The reckoning before Christmas

I’ve barely had time to start attacking the candy cane I’ve picked up on the way in before my psychologist diagnoses me with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

His directness throws me. Even though I had been the one to brandish a series of printouts at him a few weeks ago, I’m in disbelief. Usually my psychologist couches his words in caveats and technicalities — taking questions on notice and stressing that the answers are complicated and nuanced.

But after spending years feeling broken and investing thousands of dollars on a journey to the truth, the view from the destination really is that clear.

In my short-lived days as a university attendee, I was supposed to learn how to write features like the one you’re reading right now. Although, someone described my last story as “long and sad”, so maybe I should have paid more attention.

One of those classes covered the 1994 The New Yorker piece ‘Forty-one false starts’ — a profile of postmodern painter David Salle. It delivers exactly what it promises: 41 attempts to start the article and introduce the artist.

This piece won’t be nearly as good as that one, but it will probably feel just as stop-start. Because the journey has been complicated, and there is nuance.

It’s August 2023 in Queensland, and I’m catching up with someone to see a horror movie we’ve both been looking forward to. I’d been working in TV for a few months, including one day when this movie’s trailer was shown in a film review segment — before it was abruptly cut off by the yells of a panicked producer.

This isn’t just any horror movie; it’s the film that was too scary for television.

And boy, does it deliver. Cheap scares soon make way for an enduring tension that sits like a weighted blanket on my chest. I am absolutely enthralled from start to finish. But there’s something else — a recurring motif that makes my stomach turn, and uniquely gets to me in a way that doesn’t seem to bother my companion as much.

The cinema lights fade up, but I don’t quite feel like I’ve come back to reality. As we take a walk to get some food, it’s like I’ve put on a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription. I’m a distant observer — disconnected from what’s around me. And my body feels numb, like I’m not sure where my own form ends and the world begins.

I’d had that same ‘untethered’ feeling after a 2017 schoolyard spat. Someone had taken the nuclear option and I’d found my back against the wall in a playground war of words. Then, whatever my high school teachers were saying had started to just… wash over me in class. That didn’t feel too productive, so I picked up my things and walked home.

The familiar feeling only passes several hours after the movie. I realise a few weeks later that parts of the film had echoed some moments at home from earlier in my life. Those experiences hadn’t felt confronting — or even tense — at the time, but the film had still managed to strike a nerve.

‘Well, it was a horror movie.’

I decide it probably wouldn’t be wise to watch it again. And that’s a shame, because it was a bloody good movie.

I start to suspect it’s time to revisit my decade-plus, on-again, off-again relationship with a slew of mental health professionals a few weeks later.

I’d forgotten what had happened in Queensland, but some other moments in Melbourne were causing concern. I had moved there after a psychiatrist had urged me to “get out”, although I don’t think she meant two states away.

But people smile when I walk into rooms here — and they’re starting to reach critical mass. I delight in mixing them, just like I mix drinks, to create friendships between former strangers.

‘I am fixed.’

Sure, there’s a deep-seated self loathing that fills the entirety of my being like a thick sludge and confines me to bed for days at a time. But that’s normal; it’s my drive and determination to be better. Yes, it’s a hunger for more — and oh, am I starving.

I have so much to do. And someone who bristles when they see me had helpfully outlined almost all of it in an email:

“When Loughlin is free, if he is not overburdened with his dual-degree, part-time role in TV, high school tutoring, community radio production, and presidency of a university club, we would love to talk to him. However, I am beginning to doubt his ability to live up to all of these commitments.”

‘I am successful.’

Sure, sometimes I wake up and immediately throw up from apparent exhaustion. I call that a ‘warning shot’, like it’s normal; it’s my body telling me to take one day off or watch it make me take several.

I look at my sheet-white face and sweat-drenched brow in my bathroom mirror and silently nod to accept my body’s faustian bargain.

‘I am healthy.’

But two moments had been inconveniently challenging these innate truths.

