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I Feel Different
I feel so self conscious and very needy right now. This isn’t the normal me. I don’t cling or need validation at every turn, not usually anyway. Right now I’m worried that this and that person will be angry with me or I’ll do something foolish and push people away. I feel lonely and basically not like myself. All the self loathing has me physically exhausted. Well why wouldn’t they go away you stupid….blah, blah, blah. Shut up please!!! I’ve even been begging in my dreams. I don’t beg or plead but recently it feels like my heart only does those two things followed by deep, deep sorrow.
Today a friend called to moan about no longer having a maid to clean her apartment. She said she had to clean the apartment all by herself and make her own dinner. I thought to myself, please call me when you have a real problem. But I said nothing. I just listened UNTIL she said, “I wish I had someone like Maureen that I could pop out and have clean my house.” Oh no you didn’t. You didn’t go there. You wish you had been so damaged by abuse you split off into parts that function separately? And please don’t go, Oh that’s not what that means. It just means I wish I had extra help. Well, it’s not extra help just by itself. It’s extra help with issues. So just don’t go there. Besides, why bring up Maureen, who has been MIA for months just cause you had to fire your maid? Gracious!!! Too sensitive of a topic to just toss out her name cause that bitch is too damn lazy to cook or clean for herself. You don’t work. You don’t do anything at all and you have a maid? Girl stop, please, cause I can’t take it.
Control Is A Handicap
What would it be like for me to express pain, to express simple pains like stubbing my toe or getting a paper cut? One question lead to a conversation that had me running from the therapy office to the restroom to toss my cookies. For me, expressing pain means losing control and letting the pain or giver of pain have the satisfaction of knowing they can hurt me. I stifle all groans and rarely flinch or grimace even when something really hurts. I can be in an extraordinary amount of pain and not drop a tear and never hint that I’m suffering. I saw that as a strength when I was younger, now I see it as a handicap. I can’t express a physical ouch let alone severe, should be doubled over in pain type reactions. That reaction was warranted today when I went to cross my legs in therapy. My knee cracked and sent a pain shooting up the left leg, right where the degeneration is the worst. He said that was the first time he’s ever seen me grimace, as he called it. I didn’t realize I did. I felt rather stupid, embarrassed that he saw it. Through everything we’ve talked about and all the times I’ve shown up hurting so badly, today was the first time he saw any sign at all that I was physically uncomfortable.
He asked what it would be like if I were to express pain as others do. The question confused me but then I asked him, Don’t people usually feel embarrassed when they’re in pain? He said not really, no. I started to think about how embarrassed I was to cry because it meant being laughed at, being mocked, scolded and told how shocked they were because they knew I didn’t have a heart so where were the tears coming from? And of course I recall how horribly my sister was made fun of for crying. My goodness they laughed at her, right in her face and told her she was making a circus clown out of herself. They mocked her, jumped up and down like she was doing and did the “oh this hurts” dance. They told her she could win an Oscar for such a performance. How could I break down, lose control that way and subject myself to that? No sign of pain meant no satisfaction for giving it and no scolding or mocking for expressing it. It also meant I’d carry that lesson with me into my adult years and apply it to situations where it’s not warranted.
Callous Abandonment
Last nights dream was quite interesting. I was in a classroom at elementary school desks waiting for the group therapist to come in so those assigned to speak that day could talk. The group therapist came in and went directly to the chalk board and started crossing off names. As he called off the names of the people who wouldn’t be talking that day he put one white chalk line through their name. He then wrote 3 names on the board of people he felt needed to talk that day. After writing he handed us a workbook and told us information on how to understand these individuals would be in the book. He didn’t even let them talk. He just gave us a workbook and left the room. We were to understand that one survivor used a tiger as a service animal because of her severe PTSD issues. One lady is in a domestic violence situation because she doesn’t have strength in her voice to tell and the third person ended up being accused of a crime he didn’t commit and was killed in prison which affected a survivor in our group because he witnessed it. The group therapist came in, shook things up, told us one thing then did another and simply walked out of the room but not before turning the lights out and leaving us all sitting in the dark.
