Tag Archives: mental-health

Coming back

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I’ve been silent on this blog for too long. My own life has been such a distraction that I’ve felt “blocked” from writing. Twice, over the last two weeks, I’ve started blog posts that I’ve abandoned out of the feeling that they made no sense, or that they were garbage. Finally, I realized that I just have to start writing again, no matter what, no matter how nonsensical, or “bad.” It’s true that it’s always harder to start up again after you’ve been away from the page for too long. Similar rule with running, always harder to start up again after a prolonged absence. Better to just keep going.

A lot of change is afoot for me, and that’s probably what’s been impacting my ability to concentrate on writing.

With regard to my dissociative identity disorder, I’ve been progressing with integration. My progress has been so notable that I’ve come to the conclusion that my current career is no longer a fit for my true self. This realization has been a shock, but the more I think about it the more I realize that this, in fact, is true. I am good at my job. I do it well, but it is not the best fit for the real me. The core of me desires a job that is far less adversarial, quieter. I investigate employee misconduct, and I represent management at arbitration hearings. I do it well, but it’s not how I want to contribute to the world.

This job is what I wanted up until now. There is no accident in how I got into this career. I can certainly connect the dots. But, the core of me of would like to contribute to the working world differently. I would like a job that is more social justice oriented. Just as a Hail Mary submission, I sent my resume in for a position that caught my eye. At the very last minute, right before the deadline, I crafted my cover letter, and pressed “send.” I waited until the last minute because it felt silly applying for a job in a field in which I had been notably absent for a while.

Meanwhile, I told my boss that I was looking for another job. I did this because my boss has been very supportive of me with my treatment efforts, and I felt like it was the right thing to do. I envisioned that this search would take months, perhaps longer, especially since I’ve not worked in social work policy for a while.

Much to my surprise, I received a phone call at 5 pm on Friday for an interview for the job I considered a Hail Mary resume submission. I know it’s just an interview, not a job offer, but I am still very surprised, and heartened at the fact that I have an interview. Even if I don’t get the job I will be grateful just for the interview. It shows me that I am a viable candidate for what I really want to do with my life.

Lately, life has seemed clearer, just crackling with clarity. One morning as I walked into Doc’s office I noticed a brass name plate on the door of his office with his name. I walked in and complimented him on the new name plate. He said to me that it’s been there the entire time I’ve been coming to see him, which will be two years next month. I was surprised to realize that I’ve never noticed the name plate until recently. I’ve opened that door countless times with no notice of the name plate right in front of my nose as I entered his office. But, that’s dissociation, or at least that’s what Doc says.

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.