Essay
The first pieces are coming.
Personal essays on memory, CPTSD, family, survival, fear, ageing, and the strange business of walking toward something on purpose.
A long walk. A longer history.
This Is
Gonna Hurt.
This began as a bucket-list walk.
I was 63. I watched a movie, “The Way.” At first, that was all it was supposed to be. A road. A backpack. A challenge.
But the more I planned, the more I understood I was not just walking across Spain. I was walking back into a story I had spent most of my life surviving.
The Project
Not a travel blog.
This site is the long-form home of This Is Gonna Hurt: the writing that happens before the Camino, during the walk, and after it.
The Camino is the spine. The rest is everything carried into it.
The journal will grow piece by piece. No content treadmill. No forced schedule. Only work worth keeping.
CPTSD
What is Complex PTSD?
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop after exposure to trauma and is commonly associated with re-experiencing what happened, avoiding reminders of it, and living with a persistent sense of threat.
Complex PTSD (CPTSD) includes those core PTSD symptoms, along with additional difficulties involving emotional regulation, a deeply negative sense of self, and relationships with other people.
CPTSD is recognized as a separate diagnosis in ICD-11. It is related to PTSD, but it is not simply “more severe PTSD.” This section will look at what that difference means and how complex trauma can continue to shape a life long after the danger has passed.
Journal
Writing from the road before the road.
Camino
Twenty-one days.
The Primitivo is being planned slowly enough to leave room for observation, photographs, video, notes, and real writing along the way.
Archive
The work stays here.
The website becomes the living archive: essays, field notes, photographs, reflections, and the record of the journey as it unfolds.
“The Camino creates the material. The writing discovers what it meant.”