Broken Vase — The Rebuilding of Joel

This is how I understand my Complex PTSD.

I believe that most people see their lives as a single unbroken continuum. It starts at a single place and time. Their lifeline, if you will, continues up and down and around and around. It ends in the present ‘now’. It is a complete whole. An object, whole and perhaps twisted and coloured, but a single thing. It has integrity, in the basic meaning of the word.

To contrast, my life is a broken vase. There are some larger pieces which I recognize as belonging to my life. I own these. There are other pieces that are smaller. they are dustier. They fit the larger pieces in the sense that a jigsaw puzzle piece fits the other pieces of the puzzle but I don’t immediately recognize these pieces as mine. Logically, to me, they must be parts of my life. They fit the whole and they seem familiar but also strange.

I know, for example, that I was in a play, many years ago at Theatre Passe Muraille, entitled ‘Tragedy of Manners’. I know I was there. I cannot tell you the circumstances surrounding, in the sense that I don’t have much other context for this circumstance. Fortunately, there is Google and if I type in ‘Donna Lypchuk’ (the play’s writer)and ‘Tragedy of Manners’ I get 1987. Suddenly this shard of my life has a context. I can place it in space and time.

I have done similar detective work with other chunks. In 1989, the song ‘Funky Cold Medina’ was released. I know the song was popular when I was working as a DJ for strippers (don’t judge) at Cheaters Tavern. Therefore, I was working at Cheaters in 1989 and another piece falls into place.

In that sense I am reconstructing what my life is like. I am starting to feel a sense of sanity. A shape of some sort is starting to emerge, and within the shape of what is emerging, so am I. I am starting to become more whole.

I have never seen the following documented, but I would say that a person needs to have a sense of who they are as a person to feel sane. I would argue further, that the sense of who we are is tied up in the single story that is our life. We are who we say we are and who we believe we are. The more congruent those two are the more integrity we have. We do what we say. In some cases, reframing of parts of the narrative may be needed as we come to terms with who we are and to retune parts of the narrative, but first we must have a narrative within with to construct who we are.

The tragedy of people with Korsakov Syndrome, or ‘Wet Brain’ is not the problem of lack of narrative, it is the fact that there is no consistent narrative. Each time a person so afflicted tells their story they tell a different one. Each story is a consistent whole. The problem is that they can never tell the same story twice.

That was never my problem. I just never have had the entire story, or at least, felt that I had. Think of an earthenware vase. It breaks. Some pieces get lost. Some pieces get ground up. Fifty four years later I have something that looks like it once was a vase.

And I am proud.