The smell of the drains was a Gollum hand, reaching up my nose to rattle my brain. It was as if its fingertips had made craters in my grey-matter, bruising it for no other reason than a cold and petty thrill. How could it? Foul though was, it’s just a stink. Somewhere, behind the closed and double-locked doors of my memories, a darkness stirred. PTSD erased my memories, but whatever happened, it stank this same way.
PTSD in youth and children is vastly under-diagnosed. Home troubles, shouting and such, can have the same effect on the brain of a child as combat has upon the soldier.
Sport, especially cycling and running, is an effective treatment for PTSD, and we know many youth in poverty have PTSD. So why aren't all schools enabled to make sport a higher priority? Additionally the arts are healing for the brain, reducing stress to bring higher states of health that the individual is in control of, that empowers them. So yes we need sports, yes we need the arts, and then perhaps we'll have more creative scientists too because they we able to heal and grow strong.
There are days my head just doesn't work. I try so hard to focus and it's like trying to run through water. My brain fogs up and thoughts go nowhere at all. Sometimes I think its natures anaesthesia, anything to numb the pain, to wipe out the trauma. Then there are the times of clarity, sudden moments when I can see every detail and feel every feeling. The trigger can be something like sports on TV, a turn of phrase, a smell. At the start I hoped it was a process to wipe out the bad memories, to stop me reliving them to well meaning askers. Now I know it's not so simple. It provides some protection, but the price is the flashbacks and the times of confusion; the stronger the blocks become the more intense the flashbacks are - as if the neurones are fighting for their lives, anything not to wither away.
Yet, as my brother said one day on a train with the countryside flying by, "There will be a future, there will be a future." And so that keeps me living, breathing, loving. I walk, each day another step onward, always hoping to arrive in that future, in a meadow for our souls, at peace.
My attacker had a diagnosis; it didn't make a difference to me. The knife was still sharp and my psychological issues afterwards just the same. My temper frays, my children cry because they don't understand how mama changed so much. I fight it, try to return to who I was but the flashbacks and anger take their toll. The man who did this to me is still at large, not because they don't know who he is, but because "He couldn't help it." He'll do it again to someone else and someone else after that. When they decide to remove someone from society the cause of the violence shouldn't matter, it's after that, after their removal, they can decide if "treatment" is possible. Don't we deserve protection from violent criminals regardless of the cause of their actions? I don't need my attacker to suffer, he can go somewhere with a nice bed and decent food. If they can't cure him they should keep him locked away; they can't protect us with him at large. They don't though; they talk to him nicely and let him go. What are we supposed to do? Live in fear? All carry guns? Hope the attacker doesn't get the first shot? All become MMA experts just in case? One day they'll be a diagnosis for every type of criminal, what then? Let them all run amok and tell the rest of us to "accommodate" them?
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