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A War I Fight Alone
Walking has become part of my daily life.
It’s been over three weeks since I started walking every day. I walk for about one to two hours daily, taking anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000 steps—roughly 13 to 15 kilometers a day. I walk at a slightly brisk pace, work up a sweat, watch people pass by, and jot down or organize the thoughts that come to mind along the way. There’s a certain enjoyment in that. There’s also a sense of accomplishment in the act of walking itself.I believe that to get better, I need exposure training to external stimuli, and nothing works quite like walking. Entering enclosed spaces like libraries or cafés still feels overwhelming, so I decided that walking outdoors was the most appropriate choice for now. As I kept walking, I also discovered the simple pleasure of walking itself. I kept thinking, “Just a little more,” and before I knew it, 20,000 steps no longer felt like a big deal. It’s not the same as weight training, but I like the mild muscle soreness and the feeling that I’m building some muscle. Of course, my weight hasn’t dropped, and I haven’t visibly lost fat yet. That part is a bit disappointing. You’d think walking this much would lead to weight loss, but I suspect my habit of eating to cope with dissociation or insomnia plays a role.
Signs of War
But when I walk, my neck quickly stiffens and my shoulders tighten. Soon after, pain spreads to my neck, shoulders, back, and lower back, followed by headaches and a foggy feeling in my head. These are major symptoms of CPTSD.
When people hear about mental illness, they often assume it can be overcome with sheer willpower. “If it’s mental,” they say, “can’t you just toughen up?” My mother has often told me the same—that I’ll be fine if I just steel my mind. But when a mental illness reaches a moderate or severe level, it’s not just mental anymore. The symptoms manifest physically—what’s known as somatization.
Somatization refers to psychological pain expressing itself through physical symptoms. Psychological stress, trauma, anxiety, and suppressed emotions appear as headaches, dizziness, indigestion, pain, fatigue—physical symptoms that can’t be fully explained medically. My habits of scratching my body, experiencing severe motion sickness, and suffering chronic toothaches, headaches, and dizziness all fall into this category. This isn’t just a matter of feeling emotionally distressed; it becomes physical, and that physical suffering, in turn, makes life even harder.
It’s a War
In my case especially, walking triggers severe tension in my shoulders and neck, mental fog, and intense headaches.
Chronic tension is likely the main cause. The tension along the “neck–shoulder–scalp” axis becomes fixed. With CPTSD, the body remains in a constant state of alert, and the neural connections involving the parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and amygdala—where traumatic memories are stored—become overactivated. To prepare unconsciously for threat, the body lifts the shoulders, tightens the back of the neck, and bows the head. Over time, the nape of the neck, the trapezius muscles, and the temporalis muscles (at the temples) become chronically tense.
When the neck and shoulders stiffen, they compress the vertebral arteries. This reduces the amount of oxygen reaching the brain and prevents proper release of carbon dioxide. As a result, the brain becomes foggy, and memory and concentration decline. Reduced frontal lobe function makes emotional regulation harder and judgment less clear.
When I’m exposed to unpredictable stimuli during a walk, the sympathetic nervous system activates, causing muscle contraction and peripheral vasoconstriction. This reduces blood flow to the head and triggers headaches, which may appear as tension headaches or migraines.
In short, chronic excessive tension causes the muscles, arteries, and peripheral blood vessels to constrict, reducing blood flow and oxygen to the brain and resulting in pain. The episodes I experienced before—blurred vision and the sensation of being struck by a hammer—are likely related to this mechanism.
Why the War Exists: Fear of Sudden Change
So why do I experience such chronic, excessive tension while walking?
It stems from overinterpretation—the feeling that others see me as a useless person. This is known as a negative self-schema, associated with a damaged sense of identity. People with CPTSD often grow up internalizing beliefs such as “I have no value” or “I don’t deserve love.” As a result, even a simple exposure situation like walking can lead to the assumption that others are constantly evaluating and judging me.
Another factor is hypervigilance following trauma—the fear of unpredictable human behavior. The amygdala detects threats and sounds alarms, and in CPTSD, this alarm system becomes hypersensitized and fixed. It’s like a fire alarm going off every time you boil ramen, setting off the sprinklers and soaking everything repeatedly.
CPTSD doesn’t just preserve memories of past trauma; it creates a bodily sensation that danger is ongoing in the present. Each passerby can feel like a potential threat. For me, strangely enough, places with many cars feel safer than places with many people. Cars are predictable—their turning radius, distance, speed, acceleration, and signals allow for anticipation, and they follow traffic rules. Pedestrians, on the other hand, don’t follow clear movement rules, and their behavior is harder to predict. So walking through crowded pedestrian areas makes me more anxious and worsens my somatic symptoms.
