I like my boring life. Those poor minivan drivers are probably sitting around talking about how tragic it is that your life has no meaning, because people love to judge one another and put down each other’s lifestyles. I think it’s because they confuse themselves into thinking everyone must necessarily of course want whatever they want and assume others find meaning and interest in the same things.
" Oooooh. You didn’t walk on the Moon? Loser. "
I am guilty of this, I fear. At 55, sharing anecdotes with the young’uns can slip into " Oh, back in the day, filmmaking was REAL and HARD and CREATIVE and shit and shit. " They ask questions, I launch into stories- and I try hard not to do comparisons to present-day. Because their dreams are as vibrant and important as the ones i was chasing back in the day.
What I do without meaning to is be Mr. Topper. We live in NYC. Now and then, 9/11 comes up. I was an EMT then and was involved in the initial response. To stand there mutely as others shared their experiences on the days seems just stupid, but when I start to tell my experience, I feel as though people are playing a notch game. Including myself - and that’s embarassing.
Not good. Less ego. Most listening. Life’s lessons never cease.
I have to agree here. I’ve got a wee touch of PTSD and when very specific triggers arise, I go from zero to 12,000 in a few seconds. If I’m alone I can express my feelings. If I’m in public, not so much. So true though, that PTSD on many levels is a time machine whose batteries never wear down.
Well, you have to remember there were still a lot of Japs out there, 10+ years after the war ended.
Seriously, it was one of those recurring news stories, when I was growing up in the 1960s: another Japanese soldier would be found where he’d been hiding out on some Pacific island, not realizing that the war had ended a couple of decades earlier.
I think they even worked that into a Gilligan’s Island episode. 
I watched a TV show last night… End of the F***ing World, that brought me back to my childhood in about two episodes. One minute I’m 34, next minute I’m 16. I felt so bad afterward, I don’t think I’ll be finishing it.
This.
PTSD, grudges, or trauma doesn’t follow anyone else’s schedule or timetable.
Some people will heal in a year. Some in 10 years. Some never will heal, all their lives.
The specific story in the OP, though, was about a guy who was shot at work. Isn’t that surviving something traumatic and life threatening?
I suspect such events can, depending on the person and event, be a case of ‘persistent post-traumatic stress I can’t seem to escape’ … or a case of ‘this bizarre thing happened to me, and I glory in how interesting it makes me to be a survivor of it’ (which seems to be the case in the OP); or even ‘I will never, ever forgive that person who wronged me, even if I live to be a million; I’ve been hard done by, and I want everyone to know it’.
A weird case I experienced when I was in high school was an acquaintance of my fathers, who evidently murdered a man in WW2 (his story was he was a Canadian sailor on escort duty in the North Atlantic convoys; he got into a fight in a remote part of the ship at night with another sailor, and knocked him unconscious; he then threw the man overboard to his certain death … it was storming at the time and in the winter, and he was never discovered. The authorities simply assumed the missing man was washed overboard).
The guy was like the ancient mariner in the poem - he compulsively told people he met about it (I heard it in the 80s, and it freaked me out - why are you telling me you murdered someone?). I assume it was a reaction to unbearable guilt.
One persistent hallmark of PTSD is oscillation between avoidance of triggers and obsession over the trauma. Regardless of his demeanor telling the story, I suspect the guy in the OP can’t get over being shot. He’s still in disbelief that it happened, it makes him feel different, he gets pieces of sympathy and validation from others, so he tells the story to others.
I think ‘feeling special’ is also a coping mechanism. It’s for the best when the alternative is ‘feeling like an irredeemable freak.’
I think it could be as you say or as simple a thing as he wears the scar of the bullet as a badge of honor. A lot of guys brag about being shot or stabbed who are not traumatized by it. A lot of men are very proud of their scars.
I’m not any kind of psychoanalyst, but I feel confident in saying the guy I mentioned probably doesn’t have PTSD - he just likes telling the tale and basking in the reactions. I’ve never heard of any other gunshot victim making a picture book about the event and offering it to all and sundry to read and oooo-and-aaaah over.
