Cosslett (excerpts)

It is rarely said, but post-traumatic stress disorder can turn you into a horrible person. I found its old name "shell shock", strangely fitting. Not because I had ever seen action – the poems of Wilfred Owen do not count – but because that was how I felt. Like a soft, gelatinous, wobbly little thing surrounded by a hard shell of fury. And instead of seeking out others in the same position, I stayed crouched inside, pink and seething. I had been inside my own head for so long, feeling so helpless as obsessive, frightening thoughts percolated around and around, that I had forgotten what it meant to be outward-looking. 

I have never felt like an animal before, not like this, where I flinch and startle at every slight movement, just as the mouse I toy with on the tube platform does when I stand and watch it approach before gently shifting the toe of my trainer so it bolts. I note this atavistic hypervigilance in others, too, when I am out and about. I see a person jump in a certain way and I will think, "Something happened to you". I am not on a plane nosediving into the sea, but my brain is on that plane. It’s firing off terror signals like a wonky catherine wheel. I think: I am about to die. Not for the first time, either. Not even for the first time that day. I feel as though I’m about to die almost every waking moment.

Yes, there were times when I felt like killing people, but there were many, many more times where I felt like people were trying to kill me. One person had tried, but in my confused and traumatised brain, there were more where he came from. Like many trauma victims, I was constantly on high alert but, naturally, other people just thought I was mad. Fury, paranoia, hypervigilance – all are common in a traumatised person. 

Strangest of all, though, is this ghost-ship feeling of not being really there. A floating sensation of being outside yourself, like when you are a child and someone tells you about the universe, or you think really hard about how strange humans look, objectively: our noses, our slender, tapering fingers. I learn this is called depersonalisation or derealisation. My self is in splinters, basically. I’m a simulacrum, a cardboard cut-out trudging woodenly through the city. Somehow still at university, I am reading Being And Nothingness...And, unlike with Walter Benjamin or Michel Foucault, when I read Being And Nothingness, I do not have to read the same paragraph over and over until I understand it. I get it, this not-being, this dissolving into the background. How pretentious, the person who is me but not-me thinks.

The psychologist who helped me to get better characterised the condition thus: imagine your memories are a conveyor belt of cardboard boxes heading towards a final point, where they are processed. But if something life-threatening disrupts that process, the box memories get stuck, trapped in the amygdala, that bit of the brain that triggers your fight or flight survival impulse. The amygdala knows no sense of past or present, and so, when faced with a perceived threat, it responds how it sees fit, unbeholden to logic, in the form of blind panic.

  Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett