Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time.
Maybe I had been a human—flawed and still growing but full of light nonetheless. All this time, I had received plenty of love, but I’d given it, too. Unbeknownst to me, I had been scattering goodness all around like fun-size chocolates accidentally falling out of my purse as I moved through the world. Perhaps the only real thing that was broken was the image I had of myself—punishing and unfair, narrow and hypercritical. Perhaps what was really happening was that, along with all of my flaws, I was a fucking wonder. And I continue to be a fucking wonder. A fun, dependable friend who will always call you back, cook for you, and fiercely defend your honor. A devoted sister and daughter who prioritizes and appreciates family in ways less-traumatized people can never quite understand. A hardworking, capable employee who brings levity and mischievousness to the offices I inhabit. I am a person who is generous with her love, who is present in texts and calls and affirmations, because I know so intimately how powerful that love can be.
* * *
—
When I’d written Love begets love, it had been somewhat of a hypothesis that I’d gathered from other people’s stories. But like some Chinese magic, it feels as if I have spoken it into reality. I do not only feel like I have just married the love of my life—though, certainly, I have. I also feel as if I’ve married a whole flock of people. Like I’ve tied myself to them in some permanent way, with golden links that multiply every time we vow our commitment to each other—love and more love and more and more love until it is blankets of love, fields of love, worlds of it, bigger than hurt, bigger than fear, bigger than division or prejudice or petty shortcomings, power beyond time, death, or human comprehension.
This would be a nice place to wrap things up. A happy ending, after all, contained within the best day of my life.
But in the end, it was not simply love that helped me come to terms, once and for all, with my C-PTSD.
It was tragedy.
CHAPTER 43
So the world was ending, of course.
No bread in the grocery aisles, racial reckonings that trickled up from seas of marchers on Broadway to the sparkly glass offices downtown, hate crimes galore, armed rioters in the U.S. Capitol, and, oh yeah, hundreds of thousands dead from a weaselly, shitty virus that chews your lungs up like old gum.
It was 2017 all over again but worse, an endless news cycle with commentators so tired they were hallucinating on air, shaking their heads at the camera slack-jawed and declaring, “That was a shitshow.”
But this time, I was fine. I was good, actually.
I was productive. Teaching, writing, sending encouraging paintings to friends in crisis, spending hours on the phone comforting friends who were evacuating their homes in California, which was being incinerated by wildfires.
Online, everyone was melting down. My friends were posting that they didn’t have the attention span to finish reading a book, let alone work. They were lying in bed sobbing all day long. They showed up to my Zoom calls puffy-eyed, in bed. I sent them comforting messages and gave them pity “likes.” And then I patted Joey’s head and went to sleep.
I felt bad about this okayness at first. Was I only doing well because I could work from home? Because I was privileged or insensitive? Because I was dissociated?
But then again…the week prior, I had gone for a walk and saw a sticker with UNAVAILABLE UNTIL AFTER THE CRISIS plastered across the front of an ATM, then stood at the edge of a funeral home’s gate and watched them wheel yet another body bag inside. I stood there helplessly, and my mouth crumpled behind my mask, my shoulders shook. But then I went home and made a delightful potato leek soup, and it really was just so good with a dollop of yogurt.
It took a couple of weeks for me to get it. Ah. I wasn’t freaking out because I was made for this moment.
Dr. Ham would tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment. My parents prepared me to face a vicious world with danger around every corner.
But as an adult, I hadn’t lived in that world. I lived in a fluffy, down-comforter world with seventeen kinds of capers at the grocery store, where if you decided you wanted to relax, you could have someone bring a vegan ylang ylang bath bomb to your house in a matter of hours. My fear was misplaced and paranoid here. Until the pandemic.
With freezer trucks full of dead bodies parked outside morgues and Asian women being kicked, burned by acid, and shot, my PTSD transformed from a disability into a superpower. Because objectively, PTSD is an adaptation, a mechanism our genius bodies evolved to help us survive.
All of a sudden, I was no longer hypervigilant. I was just vigilant. I rationed our canned food and grew vegetables and fastidiously sanitized our groceries in the bathtub, but that didn’t make me an oddball. It made me responsible.
* * *
—
“Sometimes it’s a curse, and sometimes it’s a blessing,” said Greg Siegle, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. He studies the brains of C-PTSD patients, and he told me that my suspicions were right—there were many ways in which C-PTSD could be considered an actual asset. “I call them superpowers,” he told me. “So many of what we call psychopathologies are actually skills and capabilities gone awry.”
Much of my research had stated that people with PTSD had shrunken prefrontal cortices—that experiencing triggers often shut down the logical centers of our brains and left us irrational and incapable of complex thought. But Siegle told me he’d discovered that research to be flawed. He’d found that for many people with complex PTSD, the exact opposite was happening. In moments of intense stress and trauma, our prefrontal cortices were actually far more active.