Well don't I look fancy
Alternatively, this post could be titled: PTSD, the wound that never sleeps.
If you’ve been following along with some of my other posts, you will probably notice that I am someone who is cryptologically dealing with a problem I’ve had with a certain narcissist that will forever be nameless. It’s actually quite possible that she was just the last one in a string of narcissists--see: Narcissistic Victim Syndrome. I’ve always been told that I’m sensitive, that I’m “deep” and all that kind of stuff.
What I wasn’t told was that having an open heart to fucked up people will probably leave you fucked up in the end. Such is my situation. You see, I now recognize that I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a consequence of my romantic exploits. Okay, how do I know this? There are three criteria: Reliving i.e. dreams, memories, hallucinations; Avoiding; Hyper-vigilance.
I have been troubled for the last six months or so that I can’t stop thinking about the things that have happened to me; I replay scenarios between myself and the narcissist in my head, I explore conversations in the sense that I think about what I should have said, I relive memories of the narcissist and I, and I have dreams about the narcissist continuously. They aren’t good dreams. But it was something that I just accepted; I even told my brother recently, “I’ve realized that there are just some things you can’t get rid of and you’ll always live with them. I have a dream with her and I just wake up and go about my day.”
Avoiding: I try to avoid any and all interactions with my narcissist, since I have to see her at work. I will purposefully avoid her presence, her gaze, her name, whatever. If there’s a sheet of paper with her name on it, that piece of paper is going somewhere else where I don’t have to look at it. If I know she’s going to come through this or that door with a tour group, I will exit another way. I would honestly jump out of a window to not be in the same room with her at this point. Sometimes that’s not an option: so I purposefully turn my back to her. I will not talk to her. I will not engage her. Obviously this makes me somewhat of a weirdo at work and this plays into her gaslighting manipulation, but I have long ago stopped caring about my social standing at work...I’m on a different track, bound for graduate school.
Hyper-vigilance to me comes into play when I am trying to “plan” my life around avoiding her and the memories I have of her. And it also comes into play in the sense that I have a difficult time relaxing when certain things trigger my anxiety. Dodge Trucks, for example. This is why I hate them.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road, I think: have I become like my abuser? Am I trying to maintain an image for the sake of my own comfort? Am I, in fact, narcissistic in all of my guarded behavior?
Yes and no: you see, for one, we all operate on a level of self-absorption. This is called “Primary Narcissism” in the Freudian Schools of Psychology. At the bottom of our psyche, we are all the products of our habits, and we cultivate these habits to keep ourselves successful with being how we are. It is a difference in kind versus a difference in degree. This is Hume by way of Deleuze speaking here. We are our habits. But the fact that I have these habits doesn’t amount to a conflation between “Primary Narcissism” and a “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” I am not, after all, a manipulator, a gaslighter, or someone that feeds off people’s attention. I am a crypto, a nomad, a disembodied voice in the wilderness. I am one of the “New Wounded.” Which is to say, I have left behind who I was in a sense, before, to become something afterwards. The fact that I have PTSD now is merely an articulation of the cut that was produced in my being: a cut that divides, doubles, creates a new identity, in Time. I am not the wound. I am after that. I am a person to come.
Thus the necessity of all Plague Journals.