“Well, you certainly have symptoms of PTSD,” she said. “Hypervigilance is one symptom. Ordinarily we diagnose PTSD only when those symptoms have significantly impaired someone’s level of functioning, and your functioning is still remarkably high. But I think it’s important to reflect on the many ways traumatic experiences can shape our lives and what it means to be affected functionally. We’ve become more trauma-informed as a society, so we are getting better at seeing now that people with trauma