I had yelled at someone while working in customer service — a third job forgotten in that earlier email. Sure, customers are annoying, often wrong, and are in and of themselves a compelling argument to bring back the death penalty.

But I am always poised and in control; I am not a person who raises my voice. Ever.

Then, I had decided to drink heavily, late into a work night. That hadn’t been the plan. I’d done some maths and figured if I cut myself off before heading to a birthday party, the booze would be well out of my system by the time I needed to be alert.

“You don’t seem drunk at all,” said a man with the build of a Victorian-era child, who would later admit he threw up the moment he got home from that party. “There’s like, no difference between you drunk and sober.”

It was a compelling argument, but it wouldn’t normally be. I’m not a person who puts a job — any job — at risk. Ever.

Of course, I’m entitled to yell and drink like a pirate. But as a walking safe-word of a person, these choices feel out of character to me. I don’t feel like I was a part of making them — or even know where they had come from. These moments feel impulsive, reactive and disconcerting.

‘I am out of control.’

“When I was five or six, I’m told my sister would regularly wake up very early in the morning and scream continuously for about an hour while I would hide under a table. I don’t have any memory of that, but you know what? She’s real for that; I’m starting to get it.”

— ‘I wiped my sister’s own vomit off her.’ (July 2024)

I’m trapped in a banal conversation — no, this doesn’t qualify as that — with a group of people about their middle names. They start to go around in a circle sharing them, like they’re introducing themselves at a support group.

The Victorian-era child (he’s been getting on my nerves) jabs a bony finger in my direction. I guess it’s my turn.

“I already know your middle name,” he says, “because you’ve been using it as your last name!” He boasts that he’d spotted my real last name written down a while ago and starts trying to remember it.

“Shepherd?”

“No.”

“Sherman?”

“No”

“Shane?”

“That’s a first name.”

I wonder if he’ll want a medal if he manages to get it right. Then, if a medal could be used as a murder weapon if thrown with enough force.

‘If only…’

“Wait, why do you go by your middle name?” the group asks.

“Oh, just for the vibe,” I lie confidently.

I bring this up later with a person who had mutually agreed with me that, on the balance of probabilities, we were most likely best friends. We had figured it was about time to have that conversation after 11 years of knowing each other.

“I mean, there’s not really a reason for the middle name thing,” I say. “It’s just something I started doing.”

There’s a silence on the phone line.

“No…” she starts.

She alleges I had been incredibly intent and vocal about my seeming rebrand in 2018. But I don’t remember that, and my long-term memory is usually so good I have to play it down to not freak people out.

The last time I’d felt such an absence of recognition was when a university classmate had gotten me to try and guess songs from well-known children’s movies. We were making a program about kids music, and he could play all the classics on the piano.

“Surely you know this one,” he had grinned, playing the opening notes of a fourth or fifth song.

But my mind had been completely blank.

I get an appointment with a bulk-billing psychologist a few weeks after my referral. The short wait surprises me, until I discover she bulk bills for a reason.

“So what’s brought you here?” she asks, before spending the next hour tossing out a laundry list of wrong guesses to what was apparently a rhetorical question. I struggle to get a word out, and that’s rare for me; I love to yap.

She says my university program must be stressful, but I wouldn’t know; I had dropped out.

My father had a stroke a few weeks before my birthday and I had rethought my priorities. The psychologist tells me I must have been shocked and worried. But he was at a stroke-having age, so it hadn’t been a shock. And he had recovered quickly, so there was little need to worry.

I’d been working more after one of my scholarships had ended. The psychologist suggests the financial stress must be weighing on me, but it’s not. I’d already run out of money and had to move back to Queensland before. It’s like getting suspended from school; there’s no shock value after the first time.

Her focus turns to the job in TV. It’s a type of work dominated by raised voices, sudden changes and quick reactions. But it’s also an entry level job, and where I want to be. The shifts are odd hours, but for some reason I always leave feeling energised. I enjoy it.

“It sounds like you pursue a lot of stress,” the psychologist says. “It keeps you going. But you’re going to hit the wall one day.” I wonder if she’s been watching Andrew Tate.

