The right friend I had is an herbalist and she’d helped me with a tincture for my stress and pain which included black cohosh and kava. After it’d been helping I said something to her about Post Traumatic Fresh and rapping on a tincture called the same. She said I don’t think that’s just the name of the tincture. She put it back on me; not that it was a bad idea but in the spirit that there was more to what I was saying when I said Post Traumatic Fresh. I told my brother what happened; that she supported the idea but didn’t take up the name and put it back on me. He said:

“Sounds like a good friend.”

I agree. And so it goes there was a lot more to the fake idea. So I started to treat it like a real idea. This was 2019 and Post Traumatic Fresh had been bouncing around my brain-guts for a few years without doing anything about it, or telling anyone. Turns out there was a lot to do about it, and people to tell. And I have been working at the speed of a belligerent turtle with chronic pain ever since.

Early iterations of PTF were newsletters and a printed zine. When the pandemic hit my belligerent turtle self went more inward. I thought I could keep up with a handful of printed zines a year and my efforts resulted in only one. A few friends kept supporting me through all this. That support was a major help in allowing me the time and energy to keep doing the work. I think I was getting about $27/month on Patreon. I didn’t ask for much even when good people said to ask for much. I never sent emails or notices. And here we are now. It’s very helpful when someone believes in your ideas. That alone can be treatment for PTSD and other mental illness. And I really am a belligerent turtle with chronic pain, it’s not just how fast I go.

My goal with this iteration is the website and services and programs offered herein. I will continue to work on publications and the organizational development. The website will outline other aspects of Post Traumatic Fresh; programs, praxis, poetry and artwork, Peerscriptions, and provide a means to put this work out into the world.

My earliest ideas for Post Traumatic Fresh included herbal remedies, monthly wellness subscription kits, and memberships. It shifted into a newsletter or zine. And now we are here. I would eventually like to go back to those thoughts but I will need some time and other resources in place. My basic belief with the idea was that even just a tincture membership that helps PTSD and chronic pain would be better healthcare than what I’ve had; even though I’m poor I could probably afford $15-20, or even $30 a month if I was employed P/T or on SSDI - if I knew each month I’d get some good support for my pain; both physically and traumatically speaking.

Once I started pretending Post Traumatic Fresh was a real idea the thoughts and visions grew to other dimensions, took into my own account ability for my own healing, brought into the fold what you’re seeing on the website today. Eventually I would like those things and more; such as a physical location or even a home with land, retreats, classes, more art and creative expression, increased access to trauma informed providers, healing and creative opportunities, somatic tools and teachers, and holistic medicine for members. I have been able to imagine social clubs and peer support groups, conferences, small healing cohorts, working with youth and in schools, group homes, and increasing accessible and resonant programs for people experiencing trauma in our communities; namely other folks that are unable to access consistent care for managing chronic stress and other mental and chronic illnesses. The people need more opportunities for healing, tending, and care. I am a people; and I need more opportunities for healing, tending, and care. I actually need you for Post Traumatic Fresh to exist. I have never healed in a vacuum, and I might need your help someday just as much as you need my help today.

Because I had no healthcare for so long, was earning nearly nothing for years, and even with Social Security my economy is below the poverty line - much of the care I’ve received has been charity, public and limited funding. So-called alternative providers and non-Western concepts were incorporated into my healthcare because, in part, I had no solid access to traditional therapies or doctors. I began involvement with social justice and social change programs and organizations in my early twenties, even while I was in the Marines. My political organizing with other veterans and anti-war activists began around the age of 28. Also around that time I began dedicating time to reading and learning more about the Civil Rights movement, First Nations accounts, culture and histories to include my own family cultural lineage to what extent I could find. So looking back I see how much all of this was also medicine in my healing journey. I’m 42 now, this healing has taken some time and it took a long time to be able to address some things. My hippie farmer brothers told me 42 was the answer to something. They told me to read Slaughterhouse 5 after I got out of the Marines too. So it goes.

I’ve been drawing a lot of my life and am a visual artist, so that and poetry has been a medicine for me over the years. I was fortunate to be in spaces with other veterans where we didn’t call ourselves things like artists and writers and poets, we just wrote and shared if we wanted. The space was the medicine, not the result, and it was the only space where many of us could write. Finding Siegfried Sassoon’s poem Suicide in the Trenches before the invasion of Iraq and two years after a Sergeant had completed his own life was a profound experience. A poem written nearly 100 years before I read it was medicine and continued to be medicine for some time. It was also easier to wean off World War One British War Poets than Cymbalta and Klonopin too, and none of them gave me restless leg syndrome or increased risk of suicide. I’m not sayin Klonopin didn’t help, but Dulce et Decorum Est, you feel me?

And so it goes I have been encouraged to share these medicines with you. The poetry, the art, the Civil Rights, the peer support and personal mental health work, the veterans movement work, the body work and alternative medicines, the resistance and justice work, the bell hooks, the natural and herbal healing, the lessons parenting, the Black Liberation Theology and womanism, the Lakota recollections and First Nations learning, the gardening and poor hippie farmer advice, the James Baldwin, the recovery work, the many myths of America, the all of it.

These all coagulated into an idea called Post Traumatic Fresh. It used to be a fake idea, and it was all in my head. It was how I was healing and I didn’t tell anyone. Then thanks to some friends it became a real idea. I got it out of my head and started telling everyone. And that helped some other fake ideas of mine become real too.

Who knows, maybe it’ll do the same for you.

Belligerent turtle with chronic pain wins the race.

Peace,

jerms