“I hate being touched, but sometimes I’m beyond desperate for a hug.”

Among the quotes in the blog post that's probably the one that sticks out to me. The thing I feel I'll always battle with is intimacy.

In November 2013 I first got my diagnosis, and from that point I began taking medication and going through CBT. Over the course of the next year just about all of the guard rails I had up around myself came down. What I was left with was me without all the false identities and facades that helped me live one day to the next.

But behind all of those there is still, and will likely always be, a very large, very thick, steel wall and intimacy threatens to penetrate that wall.

I can't look people in the eyes for too long. Physical contact feels jarring and marred with a need to get away. While I was partnered I stopped being able to sleep at the same time as my partner. I could only sleep if the other person had already, or if I was in the bed alone, and even then it took sedatives to make it happen at all.

I can't talk about these things because I don't have the words to make them tangible concepts for people to understand. And the more someone probes the more closed off I become. The more I start to resent the person. Resent them for being invasive, for not giving me the space I need, even though I'm already taking up the whole damn room with the baggage.

A year on and I still don't know who I really am, but I'm glad that I no longer have to drag anyone else down with me while I figure it out. I'm glad that I don't have to think about other people while I'm trying to work myself out.

I have come to realise that there is not one part of me that wasn't touched by the events that gave me PTSD. Everything from the experience of my senses to the way I carry myself - always on guard, always ready to lash out and attack. Even who I force myself to be now - placid, muted, even tempered - is the product of never wanting to be that other person again.

And I drink. A lot. Sometimes it feels like it's the only way to feel anything. Other times it's the only way to stop feeling things. Though nowadays it's starting to feel more and more like I'm doing it solely out of habit. 'Cause it doesn't make me feel better or worse.

Anyway my trauma owns me plenty. Fighting that feels futile at the moment, because there's just no place I can identify to start. I still have the big fortress around the parts of me that are vulnerable and I don't see that ever not being the case. People are a risk, so all I can ever give them is a half-measure. A pretend piece of me.

But I tell you what, I spend a lot more time surviving myself nowadays than I do anything else.