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.

reawakening of memory

The sudden, brief recollection of slippery, terrible events is always a possibility. When I read the story about a young girls' incarceration and abusive neglect and violence by her mother, I read it with a ringing threat of dissociation hovering around my ears but I held on. My experiences were different. I was younger when I went through the locking up and starvation. When I got to be a certain age and size, and able to work and get food and fight for myself, my mother became more reliant on and emotional intimidation and abuse. I did not have a boyfriend, or indeed anyone who tried seriously to help me escape. There were other siblings, in various numbers, ages and sexes - they ebbed and flowed with my parents spouses - but they almost always made things worse, more dangerous, more worrisome at the least. Many differences between the stories, but enough similarities to wake up the ghosts.

They are why I reach out like this in the dark. It's nearly 4am. The sweetest, most beautiful lover is waiting for me in our warm, comfortable bed and I am here. With them. My prayer, perhaps the prayers of all the tortured and haunted, are some kind of release. Understanding? Acceptance? Could it just be the need to be HEARD? To have told someone and gotten it out? Maybe ONE person will believe and understand, maybe ONE person like me, inspired by Violent Acres, will try to exorcise the demons and get some fucking sleep for a change.

Today's haunts are brought to you by The Holidays and by unpleasant flashes of memories of someone holding my naked hip in the dark. The pursuit of government medical assistance for therapy and medication (which i assure you, i need.) are forcing me to finally pursue medical disability. I've been eligible all my life, but diagnosed and labeled eligible in my early 20's, and I've been lying to employers(though I must plea: sometimes without my own knowledge)
for decades so that I could try to be a productive member of society. Did you know that if you put post traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder and dissociative identity disorder (though when I first joined the work-force it was still called good old 'multiple personality disorder') in the place on an application where it says 'Do you know of any reason, medical or otherwise, why you might be ineligible for hiring...' - you will not get a job? Fortunately I'm crazy and not stupid, and so I never did that. And people gave me ALL kinds of jobs over the years. I never stayed at many of them very long, for lots and lots of reasons, though I have managed to keep a fairly good reputation as an employee over the years. Generally, I was smart enough to quit before I snapped or caused someone else too, though at times it got ugly. Police were involved once. I have tried hard to hang onto my sanity and my status as a Good American, but the physical side-effects of growing up as I did combined with the sharp shortening of my mental and emotional fuse have rendered me incapable of leaving the house some days, much less holding down a steady standard job. You don't want me dealing with your customers.

The personally dehumanizing process of going through the system and trying to be declared sufficiently mentally and physically crippled enough to have some help is brutal. I have not seen a medical doctor more than 5 times in the last 5 years, with the exception of one brief visit to a trauma stabilization unit last holiday season and the subsequent 2 months/5 visits of required county therapy, NO psychological care, because I have no health care. I self-medicate and try to stay healthy. I feel guilty about trying to get the help I need and I feel bad about myself because I can no longer care for myself. This does not help my depression. You do not want me working in a place where I prepare your food or care for your children so that I can afford the stelazine it would take to keep me employed there.

I have cause to be happy. I am grateful for the good things and I am learning to enjoy and appreciate them. But I ache to be able to voice the not-nice things. The harder truths. That love doesn't conquer all. That Jesus doesn't save. That people get what they deserve. I ache to know that someone understands that the darkness never goes away.

like me, but with a strong voice.

I stumbled upon a blog late last night that was like a slap in the face, in more ways than one. The writer of Violent Acres is driven to write "simply because [she] has things to say." The things she has to say aren't always nice - or even really repeatable in a lot of mixed company - but I believe they are honest expressions of her thoughts and feelings, and as for truth, well, she explains how truth is rubbery and writing a live memoir is hard, etc., especially when it is the memoir of a hard life, and I know all this to be true because I've struggled with it myself for years. Whatever the reality, whatever her (?) reasons for writing, she does it. And what I read there made me unable to sleep. Made me realize that I don't need any more reason than that either. Those who struggle must cry out eventually.

I have things to say too. I want to thank this anonymous person for being herself, and for realizing that there are children locked in their bare rooms who may need to read it. I want to thank her for inspiring me to finally find a way to say what I want and need to say. To reach out. To be honest freely, and with no apologies.

I think we write these things because we HAVE to cope, because society expects it of us. Because we can't survive any other way. Because there is no more room in this world for the berserker and the ulfserker. Because although we are antisocial, we must be butterflies or we are born butterflies who are made to be antisocial. Either way, our wings don't fit and neither do we.

-AB