As I leave, I realise my referral probably included my scores on the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS). I’d scored low for depression and anxiety, but the DASS had alleged I was under ‘severe stress’. That may have coloured the circular conversation I’d just had.

My concerns about my drinking or my outburst at work hadn’t come up, so I figure they can wait while I shop around for another psychologist. A few weeks later, I self-medicate a tightness in my chest by downing four negronis in the space of about an hour and a half.

I head back to my GP to update my mental health referral a few months later. I’ve found another psychologist near me and I’m hoping he might be the one.

The DASS alleges I have become three times more depressed than last time. That’s ‘severe depression’. My GP asks if anything’s happened over the last few months.

Well, I have been feeling for a good while like I could burst into tears at any moment. And last month, I’d gone out of my way to hide my birthday from the people around me — hoping it would slip by unacknowledged. I didn’t want to confront the fact that I’m getting older and I am still Like This.

Oh, and there’s that other thing, of course.

I’m walking down the street with someone who lives ages away. We’re going to pick up some food before settling in for a solid life catch up.

“I think things are starting to get a bit dicey with my sister,” I say absentmindedly. “Three weeks in a coma is a pretty long time.”

He stops me in my tracks and his eyes widen.

“You have a sister?!”

“And a brother. Why?”

“You’ve never spoken about your family before.”

This can’t be true. We’ve known each other for years; we’d met a few months after he’d been kicked out of his church congregation. And yet he insists.

“You have never ever spoken about your family before.”

I wonder how that could be. My allegedly chaotic home life had felt like a defining feature in Queensland; I was always ‘the brother’. But it hadn’t even been that bad.

As I got older, my father had started to call our home a “highly-dynamic household”. And, okay, maybe a Christmas party I had thrown one year had shown that.

I’d had my guests stay downstairs to give my sister and her carer their space. That’s why I rarely had people over. My best friend comes from a highly-dynamic household of her own, and says spaces like ours have to be centred around our siblings.

There’s truth to that.

But years of unreciprocated invitations had a consequence. At least having everyone in the small space masked how empty the house really was. After all but one of them had left, I put the last drunken straggler to bed and started cleaning up.

That’s when I heard my sister’s carer crying out in pain upstairs; she’d fucked her back after lifting my sister and we spent the whole night waiting for an ambulance. I quickly moved my guest on in the morning, because I was on duty until my parents came home and I could finally go to sleep.

But everyone chucks an all-nighter sometimes. And sure, people had lashed out when the stress in that household had reached boiling point. But all families have blow ups every now and then.

A few weeks later, my father heard a radio interview about a scholarship for so-called ‘young carers’.

“There’s no way that’s for me.”

“That’s what they said you’d say!” he said. “They literally can’t give it away because no one thinks they deserve it.”

I reluctantly filled out an application for the Young Carer Bursary — a $3,000 grant that I’d apparently been able to get every year since I was 12 years old. My parents kept suggesting more adverse impacts to beef up the application.

“You were late for school a lot because you were helping with situations at home,” offered my father.

“But I didn’t want to be at school in the first place.”

I ended up submitting a very bare-bones testimony — even doing a final pass for any sympathetic adjectives that might bias the decision-makers in my favour. There were real people with difficult lives who deserved this scholarship…

…and apparently, even with the little information I had offered, the panel thought I was one of them. That’s right: an independent panel of experts — who had never met me — had decided my life was so shit that I should be paid thousands of dollars in compensation. What the fuck?

‘Well, they did say they never get enough applicants.’

A journalism degree that had seemed like a preposterous dream, in a city that had always been out of reach, was now in the realm of possibility. I moved to the state of Victoria — and straight into pandemic lockdowns.

And while the state’s government had been erecting a so-called ‘ring of steel’ around the city, I’d managed to completely ring-fence my life in Melbourne from what had been in Queensland.

I hadn’t even noticed I was doing it.

“You know not everyone’s out to get you, right?”

