Member-only story
The Chest-butterflies Never Leave Me
A poetic narrative of my embodied experience with C-PTSD
The chest butterflies never leave me. They stay — each day, in metamorphosis — but, oh, they stay. First, they’re cockroaches. Next, they’re bees. Then, flies. Piranhas. Electric eels. It’s a buzzing, biting, stinging vibration some doctor would call the physiological component of anxiety. But the butterflies — they stay. And the trouble is they never leave.
I’m tired. That’s it. Tired. That’s the real trouble with fear, if it doesn’t go away. You can’t sleep. Not completely and utterly, without the stain of vigilance. The sympathetic system keeps the parasympathetic from doing its work. It’s a tug-of-war, really: parasympathetic for sleep, sympathetic for survivalism. The butterflies flutter the eyes before they can shut, leaving weary hyper-wakefulness to flow underneath whatever else might happen.
Little things are hard. The butterflies try to send an email, disjointedly. Each one can only hit a single key. They can’t speak to each other, sometimes, which makes simple sentences an impossibility. The butterflies fill me.
The butterflies — together, they try to fill out a mental health questionnaire. It asks, “how often do you experience anxiety?” The options: never, rarely, sometimes, often, on most days. The…
