Post Tenebras Lux - After darkness I hope for the light

Hello there and thanks for stopping by. That's how you open a blog right? I haven't done this before so here goes nothing. I think the appropriate adage is fake it til you make it. The same way I've survived the last 10 years of my career, though looking back there's been a lot more faking it than making it. But that's a story for many more days down the road.

Today I'll talk about the who and the why. Who I am and why I am doing this.

So who am I? My name is Chris. I am currently a regular member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP, the Kings Cowboys. I am corporal by rank and am posted in the far north region of the Northwest Territories. My career has taken me and my family across northern BC, western Alberta, the Sub-Arctic and now into the Arctic. These past 10 years have been filled with some wild adventures, hair raising police work and more trauma than I could possibly ever recount. That trauma has taken an immeasurable toll on my mental health, physical health, family health, the health of my marriage and has even come a lot closer than I was willing to realize to ending my life. 

As a result of this trauma I have been diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress, Anxiety and Depression. I have dissociative tendencies, struggle to sleep due to not being able to fall asleep some nights, not being able to stay asleep others and nightmares that fill the gaps. I am irrationally angry all the time and have the emotional control of a dumpster fire. 

Physically I suffer from Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Dysphagia, chronic tension through my upper back and neck which leads to clenched teeth and nasty headaches. 

So what does all of this mean? It means that for the last multitude of years all I have been doing is fighting every day to just survive. My Psychologist used the term "white knuckling" which is an extremely accurate way to describe things. I have been running on pure adrenaline for years, having to ramp myself up just to function at work then crashing and not being able to see past the return to work in a couple days during days off. I lost the ability to be a parent to my girls. I lost the ability to be a loving and worthy partner to my wife. I lost the ability to feel happy, to find joy anywhere in life, to have a will to live. I couldn't see how bad things had gotten because I was trapped in the ever deepening darkness that had clouded every aspect of my life. I kept falling deeper and deeper into the darkness with each passing day and I was unable to see how dark it had gotten because that was what I was used to living like. I knew I needed help and I knew I had needed help for a long time.

Last spring, after my parents had visited us for my daughters birthday and my dad looked at me and asked if I was really okay, I realized that I wasn't. But I didn't trust my organization to be the right way to get help. Over the years of my career, I had seen the ostracizing of members who had asked for help, hell I was one of the members who sat around and bitched about people taking time off. I sat back and judged, looking at them and comparing traumas saying that I had seen way worse and was still going strong. I also didn't have a lick of faith in the RCMP to be able to actually help me. I had a deep rooted distrust of health services so I decided that I would get help on my own. So I went to the Royal Canadian Legion, reaching out to them for help so I could avoid the RCMP system as much as I could. Through the Legion I was able to make contact with a Psychologist so I could start getting help.

The hardest part I found was being honest with the process. I was obviously still very deep in the darkness so I couldn't really take a true stock of how bad things actually were and I still didn't really want to be honest about things. I knew I was anxious all the time and couldn't go out in public without nearly shitting my pants constantly. I couldn't get through a shift at work without dealing with 5-10 bathroom trips during a 10 hour shift. I couldn't control my temper or express any emotion other than anger. But I still didn't think I was that bad. So I said the bare minimum, enough to make myself feel better about talking to someone without really dealing with the issues at hand.

Why? That's a question I have asked myself a lot over the last 6 months. Part of it was because as a police officer I am supposed to be the one helping. As a senior member in the detachments I worked in I was the member that the younger members looked up to and looked to for help and guidance. If I wasn't able to deal with my shit then how could I help them? I couldn't be the one to let them down by needing help. And then there is the reality that if I admit to how bad things are then I am admitting to myself and everyone else that I am not as strong as I was showing to be. See, fake it til you make it. 

After this past new year, all the little cracks that had started to form over the past years overwhelmed the dam and it collapsed on me. Everything I had worked to keep down, everything that I didn't want to deal with was thrust into the open. I had to face reality and the reality was that I was a complete disaster. A shell of the person that I had been.

I started writing when that happened, sitting in my office at work trying to avoid having a complete melt down on top of the multiple anxiety attacks I had already had. I closed my office door and sat with a legal pad and just wrote. I took stock of myself in a way that I hadn't really ever done. By the time I was done writing that night I had filled 4 pages front and back, which were covered in blue ink and spotted with dried tears. I had more emotions come out that night than I had allowed myself to feel for years past. As anyone who has struggled with PTSD and depression can attest to, feeling emotions after being numb for so long scared the living shit out of me. Especially because the only emotion that I felt at the time was crushing sadness. I was ashamed of myself for letting myself get so bad. I was ashamed of myself for spending years hiding from being a parent to my daughters and a spouse to my wife. I was ashamed that I hadn't been a good friend to those who had stood by me and cared about me as I fell further into the darkness.