Someone who’d been out of my life for ages is reconnecting with me at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place that’s tucked down a laneway. It’s still packed at half one in the morning and we’re crammed at a small table in a corner.

“Of course not everyone’s out to get me. There are still some people who haven’t even met me yet,” I grin, garnering an eye-roll from the other side of a mountain of dumplings.

While not everyone’s out to get me, I know of people in at least four different states who would delight in my downfall. And even in Melbourne, I’ve always known I don’t belong. I’m a vindictive, damaged person, and other people know it, too.

But people begrudge me a smile, because there’s very few I’m not useful to.

I’ve served as a de-facto careers counsellor — helping people land opportunities both here and overseas. I’ve gotten a midnight birthday text accompanied by a fresh draft of a cover letter for review. I’ve been a confidant in the witching hours and a shoulder to cry on when things go wrong.

But I’m also difficult to deal with and easy to replace. That’s why I’ve always been very sparing with the word “friend”. They often evaporate like a mirage when I dare to look more closely.

I carry myself with a fundamental belief that seems to read to others as confidence. It lets me push boundaries by choosing to walk through some social cues like invisible walls — picking and choosing which rules are optional. And it makes me comfortable with conflict; I’ll start tough conversations and finish them with brutal action.

It’s easy to do when you believe you’re an awful person, and that everyone you meet doesn’t like you; there’s no relationship there to damage. But of course, that also makes every interaction fraught with tension.

I’d started talking again with my dinner partner a few months ago, when we were at the same party. She’d been the one to approach and ask if we were good; we weren’t. A Christmas party I’d thrown had been torpedoed by drama over the guest list that I believed she had started.

Some of her friends had become like an oil slick that oozed negativity over outsiders. As soon as I’d found some professional success, I had started to hear rumours they’d turned their scrutiny toward me. After the guest list blow up, it had been easier to just quarantine the entire group from my life.

But I’d never put the Christmas party allegation to this person specifically. And when I did, she put my theory to rest in minutes. She told me she hadn’t bothered to defend herself at the time because she thought she’d already done too much to damage my trust in her.

I end up being one of the last people to leave her birthday party a few months later. There’d been a cold war brewing in the lead up; one of her friends had asked why I was on the guest list. Some things never change.

One of them tentatively ventures over to me when we’re at a wine bar.

“I can’t believe we’ve gone a year and a half without talking,” he smiles.

“I thought that was your intention.”

Across the room, one of his friends across studies our interaction intently.

“Look,” he acknowledges, “I see how you could get that idea.”

Although we hadn’t been speaking, we had been keeping tabs on each other. I’d emailed him some tips when I saw he had started an internship. And at the party, he becomes one of few people who have managed to find the words to ask about my sister’s hospital stay.

“You know, you warned me this would happen,” he says. “The last time we spoke.”

We used to be close. He’d been there years ago to witness my first kiss. But apparently on a three-hour drive to support someone in a community theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I had told him about falling out of touch with someone else.

I wrack my brain trying to work out who that could have been.

It can’t have been the man who told me “I thought I finally had a friend in you, and then you hated me,” because that had been after the drive. Maybe it had been the woman who ghosted me after I’d helped her move out of an abusive home in Queensland, but that would have been too long ago.

In my bedroom, a collage of pictures of me with groups of people takes up almost all of one of the walls. The photos have been collected over years. But many of them — too many — depict people who aren’t in my life anymore.

There are too many possibilities. I’ve been caught in a loop for years.

I’m back in Queensland and walking to meet someone for dinner. She manages a bar and we’ll be eating at a fancy competitor around the corner — market research.

My phone rings; I’m expecting the call.

“Hello, nice to meet you,” I smile. “So, what you’re going to do is take your hands off the devices and step away from the desk.”

I’m talking to a frantic stranger who is under the mistaken impression that they’re solely responsible for keeping one of Melbourne’s FM radio stations on air.

“With me, let’s go,” I instruct. “Breathe in, and hold…”

My gaze lazily flicks down to my smartwatch to check the directions to the restaurant.

