Paint by Numb, errr
The walls in my house are gray. All of them. When builders construct homes, they pick one color of flat paint and cover every piece of drywall with it. Having been in the newly built house for several months, the gray was starting to get to me. So I went to Lowe’s (Yay Jimmie Johnson!) and picked up two gallons – one Battle Creek Blue, the other Dusky Alpine – in order to create some accent walls in the master bedroom and kitchen.
Paint is the great cover-up. The old paint doesn’t go away, it just gets to live beneath a layer of a fresh hue. It’s still there, but nobody can see it. My walls are still all gray on the interior. And this makes me think of PTSD. I think for many people, like me, we try to manage through life with our PTSD constantly carrying gallons of paint. We cover ourselves continuously with fresh coats so that on the outside we appear unblemished, as if things were normal. And to most people, we may look like things are going OK for us. We chat, we smile, we say “please” and “thank you” – but when we go on our way, the numbness permeates.
I had a really good talk with my mental health counselor today after I had taken some time to scribble some thoughts down on the back of a list of Which Wich menu prices listed on an 8.5″ by 11″ piece of typing paper. I was trying to get to the root, the source, of the distance I feel inside toward others closest in my life. Where was this coming from? My piece of paper quickly filled itself with words like “emotional distance”, “annoyance”, “defense mechanism”, “uncomfortably”, “struggle”. I concluded that multiple traumas in my life created these arm’s length relationships that I had created and sustained, and now felt comfortable with. My therapist challenged that line of thinking.
“What if you substituted “love” for “trauma”? she asked. I became confused. Love is a good thing. Trauma is a bad thing. I couldn’t see how a good thing could lead to a bad thing like emotional distance. The counselor explained: “You’ve been through a lot of crap, Garrett.”
I agreed. An emotionally absent alcoholic father, a mother faced with the trauma of sexual assault – whether intentional or not, people a child expects to be able to unconditionally love and trust in weren’t always available to confide in. Trusting outside of myself became a huge risk, one I became not so fond of taking. I coped by finding comfort in distance – physically (moving alone to the East Coast after college graduation) and emotionally by finding relationships -platonic or romantic -where partners dared not cross emotional boundaries I had set.
“And then, and then you find somebody you want to marry, and she wants to marry you – and what happens?” The counselor let the sentence hang. Once again, the rug had been pulled from beneath. And six years after the bridge collapse, I look back and see that for most of my life love and trauma have been woven together. Love AND trauma left me feeling trapped. It became easy to see how I might think that love was the problem.
“Love is the messiest, riskiest and most inconvenient thing a person can do in life,” the therapist told me. “Being able to accept that fact makes it much, much easier to love.”
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way
But now it’s just another show
You leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away
I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all
I have two choices: I can do nothing, and continue to cope as I always have and sacrifice close relationships in exchange for comfortability in distance. Or, I can “get uncomfortable,” so to speak, and start unweaving love and trauma. That’s scary. I don’t know how to do that, or what it’s going to entail. I don’t know how long it will take or if, when I get to the end, it takes me to a “me” I want to be.
In a nutshell, I have to decide whether or not to put down the cans of paint and end the cover up.
