don't think. just write.

When I was in my mid-to-late 20's I was diagnosed with and treated for first anxiety, then post traumatic stress disorder, then DID
and very recently 'borderline personality disorder', which i am trying to understand and begin to process now. The break-down i suffered from the realization of how completely severed my memories and aspects were was crippling. I came completely unhinged from the common perception. I had to be institutionalized for a time with other people in a similar condition and doctors and therapists who knew how to try to get us to get it together. This was my first long-term institutionalization, and it saved my life and possibly the lives of others. The main function of that first 'hospitilization' was to teach us some basic coping skills (and more than basic, if we chose to truly listen and learn) and help us get through some of the worst of the memories and associations in a safe, controlled, HELPFUL environment. They taught us some Scout rules for those mentally divided by trauma. They tried to teach us to teach ourselves to re-associate. But you can only do so much in a prescribed time against a lifetime of insanity, and the uninsured have limits on how much help they can get. I got out. I immediately went through one of the worst periods of my life, and then I went on. Years have passed. I have seen a counselor here and there, sometimes as a luxury, sometimes because I had no choice. If I could see a useful therapist regularly - once or twice a month, have consistent access to the one prescription drug that I've found that actually helps me and doesn't give me new, improved psychosis, and be able to deal socially with others on my terms, I would be able to manage a fairly productive, low-consumption life. As it is, I struggle. I spend a lot of time hiding in the house. I have addiction issues. Self-medication is a bitch but it beats stalking people you think might be harming children and threatening them or beating them near to death and having to cover that up constantly. Or whatever. Mothers hurt their children in department stores. Husbands degrade wives in the middle of the mall. Bosses often choose their career path based on what kind of underlings they want to make miserable. Policemen thrive on their merciless power. Nowhere is safe. There is nowhere that the un-edited me can go and not possibly explode. As a small child and then a girl and then a small woman, my sudden turns to violence were somehow considered a kind of edge-of-culture norm sadly enough. I viciously fought with various siblings for various reasons, but that was definitely a cultural norm in our community. Then I fought with boys in school. I knew the administration and staff put it down to my 'home life', and I was shuffled from school to school because no one wanted a student who would snap and try to kill another one. One of our schools was the second-to-last ditch before Catholic school. It was the poorest school in the district, the most remote, and my brothers and I were three in a minority group of 5 in the entire school. On my last day there (before my fun time at Sister of Mercy) a boy cut me with a little knife on my right arm. I see the scar every day. I had never touched him. I wouldn't have. I didn't like to touch or be touched. I may have smarted off to him, because that was my only defense, and I could not keep my mouth shut. He had been making fun of my clothes. I am only just now beginning to try to learn that trick. Whatever I'd done had not provoked a scrape with his pen knife. We were the two smallest kids in our class. When the teachers came I was slamming his head against a steel pole on the walk outside the cafeteria, his small head was ringing the steel like a harbor bell.The first day at the Catholic school, one boy who knew me from another school dared his friend to push me out of my swing and try to force me to eat a cricket. I was very small, sitting alone, not even swinging, and for whatever reason children do these things to each other, he tried. Maybe I began to become addicted to the feeling of authoritarians pulling me off of mean assholes. Half of me was then and still is just a little girl on a swing. I like to swing. I did then, I do now. I'm not ashamed of having a positive side despite all reasons not to. It's who I am - too.
To try to be a person who is both things - a bright, expressive, lonely person and an angry, vicious, brutal watchman - takes a toll on you. That's what I've been juggling lately.

When they treat you for dissociation, something has to fill the gap that the old mechanism used to fill. You can't take away a person's coping skills, no matter what they are, and not give them something to replace it with. I should have continued therapy when I got out of the hospital. I should still be in. I should be on a good mood stabilizer. I should have a healthy backup plan and support system for anxiety. I do the best I can.

What I know is that my antisocial (*ding*) behavior is getting worse. My ability to keep reality pinned down to the accepted parameters is getting thinner. My fears manifest themselves in potentially dangerous (and thank whatever also potentially useful) ways. If I concentrate very hard, I can keep it together well, for a short period of time. I can act as if things are fine for far longer than they continue to be. I might be your neighbor, your friend, your daughter, your house-sitter, and fortunately I have spent a serious lifetime learning, by hook or by crook, not only how to keep it together, but how to be useful to the world around me and then some.
Not everyone who has problems like mine has that option. You see a lot of them in the streets, pushing carts full of garbage and talking to themselves. A lot of them are in jail, or permanently housed in state institutions. I have to come to terms with it being ok for me to ask for help.
I still have things to say.