The Strong Ask For Help.

Life Advice on a Bumper Sticker

For the past 15 months, I have faced difficulties I never anticipated that I would ever face. They are the life altering, hard to not think about all the time, exhausting, frustrating, irritating, and altogether regrettable kinds of difficulties.

Yesterday I hit a low I haven’t experienced in a long while, but after a lifetime of living, working, and surviving as a humanitarian aid worker who, after I finally returned home spent and bruised, now knows what PTSD is from first hand experience. Once again, I’m living the dream. . . er, nightmare. It can again become completely debilitating if I don’t deal with it, so I am. I won’t go into the technical details because Leon Macfayden does an excellent job of explaining trauma and ways not only for coping but also for learning to thrive after trauma, in his Substack publication called Trauma to Strength.

We are by now used to the acronym PTSD, and I often hear it used by people to describe their disappointment at, say, finding that the soft serve ice cream machine at McDonalds is broken. Sometimes I hear someone say they “got all PTSDed” by something. Honestly, it makes me cringe and I have often thought it might have been easier if I had stepped on that cluster bomblet mostly buried in the sand while taking a stroll around Chukudum, South Sudan. At least I would have something to show for my troubles.

That’s the worst part of these hidden wounds. Why can’t I just get over it, some have asked me. I think about that question and wonder if a person with a broken leg is ever asked the same question. This isn’t about self pity; it’s about wanting to be understood. Debilitating PTSD can destroy families, end lives, and make each day a battle. And sometimes, even when it seems everything is finally good again, something can happen and one must push that boulder all the way up to the top of the hill again and again, like a Switter the Sisyphus. That’s what I’ve spent the last 15 months doing. “Welcome darkness my old friend.”

But it’s different this time. I know and understand what I’m facing and I learned a lot of coping tools and strategies, kind of like having an emergency trauma repair kit, and I did not discover those things on my own. I had a lot of help from experienced, trained, very patient, very caring people. I’m looking at you, NJ, if you read this!

Another thing I discovered early on is that it’s simply ignorant or futile to try to power through without help. I started out ignorant and I couldn’t power myself out of my mess. It doesn’t work that way. You can try to run away from it, you can try to ignore it, you can try to self-medicate for it, but despite your best efforts, you will struggle and often find yourself overwhelmed and soon thinking it would be easier to simply give up, forever. You need to ask for help if you are in that place. Not soon, but NOW.

For me, asking for help was almost too hard, because it was my job to provide help for everybody else. I probably didn’t even know how to ask for help. I was simply afraid of asking for help. I was also very reluctant to accept help when it was given, because I thought I didn’t really need it or deserve it. I was so wrong about all those things. As my counselor once told me, “Switter, do you not understand you are a person, too?” I never thought of it that way before, but I eventually learned we need to be strong enough to ask for help because we do deserve it. Life does not need to be lived in misery, with no hope of finding a way out. In fact, it takes a lot of courage to ask for help.

Early on in my substacking days, I wrote a short entry called “Only the Strong Ask for Help.” I think one person read it, so I am going to rerun it. I hope it reaches someone who needs it, the way I got exactly what I needed when I needed help the most.

For months in 2008, I was so desperate to understand and to find a way out of the darkness into which I was sliding deeper and deeper that I finally started going to weekly counseling sessions out of sheer desperation. Of course it was only temporary, maybe a session or two, because I’m tough and thought I could weather anything. I soon learned that I was suffering from PTSD, something I knew very little about, other than that soldiers struggle with it. I didn’t believe it was a real thing in my case and I always resisted being lumped in with soldiers, because I thought they are heroes, and I’m certainly no hero. Besides, I was told by the organization I worked for that my “so-called problem is from a lack of faith, and it is clear I was not emotionally suited to work internationally.” I was told this after nearly a quarter century of living and working internationally in some of the world’s saddest and most broken places. If what they said was true, someone above my pay grade was either the world’s least observant supervisor to keep sending me back out there, or else was a straight up sadist! I still sometimes wonder which one it was: incompetence or cruelty? Heh! At this point, why does it matter?

After I finally convinced myself it was time to do something, anything, other than continuing to live so miserably, I attended the sessions faithfully. I appreciated my kind counselor, but I had little confidence that I was getting better. Sometimes I felt I continued to slide into the darkness. I was, after all, weak. They told me so.

One morning on my drive to the counseling office, I realized I didn’t want to continue the sessions anymore. Who was I kidding? I was a miserable human wreck not worth fixing. Why continue? I was at the stoplight where I needed to turn right to go to the counseling office. I decided to go straight.

Before the light changed, a big red diesel pickup pulled up next to the left side of my car, and right at eye level on the front fender of the truck, I saw a round sticker with the words “The Strong Ask For Help,” and then something about an army hotline.

I was stunned. Why? How? My plan to skip out was completely derailed, and I attended that counseling session despite myself. How could I not? That sticker was like a bolt of lightning aimed directly at me. I continued attending those counseling sessions because slowly the pieces of my life started coming together to form something good, rich, and meaningful. I was not what they said I was. I was a person, too

That round sticker on a truck fender with a message I needed right then might be only a coincidence. I don’t know, but when I told this story to a military veteran who also struggled with PTSD, he asked me whether I noticed if the driver had wings.

I forgot to look. I just did what I was told.