Title T16.doc

Hello there, good people. I hope everyone is having a good week.

I have something I both want and need to talk about.

Before jumping into it, I want to just preview what is ultimately ahead:

For you, it is me offering the best writing I have to offer in a marked departure from what that has been.

For me, it is being where I want to be in life poised to spend the rest of my years there. That place is off somewhere living on the cheap with the freedom to be the best writer I can be. The accommodations will likely be spartan. I’m not sure I will have a pullout sofa for you, but you are still welcome to come over. If the weather is nice, we can always sit in the yard.

I am being closer to literal than figurative. I’m in the early stages of planning a significant life change – the most significant of my life, really. I live in suburban New Jersey and have most of my adult life. I’m planning on giving up my current place and relocating to another state by the end of the year.

I have a significant mountain to climb between here and there. In some ways, I am at the very bottom of it and haven’t even begun. As a result, there is some optimism in choosing to use ‘planning’ rather than ‘hoping’. The choice is intentional. The outcome isn’t certain. II am just gritting my teeth and clinging to the belief that it will work out.

I want to move. I want to start over. I want to give up almost everything I own, uproot, and resettle. I want to get rid of things that don’t matter to me so that I can have the only one that does. I just want to have a chance to write without feeling like I have an actual physical concussion.

I am not being exaggerative or dramatic or figurative. I feel like I have an actual concussion, and there have only been a few brief periods when I didn’t. Physically, it feels like a ‘whooshy’ fullness in my skull. There is a pressure to it almost like the pressure you feel with sinus congestion. I have a subconscious sense that I shouldn’t shake my head too much. It feels as if my actual brain is bruised and I should treat it gingerly.

And finally, I have two lines of muscle tension that run up my neck to the base of my skull. Those, I can do something about. Those can be massaged, meditated, relaxed, distracted, or hot showered away. Those are simple surface-level stress. The concussion stuff though, that will be with me until I resolve what is causing it: unresolved complex post traumatic stress disorder and the physiologic cascade it triggers.

Complex PTSD is a sinister affliction. If you are a writer, its effects are diabolical to the point of being something out of a Stephen King book. It’s an in-body Misery with no need for Kathy Bates. Your most primitive brain structures run amok can hobble you just fine with no need for an axe.

It is brutal. At its worst, it is a living agony.

I began sliding toward it close to two years ago. I was engulfed by it last February. I have been mired in it ever since. Yet, I didn’t really understand it until a month ago.

I have essentially been in the grips of a severely debilitating syndromic condition which I did not grasp as a condition. I was *profoundly* debilitated by it to the point of being wholly disabled in some ways, and I *still* did not process the cluster of severe effects as being either a cluster or components of something larger.

I have effectively been trying to function with brain damage too impairing to even grasp that it was brain damage… even while being so disabled by it, I entirely lost the capacity for certain kinds of human cognition altogether.

I am in a REALLY peculiar position right now, and it is going to make for some *interesting* reading. As I sit here writing this, I am both severely impaired in my brain function *and* able to understand, observe, and describe that impairment in real-time. I am able to be both ‘observing physician’ and ‘patient experiencing cognitive impairment’ at the same time. The first of the two is a new thing. I was not able to do that until a month ago.

Up until then, I was just impaired-impaired. I was just flat-out brainfog, all-concussion-all-the-time. I was 100% aware of how I was impaired because how could I not be… and I was throwing everything I had at fighting through it. I didn’t not have the ability to observe what was happening overall as a ‘condition’ – thus, I couldn’t understand it. I was fighting as hard as I could to stave off the effects and get past them.

A month ago, something changed. I cleared one of the two hurdles required to get past all of this. For a couple weeks, I thought I had gotten past it altogether. As it turns out, I still had one hurdle left. Clearing that first hurdle though… it helped… it led to getting back some of my ‘impaired cognitive function.’

Up until March, there were two forces behind the systemic, physiologic effects I have been experiencing not resolving. The first was an ‘active fire’ causing ongoing damage to my life. The second was the damage that fire had already caused. In early March, I managed to ‘resolve’ the first of the two… weirdly, by just fleeing the fire and letting it burn. The impact that had was profound and immediate. It literally changed how my whole human machine was running.

That broken switch and ‘always-on’ state of emergency operations?

It just… shut off.

The entire physiologic complex of feeling physically concussed, etc.?

It all just… lifted.

It was like the fever of all fevers broke…

but then the physiologic complex slowly crept back in until it was fully back.

It was different this time though…

With my energy, attention, and effort not being consumed by ‘fighting the fire,’ I was able to step back and get a perspective on the damage left behind – including the ways I had been injured and was still impaired.

It has been an interesting awakening of sorts even as the same old concussed brainfog crept back to full force. I had mentioned complex post traumatic stress disorder though I honestly can’t remember how far back it was when I first did. It had been present for me that I ‘had it.’ Yet… I didn’t ‘get it, get it’.

I was too debilitated to understand how I was debilitated.

A ‘healthy me’ would have become deeply grounded in what C-PTSD was and how it worked and how a person manages it. I would amass a solid working understanding of it *in a matter of days*. That is the kind of thing I did routinely in my professional career. I would come to have some reason to need to understand some illness, condition, or disease state and would then voraciously consume information by the pound to very quickly get educated on it. At one firm, I had access to a corporate librarian who I could give a topic and a sense of what I wanted – everything they could get their hands on – and a day or two later, they’d give me a *four-foot high* stack of information. Cancers, immune diseases, mood and affective disorders, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia, hepatiris C... In each case, I went from knowing nothing to having a solid base understanding in under a week of high-volume information consumption.

