May 22, 2018
I’ve been hitting a wall lately on how I want to approach these next few blog posts.
Everything in my life is so intertwined that I can’t just pick a spot and start telling a story, so I think I’m just going to crank out a slew of posts all together and post them within a few days or weeks of each other and just update the posts when I get things published with links, etc.
So I’ll start off with this one you’re reading now.
Here were some of the events leading up to eventually me starting this blog…some of them may not be related, yet, somehow eventually it’ll all make sense as to who I am today and will hopefully lead me to be a better person.
- I was abused as a child – blog post to be written (I’ll insert links as they come out of my brain)
- I was part of an active shooter situation and survived (Washington Navy Yard shooting in 2013)
- My oldest son attempted suicide in 2015
- My wife, son, and I began going through therapy together as part of my son’s suicide attempt counseling, which eventually became therapy for me and my wife. The therapist, within a couple sessions, said I have some classic symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) possibly from the Navy Yard shooting.
- In the process of retiring from active duty, I moved my family to Iowa in 2016.
- I underwent a PTSD evaluation with a therapist, where I was diagnosed with a mild case of PTSD, but still have anxiety and anger issues at times.
- My anger issues began surfacing more and more when in 2017, I decided to saw screw it and called around for a Psychiatrist to give me some type of medication to help me deal with things.
- Eventually, I began seeing a therapist in late 2017 where I told her all I wanted was just a prescription for something to make me “just not so on edge all the time.”
- I never got a prescription, but began weekly visits with the therapist and my PTSD was determined to be caused by the trauma I experienced as a kid and eventually manifested through the Navy Yard shooting.
So as time goes on and as I get around to sitting down and typing, I’ll eventually have blog posts for each one of the above items, but this is basically how I got around to starting this blog for myself and anyone else who might be going through the same thing. I suspect there’s a lot more people who are in the same boat as me.
I usually have used my dry, sarcastic sense of humor to hide my true feelings..or even just buried my true feelings deep inside me. I remember in 2009, my wife found thing thing called Facebook and wanted me to set up an account for myself. I told her that nobody would want to hear what I have to say about my life, but I reluctantly set up my own account to get her to stop talking to me about it. Eventually, I found Facebook as a way to channel to vent my frustrations about work/life/etc. in my dry, sarcastic sense of humor. My “friends” found it funny…and would suggest to their friends that they “friend” me since everyone loved how funny I was. I guess I could bring up a lot of my old posts since I have archives of them and put them up here for shits and giggles, but I wasn’t trying to be funny. I was just being me.
Then people would expect me to be funny..and not just on Facebook either. I had to be funny/sarcastic in real life for them (a lot of my “friends” were co-workers and neighbors, etc.) So whenever I had something really important to discuss, people would just pass it off that Dave is just being funny and not really meaning anything by it.
So, eventually, I stopped posting on Facebook. And eventually deleted my account. I’ve since created a new account, but only for the purposed of a different venture that I have which I’ll explain at a later date.
I was completely off social media for a little over a year from 2016 – 2017. I realized that there was much more to life than posting funny quips or memes. But yet, I was still unhappy and angry. That’s when my plea for medication came out, especially when my own family was scared of even talking to me.
So now, I’m back on social media…and back to typing up my feelings, but this time through this blog. Where hopefully I can be taken a little bit more seriously and start with a clean slate and actually help people get through their issues too. I’m not an expert or a therapist or a doctor, but I have been through some crazy shit and sometimes I do wish I could take a pill every now and then to just take the edge off and chill out, but something is telling me that it would only be a band-aid. My problems will still be there waiting for me when the dose wears off.
I need to confront my demons in my brain and this blog is how I’ll be doing it. Instead of swallowing my feelings (yes, I can sometimes literally swallow my feelings down when I get sad or proud etc) I’ll be pouring them all out on here…through my keyboard therapy.
How do you deal with hard feelings? I’ve always been told that I’m stand-offish and robotic. I’m tired of being that way, and I’ve seen some improvement over the past couple of months with my therapist and through typing up these posts. I might venture in to videos and podcasts, but baby steps for me right now.