“Keep holding…”

I’ve overshot by about a block.

‘That’s okay, I’ll get to walk along the river and it’ll be nice with the sun setting over it.’

“Okay, and out,” I sigh. “Let’s try and stop the tears as well; you’re not being paid to care about this.”

I guide them through a technical challenge that’s being caused by a software program invented before the modern smartphone. There’s also something going on with their laptop.

“Let’s just focus on that,” I suggest. “Your radio show will sort itself out.” I know it will, because I’d automated the program weeks ago after another issue. When I fix things, I fix them properly.

When the stranger thanks me for my time, they tell me how calm I am. So did the last one, and the one before that. So did one of my bosses when he was training me, and a coworker when I was training her.

This always perplexes me; I don’t know why I wouldn’t be calm. There’s no immediate, personal threat, and there are always plenty of other options and redundancies. If something’s not within my control, there’s no point worrying about it — and if it is, it’s fixable.

It also helps when — like in this case on the phone — I do not give a single fuck about what happens. But a different feeling would flash over me a few months later.

I’m sitting in a dark room.

Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of how every part of my body feels in my chair.

How my shoes feel on the ground.

My chest is tight.

My heart is racing.

My vision sharpens.

I look down at my hands.

They are trembling.

My eyes dart around.

There’s someone yelling.

But not even at me.

I still flee the room as soon as I’m able to.

That tightness in my chest had used to be easily treatable with alcohol. At least, it had been — until even the people who’d been telling me it was dramatic to call it ‘a drinking problem’ had asked me to share my location with them so they’d know if I managed to get home safe.

Back at that Queensland restaurant, a waiter comes to take our table’s drink orders. My choice to go with soft drink earns a raised eyebrow, so I get to make my one joke about being a recovering alcoholic.

“I’m retired,” I sigh, miming a puff of a cigarette and affecting a wistful gaze over the river.

Now that booze is off the table, I investigate personal trainers. And I soon come to a horrific realisation: going to the gym actually does make me feel better.

And the people here seem to get it. One of the trainers admits to having a “full-on panic attack” at his home earlier in the week. Another says exercise helped him to feel grounded while living with a brother who has schizophrenia.

‘All of those people who talked about endorphins and science were right. Fuck.’

At least I can commit to the bit by turning up every time dressed like an absolute wanker. Although sometimes noises splutter out of me not unlike those made by professional tennis players, or a dog that’s about to be put down.

But inside my head it’s quiet. Outside of my professional career that’s been described as a “meteoric rise”, I’ve managed to find something I am decidedly not good at. It demands my full attention; there’s no opportunity to think about anything else.

‘Watch your shoulder or you’ll hurt yourself again. Engage your core. What core? Where your core will eventually be if you keep engaging it; concepts of a core.’

My personal trainer gets creative to help me narrow down where my concept of a core is supposed to be.

“Imagine like I’m going to punch you in the stomach — ”

My stomach tenses, but so does the whole rest of my body. And I must have pulled a face, because he quickly follows up with:

“I’m not actually going to hit you.”

I’ve always been jumpy; sudden loud noises like car horns really get me as well. But of course I’d knew my personal trainer wasn’t going to hit me. That would probably damage the professional relationship somewhat

I get back to lifting after that odd moment. It’s always easy to know when it’s time to step things up.

‘Lower with control. Long arms, straight shoulders. Engage your glutes. Remember, no matter how sculpted your body is, you’ll still be damaged goods. Everybody finds you difficult and they’ll all— wait, hold on.’

“More weight for the next set?” asks my personal trainer.

“Yeah,” I pant, “it’s time.”

I grab heavier dumbbells and soon enough that emotional weight is drowned out as I strain against the fresh challenge.

‘The beatings will continue until morale improves.’

I’ve found the one.

There’s a psychologist who practices just down the road from me. He’s happy to take questions and gives thoughtful answers — making clear the bounds of his knowledge. He’s curious, but he doesn’t ask stupid questions like “Do you ever wish you had a normal life?”

