I

I've written a great deal over the years about my struggles with PTSD, or at least the discreet events which leave that lingering shadow. I struggle, as I look back over that writing, to find clear and cohesive statement about its effect on me as a person. I encounter often it feels this scattering perception of me, where the chaotic exterior gives way to sensuous and through-composed interior that people fall in love with, only to reveal the tangled knot of barbed wire and twine at the heart of me, this fraught wreckage surrounding a frightened child. I don't suppose that I am radically unique in having a frightful and tender core, to be clear, but people become enamored with a version of me I have to work very hard to construct. I am both that construct and the interior, plus that chaotic exterior; I have no illusions that one is true and the other's false. We are all, per Derrida, a collision of masks, floating on, per Sartre, the trembling surface of a perfect empty black hole.

C-PTSD is trickier, however. PTSD by the common definition is a disorder based on a discreet event and the surrounding elements. For me, they are instances of great and terrible physical violence or emotional ruin. In a lot of ways, these are the easiest to explain to people. You tell people about horrors done to your body or things you had strong plans to do to yourself and you can, if you are evil enough, if you lock eyes with someone while conveying your pain, watch them flinch inside. I am no longer certain whether it is a kindness or a curse to convey these things to other people. But regardless, the empathy for those specific incidences is often great, even if proper sympathy is preserved only for other people you find in the grave of self. C-PTSD however is defined by patterns of behavior rather than specific incidents; moreso, it is defined by negative patterns rather than affirmative ones, patterns where things did not occur rather than where they did. We struggle conceptual with the negative a great deal. Often we can only really see it as subtracting something that is already there, like having an item stolen. But a true negation is closer to something simply missing that should be there. A child born without lungs or without a mouth. But in the case of C-PTSD, it is love and emotional or physical safety. You feel PTSD from the person who hurt you. You feel C-PTSD from all the people who should have helped or protected you but did not.

I've been grappling with this intensely recently, but it is an issue that has persisted for a long time. My first encounter with people is often intense; I am like a hurricane, spilling love and focused attention by the bucketful, drenching you in my waters. For the longest time, this came natural to me, so natural that I not only didn't think it was inappropriate but actively believed it was better. I wasn't without a point, in fairness. We are all desperately lonely, and those who would tell you they aren't have simply mastered a kind of suppression that you can see comes out in their natural meanness toward others, often dressed up as being protective or having good boundaries. We suffer things, experience things, good and bad, and we yearn for kinship, be it in romance or friendship or camaraderie or any number of other loving configurations. In many instances, the most compassionate thing you can offer to someone is witness and connection. That I see you, the you that is and not the you that is projected, and that I am with you, without judgment, without desire except to sit here with you. This is, in fact, a holy thing. Quite literally, in fact; it is the fundament of, say, Christ's offering to the world, that a light will sit next to you in every darkness for no other reason than because it does not want you to be alone.

Part of the issue, mechanically at least, is that this kind of witness takes a lot out of me. It feels like I enter a rhapsody in negation, like the Buddha by the river, and I can take in so much of another person and give back so much in turn. But after, I feel exhausted, not emotionally but almost in a spiritual sense, that secondary type of fatigue that isn't as concrete or easily defined as emotional. My intensities do not fade but shift with the wind, and I depart and return as I follow them. It is about here that the disordered aspect begins to become apparent to me. You cannot offer something like that to someone and not stay. You cannot give a warmth like that and walk away. You have just made them more aware of the cold they commonly feel. It isn't out of malevolence and the sincerity of the mistake makes it easy for me to be forgiven for a time. But forgiveness is trickier than we often think and is a task of love we often fail at. In this instance, it is a failed forgiveness because I seem to aggravate the wound before it properly heals until, one day, it is just too much, and they leave.

I didn't understand why this would happen. To my eyes, I was trying as earnestly as I could to be there for others in a way that I longed for in my own darkness. My reward, it felt, was that when they became healthy, they would leave. On better days, in a sense of the word, I would accept this; I was a horse, come to show them the breadth of the world which had narrowed for them, and after seeing it they would depart to their new, fuller lives without me. This was not entirely untrue. I would meet so, so many people in the darkness of their lives and would work to be a nurturing spirit to them, with intense earnestness, and after they would drift away I would learn that they had become married, had children, followed a passion, and I could still see lingering traces of me in the version of themselves that they became. This would be my solace; I was a good thing, if not a sustainable one, and people would leave me but stronger and better than I had found them. It hurt, but you can only hurt so much when people thrive in the wake of you after you discover them at the limits of themselves.

