Tag Archives: dissociation

No, not again …

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11

You start to feel heavy, floaty, glued to the couch, and you fight this heaviness for at least a couple of hours. Around midnight you make a serious attempt to go your bedroom, but it’s like you are magnetically attached, and you finally just give in and drift off to sleep. You have that familiar fuzzy floaty feeling that means the dissociative universe is upon you. The alarm on your phone goes off at 7:00, 7:13, 7:30, and 7:45. You regularly set multiple alarms, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You turn off all of them in your sleep, at least you assume so, because you have no memory of them going off at all.

Mercifully, you wake with a start at 8:15. Shit! You have a meeting across town at 9:00, and it takes you at least 30 minutes to get to work. You look down, and realize that you are wearing the same dress from yesterday. In fact, you slept in everything from yesterday. You take off yesterday’s clothes, put on new clothes, try to fake that your hair is clean by pulling it back, brush your teeth, fall into some ballet flats, and run out the door.

As you’re trip walking down the staircase in your apartment building you start begging God to get you out of this dissociative trip because you have an important meeting, dammit! It’s bad enough to run out the door with unwashed hair, but it’s a whole other situation to be floaty in a situation where, oh wait a minute, yes, you’re LEADING a meeting. Shit! Wake up! Now is not the time be dissociative.

Somehow you pull into the parking lot at 8:55. You run in and take the stairs all the way to the fifth floor because it’s faster than waiting for the elevator. Thankfully, the run up the stairs starts to jolt you out of the dissociation. You get to your office cube, grab your laptop and run into the conference room right at 9:02.

Pull those weeds!

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5

Garden Weeds

The floatiness came upon me when I woke up this morning, and it would not leave. It stayed like an unwanted guest. All day I felt like I was walking in swaths of cotton. I texted my friend Jack, and he had an idea, or at least I thought he had an idea:

Jack: Come over and weed my garden. It’s therapeutic 🙂

Me: Ok. I’ll come over after dinner around 7.

Jack: Seriously? I was kidding, but you’re welcome to weed if you like.

I had not weeded a garden for decades. My grandmother’s garden was the last garden I ever worked in, and “worked in” is putting it loosely. I puttered in there, and she worked.

As soon as I arrived, I dove right into pulling those damn weeds. The earth in my fingernails felt real and grounding. I pulled those weeds, and after a while, I was pulling my mother’s hate, her wrath, self-loathing, and rage. I pulled as if I was pulling those demons out. I would still be out there pulling, but night fell, mosquitoes came, and my body hurt. I think I have dirt in my teeth, but the floatiness is gone.

(Photo credit: Auntie P)

Mayhem in my mind

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4

There is no easy way to put this. I am in an emotional meltdown. My therapist is out for a week with surgery, and my psychiatrist is new, and I am uncomfortable with calling him over the weekend. But, if I don’t improve by tomorrow I may be calling him because I am scaring myself with the depth of my hopelessness.

Today was a better day at work, but just a smidge. I didn’t break down, and I kept it together. But I certainly felt teary and on the verge of tears. I had this heavy feeling of dread that I could not shake. I made it through the day, and cried on the way home.

I got home, glumly ate dinner, and cried while I ate. My friend, Dave, called me to see how I was doing, and insisted on coming to get me. He brought me to his place, and I’m starting to feel somewhat safe again.

This morning was a huge fog. That is not unusual after a huge triggered event. I felt very dissociative, as if I was walking in huge swaths of cotton. My body was heavy and felt leaden. I found my electric toothbrush on it’s side, out of it’s stand. I always return it to it’s stand. This means that I’m losing time again. That has not happened in many months. Damn. I’m regressing, going backwards.