Posting this as my own story and hoping for camaraderie, if not for me then for people who come after. A little message in a bottle on a message board.
I'm currently in my 30s with severe cPTSD and I've been wanting to ctb for a while. My life story is very unique so I don't expect many will relate to all of it but aspects might be little footholds of connection for others. If you read this and somehow know who I am or have heard my story, please respect my privacy as seems should be a mission for those of us on this site.
My story:
I was born in a small town to a small family and we moved around to other small towns a lot... Even all the way to Alaska. I was an only child so I had no siblings to latch onto as peers who were going through the same things as me. I often got attached to small friend groups and tried to foster a "best friend' everywhere I went. Even from a very young age camaraderie meant everything to me. I wanted to feel connected to someone and like we always had each other's backs.
When I was 16 my parents went through a brutal divorce. They both ran off with different people and left me alone in a house. I didn't really accept they were really actually gone until the morning I got kicked out by the landlord. Immediate radical acceptance and survival mode kicked in. I was freshly moved to a big city for the first time and luckily had a car so I was able to sleep in that.
I could feel if I slid fully into homelessness it would be very hard to recover so I stayed in high school, even finished it, worked many jobs, even joined the military (even though I'm REALLY not the military type at all, even getting hate crimed) just to try and find SOME level of stability. I tried very hard to be okay.
It wasn't until 2012 I was able to attain minor stability with a 1bdrm apartment. It didn't feel like home for years, like anything could up and change at any time given how much tumultuousness I experienced in my life. When things started settling down there I processed what all had happened to me and I figured maybe I could turn it into some good. I started work on a very ambitious business that would draw in people like me and give them a safe space and maybe a small sense of stability and escapism. A place maybe I could feel that sense of camaraderie I had been looking for since birth.
It was very hard and also traumatic to open that full of risks. I actually got it open in 2019... Shortly before COVID hit and lockdown told businesses like ours to shut down. Cosmic irony was in full force.
Lockdown inspired a great helping of hopelessness for me. It's hard to feel like things can be okay when so much of this just seemed to happen. And even besides COVID, it's very hard to feel like you have a sense of camaraderie opening a small business, especially alone. Even if you relate to the people around you, you have power dynamics to consider and have to wait for people to come to you and build a lot of trust.
After lockdown ended we ended up doing pretty okay for a while. I ended up with some horrifically abusing people on my team and it made functioning and absolute nightmare. Without going into too many details everything I could ever do was wrong and I had people, friends of those people, and people I never even met or knew harassing me in person and online, for things I didn't do, for things other people did. It was horrific and confusing and I had no idea how to handle it. I have always given freely thinking that was how to build friends and connections and loved ones and I didn't realize how vulnerable that made me to being taken advantage of and being attacked. This was paradigm shifting in the worst way.
Now by this point I should point out I've had PTSD since living in my car. Diagnosed, therapy, medications... The works. Military made it worse, the risks of opening a business, COVID... But the harassment has been what broke me. What truly broke me. Because it made me feel dehumanized in the worst way. That sense of camaraderie felt completely unattainable. I couldn't trust what people think about me. Normally physical touch from loved ones would be nice but it started making me so scared like everything was a trap.
The severe prolonged harassment lasted for years and there's traces of it still. It has made me so hyper aware of how people can change or the things people say and do could cause me so much harm. Not only have I not found that camaraderie but even to this day my PTSD symptoms are getting so much worse and it's hard to envision anyone breaking through this and providing that desperately needed connection. Therapy and medication do little (gene sight testing hilariously shows I have weird interactions with most medications as some more cosmic irony), and I can already feel I am fighting a losing battle against the symptoms and I risk alienating any existing friends and loved ones I have.
Onto the ctb stuff: I started to really pursue ctb during lockdown. I felt like I had done more than my fair share and carried a lot of burdens in my life and could feel comfortable in being complete. It didn't seem likely the camaraderie I've been missing was in the cards. I was hospitalized during lockdown during a failed attempt and they put me with violent offenders even though I wasn't violent because there wasn't room anywhere else and that was very traumatic and made me have to make sure to succeed and never go back. It's been a few years and several attempts later. I'm still here but still trying.
I'm in my mid 30s now which is older than I've ever imagined myself (it's amazing how years just blur by when you spend them in survival mode) I've been exploring the right method for me, the right location, the right timing. I joined these forums because after reading some posts the hopelessness shared with others here feels like perhaps the closest I've felt to potential connection.
I can't save anyone and I don't expect to be saved. But maybe my story will resonate with others here and through any of this, if it's important you you, we can both feel a tiny bit of camaraderie.
