Category Archives: dissociative identity disorder

Who are you?

Posted on by

2

You peer into the mirror, and you don’t recognize the person looking back at you. You want to ask, “Who the hell are you?” In your mind, you are still that gal with the long beautiful brown hair, nice olive skin and big brown eyes that will pop with just the right make-up. This could be the reason that you’ve held on to your clothes from that other time: the beautiful and flowy brown skirt with intricately embroidered blue flowers tastefully placed on one side of the skirt, and the matching blue keyhole blouse that hugged your figure perfectly. And let’s not forget the long black formal with strategic cut-outs that garnered the attention of all the queens at the LGBT holiday gala. You were so proud to be loved by the queens!

But, that’s not what you see in the mirror before you. Instead, you see a greasy head of brown hair that is in bad need of a hair cut. Your face is far chubbier than your imagination will allow. It stuns you to even look in the mirror. You have this strange impulse to dive into the mirror, in search of the girl you used to know. Surely, if you dig hard enough, you will find her.

In that other time, you could feel the effortless way that your clothes flowed around you as you walked. You knew that every part of your physical being was perfectly intact, and you knew when you walked into a room you could command attention. But, the perfect physical being on the outside was a shell for the internal deceit taking place inside.

You can only run from yourself for so long, eventually it all catches up with you. In essence, that’s how one can go from belle of the ball to looking like a woman on the edge of falling into the abyss of inpatient psychiatric care. You run into people you knew when you were belle of the ball. They pass you by because they do not recognize you. You know when someone passes you by because they want to pretend they don’t know you, when that happens there’s that nanosecond flicker of recognition in their eyes before they look away. But, these people just look past you as if they’ve never met you. Part of you is glad to forgo the humiliation in front of them, though the humiliation is still there inside of you. You know they don’t recognize you because you look incredibly different from that other time, the faraway other time that feels like a fairy tale that happened to someone else.

Somehow, some part of you knows that your current life is a purer one from the previous belle of the ball sham of a life. But, purity does not mean it is easier, or painless. In fact, it seems the more truth you find the more pain there is to sort through. In those moments when the dissociation and PTSD make you feel heavy enough that you can hardly sit up in your chair, you can’t help but wish that you were still in that blissfully ignorant sham of an existence. At least you looked great.

Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day

Posted on by

0

Yesterday, the day after the day where you were most afraid the worst could happen, was Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day. On Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day you wake up, and your body feels like cardboard that will not bend or yield. Somehow, you find a dress and some sandals. And look at that! You even found a cardigan. Hold on a minute … must shower, and so you do, for the bare minimum amount of time to be considered clean. Now you can pull on the dress, fall into the sandals, and pull on the cardigan with a double check to make sure it is not on inside-out. Oh, yes, don’t forget to twist your hair up into a a hair clip.

Mercifully, your day at work is a half day. You get through it, actually it’s a strange godsend to go to work. You love the feeling of semi-normality as you discuss the performance evaluation of an employee with a supervisor. Inside you are internally incredulous. “How is it that I can do this? I look and sound normal, and even get the job done well, but the deepest inside of me is in dissociative hell.”

A few more emails to answer at your desk, and you then head out for the day. You head to a coffee shop to take a final exam online. Done. But then you realize that you have to go home, and you feel yourself start to slip away again. You call your friend, David, and he invites you to come over to his place. He reminds you that you need to eat something, so you stop at the bakery to get half priced baked goods since it’s closing time for them. You get a quiche for yourself, a cinnamon roll for him, and vanilla pound cake just to have on hand.

He saved a George Lopez HBO comedy special for you on his DVR months ago for an occasion just like this. You watch it in that sleepy, drifty mode of yours that feels almost like drunken sleep. In that sleepy state you hear “órale! órale!” from the television screen. It’s George’s forever rallying cry. But, you don’t quite drift off because David has it in his head to show you this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, which thrills you because, not having HBO, you’ve not had opportunity to ever see it. You drift off as one of your personal heroes, Simone Campbell, of Nuns on the Bus, is on the show. Such sweet serendipity.

