Harlow Shut Down for Days

There are times when I’m not a very big fan of the human race. I joke that I’m no social butterfly. Not really a joke though. It’s not about anger (although at times it is), because I don’t have to be experiencing rage towards others for this to come up. Some days, I’m just disinterested in interacting with anything that walks on two legs and talks.  

I’ve learned this is not just what I’ve been born with. Instead, it can often be fallout from living with the intense and not necessarily ‘normal’ experiences in my past. Environmentally or situationally, it may be the norm at times to react and act like this, since fallout from the dark stuff can have a wide range of what that looks like. Trying to fit into mainstream ‘normal’ after that kind of history, for me this has meant nothing fits like it used to. The mundane and ordinary world made me uncomfortable and needing to distance myself from others till I could tolerate it better.

With the reality of family, home, work, and life on this planet, it’s inevitable we need to interact with others on some level.  Yet those who haven’t gone thru what some of us have… will not understand our reality.  

Trauma (for lack of a better word) creates a loss of innocence and faith in the world as a safe place, or even a good place. The frame of reference in life is totally different for the innocent masses from ours. Basically? They don’t have a clue what life holds, both during and after for those who have seen and done what most do not.  And well… how could they know? 

Often though, they will try to have a clue. To give credit where it’s due, some will care very much and they so want to have a clue what it is we carry/know. They want to… help, fix, heal us. Even more than getting a clue they would love for us to give them a clue. Any clue. Even just maybe one little hint of one. I’m pretty sure it drives loved ones crazy trying to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ or ‘what happened’.. or ‘why??’. But these things are most often communicated outside the realm of spoken language and words don’t cover it. It may be why I’ve learned – as someone who is not actually military but have my own closet full of demons – that I can be most comfortable in the presence of those who have had also their eyes opened to evil. I have several kinds of connections to the military, both personal and professional, and often can find great comfort in the company of warfighters. 

Sometimes in the past, others concerns and desire to help and understand would just piss me off even more. Because I didn’t want someone understanding what I’d gone through, if they hadn’t paid their dues by actually going through it themselves. Those of you with a clue will likely understand this logic.

Over the years, as I’ve worked on my own trauma in therapy, which focused on building skills and increasing my awareness of how the world and people can profoundly affect me, I began to understand more specifically why I was the way I was. This understanding helped me to become a little less reactive and much less irritated around people who cared about me. I could spend time with my family without feeling trapped. I experienced something that felt somewhat foreign. Let’s call it hope, or even just possibility.

I also should qualify the above by adding that not everyone – in every family – is worth spending time around, no matter how healthy we get. 

And for what it’s worth? I still am no social butterfly. Maybe that much I was born with. I prefer solitude and being outside, to social events or big get-togethers. Once I gave up drinking (another story there for sure), I have to say those kinds of scenarios got even more uncomfortable. But the messes created by my drinking were a lot harder to clean up afterwards, so it was a fair trade-off. And seriously, I have always preferred the company of my dog to any human on the planet, hands down.

I realize now, years later and after a whole lot of work on myself and with help from wise good people, that I get to choose how to live my life, so that it has meaning and value to me. 

To me, this was a profound realization. The fact that I get to choose – most of the time – the level of human interaction I have.  And it’s nothing personal, it’s just creating a life that I am comfortable with. The significance of that choice and the comfort embedded in that, means I can live a life truly worth living even in the aftermath of evil.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on May 29, 2024.

Shelly Harlow is the mother of two US Army veterans. She has worked for the last 20 years in the mental health field with those who have seen and endured more than most humans should ever have to and believes firmly that we are our own most powerful healers. Her own background and history are the foundation for her work with others and for her writing. Her hard-headedness has taken her further than any degree ever has. She remains a cynical optimist whose interest in humans has never faltered, knowing how flawed and amazing we all are.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.