A War I Fight Alone
I call this my “war I fight alone.” No one notices, but every day I walk through a battlefield of external stimuli. I avoid crowded places as much as possible. If someone is walking a pet, the unpredictability increases exponentially, so I won’t even take the same path—I’ll change routes or cross to the other side of the street.
I analyze the gait, objects carried, gaze, and clothing of people approaching me, staying alert in case they suddenly attack me or veer into my path. That’s how I fight this war every day.
And yet, I keep walking. Because this is a recovery routine. I believe that with repetition, my amygdala’s reactivity will gradually dull, and the overactivation of my sympathetic nervous system will slowly subside—like people who endure muscle pain while lifting heavy weights.
Right now, walking alone gives me headaches. But I believe the day will come when I can feel affection at the sight of a dog on the street, or freshness in a gentle breeze.
So today, I walk again.
This war has only one purpose:
to end the war itself.#Thought_No_20250616
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[Netflix When Life Gives You Tangerines Review #7] A Love the Times Did Not Permit
There Were Feelings, but No Language for Reality
Youngbeom loved Geummyeong. That much was true.
But he could not translate that love into the language of reality. He kept repeating, “Let’s not break up,” trying to preserve the feeling itself—but that remained an act of clinging, not of sustaining love.
The Temperature of Responsibility and Action
What if he had saved money intensely for a year, found even a tiny one-room apartment, and said, “Let’s start here, just the two of us”?
Would the ending have been different?
Perhaps. Because those words would have carried not emotion, but the warmth of responsibility and execution.
A Generation of Emotion
But Youngbeom didn’t know that language. He belonged to a generation that learned love only as emotion. He valued feelings over action, ideals over reality. That purity was sincere—but sincerity alone could not break through structure.
A Generation of Intellect
Geummyeong was different. She was a woman who graduated from Seoul National University and even studied abroad in Japan. For a woman of that era, such academic achievement was already a quiet revolution.
But it was a revolution the world did not welcome.
The Paradox of Knowledge
Her intellectual capital did not become a weapon to protect love—it became a label: “a woman who is too smart.”
She had learned much, yet that learning did not set her free. Because there was no structure that could convert her knowledge into social authority.
She Could Persuade, but She Could Not Change the World
In the end, she had many words to persuade him, but no authority to persuade the world.
That was not her failure—it was because society was not ready to accept women like her.
A Love the Times Did Not Permit
So Youngbeom and Geummyeong did not part because of each other’s faults. They simply loved in a time that did not permit their love.
He tried to endure the world with emotion alone.
She tried to protect the relationship with intellect alone.
Both were right—but the world was not mature enough to bear their rightness.
Love Is Not Just Emotion, but Structure
Love appears to be personal, but in truth it is structural.
People love with emotion, but the world judges love through institutions. And in some eras, it is not the lack of love, but the lack of structures capable of sustaining love, that separates two people.
The Sin of the Times, the Innocence of People
Youngbeom and Geummyeong did not lose each other.
They were simply born into an era where love itself had nowhere to stand.
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A Night I Don’t Want to Fall Asleep
A Night I Rely on Medicine to Sleep
I still don’t know the exact clinical name of the condition that developed because of CPTSD. Think of it like this: imagine you have diabetes, and complications have appeared—but you still haven’t identified what those complications are. Mental disorders are especially influenced by a patient’s personal memories and thoughts, so it can take a long time to arrive at a clear diagnosis. It could be major depressive disorder, or bipolar II disorder (a form of bipolar disorder). So I’m still searching for the right medication.
Even so, the one thing I’ve consistently been prescribed is medication with sedative effects. At some point, sleeping became difficult. When I lie down to sleep, the stillness and the darkness make me so anxious and restless that I become more awake instead. And even if I try ASMR or white noise, the very thought that I must sleep makes me hypersensitive—the sound irritates me, and I end up more alert again. Even if I manage to fall asleep somehow, I keep waking up every 30 minutes or hour. I can’t get deep sleep.
After painfully repeating that cycle of sleeping and waking all night, I would eventually give up on sleep altogether. So I decided to accept help from medication. I started with sleeping pills, but now I’ve switched to an antidepressant that can induce sleep. And honestly, it works quite well. If I take it, I can fall asleep within about 30 minutes. And if nothing extremely stressful happens, I can sleep for about 6 to 8 hours.
