When do you call a late response a no response? This brief note is a bit of a follow up to the last post.

I got curious and so went and looked at the stats I am generating off my database for queries. The longest query still open is *drumroll* 331 days old. So that query is just one month shy of a full year.

I’ve assigned it the category of *crickets* in the database. That category is reserved for those agents and agencies that use the *ghost* reply. In other words, the non-reply.

At this point I suspect I will never see a reply from this agent. Disappointing, but moving on. But I think this case is a good example of the inability to resolve issues that I often talk about here in regard to querying and mental health.

Particularly in CPTSD there is this need to cling to the hope that you will receive a response to any request. The need to know we haven’t slipped back into being inconsequential is vital. It is one way we use to define ourselves. And before everyone gives me the “you shouldn’t care what other people think” spiel — Thank you I already know that. But in the case of those of us with CPTSD, this wiring is baked in. This is the way we were shaped and we have no other way to identify ourselves.

Suffice it to say, changing the legacy of CPTSD is a long, long process of not just unlearning, but also of building ourselves as people. All that learning and discovery which shapes children into adults was in our cases deferred. Some folks with CPTSD never understand the confines they work within. Perhaps they are happier, perhaps not.

But once you have seen the box, and you know how stuck you are, being able to accept those parameters is a huge contradictory wad of ambivalence. The box is safe, we think. But we know that the world beyond the borders of the box is dangerous, spiteful, and stacked against us. Braving the world beyond the borders of safe to discover who we were meant to be is a daily, sometimes hourly, struggle.