Unfortunately for me I still had another night of work before I was on to days off, so I did what I had been doing for years. I slept like shit, loaded myself full of caffeine and hate for the world, passed off my IBS as just another day and headed back to work. I shouldn't have been there but again I couldn't let myself get away with letting people down. That night I sat in my office again and kept writing. This time I wrote letters. Letters to friends, family members and those people who I had neglected for years. Each letter was an apology. Some were harder to write than others. Some I wasn't able to send to the people I wrote them to because of the pain and shame I was feeling. Each one felt like a piece of my soul coming out. In there somewhere I did some work. I lost my shit on a mouthy drunk, came really close to stomping him out just for being a drunk asshole. In that moment, as I stormed out of the cell block, slamming doors and kicking shit out of my way, I knew that I really needed help. I was one mouthy asshole away from ending up on the front page of CBC for beating the shit out of a homeless person for no reason. 

Thankfully I had a psych appointment the next day and during that appointment I made the conscious decision that I was done lying. I was done lying to myself, I was done lying to my family, I was done lying to my doctor. So I let it all out. I spent an hour barely able to talk as I cried, telling the honest truth for the first time. Admitting that I had been suicidal. Admitting that I was depressed and found no joy in life and had no will to live. Admitting that I spent hours at a time sitting on the couch staring into nothingness solely so I could avoid the responsibilities of life. After about the halfway point of this appointment my Psychologist made the determination that I needed to be off of work, that I was not able to continue on the path I had been going on, that to continue on that path would lead to either my hurting myself or hurting someone else. The appointment ended and she sent me a letter to give to my employer to tell them I would not be returning to work indefinitely as I needed a lot of help to deal with my litany of issues. 

Thankfully the RCMP is such an easy to work for organization...what a crock of shit, I could barely type that out. The letter wasn't deemed as enough as it was just from my Psychologist. Who is a doctor. But not the right kind of doctor I guess. So I had to go to the general clinic and rehash everything to another doctor that I had no background with at all. Thankfully that doctor very understanding and actually took the time to listen and care so I was able to get all my paperwork filled out. Going back into the office was another story. I had an anxiety attack just walking toward the building. I ended up having to stop in the first bathroom through the door to shit so I didn't shit my pants. I could barely function enough to go send the emails I needed to send and give papers to the people I had to give them to. But I survived it.

And truth be told, when I walked out the door into the -40 arctic air, seeing the orange glow of a mid-afternoon sunset, breathing in the sharpness of that air I actually felt alive, for the first time in longer than I cared to remember. I cried again, the tears instantly freezing to my face and it felt great. I let the cold sting my face and felt my eyes freeze shut. I walked home with a feeling of hope permeating from my chest. A hope that maybe one day I would be okay again. 

6 months later, that hope is still there. There is a long long road laid out in front of me. I can't see much of it since it is still masked in darkness yet there is more light to it. I can see a light in the darkness that is slowly getting brighter.

Which now brings me to my why. Why am I doing this? Why start a blog in a time that blogs aren't really used much any more. Partly because I am one of those technologically challenged millenials, who can barely use a new cellphone. I had to try three different sites before finding this one because the ones before were too complicated. The real why lies within me. Writing probably helped save my life. I have stacks of written papers since I started this healing journey. I have a daily written log of my symptoms, tracking my anxiety, depression, IBS, dysphagia and mood. 

I also believe in the power of written word. To steal a quote from Albus Dumbledore "words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it". I want to use words to express my pain, my struggles, my triumphs and everything in between. 

One of the other reasons is time. I have stacks of podcasts that I want to listen to but don't have enough hours in the day. Having two kids I have to be a parent to I can't listen to them during that time. I need music for my workouts and I live in a community that it takes all of 3 minutes to get from end to end in. I want to create a way to tell my story that people can read in a few minutes. Hell, if anything it is more just for me. Giving me a chance to use this medium as a way to help further my healing. 

I also want to use my story to help others. I want anyone who reads this to know that you aren't alone. That your trauma is valid and that no matter the situation you find yourself in there are people in the world who want to help. I had people in the past talk about their struggles and I never really stopped to listen. Looking back it was because I couldn't deal with what I was hiding and what I was trying to survive on a daily basis. Now that I am in a better position, I don't want to miss the chance to help. I don't want anyone to go through what I am going through. A very idealist position that is even surprising to me but if I can inspire even one person to look at their situation and realize that they need help, that they aren't the only one struggling, that their story is unique but also more common than they can see, then I have succeeded. I feel like I haven't had a true purpose in life for a long time and now one of the things I want to do is help the helpers. Police officers, medics, fire fighters, nurses, anyone who works a job that exposes them to things that humans aren't meant to deal with over and over.

If you've made it this far, thank you. I wrote, deleted, wrote again, deleted again and finally got to this point where I feel like its a legible way to start telling my story.

Going forward I will talk about my career, my life, my descent into the depths of the abyss which I am currently trying to find a way out of. I'll talk about things that I struggle with, things that piss me off and things that give me hope. 

I appreciate you taking the time to read this post today. Please share it, leave a comment or even just a like on my socials. I want to continue driving conversation, to continue reducing the stigma around mental health and to help others realize that they truly aren't alone. 

I'll end with a quote that I have as my background on my phone:

Post Tenebras Lux - After darkness I hope for the light

Chris