Future Unknown
At work today, I was working on a paper on PTSD and veterans, and looking over the diagnostic criteria.
It's been many years since my trauma, and even at the worst I don't think my symptoms were quite as horribly intrusive as they are for many. Most of them have lessened a lot over the many years, though all are still present to one degree or another. I may well have some intrusive experiences and anxiety until the day I die, but the severity has lessened with time.
One thing I've noticed I still have strongly, though, is "(7) sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span)." I don't really have a conviction that I will die before I achieve certain things, but I'm very familiar with this feeling. I'm 29 years old, and somehow, when everyone else seems to think of that as young, as pretty much in the prime of my life, etc. I think about that and am amazed I've lived so long. I worry about dying soon, in an odd way. On the one hand I understand I most likely won't, but on the other I feel as if I'm running, being chased by all the medical problems, and they can't help but catch up to me very, very soon. Whenever soon is.
I'm scared of dying, but more than that, I don't really have a sense that I can speak about where I'll be ten or twenty years from now without feeling like it's a fantasy. I caught myself the other night thinking about how, now that I have a loving, stable relationship that also includes the D/s and SM elements I've wanted all my life, I'm a little more ready to die than I once was, maybe. I was thinking about how nice it will be to have given my partner my collar -- for real, knowing I meant it -- rather than dying before that happens. (Of course I could still do so, given that it isn't here yet, but I can't say I strongly expect dying before mid-January.)
And then it struck me that I've really got no reason to presume I'll die notably soon -- of course I might die tonight, but I shouldn't be acting and thinking as though it's around the corner. I'm not growing any more, but neither am I at the endpoint of aging. And when, heaven forfend, one or the other of us dies it's much more likely to be him, since he's far older than I am.
And I realized, looking at that list today, that I've always been like this, really. I don't really have the expectation of growing old, and I probably don't have much reason not to have that expectation.
I wonder what it's like to have them, to feel reasonably sure one is going to have a long life.
And now, an unrelated video, because I feel like it.
It's been many years since my trauma, and even at the worst I don't think my symptoms were quite as horribly intrusive as they are for many. Most of them have lessened a lot over the many years, though all are still present to one degree or another. I may well have some intrusive experiences and anxiety until the day I die, but the severity has lessened with time.
One thing I've noticed I still have strongly, though, is "(7) sense of a foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span)." I don't really have a conviction that I will die before I achieve certain things, but I'm very familiar with this feeling. I'm 29 years old, and somehow, when everyone else seems to think of that as young, as pretty much in the prime of my life, etc. I think about that and am amazed I've lived so long. I worry about dying soon, in an odd way. On the one hand I understand I most likely won't, but on the other I feel as if I'm running, being chased by all the medical problems, and they can't help but catch up to me very, very soon. Whenever soon is.
I'm scared of dying, but more than that, I don't really have a sense that I can speak about where I'll be ten or twenty years from now without feeling like it's a fantasy. I caught myself the other night thinking about how, now that I have a loving, stable relationship that also includes the D/s and SM elements I've wanted all my life, I'm a little more ready to die than I once was, maybe. I was thinking about how nice it will be to have given my partner my collar -- for real, knowing I meant it -- rather than dying before that happens. (Of course I could still do so, given that it isn't here yet, but I can't say I strongly expect dying before mid-January.)
And then it struck me that I've really got no reason to presume I'll die notably soon -- of course I might die tonight, but I shouldn't be acting and thinking as though it's around the corner. I'm not growing any more, but neither am I at the endpoint of aging. And when, heaven forfend, one or the other of us dies it's much more likely to be him, since he's far older than I am.
And I realized, looking at that list today, that I've always been like this, really. I don't really have the expectation of growing old, and I probably don't have much reason not to have that expectation.
I wonder what it's like to have them, to feel reasonably sure one is going to have a long life.
And now, an unrelated video, because I feel like it.
Click to view