Stone: There is hope out there for those of us with PTSD

At 67, I don’t think of myself as old, perhaps because like so many of us in the valley, and in our larger state, we are active and outdoors through our later decades, doing a lot of the same things we were doing in our 20s. But, perhaps I can position my age in a different way in this column — as a way to let people know that it is never too late for hope.

Earlier this month, on Oct. 19, I had the opportunity to share a part of my story, which I called, “Everest Without Oxygen,” on the Vilar stage. My presentation was part of SpeakUp ReachOut’s “This is My Brave” — a local event tied to a national organization that seeks to reduce the stigma of mental illness and to give hope through storytelling.

I shared how I had “disappeared from the world” in 2010, taken down by a perfect storm of events that threw my brain back to previous events of repeated childhood trauma, of which I had no retrievable memory, nor any knowledge that those memories even existed deep in my amygdala, the part of our brain that thankfully takes over in times of overwhelming trauma.