It took an event that unfolded over the past six months for me to begin to reassess things in earnest. (That word recurs so much for me, someone with autism, and to whom falseness doesn't come easy save in jokes. It is my one saving grace.) In short, I fell not just in love with someone but deeply in love and they in turn fell in love with me. It did not sustain itself, however. To say this was painful would be an absurd understatement; I would convey it to them sometimes but every day, whether spoken or not, it was a wound and more pressingly a failure that stung me, drove me mad. I tore myself apart looking for an answer, one that wasn't as flippant or misogynistic as them being a bitch, which is untrue and cruel on top of unhelpful. I refuse to think of them that way. It did leave the lingering intensely painful mystery of how this could have happened, how something we both felt so sincerely and intensely ended up how it did. It was in the intense interrogation of that question that I returned to therapy, an event itself prompted by an unrelated mental breakdown from mostly disconnected elements. I was aware of OCD's increasingly obvious role in my life, for better and for worse. I was not adequately prepared to face C-PTSD again.

The briefest form of the thought is: My supposition that the issue was something within me and not within them appears abundantly true. I don't say that in a blaming sense; you do not ask for PTSD of any kind and you do not ask for its fruits. These are things planted in me. The problem that arises is that they are first my responsibility to discover and root out or contain as best as I can and second the responsibility of my loved ones to aid me with. That latter part is often contentious, but I hold firm to my idea that love is a commitment and not just a gift. We see people far too flippant with love, that it is something defined by when people make you feel good and not a statement that you will be with them even in their darkness and that you will strive for them for no other sake than them. It is that latter sense of deep camaraderie which is to me the hallmark of love.

II

Deleuze's most famous work is Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the two-volume work he co-authored with Guattari, but his best work is easily Difference and Repetition. This is made clear to me by how much of his later work is contained in germinal form in that earlier text of his, with the mechanics of his thoughts made manifest in D&R which would later be applied to fields as disparate as economics, psychology and art theory by him. It's also a text I come to find in my hand often; it sits on the bookshelf next to my computer, within arms reach at all times.

The key thesis of D&R is, per its name, a definition of difference and repetition and an exploration of their mechanics. To theoryheads out there, this instantly makes us salivate; to normal or perhaps mentally healthy people, it is somewhere between boring or unclear what the point even is. Theory that sounds more general and almost impossibly vague is, when written by the right and most toothsome of thinkers, some of the most profound work we've ever produced as people, requiring as it does a synthesis of so many fields to make manifest. The only thing comparable to theoryheads is a text on something so inscrutably granular that you wonder how they could get 200 pages of theory about such a finite topic, leading to insane and sometimes even uncalled for depths of thought.

In a sense of things, the goal of existence, if such a thing can be stated, is repetition, per the text. Repetition is the highest form of being; everything in all of existence is endlessly singular and riven with identity, so to occur twice is so fundamentally wild that it is the ultimate affirmation of being. It is also an impossibility, at least in common senses. Take a river, for example. If you know the idiom, you know where I am going, but if you were to step in the river, remove your foot, then step again, did you step in the same river? The water is different now, flowing elsewhere; likewise your foot is different, already wet now, having kicked up dirt or sand from before. Two cups of water may look identical, may even have been taken from the same source, but they will contain different bacteria, have a different number of atoms, be contained in glasses with different flaws and fractures. The world is, in a real sense, endlessly differenciating.

Note there the use of "differenciating" with a C instead of a T. This is a shorthand Deleuze uses: differentiation is, per Deleuze, when one thing becomes another thing, like ingredients becoming a meal; differenciation meanwhile is the thing in the midst of changing, when it is in that primordial betweenness of identities and has not yet, definitionally, settled into its new identity. The easiest way to explain this difference is with evolutionary biology. An early fish, the first form of complex life we are aware of, is obviously different from a mouse in ways that would be condescending to enumerate. This means, however, that there is a midway point, something not-quite-fish and not-quite-mouse, half of each. A chimaera. Except this is not so. That lay concept of evolution sets us up for that common flippant question by creationists of when the half-man, half-monkey walked and why haven't we found it. There is no generation in which something becomes a new species; it is always produced by parents able to breed or reproduce and is itself able to do the same. So how, then, do we get these differences? Differentiation is the taking of two elements separated by time and noting how they have changed, past tense. Differenciation is the continuum of change from that first element to the last, where at no point is there a discreet change in species. The slowness of evolution captures well that shocking difference between differentiation and differenciation. The only thing better is the shift conceptually between arithmetic and calculus, where suddenly the use of infinitesimals and infinite summations over a continuum radically shift how we approach mathematics.

