I don’t make New Years Resolutions anymore. I make challenges. I dunno why calling it a challenge gets me to do it better than “resolution”, but it does.
In 2023, I watched 100 movies in 100 days. In 2024, I read 100 books (actually 107, but the challenge was 100). In 2025, I had a different, more personal challenge, which I also achieved. Now, for 2006, I’ve decided to write a 100 pages. Of what? Any creative writing. Journal and diary entries don’t count, but this blog post does. All the writing I do for money doesn’t. Poems which are only a few words but take the entire page? Do. Essays? Yup. Novels? Sure. Scripts? Uh huh.
This is totally doable. Two pages a week? I used to write at least two pages a DAY. If I could read 100 books in a year, or watch 100 movies in 100 days, 100 pages of creative writing should be fine. Maybe not easy, which is the idea—easy challenges aren’t really challenges—but doable.
But it’s already mid-February, so why is the only writing I have to contribute to this challenge this very blog post?
Many reasons, I am sure. Unpacking from a move, working five jobs (count ’em!), and an actual social life all take up a lot of time. But here I am, still trying. Better late than never, right? So here’s a little life update.
A year ago, I learned that I had complex PTSD. Thankfully, by the time I learned this about myself, I’d already been in therapy for years and had come a long way in healing, though I still had enough symptoms to meet PTSD criteria. It was not easy, but I worked hard in and out of therapy to heal and grow, and a few months ago I noticed that my symptoms had ebbed enough that I didn’t meet the criteria anymore! I’d healed from PTSD! Sure, it still comes up now and again, but it doesn’t run my life the way it once did, and I am a happier, healthier version of myself that I’d never even known was possible. I hadn’t even known PTSD was something people could heal from. When you hear about it, it always sounds like a life sentence. Maybe it was, once, but with modern research in psychology and more resources and understanding for those impacted by PTSD, it can absolutely be eased, if not healed. Of course, everyone’s PTSD is different, and I had it easier than many do, so I can only speak from my own experience. But I want people out there who may be struggling as I once did to know that there is hope. Things can get better.
If you’re curious about complex PTSD, my friend Kelela has a great YouTube channel about it here: https://www.youtube.com/@PostTraumaticVictory/featured
One of the main aspects of my life impacted by PTSD, and one of the last remaining effects of it I had to deal with, was relationships. It’s almost Valentine’s day so romantic relationships are on my mind, although relationships of all kinds are often impacted by complex PTSD. While any unexpected traumatic event—like natural disasters or car accidents—can cause PTSD, complex PTSD often comes from maltreatment from other people over time, whether months or years. The fallout of long-lasting maltreatment from others is that it erodes one’s sense of safety around people and sours one’s worldview, especially in regards to society and people overall. This makes it difficult to get close to people, because it’s hard to trust that anyone you meet won’t also hurt you the way you were hurt in the past. The problem with this is that the way to heal one’s distrust of others is to trust others and not be betrayed or let down. Yes, the fix for trust issues, is trust. Which is hard to do with trust issues. Catch-22. It becomes further complicated when you consider how after years of maltreatment, a person’s sense of how trustworthy someone is can be entirely screwed up. So in attempting to fix trust issues, someone may trust the wrong person and have those trust issues compounded when their vulnerability is used against them. This can easily spiral, and that’s one of the things that makes C-PTSD so difficult to treat.
But it can work the other way around, too. After experiencing maltreatment, one may gain valuable experience and knowledge which would help them identify and differentiate truly trustworthy people from bad actors. Previous experience can help people gain deeper understanding and empathy of others, which can make them the kind of trustworthy person someone else may need, eventually stopping the cycle.
For me, the make-or-break difference between whether relationships became stronger or impossible, was isolation. Now, I wasn’t living alone in the middle of the woods or anything, and I always had friends and family that I was in contact with, so isolation was a little less obvious in my case. It looked more like having a lot of good friends but never sharing my innermost thoughts or feelings with them. It looked like seeing family all the time, but maintaining only a surface-level relationship. It looked like trying to be perfect, because perfection has no vulnerabilities and if I had no vulnerabilities, no one could use them to hurt me. It looked like listening to everyone else’s problems and never sharing my own. Romantically, it looked like trying to be who the other person needed, instead of being myself, because if they didn’t know me, they couldn’t reject me. It looked like feeling sick when they were too nice, self-sabotaging when things were going too well, or running away when they got too close. This led to me choosing to stay with people who weren’t too nice, staying it relationships that weren’t going too well, and always keeping partners at arms’ length. My reasoning was that if I kept my expectations low, I couldn’t be disappointed. Instead, I ended up just being used to disappointment.
Allowing myself to be vulnerable was very difficult after a lifetime of being taught that it would only get me hurt. I was careful about who I decided was trustworthy, and as I got closer with those people, I began by only trusting them with small, nearly inconsequential things. Slowly, over time, I trusted them with bigger, more important things. When they slipped up as all humans do, I had to determine whether they meant harm by it, then communicate that they hurt me, forgive them (if deserved), and then keep on trusting them. That was the hardest part. But as time passed and those I trusted proved themselves trustworthy, something unexpected happened: I gained allies who helped me protect the vulnerabilities I shared with them, and they gained an ally in me. Somehow, opening myself up actually made me feel safer, less alone, and happier. Which is where I am today. So that’s cool.
Ta-da. My first of 100 pages. Hope you liked it.
Feature photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash
Precarious Writer 