That one had been a favourite of a few mental health professionals, including the psychiatrist who started a session by asking me “Are you a cutter?” (No.) and ended it with an offer to prescribe antidepressants phrased as “Want some drugs?” (I guess?)

I always parried the ‘normal life’ question by breaking it down. I would reject the assertion that such a life exists, because what is that really? And if we’re to assume it’s a life like one from a TV show, would I really still be me if I had lived that life?

I was still a fan of being myself back then. That’s why I never took those antidepressants that had been prescribed for me. I was scared I’d lose my sparkle — my dry wit that keeps the people around me chuckling.

But five years later, I had changed my tune.

“This isn’t funny anymore,” I say, when asking my new GP for antidepressants. And a few weeks later, I’m back in his office for a new mental health referral because it had been so long since the last one.

“And you were diagnosed with depression in 2019?” he asks me.

My forehead creases.

“Oh, no,” I clarify. “I haven’t been diagnosed with anything. I was just offered antidepressants in 2019.”

Now, it’s the doctor’s turn to be confused.

“To have been offered antidepressants…” he trails off, before delivering his next words slowly and gently — as if talking to a small child.

“You were diagnosed with depression,” he announces. “Look at your medical history. Maybe it wasn’t made clear to you at the time, and no one said those exact words, but you had to have been. If not…”

The doctor pretends to tap an imaginary sword on each of my shoulders.

“I hereby diagnose you with depression,” he says regally. “You are diagnosed.”

I walk out of the appointment thoroughly perplexed about my knighthood.

Had I really been diagnosed with depression by a woman blunt enough to ask if I’m “a cutter” and not noticed? That was years ago, in 2019 — pre-Covid.

I had spent years assuming the worst and managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. My self-esteem was clearly in the toilet. On rare days when I had nothing on, I’d refuse to budge from bed. My lows felt deeper and rejections cut harder.

But I thought those were personal failings — that I was just too lazy, and too sensitive.

‘Oh my god,’ I realise, three weeks into a course of antidepressants, ‘am I depressed?’

My supervisor at work had also started to suspect something was up. She told me she was worried about me and I wondered what had pushed her over the edge. Had it been:

1. Saying about a tumour that had been removed from my knee when I was a child: “It wasn’t cancer. I’m not that lucky”;
2. Telling her that what had sold me on starting antidepressants was the chance of losing weight as a side-effect;
3. Responding to her request to provide an emergency contact with “I don’t have one of those. If it gets to that point, just let me go”;

Or, possibly, all of the above? We’ll never know.

But my mother’s coming to Melbourne to help me put up my Christmas tree, and I figure she’ll have a snoop through my medicine cabinet while she’s around. I reckon it’s best to ring ahead to tell her about my antidepressants — and my new diagnosis.

“Well, 2019 was a hard year for you,” she says when I tell her.

“Yes,” I reply, “but every year’s been a hard year for me.”

My mother ponders this.

“I guess that makes sense,” she said. “Honestly, after everything you’ve been through, I’ve always thought it’s a wonder you don’t have PTSD!”

‘Funny that.’

“It’s tough for you,” my mother continues. “There’s loads of people with divorced parents and things like that. But you? No one’s ever going to be able to understand you.”

I met my best friend in a support group about 12 years ago.

The group was a bit dodgy, to be honest. We met on an odd cadence of Friday evenings that were six weeks apart and easy to forget. And when we did turn up, we found plans for outings had devolved into a long-running tour of various fast food restaurants. (Yes, I shed 20 kilos after high school.)

Despite that, it was helpful to know some other people who ‘got it’. In other places, I usually found myself having to manage other people’s shock and emotions when telling them about my life. But in that group, that shock and emotion was rightfully acknowledged as belonging to me.

My bestie and I ended up going to the same high school together, in different classes. We had chaotic lives and mostly stayed in touch over text, so would sometimes go months without contact. When those months turned to years, I worried things would be awkward when we decided to catch up as freshly-minted Melburnian adults.