I'm currently in my 30s with severe cPTSD and I've been wanting to ctb for a while. My life story is very unique so I don't expect many will relate to all of it but aspects might be little footholds of connection for others. If you read this and somehow know who I am or have heard my story, please respect my privacy as seems should be a mission for those of us on this site.
My story:
I was born in a small town to a small family and we moved around to other small towns a lot... Even all the way to Alaska. I was an only child so I had no siblings to latch onto as peers who were going through the same things as me. I often got attached to small friend groups and tried to foster a "best friend' everywhere I went. Even from a very young age camaraderie meant everything to me. I wanted to feel connected to someone and like we always had each other's backs.
When I was 16 my parents went through a brutal divorce. They both ran off with different people and left me alone in a house. I didn't really accept they were really actually gone until the morning I got kicked out by the landlord. Immediate radical acceptance and survival mode kicked in. I was freshly moved to a big city for the first time and luckily had a car so I was able to sleep in that.
I could feel if I slid fully into homelessness it would be very hard to recover so I stayed in high school, even finished it, worked many jobs, even joined the military (even though I'm REALLY not the military type at all, even getting hate crimed) just to try and find SOME level of stability. I tried very hard to be okay.
It wasn't until 2012 I was able to attain minor stability with a 1bdrm apartment. It didn't feel like home for years, like anything could up and change at any time given how much tumultuousness I experienced in my life. When things started settling down there I processed what all had happened to me and I figured maybe I could turn it into some good. I started work on a very ambitious business that would draw in people like me and give them a safe space and maybe a small sense of stability and escapism. A place maybe I could feel that sense of camaraderie I had been looking for since birth.
It was very hard and also traumatic to open that full of risks. I actually got it open in 2019... Shortly before COVID hit and lockdown told businesses like ours to shut down. Cosmic irony was in full force.
Lockdown inspired a great helping of hopelessness for me. It's hard to feel like things can be okay when so much of this just seemed to happen. And even besides COVID, it's very hard to feel like you have a sense of camaraderie opening a small business, especially alone. Even if you relate to the people around you, you have power dynamics to consider and have to wait for people to come to you and build a lot of trust.
After lockdown ended we ended up doing pretty okay for a while. I ended up with some horrifically abusing people on my team and it made functioning and absolute nightmare. Without going into too many details everything I could ever do was wrong and I had people, friends of those people, and people I never even met or knew harassing me in person and online, for things I didn't do, for things other people did. It was horrific and confusing and I had no idea how to handle it. I have always given freely thinking that was how to build friends and connections and loved ones and I didn't realize how vulnerable that made me to being taken advantage of and being attacked. This was paradigm shifting in the worst way.
Now by this point I should point out I've had PTSD since living in my car. Diagnosed, therapy, medications... The works. Military made it worse, the risks of opening a business, COVID... But the harassment has been what broke me. What truly broke me. Because it made me feel dehumanized in the worst way. That sense of camaraderie felt completely unattainable. I couldn't trust what people think about me. Normally physical touch from loved ones would be nice but it started making me so scared like everything was a trap.
The severe prolonged harassment lasted for years and there's traces of it still. It has made me so hyper aware of how people can change or the things people say and do could cause me so much harm. Not only have I not found that camaraderie but even to this day my PTSD symptoms are getting so much worse and it's hard to envision anyone breaking through this and providing that desperately needed connection. Therapy and medication do little (gene sight testing hilariously shows I have weird interactions with most medications as some more cosmic irony), and I can already feel I am fighting a losing battle against the symptoms and I risk alienating any existing friends and loved ones I have.
Onto the ctb stuff: I started to really pursue ctb during lockdown. I felt like I had done more than my fair share and carried a lot of burdens in my life and could feel comfortable in being complete. It didn't seem likely the camaraderie I've been missing was in the cards. I was hospitalized during lockdown during a failed attempt and they put me with violent offenders even though I wasn't violent because there wasn't room anywhere else and that was very traumatic and made me have to make sure to succeed and never go back. It's been a few years and several attempts later. I'm still here but still trying.
I'm in my mid 30s now which is older than I've ever imagined myself (it's amazing how years just blur by when you spend them in survival mode) I've been exploring the right method for me, the right location, the right timing. I joined these forums because after reading some posts the hopelessness shared with others here feels like perhaps the closest I've felt to potential connection.
I can't save anyone and I don't expect to be saved. But maybe my story will resonate with others here and through any of this, if it's important you you, we can both feel a tiny bit of camaraderie.
