survival

You’re so young

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

But you’re so young.

I heard that exact phrase at least two dozen times over the last two weeks.

It wasn’t the first time I heard it. I’m sure as hell it won’t be the last. But hearing it over and over and over again day in and day out made me want to scream out loud. I didn’t, of course. I only screamed on the inside.

I know that the people saying it weren’t saying it to be negative, but they didn’t realize that every time I heard that phrase, it was like a tiny jab to my already damaged heart. I know I’m young. You don’t need to remind me. I know I’m sick. You really don’t need to remind me.

I can’t blame them, though. I’m 31 years-old with a disease that affects the elderly. They see my COPD diagnosis and they don’t understand it. And then they want to ask questions. How much did you smoke? How long were you a smoker? I can never seem to tell them I only started smoking after I got sick. I can never explain to them how I grew up and lived in a (literal) toxic environment, how I spent most of the last 17 years in and out of hospitals. It wasn’t just the cigarettes that gave me COPD. It was my life.

It’s hard for many people to realize just how much trauma affects the body. I see it all the time. I’ve never met a person with PTSD who wasn’t struggling with at least one type of physical problem. The effects of trauma aren’t just on the mind.

My body started giving up long ago. It wasn’t just about the broken bones, the bruises, the damage it withstood on a regular basis. Every last bit of energy is spent trying to survive. After awhile, the body can’t fight anymore. There’s no way to win the war. So things break down in ways they shouldn’t, way earlier than they should. Broken mind, broken body.

But most people don’t understand the connection. They don’t want to hear about the trauma, about the battle you endured that brought you to this point. They want hard facts spoken in brevity.

I don’t bother with facts. I don’t bother with the truth. Just bad luck, I guess. That’s what I tell them. As if luck has been the one and only cause of my destruction. Luck took away the cartilage in my knee. Luck caused me to get COPD. And now luck has led me to a heart problem that has yet to be solved.

Fuck luck. Fuck genetics. I want people to realize the connection to trauma. I want them to stop telling me I’m so young, and start asking how I really ended up here. I want somebody to stand up and realize that I am breaking, not because of luck, not because of genetics, and not all because of my own doing. There was and is something more here.

I want to be able to tell them the truth. My heart is weak because it’s tired. Thirty one years of my life has been constant stress and fear. I’m surprised it still beats at all, to be honest. Why hasn’t it given up on me yet? Why does it try to quit and then get knocked back into beating?

And just when I thought it was over, the appointment was done, the surgery was done, the questions were done — it happened again.

The manager of cardiac unit called me the following day to check and see how I was doing post-surgery. I told her everything was okay (except for some mild pain), and then there was an awkward silence. Then I heard her again. Do you mind if I ask?  You’re so young, why did you have this done? We’ve only ever had to do this with older patients.

I really wanted to say wait, you mean not every 30-something has a heart monitor implanted into their chest? Instead I told her the basic passed out a few times, they found an arrhythmia, completely downplaying the fact that I passed out way more than a few times and I had a collection of issues that included more than just an arrhythmia.

She’s right. All these people are right. I am too goddamn young to be dealing with this shit.

But I am dealing. I am living life as if nothing is wrong. Because that’s how I learned to live.

And that’s what got me here.

Glorifying parents

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I was checking some random news stories on my Facebook this morning out of boredom.  I came across the story of an 18 year-old who witnessed a woman in danger of being run over on a highway and came to her rescue.  I thought to myself “What a great man, with courage and bravery.  He made the right choice.”  Then I read through the comments on the news story and came across multiple people congratulating the man’s parents on doing a great job raising him.  What?  What did this man’s parents do?  They weren’t in the car.  He didn’t call them and ask what he should do.  This man made his own decision.  So why are we thanking his parents and not thanking him?

By that same logic, do we blame the parents when someone does something absolutely unthinkable?  Not that I have seen.  No one blamed the parents of Adam Lanza when he shot up an elementary school and killed so many innocent people.  No one blames the parents of murderers or rapists.  I don’t blame my mother’s parents for the traumatic abuse she inflicted upon me.  She made that decision. Just like the 18 year-old man in the story above made his decision.  No one else did that for them.

Unfortunately this is a common occurrence.  I’ve had it happen to me personally more times than I can count.  Whenever I won academic awards in school, people would tell my parents they had done a great job parenting.  Excuse me?  I won the award.  Not my parents.  Neither of them did anything.  They didn’t help me with my homework.  They didn’t encourage me to study or do better.  I chose to do that on my own because I needed something positive to hold on to.  When teachers told my parents how kind and driven to help others I was, they always included “you’re doing a great job as parents.”  No.  No they weren’t.  If these people only knew the horrors I was living through.

I was parenting myself.  I had to parent myself.  The only good thing my parents ever did for me was showing me everything NOT to do.  My mother never wanted me to succeed; I wanted that for myself.  My mother and father never showed me how to be caring and compassionate; that came from never wanting others to feel the same pain and despair I had felt all of my life.

I can’t tell you how I ended up becoming the person that I am, considering what I came from.  What I can tell you is that some of the most kind, compassionate, and exceptional people I have ever met have had the shittiest upbringings.  We raised ourselves to be everything our parents were not.  We raised ourselves because that’s what we had to do to survive.

Stop assuming that everything a person is, is because of their parents.  It is so invalidating to do something good, only to have someone else be recognized for it.  You wouldn’t want that for yourself, so don’t do it to others.