Belle and the singing bowl

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A Japanese rin marks the beginning of moments ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For days I’ve wanted and not wanted to write. The words and sentences were swirling around in my head, but I could not bring myself to take out my laptop. I feared that writing those sentences would propel me closer to the depths of blackness. My selves were vacillating between wanting an end, and not wanting an end. When I’m in a situation such as this the best thing to do is nothing, and that is what I did. I simply fell asleep in a dissociative state around 7 pm.

We saw Doc yesterday, and discovered a new self. Honestly, for some reason, I don’t care for the term “alter.” Since Doc says they are all a part of me, I shall call them selves because I can. I was late for the appointment because I got lost on the way. There is no good reason for this as I’ve been there many times.

Sure enough, Doc figured out that someone else was taking over, and out tumbled, Secret. Secret is young, though I can’t figure out her exact age at the moment. She is terrified of highways and heavy traffic. Apparently, this appears to be the reason I have so much trouble getting to his office on time, or losing my way there at times. She recalled instances of horrifying car rides with my stepfather. Even now, I feel myself slipping away because I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to remember the feeling of impending death from his careless and thoughtless acts behind a wheel. He loved to scare us in the car.

It seemed like Secret was around for the scary car situations, but Belle would appear when the horror turned to feelings of death. Belle holds the worst of the feelings, the feelings of wanting the pain of existence in that household to end. Belle, for the most part, just knows despair, no hope, and a desire for an end. Doc’s theory is that Belle exists just for that, to hold the worst of the despair for all the others.

As Secret started to recall the scary car experiences to Doc, Belle appeared when it became too much for Secret. Belle has this defeated sounding voice that breaks my heart. As she tells Doc that she wants to die, he comes and sits right in front of us. We are almost toe to toe. He starts to ask her to think about what it must be like for a psychiatrist to lose a patient to suicide, knowing that his patient gave up on life. He also told Belle that we don’t know what it’s like “on the other side” so stay here, and keep trying.

He then went over to his desk, and picked up a singing bowl, of which I had never seen in my life. He touched it on the side with wooden mallet, and it let out this peaceful sound that I can’t even describe. Belle asked if she could play it herself, and he allowed her to do so. Then as quickly as she felt the joy of the sound of the singing bowl, she found herself feeling like throwing up. Apparently, the good feeling was so new, and so foreign that she nearly became sick.

We were then in and out of a dissociative state for the next 12 hours. We have now come out the other end and survived, but we are tired.

As I said before, I am a bad friend …

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It has taken me five days to compose this post. That’s how hard it’s been to write about this.

In a previous post I recounted the ways in which I am a bad friend. Well, I had a revealing conversation today that gave more evidence of that. A friend of mine asked me how my Memorial Day weekend was, and she could tell it was not a good weekend for me. I told her that it was a hard weekend because I found myself recounting previous Memorial Days when she and I were closer, and I missed it. I then went on tell her that I felt she and the rest of the group of friends abandoned me when I really needed them.

She then shocked me by telling me that was not the case, that she, in fact, called me frequently during the time after I had my traumatic incident. She then went into detail about lengthy conversations we had on the phone, and I recall none of it. She has no reason to lie to me, and she gave too many details for it to be a lie. Plus, it’s not like her to tell anything but the truth.

And in that vein, of always telling the truth, while I was still grappling with the fact that she did, in fact, keep in contact with me, she called out the elephant in the room. She said to me, ” You never visited after my son was born. You only held him once. You disappeared as soon as my son was born, and I never understood why that happened.”

So there it was, just like that, she called it out. After nearly 5 years of walking around the elephant one of us finally called it out. I decided to go with it, and tell her after all this time why I did what I did.

Nearly five years ago I hit rock bottom. I was drinking and carelessly putting myself in unsafe situations. This behavior culminated in a sexual assault from someone I knew, and that person held a job in high esteem. My friend says that I she and I had long conversations about this attack where she implored me to report it. I do not recall these conversations, but the fact the she knew so many details indicates that we did have these conversations. I can only attribute my memory loss to my DID.

