way up towards Mounts Madison and Adams. I’m hidden under the tree canopy. It’s fall, and the colors are beautiful. In a way, I’m present in the way a hiker must be present – I watch where I put my feet, I pay attention to my surroundings, I drink when I’m thirsty, I eat when I’m hungry and I rest when I’m tired. But the rest of myself, my real self, is miles and years away. I can’t get to that part of myself, hidden here under the trees. That part of myself is hidden behind years of shame and disbelief and denial. It is not something that is spoken about. It is not something I admit to myself. It did not happen.

But I am so fucking tired of hiding the fact that I know that it did. I get to the part of the Airline Trail where you pop out above treeline. It’s freaking beautiful, but my backpack is stuck on a tree, and I can’t seem to shake it free no matter how hard I try. I finally squirm my way out of the pack, unleash it from the tree, open it up, dig out the container that is holding all the rocks of trauma, and throw the container over the cliff that I’m standing on. No trees in front of me. Nowhere to hide. I’m tired of hiding. Get me out of these woods and up into the Presidentials. I’ll find myself a rock to use as a pulpit, and I’m going to tell my story.