Al-Quida School of Dentistry
In all the years I’ve done dental studies at the university never have I had a negative experience until Friday. Friday I went in for a repeat of the study I did about 3 months back. They used the same machine in the same office. Everything was supposed to be the same but this time I got a student dentist surely once an apprentice to Osama Bin Ladin. The chair she had me in was tilted so far back that my feet were above my head. She had my jaw pulled so far that I tapped her hand and said, “Um…my skin only stretches so far.” She said nothing. The person observing said, “Sometimes she forgets there’s a human being in the chair.” I said, “She had my jaw half across the room.” The student continued.
She had to be told to use the mirror to look at my teeth. She had to be told to use the lamp. When she used the little dental mirror to look inside my mouth she pushed with it so hard against my cheek that it hurt. The dental mirror should not hurt. Okay so now I’m kinda shaky because here’s a woman inside my mouth, it’s hurting AND to top it off one of the workers who happens to have my birth name kept getting paged. Even though she never used a needle the student dentist was really testing my PTSD issues. My mother used needles in my mouth. While a dental mirror isn’t a needle it sure as hell hurts when Bin Ladin’s apprentice is pressing it hard against your jaw. That on top of the worker getting paged pretty much non-stop while the apprentice dug around in my mouth was just a bit much. I figured we might as well top the appointment off with an MRI where the friggin machine sprays dye in my face. Shit, lets just make this a PTSD party. Let us not forget this was also the day of the earthquake. Why I haven’t started drinking is beyond me cause that was some motherfuckin bullshit right there.
In all the years I’ve done studies at the university never have they gone down this path. I’ll keep doing the studies because the money is good. I just have to remember this is rare.
If you do these studies don’t worry, they’re not usually like this. It won’t happen unless of course you go to the Al-Quida Family Dentistry office near you. They’d better be happy they paid we twice as much this time as last time…. the bastards!!!!!
Destiny
Somewhere In Here Is Me
Food does not make this better. Cigarettes don’t help, music touches and I don’t want to be touched. Painting helps little but I can’t focus enough to finish anything. All I want to do is go to sleep. I’m pissed, just majorly pissed and I can’t even bring myself to cry.
There is a joyful me, one who was thrilled to death about having a fantastic sales week, 56 pieces in all. I wonder how she keeps herself separated from the rest of us who care about that but are overshadowed by anguish. It’s not that I don’t care. I like the fact that people want our art in their home. It’s just that right now I am pissed and tired and frustrated and running around like a chicken with my head cut off looking for soul food, something to cut the pain. It’s just not happening though. Nothing helps.
I feel lost right now and I need to find my way back.
Self Destruction: Therapy Discussion
Wow, my therapist about threw me for a loop in our last session. He tossed something at me that I wasn’t expecting. I rather freaked out on him a bit. He explained himself as I sat there quietly, frightened, angered and in the “I knew this was too good to be true” mode.
We talked about how part of me really can’t stand Blossom but another part of me wants her company. I said that most of us can’t stand the girl but Destiny has “some use for her.” How horrible to say that but it’s true, part of us really just want to sleep with the chick. We felt horrible saying that about someone we detest but it is true. Then he said something about how Destiny is part of me and that when I mention a particular alter feeling one way he thought it might be important to bring up that the alter is part of me. I guess I thought he was telling me that he wanted me to think of myself as whole instead of divided and not continue to mention DID in therapy. Of course I went on alert. I mean, my goodness. But what he meant was that he wanted to let me know that even singletons have mixed feelings and that by saying “I” feel a certain way I can begin to integrate emotions instead of split them off. That sets so much better than what I thought he meant. I thought for sure he was about to tell me that switching was off limits. I figured from there he’d give some magical pill to make me a singleton. Thank goodness he didn’t lose his mind and tell me to act like a singleton when in his office. It really threw me. He didn’t tell me to use the word “I” instead of “we” or that I couldn’t talk about insiders. It’s not what he was saying at all. He was only saying that he wanted to point out from time to time that when I have conflicting feelings it makes me like everyone else, multiple and singleton.
Color Outside The Lines
A comment came in on Redbubble from a fellow artist who says that my artwork has a sweetness to it and that I must be at peace with the world. I’ve gotten comments like that before, saying that my artwork is joyful. Someone went as far as to call it refreshing. I suppose it’s always confused me that anyone would see such a thing in my art seeing as how I don’t experience a lot of true joy or true peace in the world. I got to thinking about it though and replied to the gentleman that since I don’t find a lot of peace in this what is left to do but create peace through art?
