What It's Like to Live With PTSD: A Poem
Like so many others who live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or other chronic illness, people often ask, “what does it feel like?” I wrote this poem to explain what it feels like for me to live with PTSD.
My PTSD
It doesn’t matter if it’s cold, hot, sunny, snowing, or raining
There is no telling when it’s going to strike.
Are they alive or dead?
Is that pain real or echoes from pain long ago that
Resurface with a memory?
It’s like being held hostage by your mind
Thinking that today would be the day I am free.
I look like everyone else
I know the difference between right and wrong.
Yet in my head, I sometimes can’t remember
The last ten minutes of my life, or what day, year or time it is.
Are those smells real or is that a smell from a place and time
when I was being held against my will?
Am I really hearing the sounds of helicopters, planes, cicadas or birds
Or is that the sound coming from a place that no longer exists and
Should never be talked about?
I want so much to be like everyone else.
So I will keep pulling myself up the rope,
Out of the clutches of PTSD and all the skeleton hands of the past that
Keep trying to pull me down.
I am like everyone else only my job is to live so I can live.
For now, that’s all I can ask of myself if I am going to have a future.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
Alexis Rose began her remarkable healing journey in 2009. Sparked by a family tragedy, she began to piece together, for the first time, a personal history of abuse and trauma. Supported by her spirituality and writing, as well as family and friends, she has profoundly grown and changed over the years. While learning to live with the effects of her trauma, and working with the deficits caused by PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), she has co-authored three inspirational books. Her newest book, Untangled, speaks to the courage, resilience, and triumph over her unimaginable hardship. Alexis is an experienced speaker on the topics of living with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. She is also an active blogger who writes about PTSD, Mental Health, and Trauma, with a bit of poetry sprinkled in along the way.
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