But a quick morning coffee had turned into spending the rest of the day together like no time had passed at all. And when someone else from our high school came down to Melbourne, the three of us hit a few bars together. We then decided we didn’t like her that much.

I lost touch with my best friend again after that — getting no reply to an invitation to my 21st birthday. When my parents asked me where she was, I played it off by joking that we only saw each other every other year.

She later apologised for missing my message and asked to get coffee a few weeks later. After some small talk in a what I had thought was a fancy café — but was actually just part of a chain — we got to the real reason for the chat. My friend said stuff was going down back home; the coffee had been her pulling the emergency alarm.

To be fair, I’ve done the same. When my sister wound up in hospital, I told my best friend within minutes. Everyone else only found out after a couple of weeks — including my boss. When I emailed him to flag I might need some time off, I went out of my way to put a bold line in the email: Long hospital stays are normal and I am not worried at this stage.

My best friend wouldn’t have needed that disclaimer.

We’d become closer over the last few years. She’d had a falling out with some friends at her university; like a TV chef, I was able to rustle up a group I’d prepared earlier. This group cheered at my arrival to a party earlier this year — to my confusion and her clear bemusement.

She explained she’d had the same reception. “No one else got that welcome,” she said. “But I get it now; I was Loughlin-by-proxy.”

In a city where I worried most of the relationships in my life were transactional, she was a rare person for whom there was little I could do professionally. We knew where we’d both come from, and were just there for each other personally — on the phone to each other during crises and life events.

My bestie had even gone apartment hunting with me when I was looking for a new rental. When we wound up at a bar about 15 hours later, we nervously made it official after 11 years of friendship: we were best friends.

“Things are going so well, Loughlin,” she said to me one day about her new girlfriend. I was thrilled; they were a fantastic match. “I mean, I’ve told her things I haven’t even told you!”

Of course our friendship was going to change when she got into a relationship; it would be selfish to want things to stay the same. But I felt her putting that distance between us again — and not just metaphorically.

She moved back to Queensland and I got dinner with her on a visit there.

“The move was really tough,” she admitted — news to me. “I was really upset, but I was able to call my girlfriend to talk about it and she made me feel a lot better.”

A few weeks later, she booked an impromptu trip to Melbourne to visit her girlfriend. Catching up with me wasn’t part of the plan for this whistle-stop tour.

But when they broke up, I was one of the first ports of call. She was devastated and I felt for her. I get the impression she thinks that’s when she checked back in to our friendship. But the distance was still there.

Things were weird this year; we were both going through it and I was mindful not to put too much on her plate. She still knew the basics; I had started taking antidepressants and was looking into something called C-PTSD. But I didn’t burden her with the context.

We also started to realise we had very little in common. She felt like she couldn’t talk about her passions of art history and astrology with me. And I don’t think melodramatic psychodramas or my pro-bono crisis management really count as hobbies of my own; my bestie has suggested taking up knitting several times.

Last month, a conversation pushed her out of her comfort zone and we had to reel things back in. But we ended the phone call amicably, and I had been working on trying not to ruminate on mistakes like that. A text in the morning made me wonder if I should have followed my impulse to grovel:

“i’ve noticed myself becoming distant in our friendship and i worry that im becoming resentful by not expressing how im feeling to you. i want to be so clear that you have done nothing wrong by reaching out to me for support, and i hope you continue to reach out to the people around you. you deserve love and support. i am struggling to provide that right now because im using a lot of my energy to prevent myself falling into a really dark place. my depression manifests in very similar ways to yours and am finding it hard to hear my thoughts echoed and to not carry them with me. i love you, and i need some space to heal to be the supportive friend you deserve.”

Sure, we’d drifted away from each other and come back together before. But I’d been her rock during some seriously dark situations. And she chose the time I was at my lowest to step away.

I hope she’s able to heal in the way that she needs.

But I also know I’m worth a little bit more than that.

“What’s up?”

“Something diagnosable,” I fire back.

