The Name for the Thing
Fragments of Heavy Light
Seven years ago, I sat in a therapist’s office and finally heard the words: complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Before that, I had been collecting symptoms like mismatched puzzle pieces. Panic in unexpected places. A sense of floating just above my life. Startle responses that made people laugh and made me want to hide. An inability to rest, even in safe rooms. I couldn’t let my guard down, couldn’t let the walls fall long enough to truly connect—not even with people I loved. I had language for depression. I had language for anxiety. But this—this was different. This was a long, low hum beneath everything.
When I first read about CPTSD, it felt like someone had cracked open my chest and mapped out the quiet, aching architecture inside. It wasn’t just about one big “event.” It was about accumulation. About growing up in a body that never fully relaxed. About scanning rooms. About never knowing what version of someone would walk through the door.
And yet.
As a kid, I found ways to survive that still feel like lifelines: I read obsessively—anything I could find. I made books from printer paper and tape. I played pretend in the woods behind our house until dusk, turning sticks into swords and pinecones into potions. I wasn’t escaping, not really. I was building something. A world that made more sense than the one I lived in.
That’s still what I’m doing, I think. Writing, making art, noticing. Not to escape—but to make meaning. To lay out the fragments and see what glows.
A lot has changed in seven years. I’ve learned how to listen to myself more kindly. I’ve learned how to let people in without shape-shifting to match them. I’ve stopped trying to earn rest.
This space—Fragments of Heavy Light—is one more part of that healing. A place to gather memory, media, art, and story. A place to say: this happened and here’s what I made of it.
Thank you for reading. I’ll be back next Wednesday. Until then, if you feel like it—send me a note. Tell me what helped you make it through. Tell me what your pretend world looked like.
More soon,
AnnMarie
Excerpt from Tuscaloosa Grief Factory
In that house I hid things and talked in my sleep. I gathered rocks and made kites.
A black dog with mange and a beaver tail of dreadlock limped into our yard and lay at my mother’s feet. She said, “This is Oliver,” and so he was. My mother refused to visit my dreams, but Oliver trotted through several times. I woke up and told her ghost in case it was there in the room at the end of the bed, “The sun has no ownership over the moon, but you can’t tell the moon that.”
I knew she’d get it.