Holden Caulfield, yes! Phony bastards...

One of my negative mantras through my latest bout of major depression was "I am alone in the universe" and this, combined with my PTSD "closed perimeter/soldier-behind-enemy-lines" thinking, made me a real bear to deal with, even for myself!

I guess on one level, empirically, we are ultimately alone in that we can only know our own thoughts, and even then not thoroughly or consistently, and when we leave this world we seem to do it alone, at least before we pass into whatever is next. As far as I can tell...

But on another level, we are never really alone. We are interdependent creatures. Every breath we take exchanges oxygen for carbon dioxide, changing the atmosphere of this planet. We affect others and vice-versa, even when we do not think so.

So we are simultaneously alone and interdependent. Why do we feel so achingly alone sometimes, then? The Talmud says that "The world is not as we perceive it, it is as we are." In other words (more Buddhist words), we kind of create the world in which we live based on how we perceive it. We can take in the same sensory information and read it different ways. A summer rainstorm can be a refreshing shower or a miserable flood. But it is the same rain!

I think what is so freaking hard is that PTSD survivors have to overcome major disruptions in the ability to choose how we perceive our world. We did not ask for the trauma, and we do not deserve the aftermath, but it is so hard to see past the effects of it, to imagine a world where we can go back to being able to choose how we will respond to our perceptions.

And so, like Holden Caulfield, we want desperately to be happy, to be a "catcher in the rye" saving/preserving/resurrecting our innocence, but we keep hitting a brick wall.

I am only now beginning to see that there is a way around or over that wall instead of throwing myself against it, trying to bust through.