For rememberance

My thoughts ran philosophical today.

I don't know anything about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, save it's name.
It occurred to me to wonder today, if people who suffer from that, face the irrational expectation of continued horrific occurrences during the course of everyday life.

I have a friend who has lived in a heightened state of anxiety for years. Her troubles spring from the victimization of her beloved child, and the ensuing court battles. She's dealt with alarming financial difficulties, custody battles, and emotional fallout from the central tragedy of their lives. I'll bet she stands in bewilderment at the mundane irritations of skinned knees, and dinnertime telemarketers. Her nerves must always be braced for the next horror, because horror is what she knows.

There was a time when my life was a daily series of shocks that were so mind numbing as to become .....common. My husband pulled a loaded weapon on a child. Went to jail. Had an affair with a heroin addict. Built a meth lab. My car was re-poed. The business went down in a haze of local news coverage. The house began foreclosure. All this and more!
When every morning is the set of a new, and stunningly-cruel measure of nightmare, how is a person supposed to think?
One does what one must.
The human being is surprisingly resilient in such cases.
It's when life goes back to what ought to be normal, that such a person wonders how to live.
There is no real problem among such minor irritations as the price of gasoline, or being late for work. Someone who has lived through Chernobyl, is always expecting the Next Horror to explode into their world. How can one relax?
It takes years, in my experience.
One day, I was sitting my the fireplace, with my two children. We were reading, as I recall. It just hit me like a bolt of epiphany that I was happy. I had been for some time, and I didn't remember when it had started, but there it was. Life had become normal.
I never, ever, want to forget what it's like, though. Bombs crushing every vestige of my life, and a shattering of my world that leaves me shell-shocked. I need to remember that precisely because I am happy. It mattered. It has everything to do with who I am today. Others need to know that in the face of such things, God is Good. And life is worth getting back to normal for.