You wind up falling asleep there for the night. Somehow the sofa bed is rolled out, and you wake up with sheets and a blanket on you.

The ick of a nasty nonsensical nightmare with a kidnapping, a helmet, and a roaring train wakes you up with a start. David hears you wake up from his bedroom. He comes out to cut up the vanilla pound cake for your breakfast. He serves you seltzer that is at least two years old because he cannot waste anything.

After all these years, you never really paid any attention to his sound system. He starts to explain to you the intricacies of 5.1 surround sound. You ask to listen to some classical music to try out the sound system, and you find a Weber symphony by the London Classical Players. And it sounds pristine. You would have paid admission for that lovely sound. Later on, he further shows off the surround sound by showing you the sound quality with a game of quidditch from the first Harry Potter movie. He tries to convince you that Star Wars is best for the sound system, but Star Wars always bored you.

But when he’s done he is done, and you get the idea that it is time to leave. After all, you did spend the night. You are still in the same clothes from yesterday. You find a hair band, and you put your hair up. You can tell that you are sweaty, and could use a shower, but you are afraid to go home and lose time. Home is such a black hole of lost time for you. You drive to the tea shop, and order a Matcha Green Tea Latte with Coconut Milk, and the paradox of sitting there with that fancy drink in day old sweaty clothes, and a greasy face is a tiny scrap of humor in the eternal struggle to not drift away. Looking out the open window of the tea shop with a slight breeze, you then realize that it’s the next day of Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day.

The Floats

Posted on by

7

The Floats are plaguing me again, that state where my feet feel leaded down walking/trudging through clouds. Today I was at my favorite tea shop, and I made myself sit right in the middle of the shop where the owners could see me because I could feel myself start to disappear, float away. I thought if I put myself in front of people I would, hopefully, be less likely to space out like a zombie with a thousand yard stare. But, still, there I was, floating away, and I would say to myself, “Stay. Stay here. Don’t go.” Sometimes it would work. Other times I just let myself space out.

Earlier in the week, I had an upsetting interaction with someone. I can’t write about the interaction as I’m afraid to get triggered again. But it catapulted me into another time and place with my mother. I was frightened and my entire body shook violently. My head felt like it had been kicked in, and my chest had the sensation that it was closing in on me. I hate that I have moments like this. I look like a freak, and feel like a freak when moments like this happen.

Is this how it will always be for me? Is the idea of recovery just that … an idea, a concept, a fantasy?

Sometimes I feel so strong, and able, and with it. Times like that, I am actually proud of myself. Then there are times like this, where I wonder what the hell I am trying to do with my life. I wonder why I keep trying in the face of all the difficulties.

I have no real answers to those questions, except perhaps I don’t want to miss out if there is a chance to recover.

I’m sitting in that tea shop spaced out, and this elderly woman with a reddish brown cardigan asks me why I’m not sitting in my usual spot. I almost don’t hear her because I’m spaced out. I’m annoyed at first that she is talking to me. She tells me that some people are in her usual spot, the blue chairs (she loves the blue chairs), and she does not like having to sit elsewhere. Somehow I find my voice, and say, “Oh, yes, I’m a creature of habit too. But I decided to mix it up today and sit out here.” And then we start talking about movies, and the fact that we both love the independent theatre in town. She also reads movie reviews before viewing to make sure the movie is not too upsetting or violent. The movie, Blue Jasmine, made us both teary. She asks me to google author Lynda La Plante for her on my phone. We both love police procedurals on tv. And then the place closes down for the night. I pay for my stuff, and leave. I hear her tell the owners, “I sure liked talking to that girl.” I felt the same way talking to her. And that’s why I keep trying, for those small moments that would otherwise not be possible if I gave up. I wish I could have thanked her for helping me fend off The Floats.