“Hope you’ve found peace.”

I spent days hesitating if I wanted to write about this. I couldn’t get it out of my head. There were other ideas I could’ve written about; there’s no shortage of ideas in an overactive brain. But then I remembered some advice I had gotten in my senior thesis class: I can’t force trying to write something else if there’s something else on my mind that wants to be written, so just put it on the page.

I got stuck on the idea of “peace” and what that means to someone with C-PTSD. For those who aren’t aware, complex post traumatic stress disorder is a diagnosis that involves traumas that were long-lasting. The one season I worked in hockey was a continuous string of traumatic events¹ that I would never think about if I could help it; instead, it just lives there, feeding on moments where it could cause calm to turn into a nightmare.

There was this idea that I just wanted to “move on” and “forget” about what happened — a conversation I had with someone a little over a year ago about what happened at the time. There were conversations where people were acting as they knew what was best for me without consulting me. No one ever did seem to do anything to stop the sentiment of “believe all survivors but don’t believe Jen” that was rampant in hockey at the time, either.

Rumors and being discredited faded over time. When I attempted to get back in hockey, there were people who had no idea that was me, or what I’d been through. There were people who apologized to me for not supporting me back then. 2021, or even 2026, is not 2014. I am still proud of standing up for myself, even when I had a lot to lose and at a time well before #MeToo was a widespread movement² — I stuck to what I knew what the right thing to do was and spoke up.

That’ll never take away the sting and the pain of not being believed, though, or the lack of support I received at the time. It all crashed at once and it drove me deeper into unhealthily using alcohol to cope³. I was 22 at the time — a legal adult, sure, but still so goddamn young that I barely know any kind of adulthood without this trauma. It’s been so embedded in my brain that not being supported or believed is what I expect, which is pretty fucked up on its own, but possibly worse within the context.

“Peace” becomes a concept that’s unattainable because it was never an option. I will always have flashbacks; C-PTSD never goes away. I can’t just “move on” and “forget” like these hockey people erroneously believed I could do — believe me, if I could, I wouldn’t even be writing this blog post at all, or any of my recent blog posts relating to hockey. If I had a choice in all of this, I could easily shut hockey out of my life and be unaffected if it ever did come up. I will never have that, though.

In over a decade of various forms of therapy, I’ve learned that C-PTSD can change the goalposts at any given time. I could have a good six months of calm and then everything falls apart again because something flips a switch in my brain that reminds me of some horrific moment from that year. I’ve made a joke to friends that I’ll always at least help keep some therapist employed for the rest of my life so I can manage all of this.

My space wife Carrie Fisher (that’s another blog for another day) once told me that I am a writer with mental illness, but mental illness does not have me. At the end of it all, I will always be living with C-PTSD — no “peace” comes with that — but I am at least self-aware enough to know healthy coping mechanisms to deal with everything. I can exist, even without the peace.