We provide mental health support for people across Hampshire. Find out more about services near you.
Lucy Dyer, Lead Bid Writer, shares her experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and how she rediscovered her creative side.
(Content warnings: trauma, ptsd, chronic pain, anxiety)
There are many things that form a person, little quirks and hobbies, loves and ambitions that all combine to create what we call our identity. This can be movies, sports, spending time with friends, hiking, going on urban adventures. Whatever they are, we do them because we enjoy them and because they give us something in return, be it connection, experience, or discovery. For me, it was split between music and books. I play guitar and therefore spent a lot of my time either performing, rehearsing, or just improvising at home. And I love to read, with an ever-growing home library and a book forever on my nightstand. In both, I had the need to create, to write music, riffs or lyrics, and compose stories.
Since I was 16, I’ve been writing one thing or another, be it plays, short stories, or novels. Over the years, I’ve written over 20 full-length books, most of which are too terrible to read but a few that approach the lofty heights of mediocrity. Despite the lacking quality, I discovered a lot of myself in those words, in the ideas I had to dissect, challenge, and then put down. In practising this craft, I began to hear the words. They came at night, while out walking, when thinking absently about something else, and I would need to get them out. It was my escape.
And then everything changed when my trauma attacked!
As an adult, I’d managed to unravel the baggage that had been weighing me down, and then I got ill. Really ill. This was during the pandemic, but it wasn’t COVID. Instead, I developed a chronic pain condition. I won’t go into all the details, but I experienced months of debilitating pain, many trips to the hospital, and several invasive tests and treatments. I spent more than a year trying to get back to some baseline level of ‘okay’, and everything else became secondary. I dropped the book I was writing mid-sentence because there was no room in my mind for anything but the pain.
When the first wave finally ended, I had developed PTSD because of it. PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is an anxiety disorder caused by a frightening or distressing event. This can be conflict, abuse, or – in my case – medical trauma. Although it is self-diagnosed, I do experience many of the main symptoms, especially when the pain reoccurs, or I enter another round of treatments.
I tried to return to my hobbies, the creative pastimes in which I had once found so much joy, but I was almost completely unable.
Trauma can affect different people in different ways. Some find release and resolution in working through it via another medium, capturing their pain in art to exorcise it. But for me, it was the complete opposite. I was so consumed by my trauma that there was no space in my mind for anything else. I would pick up a guitar and, while remembering the basic scale shapes or chords, would struggle to piece them together into something melodic or rhythmic. And when I returned to my book, with an unfinished sentence staring back out at me, there were no words anymore. It was quiet for the first time in over a decade, and I didn’t know what to do.
This was a terrifying experience, like I’d lost a part of myself. A phantom limb had been severed, rendering me impotent and useless. I tried on several occasions to rediscover that side of myself, but each attempt was short-lived, like trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Words came, but they weren’t heard. The rhythm with which I used to write was replaced by a clinical, matter-of-fact arrangement whose only purpose was to fill out the space. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t good, and each time I would finish feeling worse than when I started.
Years passed this way, while the pain remained in the background. The next hospital trip was forever something to dread. And I began to contend with the idea that I would never hear the same creativity again. For the longest time I felt like a ghost, moving through the days, doing my duties, only to reach another night where I would struggle to sleep. I was moving, drifting, staring through people just as they stared through me. I wondered if I would one day cease to be, undefined and unwanted even by myself, to the point where I could drift through doors and walls, watch life from further and further away, until I finally vanished into the fog.
The question then became – how do I rediscover myself? I am on my journey and have started writing again and feel optimism for the future for the first time in years, but it wasn’t sudden. It was a slow acceptance where I found a new routine in what had once been frightening and unpredictable. It was going with the blows, unwinding when I could, and not resisting the fear that this pain would be there forever. It was no longer a matter of outlasting something temporary but enduring something chronic and finding the bright days in the middle of it all. It was telling myself that I had been happy before and I could be happy again, that being at the bottom of the pit was transient even if the ride itself would never end. And the more good days I managed to claim, the more I began to believe that there could be a life outside of pain, outside of fear, outside of just making it through.
I don’t know if I have fully found myself again – the person I was before my pain started and my trauma manifested. It may be that the person I once was, is now lost, an unattainable ideal for which I shouldn’t need to wish. Now, I am stronger because of my trauma. I have passed through the worst experience of my life and I’m still around. I’m still loved. I can still be happy. I can still push myself and reach for new heights. The pieces are all there, fractured and displaced, but I can put them back together in a new way. I might still be in the process of doing so, but one of those pieces, it seemed, was my creativity. Progress is being made, and that is a victory. Each step is an achievement I had once thought impossible, and I take them now more often and more surely. I have learned over time to cope with the bad days; to see them out so I can find the next episode of the good. And enough of these strung together form a baseline, a balance, a fresh sense of normal.
Rather than thinking of them as good days sprinkled among the bad, they are instead bad days sprinkled among the good.
And I can live with that.
We provide mental health support for people across Hampshire. Find out more about services near you.