Applied to identity, this split can be seen by comparing the you of childhood versus the you of now and then thinking of the continuous span of time. Unless something wild has happened in your crazy ass life, you are not the same type of person you were when you were ten. Maybe you even are trying to return to that childlike sense of self. But intervening years and experience complicates matters, enriches them whether for better or for worse; even your supposed return to that former self comes with the additional context of all this new information. As a result, the same action in youth that made you shift yourself one way now causes you to shift another way. Learning in this model is not a matter of getting better information as much as it is adding new information and potentially overwriting old information. Meanwhile, day by day, we often fail to see a change in self in such a dramatic fashion. Sometimes, something happens, a traumatic point or a point of intense joy, and the course of our lives shift. But other times we go long stretches and the redirection is slowly accrued rather than occurring all at once. It is a difference, in a sense, between a Lemarckian eruptive differenciation versus a Darwinian differenciation of accretion.

We can apply this even more granularly to the psyche, the overall mental map of a person. If I give you a rose every single day, how do you feel? What do you feel on day one, day one hundred, and day 10,000? The action is the same, a gift of a rose, but the very real change occurs outside the frame; when you receive your hundredth rose, you carry in your mind and body the memory of those previous receipts, and by the 10,000th your consideration both emotionally and practically on the appearance of another rose is likely quite different. This is because the mind's greatest function is the curation of a contextual web. Our brains are made up of numerous sub-processes, all of which communicate with each other in more or less complex ways. Our memory processing, for instance, does not meaningfully communicate with our sense of time but does communicate with our amygdala for emotional response, which is why you can remember an event and feel an emotional response almost as though it is occurring in the moment. When that emotional response is mitigated or lessened over time, it is in large part due to involving more of the contextualizing web of the brain to attenuate that response and move it in other directions. PTSD, including C-PTSD, is most often a structural response we can measure in the brain of functions coming from the limbic system, the part of our body that controls the release of hormones like cortisol, which tenses us to prepare for stressors, and adrenaline, which dulls pain and prompts us to be able to fight or flee. The fight-or-flight response is a chemically measurable one triggered by a part of the brain we do not have direct control over. These disorders are, roughly speaking, an over-firing of those real and necessary processes at inappropriate times.

This is a case of the brain attempting, in good faith and with good intention, a repetition. The pattern-seeking part of the brain records information about pain received, be it the intensities of the discreet in PTSD or the complexities of repeated patterns in C-PTSD. When it senses a repetition coming of those events, whether right or wrong, the brain that has been traumatized kicks in defense mechanisms, those fight-or-flight responses or, commonly for me, an intensity of emotional anxiety that can leave me dissembling internally while overcommunicating with extreme intensity externally. It feels for me like the emotional safety I have fought so hard for, my ability to be protected and loved, is about to go away, and I have to fight fiercely to keep it around, to prove myself worthy of it, to beg by action and not by words for you not to leave me and not to confirm that awful voice inside of my head that says I will be abandoned and that when it happens I will deserve it. The problem there is obvious; the repetition often does not exist because repetitions so rarely exist. The sole space where we see repetition, really, is in conceptual space. That's why we can form theory about conceptual objects and their transformation, be it genres of music or forms of governance or disorders and structures of the brain, all of which are by their nature linguistically derived concepts and not material objects even if they reference strongly the material. Materiality is always differenciating; this atom is not that atom, and it never will be. This is definitional in turn of maladaptive responses; your body, not just your mind, is trying to respond to an event it thinks is happening but isn't really and the resulting trouble comes from the difference between the two.

III

As I have said elsewhere, language is a form of anxiety. This is a notion I pull from Derrida, said slightly differently in his work but applicable here. The root concept of language is important for this. We tend to conceive of language as spoken or written utterances meant to convey information. This is a real form of language, but far from its entirety. We need to focus on what speech and writing are, what it means to be written; writing, at its basest form, is one object conveying another. This is why emojis count as linguistic structures; the picture of a smiling face conveys happiness, at least in its simplest form. A word, then, can be considered any object that conveys a second form. In this sense, the brain is a language-machine, but using a language of neurotransmitters and neurological pulses along axons. Grammar is just the structure of a language (hence also why no language act can be without grammar, just without a grammar that perhaps we immediately recognize). The grammar of the brain speaking to itself chemically does not cohere to, say, English, and doesn't map easily to things like nouns or verbs. But just because a grammar does not approach the act of language the same way doesn't mean that it isn't language. It just means it isn't isomorphic in a simple way; the similarity in structure is not deep in the sense of multiple layers all lining up but deep instead in that the layers that do line up are buried quite far down with little immediate similarity up top.

