Healing Trauna: Aperspectives And Attitudes 13

Now that I know that my diagnosis of PTSD was, if not bogus, then quite exaggerated, I do have to be prepared to live up to this claim. Or enjoy dining on several generous portions of crow with humble pie a la mode for dessert. Accepting the recovery propaganda of recovery through small steps while expecting triggers and occasional relapses, I rather persuaded myself that I would always remain, if not ill, then not completely well. Buying unconsciously into workplace stigma, since there is a tacit, embedded assumption that mental health peer support workers are going to be somewhat unwell, or, damaged goods, I became semi-reclusive. Often I felt afraid of going out in the evenings or late afternoons, for fear of being triggered by all the stupid crowd behaviour in my downtown neighbourhood. This nearly occurred yesterday. While on my lovely and long daily outing, I ended up unable to source the coffee beans I was wanting to buy. Stopping to chat for fifteen or twenty minutes with a friendly rich woman out raking the leaves outside her mansion also persuaded me to postpone stopping at the local No Frills. I thought I'd go tomorrow (now, today) instead. So, I arrived at home, tried to live with the likelihood of no tomatoes with my dinner, nor coffee in the morning, and simply got on with things. Until...I could see reflected in some of the windows outside the colour of the sunset, and decided, to hell with it, it's just 4:45, I'm going to go out and look at the sunset, and while I'm out, I'm going to the nearest café on Davie Street where I can source the coffee beans of my desiring, stop and buy the damn tomatoes, and some fruit too, put up with the idiots on the sidewalk, and see what kind of tailspin this sends me in. I was out for around forty minutes. There were idiots on the crowded sidewalk. They didn't trigger me, they were just annoying. It's just that I had internalized stigma. I think all the idiots on the sidewalk had always been only annoying, but somehow I had transformed normal irritability into a trigger for imagined mental health symptoms. I did think of going home by a quieter route, but this felt like the coward's way out, so I walked back on Davie Street. Basically, I enjoyed being out. I quietly laughed off the idiots, and got home okay. Unwinding was easy, I wrote an affectionate email to one of my Latino friends while cooking dinner, relaxed for the evening and went to sleep at around 9:30. I slept beautifully with interesting dreams. I woke early, just past 5 am. And the sunset yesterday was lovely. The coffee this morning was pretty good, too. Peruvian, Fair Trade, Organic.