I never thought that I’d find my answer to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder through an episode of the TV series “Lost”. I didn’t watch the show back when it aired, I had no interest in fiction, nor did I have the commitment for a dramatic television series. My roommates in college followed it religiously, and even attended parties for the season premiers. I might have joined them, but at the time I was just coming down with my neurological symptoms, and with the new difficulty of focusing my eyes and photophobia, television made me sick.
I tend to time travel. Back and Forth. Posterior and Anterior. I am an artist. I am a scientist. I am a believer. I do not believe I am. There is no god. There’s a god, and it’s abandoned me. Thanks God, I am so grateful to you or whatever. No thanks, I’ve had enough.
When I have a flashback episode, it’s not like typical cases of PTSD. Many sufferers re-live their moment of trauma, but for me it is reliving everything up to that. I leave my body, consciousness, and the very present. I believe that this evanescence is organic, neurochemical, and extremely spiritual. I am transcending time, for time was recorded in my cortex. My brain holds receptive information in the form of memory, and sends it out again for me to receive the exact way I did when it was coming from an external stimulus. I smell trees that I haven’t seen in years. I see people who I have lost all contact with, and I feel my body moving the way it used to be able to before I became handicapped. It’s much more than being sentimental. When these spells hit, I lose all conscious awareness, and undergo extreme physiological symptoms of adrenal-surging (rapid heart rate, shaking, hyperventilating, dilated pupils). I belief this is the outcome of areas in my brainstem that normally provide chemical regulation, malfunctioning from my Chiari, and causing a rapid influx of adrenaline, norepinephrine, or something science does not yet know. I do not believe that I am travelling through time, but rather that I am travelling through reality.
I tried explaining this all to Jesse. He has always never known me; I met him long after my life ended. He cannot understand it, but he understands that he has to put up with it in order to say “I love you too”. Losing my words, I can’t always describe things the way I want to (unless I have a keyboard and extended time to think on them). Jesse is disassociated but at the same time intuitive; I don’t have to describe for him to understand. Unfortunately I’m so slow sometimes that I don’t get when he’s actually listened to me.
“Have you ever watched “Lost”?”
“You know that I don’t watch T.V., RIGHT?”
I’ve been told I’m overly sentimental. I think I just remember too much. I have difficulty with my short-term memory, but I do not consider any of that to be memory. It’s just a paper bag to hold disposable thoughts. It’s everything I learned in college.
“There’s an episode of it reminds me of you.”
Jesse also thought that I looked like one of the female actresses from the show. She was blonde, tan, and large busted; thus discrediting all of his opinions to me.
“It’s called “The Constant”. It’s cute. And romantic.”
As cute as not being able to get out of bed with headaches and having nothing else better to do than cuddle up with the one you love and watch their favorite terrible T.V. show DVDs on your old PlayStation system. It was pretty romantic.
If it’s all just chemical, then why are specific memories reoccurring? Why are specific thoughts spell-triggers? Photos, music, my old name. It’s not random. It comes in sets, strict patterns of people and places. The best of times. I relive them, but do not enjoy them again.
The episode was about a man who after exposure to electromagnetic radiation becomes “unlocked” in time, and is flipping back and forth between two specific periods. One “the past” where he is a soldier in military training, and the other “the present”, eight years later after he has been lost on an island and yet somehow is on a boat trying to get help for the others who are back on that island. Don’t know, like I said, I don’t follow these things.
There’s plenty wrong with being sentimental. When people get stuck in the past, they tend to lose the present. The present must always be priority; it is what determines the future, by inevitably becoming the new past.
A scientist warns the protagonist that his human brain will not continuously be able withstand the time “jumping”, because any shift that rapid causes massive strain on the system (other people with it eventually undergo insanity followed by deadly aneurisms). The only way for him to survive is to find a “constant”, something that occurs in both time periods, that he can hold to and use to connect himself together. He choses his true love over his favorite brand of bourbon, and because in the past he had broken off connections with her for the military, must go back and repair those so that she may be his constant in the present. Cliché cheesey, but at least I was getting a good cuddle out of it.
And it was sweet, but there was no way I looked like that stupid blonde girl.
And slowly my brain put it together.
I am not sentimental or nostalgic.
I do hold onto things.
I am not fond of all of them. Some I am. But some just stick.
They are references.
Checkpoints.
Keystones.
Markings on my mind.
These breadcrumbs spelling out who I am, where I have been. So that I do not get lost on the way back to myself.
My life has been through such rapid shifts. I need to hold onto things for balance.
And yet I have no constant throughout all of my lives.
I get lost…
..and I begin to smell trees.