Language, like memory and the psyche, is itself a contextual web. Someone from America saying the N word absolutely means or is invoking a specific thing that someone from the Sentinelese is not. The same utterance, the same word, can shift drastically depending on these contextualizing elements. That's because the grammar of a language extends beyond its obvious borders. Epistemology begins where lay linguistics fails (academic approaches to both fuse them so smoothly that there is not a strong differentiation between the two). The study of a grammar includes a study of the cultural context of an utterance, the psychological context of an utterance and the experiential context. From outside to inside, that's the overall cultural milieu, the overall psyche of the individual speaking, and then the precise moment and circumstance of what is being said. These are all grammars that apply to the eventual common linguistic object of the sentence with its composite parts. It is also here that we see difference and repetition rear their heads again.

Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" concerns its title character, a young French writer by the name of Pierre Menard, writing a new novel from scratch that happens to be an exact replica of Don Quixote down to the exact lettering and formatting. Per the story, this is wholly unintentional, with Menard having never read the story before but by sheer coincidence conceiving of and writing a perfectly identical novel. The similarities include that he writes his novel in the common Spanish of the 14th century, an era he is far removed from and a language he does not speak. The story explores how his book is in certain ways more of a masterpiece than Cervantes' own; after all, Cervantes wrote in the language of his time, an easy feat, while Menard had to invent from whole cloth the exact language of centuries earlier in a different nation, had to come to by modern imagination the images that tantalized people of then. It functions as an exploration of how even seeming repetition, the exact same object repeated later, has inherent and fundamental differenciation occur, where the contextualizing grammar of its author and the time of creation shifting in a very real way how we go about understanding the final object.

This is also a good snapshot of the problem of the linguistic of lovebombing. For the longest time, my understanding of it was of lovebombing as a deliberate manipulation, deploying extreme feelings to gain access to someone so you can do what you wish. I had no such motivation; my entreaties were sincere and heartfelt and the desire I felt to fill the hole in my heart formed by the tumors of neglect was bone-deep and not meant as a trick. But I failed to comprehend a linguistic component to this. See, in an objective sense, Menard's Quixote is vastly different from Cervantes' own. But in a granular sense, cut away from the context that emerges only when you know of both and their contextual webs, they are identical. A common reader may not even notice the authorial change, chalking it up to a publisher quirk or the real name of Cervantes, as that was a pen name for the writer. In doing, the very real differences between the two forms disappear and they are unified again. So too is the experience outside of the head of my actions to lovebombing.

But this also touches on another aspect of Derrida, that of the nature of the thing itself versus the name. The name, as we conceive it, contains and represents the thing. But the fuzziness baked into this act is very real; when I say "dog", we both may think of the same general thing but the specifics will differ if we are asked to draw them. In most instances, these differences are minor and inconsequential, but for increasingly important topics, the sensitivity begins to skyrocket and those minor differences can differentiate into a wholly different object entirely. The thing itself, it turns out, is inaccessible in its perfection. This is as true of the potted plant in front of you, the mind of your dog or the true intentions and feelings of your loved ones. This very real nihilism, an unbreachable wall, does have some respite; the name. We arrive back at the conundrum we started in, afresh with awareness of why language is an anxiety. Anxiety, you see, is a form of hope. When you are resigned to death and the silencing pains of that void, you feel no anxiety, accept perfectly the ugly and vile coming thing. Anxiety exists because we want, somewhere inside, something better. Language is a failed means of communication, always missing and mutilating, but it is all we have. There is no making it inside the machine. There is just sending postcards between the walls and trying our best to read all the language.

This ties into, in fact, why I tend to send tidal waves of words at people. The common wisdom is not to double-text; I will often send four, combinations of short lines and paragraphs, thoughts upon thoughts upon thoughts. This urge at its best is why I am a writer and a novelist, obsessed with charting the true shape of a thought regardless of how big or small that might wind up being, wanting to cover each surface perfectly with paper. At its worst, that deepset anxiety of mine, on that predates but attenuates language, causes the anxiety of language to enflame and consume whole relationships. I have watched my shaking hands put to death relationships I'd thought, I'd hoped, stronger than my weakness, only to be proven wrong. Sometimes it is the fault of the other person, unable to withstand the faults I go out of my way to prepare people for, as best as I can. But sometimes, as in this case, it is not the other person's failure. She endured much, and endured it out of love; it was my own blindness, trapped within my anxiety, that tore away at things. The only refreshment is that the clarity of this fact makes therapy easier in a way. It is a focused endeavor. I carry hope and anxiety, that I may not be abandoned, but the work to be done ultimately is on myself.