Shortly after my assault my friend adopted a newborn baby. My hitting rock bottom and crawling into the rooms nearly dovetailed with the arrival of her son. And I couldn’t deal, couldn’t and wouldn’t go see the baby. All of a sudden I had an aversion to her baby. It flummoxed me because I love babies. But I could not come near this baby without getting twitchy and freaked out.

The baby was not at fault for my body’s reactions. My friend was not at fault for my body’s reactions. Although I knew that, I was powerless to change my reactions. I could not function around this poor child, and found myself avoiding going to her house to see him. I avoided this new lovely child because of the reaction my body had around this precious being. But the fallout was my friendship with this person whom I cherished. That friendship took a very bad hit, and then, eventually, the friendship was no longer alive. There were no words exchanged about it, it just became a long goodbye.

Now it is all out in the open, and the realization of the impact of my conditions on friendships has hit me hard. I have a better understanding as to why I’m largely alone. It’s hard to swallow, but it makes sense.

A Memorial Day for memories, but not the usual sort …

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Today I found myself waiting for a cleaner I hired that never showed up, and that was just as well. I surprisingly felt okay, and I was able to do some cleaning myself without getting too freaked out in my apartment. That was one reason I hired a cleaner, so that things could get done in my apartment that were being neglected because of my inability to spend long periods of time in my place.

But today was different, and I can’t figure out why, though I am not complaining. I started cleaning off my coffee table while I was waiting for the cleaner. Before I knew it I realized he wasn’t coming, but I was on a roll. So, I cleaned it off. It took a while, but I did it. And here it is …

coffee table

I even used the vacuum! Although it took a while to achieve such a small task of cleaning off a coffee table and vacuuming I still felt accomplished. And I felt that way because I did not freak out. I did not start getting anxious and scared and depressed in my place. I did not feel like dying, and the thoughts I used to get from Belle about death were not there. And thanks be to God for that.

It was still a hard day, and I certainly felt sadness. The difference was that it did not feel like the end of the world. The book you see on the coffee table is a poetry chapbook that my long-lost father sent me back in 2008 when we briefly reconnected. We could not maintain the connection because his active alcoholism was too much. I called him on Father’s Day that year, and became upset at hearing my father drunk on the phone. I just could not maintain a connection under such unpredictable circumstances, never knowing when he would be sober. I found that book of poetry while I was cleaning. It took my breath away. I realized that when I received it back in 2008 I had not paid much attention to it because I was still mad at him for being drunk on Father’s Day that same year in 2008. The book, braille for the heart, is a chapbook of poetry by Robert Vasquez.

poetry

And for the first time since I received the book I picked it up and looked at it. I really looked at it. For the first time ever I looked at it without anger. As I started flipping through it I found a page that he had bookmarked with a metal bookmark. I always thought it was just randomly put there. I had never really looked at what he had bookmarked until today. Here is what I found.

POEM

He underlined the last line, “Music is braille for the heart.” It just takes my breath away to see this because the underlining was meant for me, at least I presume it was. I miss him, but I don’t like thinking about how much I miss him because the pain is a huge hole in my heart. The pain of knowing that he’s been walking dead to me for decades. The alcoholism took him from me, and will likely keep him from me for the rest of our days. He is the only person on this earth who truly gets me. Case in point, he sent me a chapbook of Latino poetry without knowing how much I love poetry. I know he sent it because he connected with the chapbook. But the truth is that I’ve loved poetry since I was a child. And though he was not around when I fell in love with poetry I know that he knows because he’s the only one that knows me. And the only one that knows me is without reach. I cannot talk to him about life, or any of the challenges or accomplishments I’ve had. If I could talk to him I know he would relate to so much of it. Hell, we’re both even alcoholics. I was more like him than I wanted to be.

Oh, I miss him so. There is so much loss here that it is just hardly palpable, especially since the loss of him left me with my mother. The irony is in the fact that he’s the parent that really loved me, but his alcoholism kept us apart. This one gift from my actively alcoholic father is light years beyond anything my mother has ever given me. She may have been present, but she never had the capacity for love. It is simply not within her. Yet, she is the parent I got to be with, the one who could not love. The one who could love was and is too sick. He is sick, but I still love him, and always will.