I truly realized this past week how my life can be both beautiful and disabling on a daily basis. Thank goodness over the last decade, I have learned how to accommodate for my severe, complex, chronic PTSD enough to have a purposeful, hopeful, and exciting life while negotiating pain and suffering daily. I am on the greatest adventure of my life – to continue to learn to be in a loving, kind, and compassionate relationship with myself and another individual. (A gift I never thought I would have nor deserved in my life.) Loving with your full heart is what I am learning and I am becoming more capable of it every day. It is bringing me such joy, beauty, and a sense of completeness. In addition, I feel so intellectually, relationally and spiritually alive. However, I cannot simply rest appreciating these incredible gifts, instead my PTSD magnifies my hypervigilance and sends my brain and body reeling.

For example, I have had difficulty this past week just doing basic personal care things such as getting my teeth brushed, preparing a meal, eating, remembering medication and so on. My prefrontal cortex shut down, my dissociation, constriction, and hypervigliance became significant. I have been struggling to write this entry because my thoughts and energy have been racing causing such disorganization and a continuous cycle of brain fog and prefrontal cortex shut down. It is a reminder of how profoundly PTSD can disrupt daily basic functioning.

My therapist is always telling me that I can’t take challenging days out of context. I need to take into consideration what is going on in my internal and external environment. Therefore, some of my increased anxiety/hypervigilance this week may be due to the fact my husband has some health concerns and I am worried. Furthermore, I shared with some people that I was writing a blog. I think I felt a little exposed and vulnerable yet I know it is the right thing for me to do at this point on my journey.

One of my doctors thinks I have major depression along with my PTSD. Instead, I think I have profound sadness. I feel sadness because of all the challenges I face daily. I feel it right now because I have such ambition and drive to contribute to the evolution of society and the universe because I am clearly connected to my own beauty and pain as well as the beauty and pain of the universe. Furthermore, I have a desire to contribute to the well being of the whole. However, this ambition, drive and desire to contribute also causes an increase in my hypervigilance. In reality, I have difficulty just leaving my house for more than 2 hours a day. Even in my house I have to go to an area where I can limit light, noise, and other outside stimuli. In addition, my daily reading, which is creating for me a greater and more conscious, evolutionary, integral and spiritual worldview, is often too overstimulating for me. I have to manage the reading in small amounts and then do some form of physical movement to release hypervigilance after a short period of reading. Sometimes I need to do movement as I am reading to manage the hypervigilance. I still have not worked out a system for accommodating for the anxiety/hypervigilance, fogginess, and memory problems that come when I am learning and changing my understanding and place in the world and universe. Both developing an evolutionary and conscious worldview as well as a spirituality of interconnectedness to “all that is” are uniting me with my passion, my nature. All of this is both an exciting and debilitating process, hence, the profound sadness.