Patience Mason's PTSD Blog
My salute to Patience Mason.
Beyond wikipedia and pscho-net articles this woman was the first 'human being' I crossed on the internet when searching for so many, many things. It is amazing how others influence one when we never actually meet them face to face or even engage in conversation. Yet they profoundly change a life. I truly believe before her hard work there was scant resource for most. I am not saying anymore about myself although I am deeply changed.
I deeply appreciate what this woman has done for her suffering soldiers. I have no idea if she grasps how much she has done, not only for each of them, but for those suffering the invisible wounds of all kinds of wars.
She deserves a medal for meritorious service to those suffering in this world.
From her own words:
Because the fear is bone deep, and the only thing that puts it to sleep is the thought that you can maybe patch a few of the holes in the swiss cheese net under the high wire. Because we are frightened from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep, and if we can stave that off for someone else, well, then maybe that’s something to live for.
And that’s for those of us who get off easy. In the worst cases, people aren’t able to find meaning in a regular job, or in wealth-building, or relationships, or any of the things that modern societies tell us charts the course of a life. These are the people that PTSD takes, as they flail their way into suicide, or crime, or insanity, desperately trying to carve meaning out of a world where all the goal posts have suddenly moved, where the giant question that no one can answer is, “why bother?”
The root of the treatment has to come from meeting those who suffer where they are. It isn’t just hard operators. It’s clerks and phlebotomists and chemical engineers. It’s people who thought they were fine, only to wake up one morning and realize that the last few years have changed them in ways they don’t quite understand. It isn’t just soldiers and cops and ER nurses. Life in poverty can bring on PTSD. An abusive parent can have the same effect.
We need to treat the fear, address the world view, acknowledging that these aren’t things you cure, maybe aren’t even things you change. We need to tip our hat to the trauma, and look instead at what the life after it looks like. We have to find a way to construct significance, to help a changed person forge a path in a world that hasn’t changed along with them.
And if you’re a vet, or an EMT, or a cop, or firefighter and you’re reading this, I want you to know that you can’t put the curtain back, but it’s possible to build ways to move forward, to find alternatives to the rush of crisis. There are ways you can matter.
There is a way to rejoin the dust of the world, to find your own space on the dance floor.
On this Memorial Day she deserves our gratitude for she is a wife who took it to the trenches.
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