It registered for me that I ‘had C-PTSD’… and I never even Googled it.

My brain was functioning at too low a level to do something that would have helped… which I actually enjoy as an exercise on any new subject.

It is a weird experience to see your own injury while you still have it… and see your suffering struggle when you were entirely overpowered by it.

As a writer, it is such a loaded thing to look back over a year where you thought about almost nothing other than writing while just grinding away trying to write… while so profoundly disabled, you couldn’t hold the roadmap of a story in memory.

The title at the top of this piece is ‘Title T16.doc’. I chose it because it is the filename it was saved under on my desktop as I was writing it. It’s just the name Microsoft Word gave the file by default. It is short for the first two words at the top of the document and how many others have had the same first two since I last posted here. It is short for “Title TBD – 16^th try”. Each was an attempt to somehow navigate through the windshield to compensate for a brain that can’t hold a map.

Everything I have published since last February has been a product of that same kind of effort forced by the same severely impaired function.

Everything you have read from me has been the closest I could come to producing a ‘trip’ with a brain that couldn’t even bear the cognitive load of an intended route.

When I’ve been quiet here, I haven’t been writing less. I have been writing far more. I have been just making attempt after attempt to somehow survive as a writer with a ‘high-functioning adaptation’ to suffering extremely diminished function.

I have just been straight throwing everything I humanly can at trying to get through something… that I didn’t even understand. At some future point when I am finally past this for real, I am going to have some heavy grieving to do over the mental footage of me flailing as hard as I could while hurt and it getting worse.

A year from now, I hope I’m in that place. Six months from now even. Uprooting and moving will help. It will cut my living expenses and that will ease things.

Between now and then though, I just need to be honest with you good people about where I am, what is in my way, and what it will take for me to ever get past my current impairment.

In January I hit my lowest point when a fire, my inability to escape it, and my overwhelm at the damage all peaked.

In March, I ‘escaped the fire’ by withdrawing all human effort and energy from it.

At present, I have one remaining barrier. I need to climb back up above a red line: having enough to live on. Not enough to ‘pay for a whole life’. Just enough to not have my basic human needs imperiled. I don’t need to ‘repair the full damage’ or ‘recover to where I was.’ I just need to get back to being above a line that keeps a system with a broken switch in a state of always-on ‘danger response’. I will not recover until I do.

Every last symptom and impairment will simply persist for as long as I am below the line no matter how small the gap… because… maddeningly… it isn’t actually about *the shortfall*. It is about *the existence of one*.

There is only one way to ‘resolve’ the runaway physiologic response of complex post traumatic stress disorder run amok. It is very simple. The person themselves, oddly enough, need do only one thing… and then their human system will take it from there.

The person just has to get to safety.

That’s all.

They just have to get away from whatever ‘perceived peril to their wellbeing’ is causing their system to stay in active emergency response mode. Literally, as soon as they get clear of whatever that ‘perpetuating danger’ is, the alarm will… go quiet. The chemical flood will abate. The effects like a ‘writer’s stroke’ will begin to lift. The concussed feeling will go away.

Then, as long as the person can keep from being plunged back into another inescapable peril for a while, that broken switch will self-repair. Once it does, things that are merely challenges to address in real life - but which would have kept the system locked in perpetual screaming mayday before - won’t even set off the alarms… because they aren’t actually life or death crises.

Guys, that is what has been so diabolically cursed about all of this…

In order to have enough to live on, I need to write.

With my system in a disabling state of emergency though, in order to write… I first have to have enough to live on.

You see the cursed circularity?

In order to solve the *real-life problem,* I need to… not have it first.

My human system’s runaway response to a perceived threat to my wellbeing is actually what is causing it… by disabling my ability to do what would resolve it.

It is a diabolical perfect storm that tests your mettle, I will tell you that. It tests your resolve right to the last ounce.

With all of that said, that is where I am. I am deeply impaired right now. My brain is injured in truly maddening ways. That limits what I am able to handle cognitively. There are things my brain simply can’t do.

Now, I at least understand though…

Now, I can do my best to high-function through diminished function by adapting to the driving I can do…

I can do my best to write what I can write and have it make for an entertaining read.

I would just ask that you be a little patient with me and a little forgiving. I am literally trying to engineer around my own brain damage to produce in the absence of the cognitive function that usually takes. I will do my best to try to not drive around the same traffic circle three times… only to make three lefts and go right back through it. I’m trying.

In parallel, I could use help that is just help. Every inch closer to getting back above the red line is another entire stride toward… my entire physiologic function as a human being - my entire lived existence - changing.

Those of you who have offered me support over the past year… I wouldn’t even be *here* without you. I would have simply gone under. I certainly have no right or entitlement to anything more. My challenges are no one else’s burden to bear. That said, help would move me closer and closer to finally recovering from something that all but washed me away.

Thank you for reading this all the way to the end.

I’m doing the best I can right now.

I wish it was better.

I’m willing to pick up and move and start all over just for the chance. I just have to get there.

[Note : if you are up for offering support and it is within your means, two avenues are via becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time contribution. To offer one-time support, best options are via Zelle (hoarsewhispering@gmail.com) or Paypal (@mikegoodnough) or Venmo (@michael-goodnough-1). Support is healthcare at the moment and deeply appreciated.]