Tag Archives: Dissociative identity disorder

Who are you?

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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.

and there’s the sun …

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I walked into my apartment mid-afternoon with groceries, the bright sun shining through the sliding glass doors in the living room caught me by surprise. I stopped in my tracks, and braced for the floaty feeling because, in the past, the sun shining brightly into my apartment would send me into dissociative floaty oblivion. Usually, on the weekend, I don’t even arrive back home until well into the evening to prevent myself from losing large swaths of time at home. I stood there, afraid for a bit that it was a mistake to come home so early. Instead, the dissociative floats decided to take a vacation as they were notably absent.

Somehow, I’ve turned a corner. This weekend I did not lose time. I was not glued to my bed upon waking, and the all too familiar foggy and floaty state was not present. I have few answers or clues for the change. About midweek I started making future plans. I can’t recall the last time I’ve done that. The challenges I’ve faced the last few years have narrowed my scope in such a way that I lived moment by moment, hour by hour, and day by day. Such a necessary way of life put future planning out of my line of sight. I didn’t even realize this until I started planning for my future this weekend.

Prior to this weekend, I devoted all of my energy to simply moving from point A to point B, and all along the arduous task of moving between points I would implore my system to keep going just one more day. The effort to continue had to be broken down into discrete steps; otherwise, I likely would have been unable to function at even the minimal level I struggled to produce.

There were a few moments this weekend where I felt the floats wanting to get back into my head. I managed to trudge through them. Why couldn’t I plow through them in the past as I did this weekend? I do not know the answer to that question. What I do know is that I sat on the couch with the sun streaming in, and I remember every moment of it.

Try To Put Yourself Back Together Day

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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.