Oh, JD and I were posting at the same time. Her imput is good too, because you need to see how much you are not alone Hellion. That is what has helped me as well Hellion, and JD too. When you are in the midst of confusion with PTSD, understanding the world around you, even the overall disfunction that has somewhat always been there, can be very helpful in slowly putting your own unique pieces together where you actually begin to make some real "gains" .

As far as "identity" is concerned, who we are will "change" throughout our lives. Who you are at 23, is going to change, because that is what life does to all of us, the more we live life, the more we learn, the more we grow and change as individuals. There really is "no" one point where we truely reach that level of that "destination or destiny" that means we are "all set" with life. For myself, I was a child, a sibling, a student in grammer school, I have been a victim, I have been a girlfriend, a wife, a wife of an alcoholic,a mother, a teacher, and I am a person with PTSD, and I still don't know exactly where I will or if I will get to that point where I will feel I have reached "total maturity", because that isn't really what happens with life because the reality is, we grow into alot of the things we become in our lives. It is not unusual for a person to enter college with a certain goal of a career and discover something completely different that they want to be. It is not unusual for someone to go to college with no real idea of what career they want, then somehow discover something they are somehow drawn to. When I look back at who I was at 23, wow, I am a very different person then I was then, and at that age I had no idea of the challenge or life path I was actually going to face or have.

((Hugs)))