The Ink Drop
Picture a single drop of ink hitting a plate. At first, it’s concentrated, a small, domed droplet with all its pressure in one tight spot. Leave it there, and watch what happens. The ink spreads. Thins out. Covers the entire surface in a translucent layer. The volume hasn’t changed. Just the surface area it occupies.
This is what fear feels like in my body, ten hours after waking from a dream.
The initial sensation, chest tight, heart racing, breath shallow, like I’d just outrun a predator… that was the droplet. Concentrated. Undeniable. Now, mid-afternoon, it’s the thin layer. My entire body vibrates with it. Tense. Throbbing. Hard. The adrenaline from a threat that never existed is still trying to leave, and my body is exhausted from the effort.
It Was Just a Dream
Except my body doesn’t know that.
This is what people don’t understand about CPTSD. My nervous system doesn’t differentiate between a threat in a dream and a threat in real life. The content of the dream doesn’t even matter, it wasn’t symbolic or meaningful. It was my nervous system having a flashback, pulling up old wiring, firing off all the alarms for danger that already happened years ago.
I woke up, and my body was convinced I had just survived something catastrophic.
And here’s the thing: I can’t just talk myself out of it. I know, logically, that I was never in danger. I know it was a dream. But knowledge doesn’t override a nervous system stuck on high alert. My body is running a program it learned a long time ago, and it doesn’t care what my rational brain has to say about it.
The Radio in the Cupboard
I have ADHD. I often describe it as being in a room with ten radios, all on full volume, all playing different stations. Medication helps, like putting on ear defenders that muffle the noise enough that I can focus on the one radio I actually need to hear.
Today, the “you are under threat” radio is screaming.
And it’s not enough to just muffle it. I have to wrap that radio in a blanket, tie it shut, shove it in a cupboard, and hold the door closed with my foot. But the blanket keeps slipping. The ties won’t stay. And I’m trying to do this while also making breakfast, taking a shower, writing these words.
That’s about 75% of my brain power, just managing the noise of a threat that doesn’t exist.
My executive function isn’t offline. It’s just that almost all of it is focused on the radio. On keeping the cupboard door shut. On not collapsing under the weight of my body’s insistence that I am in danger right now, that I need to run or fight or fix this or I won’t survive.
The CPTSD piece is what the radio is screaming: You are in danger. If you don’t act now, you will fail to survive. You must act, run, fight, fix this or you will come to harm. Sirens, foghorns, screams. Except the real-life events that caused this wiring already happened. There’s nothing to fix. Nothing to run from. Just a nervous system that hasn’t learned the difference yet.
And so I’m functionally in the same state as if I’d actually been chased by a tiger, lying on the floor trying to catch my breath, except I’m supposed to show up for my life anyway.
The Impossible Math
Here’s the part that makes this truly unbearable: I know what the cure is. Rest. Self-compassion. Safety. Time for my nervous system to down-regulate.
I also know I can’t afford it.
There is no support system for someone like me. If I don’t work, I don’t earn. If I don’t earn, I don’t eat. This isn’t self-pity or exaggeration. It’s math. And it’s the reality that gets dismissed when I try to explain what a day like this costs.
People say things like “just push through” or “it’s all in your head.” But my body is displaying all the symptoms of someone who just survived a buffalo stampede. The world expects me to function normally. My body is barely keeping me upright.
So I redirect. I can’t do traditional work today, but I can write this. I can take the hyperfocus that ADHD gives me, the thing that locks onto the loudest radio, and point it at something useful. Process the experience. Maybe help someone else feel less alone. It won’t pay my bills, but it keeps me from spiraling into the freeze response that’s waiting in the wings.
Because that’s the other trap: if I let myself think too hard about what losing today means, the ticking time bomb of rent, of food, of survival, I risk losing not just today, but days. Plural. Dissociation is always an option my brain offers when things get too overwhelming, and I’ve already lost about three months of 2025 to that freeze state. Days where I can’t move, can’t act, can’t function. Where I only come back when my body screams loud enough: You haven’t eaten in three days. Come back.
So I do what I can. I write. I redirect. I try not to think about tomorrow.
Doing Everything Right Still Isn’t Enough
I want to be clear about something: I’m not failing at recovery.
I do the work. Talk therapy. Self-guided therapy. Somatic practices. Boundaries. I’ve learned to self-validate, to be kind to myself, to notice when my body is speaking. I take medication. I practice mindfulness, creating small moments where I can feel the warmth of tea in my hands or smell a candle burning, teaching myself to connect to my body so that maybe, eventually, I’ll hear it when it tries to tell me something.
It’s working, to a degree. I can hear myself maybe once every two or three weeks now. That’s an improvement.
But here’s the trap of CPTSD that no one tells you: doing everything right doesn’t make you immune. Knowledge isn’t armor. You can be in active recovery, hitting all the marks, following all the guidance from books and therapists and research, and still get blindsided by a dream.
And when that happens, it will wipe you out.
This isn’t regression. This isn’t failure. This is just the reality of living in a body that learned fear so deeply it stored it in the cells, in the nervous system, in the automatic responses that fire before conscious thought even gets a say.
Recovery doesn’t mean you stop having these days. It means you recognize them for what they are. It means you know, even in the middle of it, that this will pass. That your body is doing what it learned to do to keep you alive, even if the threat is long gone.
It means you keep showing up for yourself, even when showing up feels impossible.
Why I’m Writing This
I’m not writing this for pity. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me.
I’m writing this because I need it to exist. Because if I had read something like this on a day like today, I would have felt less alone. Less broken. Less like I was failing at being a functional human.
If you’re reading this and you know this feeling, the dream that derails your entire day, the body that won’t stop screaming about danger that isn’t there, the impossible choice between rest and survival – you’re not alone in this.
This is terrible. And it’s real. And you’re not making it up.
Your body can’t tell the difference between the dream and the tiger. Neither can mine.
And on days like this, just existing is enough.