It’s been clear to the people around me that something’s been wrong with me for a good few years. Some of them have even been rude enough to guess what it could be to my face. So when it came time to have that conversation with my psychologist, I had a laundry list of options for him to explore.

But there’s one potential condition that’s been starting to resonate with me in an uncomfortable way. The ‘PTSD’ label had been lobbed my way a few times over the years, and it used to feel like one of the most ridiculous guesses.

I mean sure, my life had been a bit… robust. But traumatic? Really? Post-traumatic stress disorder is for people who’ve been to war or survived a concentration camp. There’s no way that’s me.

But now I’m up late learning about C-PTSD.

The ‘C’ complicates things. Literally, it stands for ‘complex’. And the UK-based charity Mind lists some of those complications:

- difficulty controlling your emotions
- feeling very angry or distrustful towards the world
- constant feelings of emptiness or hopelessness
- feeling as if you are permanently damaged or worthless
- feeling as if you are completely different to other people
- feeling like nobody can understand what happened to you
- avoiding friendships and relationships, or finding them very difficult
- often experiencing dissociative symptoms such as depersonalisation or derealisation
- physical symptoms, such as headaches, dizziness, chest pains and stomach aches
- regular suicidal feelings.

An eerie sensation wraps cold tendrils around me. Every single dot point stabs at a familiar feeling. It’s like I’m reading my own Wikipedia page.

I’m not quite ready to put my full trust in one website, so I print out some other websites ending in ‘.gov’ to bring with me to a tough interview with my psychologist. I relay some vignettes from my life to him — just like the ones I’ve shared with you here — then I close the trap.

“Does this mean anything to you?” I ask him, brandishing one of my printouts out him.

He takes it and reads it. “Complex post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“Do you think it’s a real condition?” I ask, continuing my adversarial line of questioning. “It’s not in the DSM-5.”

“But it is a distinct condition in the ICD-11.”

“So you’re aware of it. Do you think it’s applicable?”

“Applicable to you?”

“Given what we’ve discussed?”

My psychologist starts to scramble. I’ve scooped him. He stumbles over his words and asks to take certain questions on notice.

“We can definitely explore this,” he says. “There’s an assessment we can do that will tell us definitively, and we’ve been heading in that direction. Regardless of what we find, it’s clear your trauma is affecting your life.”

‘My trauma?’

That word still sits uncomfortable with me, but it’s good enough for now. My psychologist asks me what the other printouts are for and I explain they’re just to corroborate the one he has. I am journalistically rigorous.

“That’s good,” he says. “I’m always supportive of you doing some research on your own, as long as you check with me that it’s a source we can trust.”

I do some more Googling, using a word that more and more people have been adding to their searches to get real answers: “cptsd reddit”.

Aha — there’s a subreddit for that. Unfortunately, the posts put the “feeling as if you are permanently damaged or worthless” symptom on full display and are incredibly unhelpful. I go to bed feeling deeply troubled and profoundly broken.

But after a month of weekly sessions exploring the condition from every angle, I take the assessment and my psychologist arrives at that uncharacteristically definitive answer. He probably remembers I went five years without realising I have depression.

“This condition fits your symptoms, and there are no other conditions that also fit all of your symptoms as well,” my psychologist says. He explains I fit all the criteria for complex post-traumatic stress disorder, but the self loathing and difficulty with relationships are the biggest tells.

So that’s it. I’ve paid more than $3,500 for this answer—and that’s after government rebates and my private health cover.

After a long search, it feels bittersweet.

Now I’ve identified the problem, I can start working towards a solution. My psychologist has explained to me that solutions for a chronic condition like this look more like managing it than fixing it. That means even though it won’t ever really go away, it will get easier to live with.

But complex post-traumatic stress disorder is an acquired condition. I wasn’t born with it, and it hadn’t been inevitable. That means there really could have been another version of me who had lived a different life — a normal life — and still be me. A version of me who can connect with people and isn’t damaged and broken.

For the first time ever, I grieve for that normal life I could have had.