I often paint fantasy worlds with high colour and lots of movement. Paintings like Dreamscape (shown in this entry) Teach Us How To Grow and Looking Forward are good examples of fantasy worlds I’ve painted but they are nothing like my personal world inside. I suppose they are an expression of a world I’d rather see and experience.
Most of my artwork has some touch of my past in it, some issue relating to individuality, rebellion, bucking the system and going outside the norm. I express a fragile state of mind, a humbled existence, fear in the form of colour and silence in the form of dark swirling lines. Unless I specifically said, this means this and this means this no one would ever imagine how much healing work is done in my artwork. It just comes off mostly as joyful and sweet. I don’t begrudge that though.
Even still, everything from Willow Child to Rainbow Child to Longing Flower and even Raindrops has some emotional significance, some healing angle to it. Then there are images where I refuse to pay attention to 
the normal way of composing an art piece. Images like Face It and Eye Sore are perfect examples of chaos, a clear reflection of life inside my head. Looking at the painting She’s Green depicts just how out of place I feel in the world, how alien-like, how homesick I feel amongst strangers. I’m pleased that people like her and enjoy the colour. I’m pleased that some have said she’s adorable and that I’ve sold a few copies of her. But never have I said until now that she’s green because she’s different, she’s a foreigner and a misfit.
On paper and in Photoshop I can go places in my imagination that I dare not go other times. I’m not too good at fantasizing. I was always told that it’s wrong, that it leads to sexual thoughts which are wrong. So when I hear the word fantasy I feel a slight sting and want to retreat to a reality that I hate.
As a child I was told I was too smart to play as the other children did. I was told I was too smart for TV, too smart for toys, too smart for anything a child does. Children use their imagination but mine was held back or directed and molded according to someone else’s idea of what I should dream. I find it difficult now to day dream or fantasize. But I’m taking chances and choosing when I want reality and when I’d rather slip off into a world of fantasy.
I’m learning to colour outside the lines.
Me
Color Outside The Lines-Sunday, April 06, 2008
People Like Me
The follow up to Aussie Conversations: Down A Twisted Road has more to do with associating with survivors than it does with the strange happenings at my place. My therapist asked me if it’s helpful to associate with people like me. While I can look forward to off the wall outbursts with non-survivors and people not in the mental health system I don’t have the same connection and unspoken understanding that I have with survivors, people with DID and people with PTSD.
I told my therapist that yes it is helpful to be with people like me because I know when in the company of a person with PTSD certain things are a given. Being with others that have the same condition lets you relax a bit. No one is going to jump from behind anything for the sake of a quick scare prank. No one is going to come in the room wearing a mask of Frankenstein. We are careful because of our own issues not to simply walk up behind one another or stand behind one another. There are certain things that are simply a given that people with PTSD wouldn’t do to another person. It lets you relax.
When it comes to associating with others that have DID it can be very complicated but also rewarding.
Pain
It was an ugly session. We first discussed how it is that Blossom seemed to put me in a “male role” when we were together. We talked about the sister’s abuse and how I was to pretend to be her husband, another “male role” played by me. We talked about how Blossom may be the worst lesbian in lesbian history because of her lack of understanding that we do not have to play parts, we can just be two girls. There was so much confusion in my head trying to separate her actions from my sister’s actions, trying to stay an adult and separate then from now. I tried to explain to Blossom that referring to sex as “play” is rather disturbing to me. So we talked about that. I failed to mention that Blossom kept calling me “kiddo” and used the phrase “Mommy that feels good” despite knowing why that phrase disturbs me so. He knows the part about the phrase but I didn’t say the part about her calling me “kiddo” and her referring to sex as “play.”
That’s The Plan
I’m in one of these “damn you why do you have to be a multiple?” spots. How come you can’t just remember what you’ve done? Then I’m like, okay, don’t panic, you’re fine, you’re just kinda on the weakened side right now you’re fine. Then the tears come and I’m like, shit okay, just pull yourself together, you’re fine. But I’m not fine. There’s too much shit to do. My house if a fucking mess so much so that I don’t want to do anything at all but sit in the office which at the time happens to be cleaner than the rest of the house. I have to figure out something to eat but I also have to clean. I need to prioritize.
