The common conversation this blog usually starts is about how I missed my calling becoming a paramedic because I can string a few words together. I’m still stumbling over that one; what am I supposed to think of having my career, my major culmination-of-adolesence symbol-of-my-adulthood life achievement labelled a mistake? Has it been a mistake all along or did it only become one after I got sick and had to explain myself? Was everyone who discouraged the decision throughout my formative years right? Should I have listened? A chain-smoking drug using extreme metal fan serving his community? Fucking ridiculous I know. My father even thought so. What on earth was I thinking?

I did it though. I wasn’t going to be weak and irrelevant in adulthood too. No more fear, no more powerlessness. I stood up and grabbed ambition by the throat. I put on a uniform and had proof of purpose attached to my shoulders in a graduation ceremony the department held. Take that life.

When I was four I would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. My mother was dead, my father had re-married. My step-mother became sick of this happening every night. One night she forbade my father and sister from going in my room to see me. I would stop the nightly crying when I realized no one was coming. I don’t know how many nights it took but I stopped. She was proud of herself, and would tell me about how she stopped me from crying every night when I got older.

I remember a dream I would have around that same age where I would be laying in my bed before sleep and I would get pulled away from my room into darkness and nothingness, further and further until my room was a speck of light in the distance. I was fucking terrified by it. I would always suddenly wake up alert and back in my room as if I had never been asleep before the speck fully disappeared. I don’t know if this was what caused the nuisance crying. I can only remember waking up terrified but staying quiet to avoid trouble.

‘Tough love’ was all the rage back in the eighties for people like my stepmother. My parents learned about it from the social workers in the sessions they went to with my ill-behaved mohawked punk teenaged sister. Thing is I’m not sure that was the answer to the inconvenience of our presence. My stepmother once told me when I was nine or ten that I was the reason her and my father could never have any fun. She told me lots of things growing up. “You’re smarter than this”. “You have no initiative and you’re going to be a loser”. “You’re lazy”. “What could you possibly have to be stressed out about”? I also heard a lot about how well behaved and useful other peoples kids were. Didn’t matter how much or how well I did. The parental grass was always greener. I could always have done more or better. I don’t think tough love was about discipline so much as it was a way for parents to feel okay with being assholes and doing nothing to understand their kids.

Isn’t life funny. The only place you can escape your shadow is in the dark until the day you turn around and realize that the dark is just your shadow and you never escaped shit. I’m supposed to put my uniform on sometime this week as part of my OT homework. I looked at it for a few minutes and instead showered and wrote this. Blogging seemed less crazy than pacing and crying in a uniform while talking to myself. I know it’s symptoms of an injury and not craziness. Same as smelling burnt flesh when I stared at the uniform shirt in the closet. Calling it crazy comes from the anger and frustration of having PTSD symptoms and from having to admit that I’m human and that I feel and hurt.