This post discusses suicidal thoughts, Complex PTSD, nightmares, anxiety, hypervigilance and trauma

September is complex PTSD awareness month and suicide prevention month.

Apparently, complex PTSD awareness month is a thing? But I didn’t get a letter through the post or anything… bit rude, really.

But jokes aside, this month feels personal to me because I don’t just know what suicidal thoughts are, I have lived with them for most of my life. Since I was around seven years old. And when I say they are always there, I truly mean it.

They are not necessarily always overwhelming and loud, or something I am actively fighting every second of the day, but they are there. Some days they are quieter, even deafening.

I have learnt to manage them; I have learnt what makes them worse and I have learnt how to carry on with my day while my brain is telling me I shouldn’t be here.

I think people struggle to understand that.

When I say, “I have suicidal thoughts all the time,” it sounds alarming.

When I say that even being happy can trigger them it probably sounds completely fucking insane. But that is my reality.

Happiness can feel so overwhelming, so unfamiliar, that my brain doesn’t know what to do with it. So, naturally, it’s response is you should kill yourself. And it is difficult to explain how bizarre that is; to experience something that is supposed to be good, something that everyone tells you is a positive experience, and have your brain respond as though something is terribly wrong.

I don’t think that means I necessarily want to die every time I’m happy. I think it means that these thoughts have been part of my internal narrative for so long that they can appear even when they don’t particularly make sense. That is what I mean when I say they are always there; they don’t always have the same intensity, or mean the same thing, but they exist and honestly? Living with that is exhausting.

There is a strange kind of weight that comes with having to manage your own mind, that others won’t get unless they have been through it. It’s not just being sad, it’s not just having a bad day, it is knowing that at any second your brain can turn on you. And there is something indescribable about having to protect yourself… from yourself.

Trying to stay alive with a mind that is trying to kill you.

Alongside all of that is complex PTSD.

I was diagnosed with complex PTSD earlier this year and, in some ways, the diagnosis gave me language for things I had experienced but not fully understood: the hypervigilance, the constant anxiety, the persistent feeling that something is about to happen, the fear, the inability to properly relax, the feeling of never being safe, and the nightmares.

The fucking nightmares.

My brain has never been particularly interested in letting me have a peaceful night’s sleep. Every night, I am dragged back into experiences and emotions that I don’t consciously choose to revisit. Sometimes, they even have symbolic narratives that seem even more traumatising than the actual event.

I wake up carrying remnants of things that occurred when I was asleep; disorientated, anxious, frightened, exhausted before the day has even begun.

I spend the rest of the day trying to feel safe, trying to convince my nervous system that I’m okay, trying to manage the anxiety and hypervigilance. Trying to function. And then night returns and my brain decides to retraumatise me because, apparently, I don’t have enough problems while conscious.

That’s the reality of complex PTSD.  

It’s not just a diagnosis written on a medical record or just knowing that something happened to me and giving it a name, it is living with what my brain and body learnt from what I experienced. It’s constantly scanning, constantly awaiting, constantly trying to figure out if I’m safe.

It’s feeling scared when I don’t necessarily know what it is that I’m scared of, it’s waking up from nightmares that feel terrifyingly present, it’s being exhausted from being on guard.

Put suicidal thoughts alongside that and it creates a horrible contradiction at the centre of everything: I want to feel safe, but my brain doesn’t let me.

I want to rest but my brain keeps watch, constantly anticipating the next thing.

I want to feel okay but feeling okay is so foreign that my brain interprets it as something seriously wrong.

I want to live but my mind tells me not to.

That is the weight of it. Not a dramatic moment, not an inspirational story about overcoming adversity, not necessarily a crisis. Just the exhausting, mundane reality of managing thoughts and symptoms that have become part of my everyday life.

There are days when I function; I write, I study, I talk to people, I laugh, but none of those things mean the thoughts have disappeared.

I guess that is what I wish people understood about living with chronic suicidal thoughts: you don’t always look suicidal. You can laugh while carrying something heavy, you can make plans while thinking about dying, you can be happy while having suicidal thoughts, you can want to live and still have thoughts telling you that you should die. Those things can exist at the same time, and they do.

I’m not writing this because I have conquered suicidal thoughts.

I’m not writing this because I have neatly resolved my complex PTSD.

I haven’t.

I’m writing this because I wanted to talk about what living with them can actually look like.

It can look like getting up in the morning after yet another nightmare, acting as if nothing happened.

It can look like feeling unsafe, everywhere and with everyone.

It can look like having thoughts you don’t want and learning how to manage them.

It can look like laughing at something and, somewhere in the background, still having thoughts that you would be better off dead.

Sometimes staying alive isn’t an act of courage.

Sometimes it’s just fucking hard.

And sometimes that is all there is to say about it.

I am still navigating how to live with a brain that has spent so many years trying to protect me, but actually seriously hurt me.

I’m still navigating how to experience emotions without immediately assuming that something is wrong.

And I am still navigating how to live with thoughts that have been with me since I was a child.

I don’t have a neat ending for this, but maybe that is the point because, for some of us, awareness isn’t about celebrating how wonderfully we have overcome everything. It is about being honest about what we are living with, and sometimes the truth is simply this:

I am here. I am struggling. I am managing, but this is heavier than it looks.