Homewood had a sign over the door out of the residence area that said “trust the process”. It wasn’t a quote from a success story.

Trust. I’m just going to have to spell it out insultingly bluntly because nice is wasted sometimes.

Trust is my problem with a lot of what I can’t do. I don’t trust. Very few close personals aside, I don’t trust, and it takes me a very long time to reach that point where I can. After my years of working with the chronically distressed addiction and mental health population I learned that anything is possible at anytime, from good to bad to downright nasty, and the less well I know you the more likely that seems to me. So, when I’m trying to absorb information from you or work alongside you and I don’t know you my brain is just a constant barrage of threat echo-location calls while I watch your hands, your feet, your posture, your demeanor and analyze your verbal intonations for any sign of anger or danger. Historically I also heard and absorbed the words as well but now that’s not so much the case for me, which is where it starts falling apart with education.

When I became a paramedic, I became a part of a world whose words weren’t just a bunch of shit for the first time. My years showed me on numerous occasions that the folks who had my back in the world at large were other first responders, literally at times of safety and life threat. We could be a bunch of antagonizing twats to each other like siblings but no Joe Q. Public was going to do something to any of us without a fight from the rest.

Flash forward to PTSD and addiction recovery. I have surprised some by being okay with co-workers while having more difficulties with other relations and strangers. To each their own. Aside from my patient zero situation co-workers had nothing to do with my traumas. I wanted to approach re-integrating into my original workplace because I still felt I belonged and that my back was still had. Once there I noticed I felt safer than in other places, and the anxiety, while higher, was more manageable. I struggled significantly to get to those locations and to be at but outside of them, however it was paying off, slowly but surely.

It was not to be. The properly credentialed alphabet soup community who were assessing me listened, agreed with my path, plan and reasoning and then recommended what they felt best. Permanent restrictions. Then wsib and my union informed me that those restrictions were severe for ems and their permanence meant I couldn’t do any of the jobs I had thus far worked towards because those were only for temporary situations. I could pick up garbage though. I would now have to retrain on top of it. Add in a healthy dose of finding out no one thought I could or should return anyway but said little or nothing because I have to believe in myself and you’re pretty much caught up to speed. Ironically, somehow constantly trying the best I could but often struggling and verbalizing that made me a negative person, even though I thought not giving up and always pushing forward actually meant I had maintained hope of success the whole time.

I don’t know why I felt it insulting to bluntly verbalize it. Maybe it all just seemed so obvious a component of PTSD this whole time it shouldn’t need asked or said still. Quite simply, it’s trust. Chances are, I just don’t trust you, and from my perspective’s history that’s for good reason. Not trusting you makes me anxious about you and what you want. The more of you there are in a given place, the worse that gets (ever been in a club with organ-pounding sub-bass and 500 people on stimulants who don’t want you there surrounding you while watching you work on an overdosing patient? That one, for example, is experiential; it doesn’t come from book-learning earnings).

I’ve had some lapses in the name of recovering and moving on. Those lapses have mostly (but not all) proven to make matters worse. That all don’t prove to be that way is the thread I hang on to. I need to take another leap of faith on trust again but I’m funding this relationship so those ones usually go better.

Until next time, shove recovery up yer arse!