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epitome of incomprehensibility
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...from northwest Dorval to southwest Pointe Claire, mostly uphill, to choir practice, might give me a small sample of PTSD. But it's just a sample. It says on the label that it's not the real thing.
Okay, less fancifully: there's a bus strike going on and I missed the train, so I had to bike to choir. It started raining harder right after I began, so I gritted my thoughts. Have grit. Be gritty. Helps with friction in braking, which helps me not to break.
(Pah, I'm still being fanciful. Oh, fuck_it, be that way.)
I wasn't even out of Dorval when a car turned onto the street I was trying to cross. I had to swerve suddenly to the left side of the road, making my breaks squeal in the wetness. I was upset at myself for not watching better. I'm not sure whether it was really a close call or not, but it unsettled me for a moment...or so I thought.
When I was on the bike path between Pointe Claire and Cedar Park train stations, the cold rain spattering my glasses and face, I had a sudden surge of panic. I felt cold and tired and far away from anyone who might help me if I needed help. (In the past, physical discomfort AND alone-ness have been triggers for panic attacks.) I also felt I was doing something needlessly reckless.
But the feeling passed quickly and was replaced with a surge of encouraging adrenaline. That happens sometimes if I get scared while I'm exercising, but not if I do so while resting. (Moral of the story: never rest! Okay, rest sometimes.)
It also helped that I came into view of a shopping centre with cars in its parking lot. Besides, I was close to Cedar Park, where I'd go through the tunnel - a bit of light and shelter.
I also saw the time on a screen there: 19:23 (that is, 7:23 PM). I predicted, "I'll be five minutes late to practice," while wondering idly if my discomfort at being late had magnified and transformed itself into panic.
I didn't connect the panic and whole avoiding-a-collision thing until I was safe in the practice room, singing Bach's Cantata 61. "Here comes the saviour of the heathens; let us now contemplate getting hit by a car." Something like that, right?
And indeed, I was thinking of biking back and hoping it wasn't still raining when a thought, a scene, came to me in a flash: me swerving to avoid a car coming at me, its headlights bright in the wet dark, my brakes squealing. No chance to escape. I'm not fast enough to avoid it and even if I do, I hit something else.
...That gave me a jolt of real fear - real fear for this imagined thing? And then I thought, "Aha, I'm scared because of the REAL thing that happened." It made me grateful I never had post-traumatic stress disorder. The difference between this and generalized anxiety, including the trauma-induced kind, seems to be the intensity of flashbacks to (a) traumatic event(s), and I guess that can include hypothetical scenarios that reference that event. A fear: the past dragged into the future. But I was okay. I escaped getting hit by a car. I escaped PTSD for my lengthier troubles back in 2012, even if I deserved it (okay, so I didn't deserve the program director's bad treatment of me for not being able to meet his academic deadlines at first, but I deserved *some* sort of consequence for hitting a classmate in the face). Anyway, anyway, anyway. We repent. We do better. In all the world (no, those are the words of the cantata: alle Welt).
On a lighter note, I also won the lottery...okay, the "50-50" draw. I got $20, mostly in quarters! And the rain had stopped by the time I biked back - mostly smoothly, downhill.
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