The locked and rusted gate of the necropolis stood before me, wisps of mazed kelp threading its spikes like the mountain paths, the unchanging symbol of my old exile. I launched myself upward, swimming several strokes and thus flourishing the skull without intending it. Suddenly ashamed, I released it; but it appeared to follow me, propelled by the motion of my hand.
Gene Wolfe; Urth of the New Sun
The above passage, where Severian encounters his childhood (a torture guild) home after drowning his formerly frozen planet with a new sun, summarizes my experience with C-PTSD. Time and again I was forced to confront a series of facts: my past was dead, I had killed it, and it was never meant to last.
My past is dead. Many people think something along those lines but very few people must confront the fact that dead means rotting. My past wasn’t just gone, it actively disintegrated, morphing into new and horrid shapes, revealing new details I’d not thought about as a child, similar to finding the skull of a childhood friend at the bottom of the ocean.
Or a childhood rapist.
Or the fading memory of your wife’s childhood laugh.
All. Rotting. At the bottom.
In one big oily mess.
But it was what was left behind that haunts me still. Memories of what I valued and why were underneath the things that rotted, but now exist as half-shades of their own, without the things that gave them context. I've tried. And Tried. And tried. To get back what I had atop of these more foundational, more primal, memories. But the person who had made those memories is long gone. His innocence, his joy, his strength, it's all gone, vanished into the ether. There's just me, here, in the present.
The truth of it is the next part: I did this, to myself. By wanting to heal, by wanting more than what I could give, I had to destroy what I was. On some level I knew who I was just simply couldn't get me through the next lifetime. I had set my face like flint so hard, had put everything I had into the attitude, that to change was to fall apart. All of this emotional wreckage... I had done it. And I had to.
But the hardest part of it all, as I examine my emotional wreckage, is the knowledge that it was always going to happen. I remember how I felt, why I felt, and how driven I was... and I know now it was never going to be a long-term thing. And it isn't. I'm far weaker than I was before. I don't have the willpower. I can't face the same emotional storms I once could. But I don't need to now, I suppose, now do I? Life has changed. I am married. A father. I went to visit family for July 4th for criminy's sake, that was definitely not something I did as a child. I'm in a new place. I chose this new place. And that means everything that could not adapt to that new place had to die.
That just so happened to be almost everything.
Almost.
But not quite.
If you think this post has nothing to do with Urth of the New Sun then I don't know what to tell you, but it does. It has everything to do with it. Wolfe, on coming back from the Korean War, could not hear a loud noise without collapsing to the ground in a heap. He lived with his parents because his PTSD was so bad that he couldn't live a normal life on his own. Book and Urth of the New Sun were written very much in this period of recovery, and I just... I felt this book in a way that's impossible to understate. Even more than New Sun I always walked in a dream when reading this book. It was a dream where I could just... be. I was what I was: strong, defeated, pathetic, and some form of nobility that I have a hard time owning.
But it's there.
Just like with Severian, the former torturer, rule, and then drowner of Urth.
