PTSD

When we think of foster care or wards of the state or orphans or homelessness, we hear poor. We hear the forgotten. We hear hopeless. We hear other. Let’s face it: we hear classism, trash, bad parents, drugs. The stigma cuts through the room, through the world, through the news reports we don’t read — and through our bodies.

So let’s get this out of the way now: Imagine not coming from a relatively typical family background, not having enough money to go on school trips, and knowing the structure of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and watching your mother at the podium. Imagine going from homeless shelter to foster care, and imagine your main source of support as a teenager wasn’t your mother or father, but your social worker or your foster parent — a stranger, for all intents and purposes. Imagine keeping all of this quiet, because there’s no way high schoolers could ever understand. This was my life. Now you know.

When I was six years old, my mother and three close family members were killed in a sudden and public tragedy, hurling those of us who survived int

She’s made all the mistakes, so you don’t have to…Ask Erin is a weekly advice column, in which Erin answers your burning questions about anything at all.

I am not sure the human race is really good enough to deserve dogs.

I live with bipolar II disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, ADHD, and complex PTSD. I take Effexor, Klonopin, Depakote, and Adderall. I knew I needed to talk to my psychiatrist about what changes I’d need to make before we could try to have a baby. The chances that none of these medications would affect a growing fetus was impossible in my mind. But I never expected what Dr. G told me.

I think a lot of us are probably walking around with mild PTSD, anxiously calculating risk and making plans about what and who to avoid.... Even though I’m no longer technically walking the halls of junior high, I am living in a fitness-obsessed city that doesn’t feel as safe as it ought to considering almost everyone is over age 13.

[M]y therapist pointed out there’s a huge discrepancy in the way I present myself. On the one hand, I am a successful working person who seems fine and normal. On the other hand, I have a hard time with basic self-care and very often experience dissociation, depression, and anxiety as a result of sexual trauma and PTSD. And between these seemingly different people is a huge gap occupied by denial.

March is always an awful month for me. In Cape Town — my home town — March marks the beginning of autumn. Summer’s exhilarating heat comes to a sobering end. Sweltering afternoons and nights spent around the fire ominously disappear, soon to be replaced by gusts of winds and air so cold it literally hurts your face.