CPTSD, ADHD, the YouTube Algorithm—or Maybe I’m Just Super Suggestible

I’ve never felt safe in my own skin. Not once. Especially not this past year.

The world’s always felt like a threat. Even when it’s quiet, I’m bracing for the next punch.

This morning I played some music on YouTube.

I was directed by the algorithm to a scene in Dead Poets Society; after that I watched Robin Williams's monologue by the lake in Good Will Hunting, which in turn brought me to Carmy's monologue from the first season of The Bear, and eventually to a video that explains complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

By the time I’ve finished breakfast, my brain’s already spinning out.

Maybe the algorithm knows I’m easy prey. Maybe it just knows when to hit me with the right thing at the right time.

Or maybe it’s just random. Probably is.

But this time, the video actually made something click. For once, part of my life made sense again.

A Reaction to a Reaction to a Reaction

Growing up, my house was built out of my mother’s depression and rage. It didn’t take much to set her off. My dad’s answer was to shrink himself down to nothing, especially at home.

I learned from him.

Stay busy. Stay quiet. Disappear. Don’t make it worse.

My mother was brought up in a home where there was abuse; her father, who had served in World War II and had a big family, frequently hit his children, which included my mother, my aunts, and my uncle.

Out of the house she took with her something. She probably didn't understand it and certainly didn't have the means to express it. Yet it went on to accompany her into adulthood and into her own family.

When my father later attempted to leave her, she put a knife to his throat and said that she would kill him if he did so.

When I copied my father by staying busy, remaining quiet, or withdrawing myself, I was responding to the way he reacted to the way she had reacted to what had happened to her.

A family can transmit fear even if they never give it a name.

Waiting for the Next Tragedy

These days, I have to check out just to survive. Feeling safe? Not a thing. My brain’s always running disaster drills, always waiting for the next tragedy to drop.

For over twenty-five years I never had to wait very long.

I was in a car wreck so bad that family and neighbors drove past the scene and didn’t even recognize me or my car.

My mother had her accident then.

There was a period of time when she might die.

Then 9/11.

My aunt lived with us for a while, then overdosed and slipped into a coma. Serotonin syndrome. She never woke up.

My father had cancer.

He suffered a recurrence of cancer.

For years, the husband of the woman who took care of my mom (she was also sleeping with my dad) would grab his gun, jump in his truck, and threaten to kill my father.

My brother died in Iraq.

My father had cancer once more.

And through all of it, we were fighting one of the biggest corporations in the country just to get enough money to keep my mom alive.

My mother died.

I got a job in which I spent each day taking in other people's trauma. For eighteen months, five days a week and at times even outside of work hours, people who were in crisis would contact me and hand me the most painful moments of their lives.

My father has suffered a recurrence of cancer.

Then COVID.

My father then passed from being fairly healthy to death over a period of a month.

I lost friends.

I held my dog as he was having a stroke.

Put it all together and it sounds fake. Like bad writing. Too much tragedy for one person.

That was the story.

But what if you throw creativity into the mix?

I continued to write all the time.

I’ve been writing for at least fifteen years. Most of it’s about grief. Any time I try to write about something else, it falls apart.

The fact that you are reading this on my website means that you have access to the loglines of my scripts. Death is everywhere and so is grief. People lose not only their spouses, parents, siblings, and friends but also their futures, their identities, and the versions of themselves that they had thought they would become.

For many years I have thought that this was what had interested me.

I am considering the possibility that it was yet another reaction in the cascade.

Did I turn to creativity because I refused to let life beat me?

Or did I just need somewhere to hide, and made up worlds to crawl into?

In those worlds, I could be successful. My wife wouldn’t have to work herself to death. I’d have the cool clothes, the cool car, the cool house.

Things would work out, because I got to decide how the story ended.

After that I would go back to ordinary life.

I have reached the age of forty-three and am still in debt, the debt having started in 2008; I have not been free from debt for nearly twenty years, and the truth is that I generally didn't want to face up to the real world and so I kept putting it off until later.

Later always arrives.

Twenty-One Scripts in Forty Months

For the last three years I have written one thing following another.

In forty months twenty-one scripts were produced.

That does sound impressive; on certain days it does seem impressive, while on other days it looks more like a person sprinting because he is afraid of what might happen to him if he stops.

My health is generally all right, but I am on more medication now. I've lost my fitness, and anything that I didn't understand at once or that I was afraid to try was rejected.

I kept buying shit—books, clothes, records, whatever. Like maybe the missing part of me was hiding on a shelf somewhere.

I was chaos looking for peace.

All I wanted was to be left alone. Sleep. Write. I could get better.

Burnout’s always right there, breathing down my neck.

ADHD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or something different?

I started wondering if I had ADHD.

I kept forgetting things. Sometimes I’d have the same conversation with someone twice in ten minutes. Disorganized. Emotionally all over the place. Couldn’t focus at work or anywhere else.

Then I encountered CPTSD.

At first, I brushed it off. PTSD was for people who’d been to war, like my brother. Not me.

I’ve always been suspicious of labels. Part of me thinks they’re just excuses. A way to dodge responsibility or truths I don’t want to face.

The fact that you understand why you behave in a certain way does not mean that you are powerless to change it.

That matters.

The Algorithm Finds the Wound

In the movie Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams refers to a man who is afraid to be himself since he is terrified of what he might say.

In the programme The Bear, Carmy talks about a difficult and complicated past which led him to achieve the highest level of excellence in cooking at the cost of losing his relationship with his brother, a man who later died.

Next was a video on CPTSD.

It outlined a nervous system that has been trained to anticipate danger. It described dissociation, hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, and the fact that depression, anxiety, attention problems, and digestive issues can at times occur together with chronic trauma.

A YouTube video can’t diagnose me. Neither can a TV monologue. Or a movie scene.

But in that mess, something let me see myself.

Not excuse myself.

Recognize myself.

For years, I thought my mind and body were just broken gear I was stuck with. But maybe they just got used to danger. Maybe they were right to be on edge.

Just because my brain isn’t always screaming disaster doesn’t mean it’s broken.

Maybe it learned that disaster was a safe bet.

Pretty sure I’ve got a few things to bring up in therapy tonight.

What will occur when the shooting has ceased?

I’m still scared.

I have no clue what’s on the other side of figuring any of this out.

From the moment I was nearly seventeen until some time after my forty-second birthday, life was always aiming at me. I ended up learning how to duck, how to hide, and how to predict the bullet before I even heard the gun.

Now I’m wondering how much of what I think makes me ‘me’ is just scars from what happened.

Was writing one of the elements involved?

The ambition?
The isolation?
The humor?

Why do I always have to find meaning in pain?

The fact that something is an adaptation does not mean that it is false.

Creativity helped me escape, sure. But it also helped me survive. It gave shape to all the mess. Turned grief into stories other people could see themselves in.

The goal isn’t to destroy the person I became to survive.

I just want that part of me to realize he doesn’t have to keep watch every second.

I want to stop hiding.

And I’m tired of feeling like I’m always in someone’s crosshairs.

Healing starts when I get that those two things aren’t opposites. I can come out of hiding, slow. I can look around before I move. Being careful isn’t cowardice. Resting isn’t quitting.

I’m not safe yet.
But I can at least pretend that safety is something I could learn.