Some things are hard to put behind you, put out of your mind, when your mind has stubbornly chosen to hold on to them, for reasons that may frustrate and bewilder you.
This story may be a little difficult for some of you to correlate with your own life experience. Be thankful for that. It is a burden, a heavy burden, to have some ambiguous feeling instructing your thoughts. If your life has included some trauma, you may know exactly what I am talking about. If the trauma was severe enough, and lasted long enough, you may have done what I did for 40 years: deny that the problem even existed, while painstakingly avoiding circumstances that might lead to a triggering event. Try to imagine how those two issues can exist at the same time in the same mind. That was me.
My trauma transpired mostly during my time in Vietnam, although, as I look back on my training, there were a number of incidents that stabbed at my confidence and scarred my mind, all in the pursuit of preparing an unsophisticated, untraveled, naïve young man to do what even the best of us find difficult.
Post-traumatic stress disorder leaves the damage mind filled with tiny time bombs, all waiting to be triggered by some sight or some sound reminiscent of previous danger. For the briefest of moments, that happen to me not so long ago. In the past 40 years it is happened more times than I can count. But when I began therapy back in 2010, I eventually understood what was happening in my mind, and learned ways to deal with it. I never received a cure, just help in dealing with the problem. That help has led me to a much better place in my life.
But the triggers, though less frequent, are still there. Their frequency is affected by the protective bubble I have chosen to spend much of my life inside. It is certainly not impenetrable. When it is breached, for some period of time, my life is in turmoil, my brain becomes a malfunctioning mess. My bubble limits the things I can do, but it permits me to have a life that is still worth living.
Some may think I am foolish, that I should continue to search for help. Considering my age, my current mental and physical health, and the potential for more deadly diseases, caused by exposure to Agent Orange, I believe my current course makes the most sense. Much of this life I have chosen is enjoyable. Mental therapy, though quite helpful, consumed too much of my time outside the therapy session, as I fretted over my homework and tried to prepare for the next session.
I do not know if my experience is typical of other PTSD sufferers, although I am certain there are some similarities. Things I had to deal with included buildings with dark windows, rooms that were dimly lit, dark spaces either inside or outside, rock- faced mountains, roads that curved out of sight just as I turned onto them or looked at them.
For a long time, it was difficult for me to drive on the highway, for fear that some big tanker truck would explode as it drove past me. The possibility of something exploding haunted me, probably more than any other triggering issue, and certainly because of the two close-hand explosions I experienced in wartime: one that sent me to the hospital, and one that happened while I was in the convalescent center at Cam Ranh Bay.
Some of those problems are more memory than reality for me today. So, when I find myself having those feelings again, it’s a shock, an unwelcome intrusion into my day, especially when the day is going as well as it was on the morning it happened to me at Lake Conestee Nature Preserve a few short weeks ago.
It was one of those quiet foggy mornings. I didn’t get a lot of keepers that day, but the experience of walking in the park, the serenity of looking out on those beaver ponds while the mist made distant trees look like a watercolor painting … it was a good day to be out there, in the middle of all that. I think the only foggy photo that made the cut was one with geese flying away over the beaver ponds and out into the mist.
But that’s also the day, about an hour later, when I took the photograph of the big shade tree. If you saw it, you probably remember it. That photo inspired me to write a blog article called A Moment in the Shade. Here is a link, in case you’re interested in reading it: http://www.myamericanmorning.com/creative-writing/2020/10/13/a-moment-in-the-shade .
A few days ago, I was looking through my photos, searching for any good ones I might have overlooked, when I noticed today’s photograph. For some reason I had put out of my mind what occurred just before I took that shot. It is not really all that good of a photo, but it represents something personal and important to me, a part of my life from long ago that still lingers in my memory.
I had come out of the woods and into an open field that used to be part of a farm. There was still mist in the air and the sun was reflecting off it in a blinding fashion. A narrow dirt trail circles the old farm, eventually passing by the big shade tree. I was just about ready to step off the paved path and on to that dirt trail when I looked to my right.
With heavy mist directly in front of me and the sun bearing down on me, I squinted mightily to try to see what I was looking at, a dirt road that curved off to the left and out of sight. The light was so strong I could barely see, but I could make out a bend in the road. Before that moment I was feeling quite fine. But a fearful dread came over me. I sensed danger. Something was right around that bend, something that I could not see, something that was intending to do me harm.
I felt confused. I did not know what to do. So, I stood there, feet spread apart, slightly crouched, staring into the blinding scene.
It was likely only a few seconds later that the feeling became recognizable. Something had triggered an old memory. There was no danger. Nothing was intending to do me harm. I forced myself to accept that, the logic of it, the certain reality of it. I wasn’t in Vietnam. Viet Cong guerrillas were not walking toward me down that road just out of sight. I was home, in America, taking a walk in a peaceful park. Vietnam was over forty years ago.
I took a deep breath and tried to relax. I really wanted … you don’t know how bad … I really wanted to just sit down in the dirt and cry. The frustration of emotional weakness is part of the problem. But I did not succumb to that weakness. Instead, I raised my camera and took a photo of the thing I feared, and moved on. The way I figured it, looking at that photograph would remind me that I’m in charge of how I feel about things.
You should know that those bad feelings went away just as soon as I saw the big shade tree, about 10 minutes later. My mind is healthy enough to swap a bad memory for a good one. If you read the A Moment in the Shade article at my blog, then you know the “good memory” to which I refer. That good memory pushed the bad one completely out of my mind. Those few bad seconds were gone until I went searching for more photos to post on social media.
As you get older, life becomes more and more about memories, both good and bad. For too long in my later years, I could not recall the good memories. It seemed pointless to try. There were so many bad memories, some of them not even of real events, that there was no room for the good ones. I dwelled on terrible things, things I saw, things I did, things that happened only because of the circumstances of war. That is a recipe for disaster, one I almost did not survive.
Some bad things happened in my life, like many other folks. Vietnam was just the worst, and it spanned the longest time. Some of those bad things were my fault, some were beyond my control, or beyond my ability to understand. It is for me to appreciate my mistakes and learn from them. It is for me to deal with the aftershock of terrible circumstances forced upon me. And it is for me to dedicate the largest portion of my remaining years to being a productive and happy individual, given my current circumstances and everything I know about myself. That last one sounds like a worthy goal. I think I will concentrate on it.
There are more bends in the road up ahead for me. A few of them may have danger lurking there out of sight. Rather than fret my life away, I will deal with them, one by one. Because I know this for a fact: most of the roads I travel will lead me on the straight and narrow, and when I see a bend in the road, I can rest assured the bend will most likely take me where I want to go.