I contrast it with his reaction when his wife was hurt, resulting in a number of days in the hospital - he was a total wreck at the time. I could be completely wrong about him, but I still feel like he wears it like a badge of honor.
I don’t really know either. Just spitballing.
What came up for me with the OP was that the thing I view as the greatest accomplishment of my life is also very tied to my trauma, and one of the reasons I obsess over it is because I see it as one of my strongest moments and all my other moments by comparison are evidence of a character flaw, because if I could achieve all that as a 17 year old emancipated minor, what possible excuse do I have now?
Not that I work my GPA into casual conversations or anything, just that I’m stuck on that year mentally in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is wishing I was still that good at life.
Of course it’s a distorted perception. I may have achieved success outwardly but I remember skipping class to lock myself in the bathroom stall and sob endlessly. I contemplated suicide daily and lost all my friends. I’m not sure that’s really success. These days people aren’t falling all over themselves to praise my outstanding achievements, but I usually don’t want to die, either. I don’t know what it means. But I definitely get stuck on my own “glory” days, for whatever reason. I maybe feel like it’s the best evidence I have of my own strength.
I honestly think there is such as thing as Post-Euphoric Disorder where someone experiences a high that is so great that they actually can’t help to trying to relive the experience.
I think of people who have won Pullitzers and Nobel Prizes and the like, or people who skyrocketed to fame as children. What do you do when your success peaks at 20?
But that’s probably not most people.
I think with people who peaked as high school athletes a lot of it has to do with the euphoria you get from performing in front of a live crowd and having them cheer wildly for you. You don’t get that type of rush working a 9 to 5 job so it’s hard for them not relive that experience.
Boring to a 25 year old or a 45 year old?
Very few people can be an astronaut or Tom Brady or join SEAL Team Six.
People live lives as boring as they want.
I went through a phase in my early 20s where I wanted to travel. I’d never been out of the country before. I went to 7 countries in one summer and then I was done. The idea of someday taking a vacation to Peru or Ireland appeals to me, but fantasies of serious travel no longer hold sway. What I want is a family and a steady job. I’m happy for people who like to travel as a lifestyle, but for me, personally, I feel no envy or longing to do that.
As for the “nobody wants to ride a desk”… Yes, some of us absolutely do. Everything I want to do with my career requires long hours behind a computer screen. It takes all kinds, you know.
I agree with you and I think the impact this has on some people is grossly under reported and under recognized. I think women tend more to associate things like this with sex or romance where men tend to associate things like this with recognition. I can think of dozens of example I have witnessed where I strongly suspected this was at play.
Different sports figures I have heard over the years wallow in past glories. Team sports particularly like football and cricket. The reason being is when they were in the moment and playing, they didn’t have much celebration for their success. They would do the hard yards to earn success, have a little time to enjoy the glory but then it was onto the next challenge. You can’t rest on your laurels as everyone else is trying to take you down.
It’s only after you finish playing that you can put your feet up and truly reflect. And you reflect on the wonderful moments of play, the biggest games, the lifting of the trophies. Not the strenuous training which led you there.
I think respect for veterans/military sometimes gets carried away in US culture now and moreover twisted into political stuff. But, not being a veteran of any war* I’d hesitate even in my own mind to tell somebody who was to ‘let it go’. Besides it being obviously impolitic to actually tell somebody out loud that. Desert Storm was a kind of walk over by the Coalition in the big picture, but some had comrades killed or otherwise it changed their lives. I’d have to know the guy and his particular situation to say if he shouldn’t call attention to it, if he feels like it.
*long ago just ever having been in the military didn’t make you a ‘veteran’, you had to have fought in a war. Now it’s common terminology that ‘ever in the military’=‘veteran’, but I’m not sold on that in my own mind, though again I don’t quibble out loud with people who use that convention.
I’m not sure this falls in that category; in fact, the more time goes on, the **more **meaningful it becomes. A “World War II veteran” bumper sticker in the year 1948 wouldn’t be anything worth mentioning. A "World War II veteran " bumper sticker in the year 2018 would be very remarkable.