IV

My C-PTSD comes from horrible things that were done to me. being hogtied, being branded, being taped to a chair and beaten, being stripped near-naked and kicked while crying, but also from the fact that these things were allowed to happen. It makes one trauma become multiple. The pain of the event pluralizes into the pain of questioning whether I deserve that pain which becomes eventually the anxiety that I already deserve it and just don't know, that a punishment or deprivation is coming and everyone will agree that it's correct and for the best. It makes it hard for me to deal with what people term as consequences because it often doesn't compute to me why it is happening even if everyone else understands. It feels instead like a reaffirmation that I'm too evil to deserve compassion and too stupid to understand why. That sense of doom, that it is a repeating cycle I will not be allowed to escape, drives much of my suicidality and engorges the rage that underpins it. Suicide for me is most often not a resignation or sorrow but a rage, a desire to hurt not the people who hate me but the people who love me but do not restore me. The problem with that is obvious; it is a distorted image, one shaped by the pain I am in and which, allowed to achieve itself, would injure people permanently that I do truly love.

This leaves in me a ferocious desire for love. When I find a sense of kinship, it means more to me than just shared interests and fun conversations. (I am aware it means more to most people as well, but allow me this contrivance.) The negation I mentioned, that the people who should have protected me from these things did not and left in me the question of what about me made me not worthy, what about their lives made their stress matter more than my extreme pain, creates this rotting hole in my head that yearns for love. Something inside of me says that if I can give the love I wanted to receive in that deep darkness of my most hideous abuse, maybe I can get that love back. Maybe I can be worthy of being loved. The trouble with this isn't just that most people are unresponsive to it but also that it places people who are not responsible to this trauma on the hook for it. The person I fell so hard for did not remove that sense of emotional security from me. What's worse is they were, and maybe still are, willing to address that sense of lacking security, but the other thing that happened to me got in the way. See, nature abhors a paradox but the psyche creates them compulsively. As much as part of me is hungry for love, another part feels like the other shoe is going to drop and I am going to be abandoned, proven wrong, beaten down again. So I arrive at the quantum entanglement of commitment, where I can neither move forward nor back. And it is here that I accidentally strung her until it was too much.

The problem is apparent to me as outside of the incident that made it become clear to me again. The traumas I endured and carry that provoked these actions so vastly predate the thing that made them occur to me as needing reprocessing that holding angst toward the person at the center of those false repetitions is obviously foolish. Very rarely are people evil enough to excite your trauma deliberately, especially not people that care for you in the way I was cared for. Which means the fault, per se, lays in the trauma itself for existing. The solution is simple; a dedicated and thorough approach to that pain, to excavate and reprocess those wounds so that they are more easily contained again. That hunger for love in me is a hunger as well for safety. I was allowed to be hurt in torturous ways without someone to come save me. I want most for someone to do so. I want to be worthy of being defended and protected. I want my pain to matter and for people to help me when I cry out. I do not want to be told all the reasons help can't come and its unfair to ask. That's the child-wound. When I break something and cannot repair it, this is what is excited; that I am an idiot child who breaks what is good and thus deserves what is bad. It drives a frightful anxiety, one that becomes language, overwhelming presence and inscrutable departure. I want to be safe to love.

What I have learned sitting with this is that it is a vast hunger for love I feel, not romance or sex but love. Love is the care for another. It is the willingness and drive to sacrifice in order to protect someone else, to lean down and make them smile and laugh when they are hurting, to sit with them when they need and stick up for them when others come knocking. That it takes the shape of romance or sex on occasion isn't what makes it love; it is that devotion that does. It is that love which I am terrified of losing, of squandering. It has happened to me in life before, people who spoke honeyed words to me about my worth departing me and telling others I'm a huge piece of shit without so much as informing me they were getting upset. My social trauma due to autism underscore those earlier traumas encoded as C-PTSD. But I don't want to control or possess someone. I want to be held and allowed to cry; I want to be allowed to fall asleep in that peace; I want my presence not to be a threat or a burden. I struggle, coincidentally, with opening up emotionally to the people in my life. That deepseated sense that if I speak about my pain then people will leave exists to me in my flesh. It is in words that I am freed. I am without containing body, stripped of mutilating gender, allowed to be thoughts and feelings and language. Unlike others, I have no anxiety with being language. In fact, I am better this way. The me that people learn to love is the me of language. The me that they walk away from is the me of flesh. Ironically, one of the things I seek in therapy is to dim my own light. I am a floodlight affixed to a neck; I either open my shutters and burn you with the light or shut them an burn myself. It never dulls. I cannot be safe without quieting that intensity. I cannot be something difficult to despise and walk away from until I become dimmer. Quieter.