The American Nightmare and the Art of Failure

Anxiety. You know the feeling you get when you are about to stumble and are not sure if you are going to catch yourself? That is what life is like for someone who suffers from severe anxiety. When coupled with depression, it assigns blame to yourself as to why you feel this way. Being diagnosed with PTSD, which is an intense form of depression and anxiety, mixed with regret and memories of your past, is no way to live. So, we seek help. Doctors give us pills to swallow. It’s as if we have too many emotions building up and we need to have some of them clinically removed. Rage, hate, fear, failure, paranoia; these all seem like unnecessary emotions in today’s society. They have no survival purpose anymore, so we will block them with drugs that will make you someone else, because if people knew the real you, they would not like you. Hell, you don’t even like you, so how can you expect others too. Depression and anxiety; it is not caring about anything at all, but also caring about everything way too much at the same time. When people would ask me how I was feeling, or what was wrong with me, I would go silent, because I don’t believe there are words to describe what I am feeling, and I also do not wish to burden anyone with these problems. So Instead I find ways to channel this. I go out of my way to help everyone. Every lost soul, every open hand, every tear that needs a shoulder, I attract. I give myself up to them. I give them a piece of me until there is nothing left. Some people will say it is because I am kind hearted or a good person. I am not so sure that is what it is all about. Part of me believes that it is to make up for a past that I no longer want to remember. To make things right. To somehow make it up to God for all the wrong I have done. All the mistakes I have made, and all the people I have hurt. This is my story. It is how I became the way I am, and how I am trying to become the person I want to be. With the work that I do, and the things I have done, I have met so many people. I have listened to the stories of their lives. I have built relationships with them. What this has taught me is that people are not really any different from one another. We all seek peace. We all seek happiness. We all seek acceptance. Everyone has a different definition of those words though, and that is where things get messy. We use the excuse “I’m only human” to own up to our mistakes. As if that phrase is a get out of jail free card, and our actions are suddenly acceptable because we are only human. I dedicate my story, my struggle, to the people suffering from PTSD and looking for success. I know how hard it is to find. My hope is that you will learn from my failures on my path to success and be able to recognize them in your own life, so you can avoid the place where I ended up. The events and “episodes” that followed have caused me to examine the human mind and ask some very hard questions. If PTSD is an illness, can it be cured? What is the root cause for why we act the way we do? Is it a single event that triggers the disorder, or maybe a culmination of events in our lives that overwhelm our psyche? As I search through my experiences for what caused my brain to operate the way it does, I found one thing to be true. It all started with a picture.