I have cptsd and I want to save everyone.
When I read through the thoughts and questions posted here my heart breaks. I know the loneliness some of you are going through. I know that feeling of ‘not enough’. I know that place where laying down and just ending is the most appealing wish to ever infiltrate your heart and mind. Those places are engraved on my heart too.
When I see that pain I want to reach out. To tell the bruised and hurting soul that they are understood, valued and loved. All the truths that I need when I am trolling those depths of self-harm and self-hatred. I know the importance of a single word. How lives can turn on a phrase or gesture.
More times than I would ever want to admit I remain silent.
Self-doubt
My fear makes me mute. The drumbeat of ‘what if’ plays over and over in my mind. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I give bad advice? What if I’m not enough? What if… That beat continues. It is the double echo of my own heart.
“What if? What if?”
I want to say it is the CPTSD that robs me of my voice. Years of self-erasure have made me timid, frightened to even share my hope for another person. Or is it that I am not enough? I have no degree in helping people. I have no experience in helping others. Looking at my own life I have very little success at a personal level. Why should I reach out when I have nothing to offer except another heartbeat in the dark as confused and labored as their own? Isn’t that a gesture that would saddle someone with my own deficiencies?
If I was brave I would reach out. I would follow my heart into fire and ice to let people know that their voice is essential to this world. Essential.
But, I’m not brave. I’m an old woman as lost as those I would help, plagued with self-doubt, fear of doing the wrong thing, and the ever-present knowledge that I am ‘not enough’.
So I find myself limited to ‘thoughts and prayers’, snarling at my own inaction.
Perhaps, I could begin to be brave by admitting my fear.