Spontaneous ∂erivation

I love Neil Gaiman’s work. His writing in combination with Terry Pratchett’s in Good Omens got me interested in two variants of non-stereotypical fantasy (and actually the first types of fantasy I became interested in) and provided a lot of relief from a bad parental situation.

Last night, I reread Endless Nights, seven short comic book stories about the Endless from Sandman, a series which I love.

It was Delirium’s story that made me go “argh, Neil Gaiman, why did you do this?!”

One of the crazy people is a raped girl who’s gone catatonic. Now. I didn’t mind that bit, because mental illness is mental illness whether someone is inserting Unfortunate Implications or not, and I think Gaiman was mostly not, for this part of the story.

No, it was the ending, where she wakes up and says, “I spent enough time there already, I’m done now.”

That was fine. I have felt this very way for years.

And then she says, “I’ll let it go.”

Four words that ruin the story.

It’s okay in one sense, in that even with chronic PTSD, there are things you can choose to do to heal over a long, looong period of time.

But it’s not okay in a lot of other senses. To name just two major ones: (a) that traumatic reactions are just a choice and not, you know, the result of hormones, body chemicals, or the long-term results of evolution/nurture; (b) that the traumatized are, basically, just victimizing themselves when they can just simply choose to let it go.

Dude, man. You for sure know it’s not that simple, right? You know that’s one of the worst examples of Armchair Psychology, almost verging on Family Unfriendly Aesop? Right? Right??

But, I quite liked the rest of the collection. He’s still a good storyteller, and we all make really, really, really stupid mistakes sometimes. There’s no help for it, except to listen when people tell you “I have a problem with this,” and also for people to say so in the first place. Fallibility is what it means to be human.

For any Neil Gaiman apologists, yes, I forgive him. No, I’m not rewriting this.

I’m going back to bed.

I would have written this, and a lot of other stuff, last week if I weren’t tied up in sick, work, and admittedly more self-triggering by writing and planning PTSD articles than I would have thought possible, but then again, triggers were always a mystery to me.

So! The third session with my most recent psychologist.¹

We talked about things and what I remember saying was that I had started becoming skittish all over again to noises and lights in the dark. I don’t mean things that go bump in the house, I mean things like cars driving by in the little lane next to my house, or cats in dire need of getting laid prancing across the backyard². Or, perhaps, the unfortunate next-door neighbor who’s dropped their keys on the stone porch and is flailing about for them.

I technically am always skittish in regards to these sounds and sights, because they remind me of the time when my parents were stalking me. And actually the times when my father was coming home. But the skittishness has been increasing back to its original interminable agony of nerves from a few years ago.

So we talked about the living room, which I barely use anymore, because there’s too much sound from the street. Not too much from normal people’s standpoints, it is rather a peaceful lane, but from my standpoint. He noticed that, even though I do like my living room, I tend to mentally phrase many things that I try to convince myself don’t scare me in terms of my parents. As in: “This living room is ENTIRELY NOT like the various ones I lived in with my parents.” Or: “That sound of jangling keys being handled by a drunk person IS NOT my father.” Or: “That van is DEFINITELY NOT my parents’ car.”

In other words, the more I start to slip, the more my thought processes become a sort of “Goodnight Moon” for bringing on PTSD.

So. A couple of action points.

The first is to start using the living room more. Which is still hard for me. But I try a little when I can spare it.

The second is to, when these noises happen, not to couch it in terms of an absentia of parents/abuse, but to say, “That’s the neighbor’s white minivan” or “That’s Mr. Wilburforce³, and he’s always a bit clumsy about his keys” or “Mrs. Tlingl’s cat really needs to get laid or have his balls clipped off.” In other words, think of the present—hang onto the present.

I’m not sure what one does with the intrusive past while one is trying to cling for dear life to the present, but I understand it’s a bit of give-and-take like most mental gymnastics. But it does help me understand the ending of Busman’s Holiday (the last official Lord Peter Wimsey book written by Dorothy L. Sayers).

I still wish that Mr. Wilburforce would leave his damn porch lights on when he goes out.

1. Maybe therapist sounds better, from a “my gods are you psycho?” viewpoint, but I think I feel better calling a psychologist a bartender if we must needs rename his/her occupation. [↩]
2. Not quite like in the cartoons! But I admit I was surprised by this part of house life. [↩]
3. Names changed to protect the innocent. I think. [↩]

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back. There are some things that time can not mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.”
– The Lord of the Rings, the movie

In part 1, I talked about the characteristics of memories involved in PTSD, as well as a summary of what fiction often gets wrong about PTSD.

For this part and the next two, I’ll discuss more in depth specific examples of fictional PTSD I’ve encountered that mostly get it right. A little wrong, but mostly right (some more “mostly” than others).

To start off, here are two examples; one from a popular SF TV show, Babylon 5, and one from a very popular fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings.

[Continue reading at Tor.com...]

Moonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent
Of summer gardens; these can bring you all
Those dreams that in the starlit silence fall:
Sweet songs are full of odours.
– Siegfried Sassoon, “The Dream”

I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Which is difficult to admit, because fiction—the medium through which people most often learn about the experiences of others—tends to imply that those who suffer from PTSD are non-existent at best, broken as par of course, and dangerous lunatics at worst. And sometimes the only depiction available in a story or series is the “worst” scenario.

It’s a little upsetting, not least because people fall back on the stereotypes presented in fiction when they know you have PTSD.

But, like anything else, occasionally fiction gets it right.

In this post I’ll discuss the caricature of PTSD in fiction; in a second post, I’ll talk more in depth about some specific examples that mostly get it right (and, in one case, pretty much all of it right).

Before I cover either, however, I ought to describe how PTSD is actually experienced. This goes rather beyond the Merriam-Webster definition or, to be frank, the times when fiction would like to show off PTSD.

[Continue reading at Tor.com...]