It's all in the dark, a walk through the fire

I've been in a weird emotional place for the last week or so, and while I figured out pretty quickly what was causing it, I'm still not sure what to do about it.

It was a year ago, last November, last NaNoWriMo, that I wrote myself into the most explicit and painful episode of PTSD I've ever experienced.  It was all the talk about NaNoWriMo in my Twitter feed that made me realize why I was feeling what I was feeling.

One of the major ways my PTSD expresses itself is as a desire to be invisible, to be quiet and small and thus safe.  Something in either the act of writing or in what I was writing triggered nightmares for weeks of being exposed, of being under attack, of being unsafe.

So I stopped writing.  And not just for that month, but forever.  This past spring, I consciously removed all the trappings of writing from my life, removed all the mentions of being a writer from my Twitter bio, from my other, now-defunct, blog, from everywhere I could think of.  It was a choice, designed to see if I cared about writing enough to get help to get over my brain's reaction to a threat that didn't actually exist.

And I realized in that process that I really didn't care, that I didn't miss it, that I was fine without any sort of creative outlet.

And yet, here I am a year later, going through what can only be described as mourning for something I still don't think I'm missing.

I have no answers here, but am rather just thinking out loud.

What's really going on with me? And what the hell do I do about it?