A Night I Refuse Sleep
But separate from the fact that I can sleep, I keep refusing it and delaying it. I know I can’t sleep without medication. I know that even if I do sleep, it isn’t easy—and that I can’t get deep sleep. And I also know very well that if I take the medication, I can sleep more smoothly and reach deep sleep.
And yet, I keep postponing it. I could go to bed around midnight or 1 a.m., but I delay and delay until it’s past 3 or 4 a.m. before I finally take the pill and try to sleep. Some nights, I delay until I end up watching the sun rise. On those days, I can’t even take the medication—because I worry it will ruin the day that’s already beginning—so I settle for forcing myself to sleep for just one or two hours, somehow.
If I know the medication will help me sleep, why do I keep putting it off?
Resistance to Sleep
Sleep means “stopping” and “letting go.” It’s the act of pausing the day and shifting into recovery. But people who carry trauma or anxiety are not good at stopping or letting go—especially when they can’t even manage daily life well in the first place.
When it gets quiet, intrusive thoughts flood in. Sometimes they terrify me. In the dark, I feel defenseless. Even though it’s a closed, safe, comfortable moment, it feels—as if paradoxically—I’ve been opened to something infinite, and I fall into anxiety. Ending the day sometimes feels like death. Turning off consciousness and switching into recovery feels like abandoning myself in a crisis, like an act of “throwing myself away.” Like lying down on a highway where cars are speeding by. That’s why I feel so anxious and restless.
But even doing something makes me anxious and restless. The fear of “What if I fail?” makes me hesitant to even begin trying. So I suffer inside a feeling I can’t quite name—whether it’s laziness, lethargy, or fear. If holding onto something during the day is painful, and even stopping and letting go is painful, then isn’t this life filled with nothing but pain?
Wanting to Hold On to Today
Today is so painful, but maybe I’ve already grown used to this pain. And maybe the fact that I can feel it—and control it to some degree—makes me believe it’s predictable. The moment I take the pill, I have to let go of “today,” which I could predict and partially control, and face “tomorrow,” which is uncertain and uncontrollable.
The truth is, time is just a system humans decided on: an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year. It isn’t nature as it is; it’s a human-made convenience. That’s why some countries shift time every few years, and why months have different numbers of days. Even “today” and “tomorrow” are imaginary rules humans invented. They aren’t physical realities.
And yet, I relax because today has already passed—because it became the past and therefore feels predictable—and I grow anxious about tomorrow, where uncertainty waits again.
I Didn’t Complete Today
I have a perfectionistic kind of compulsion. I can’t always specify exactly what must be perfect, but in certain areas, I feel obsessed with being flawless. And that includes how I end a day. If today wasn’t satisfying enough, I feel like I have to stretch it—stay up later—do something, anything.
But as I said, for reasons I can’t fully untangle—laziness, lethargy, fear—I find it hard to do anything at all. And even when I do start, it’s incredibly hard to sustain. So most days, I do nothing. If it isn’t raining, I take a walk, and I write a little every day—just scribbles. And even the writing often ends halfway, unfinished. The studying and work I want to do either don’t happen, or I glance at them briefly and stop.
When all those fragments add up into a day, I usually feel the same failure: I didn’t complete today again. I feel unsatisfied, so I postpone sleep. And that leads to worse condition, sleeping in late, and an endless cycle.
Someone Who Prays I Sleep Well
I know the medication can help me sleep properly. But I’m afraid even of taking it. In a way, only the object of my fear has changed. Before, I was afraid of the act of trying to sleep itself. Now I’m afraid of the act of taking the pill.
Of course, sleep helps health—but my essential problem hasn’t been solved. And medication alone will not solve my sleep issues in the long run. Fundamentally, I have to change. I have to accept the transition from daily life to recovery as something positive. I have to stop being terrified of what I cannot predict. I have to be able to sleep by remembering what I did manage to do—even if the day wasn’t satisfying.
This behavior doesn’t improve easily on its own. That’s why it’s an illness. That’s why I go to the hospital and take medication.
But there is something even more effective than treatment like this. It’s people. On days when I spend time chatting freely with comfortable acquaintances over the phone, I feel sleepy even without medication. I can take the pill at the planned time and rest with an easier heart. In the end, the most effective medicine for mental illness is people—people who tell you it’s okay to be exactly who you are; people who believe you’ll be okay, but more than that, people who simply wish you a good night’s sleep today.
I want to become someone who can wish sleep for someone else, too.
#Thoughts_No_20250614