I Am Sick and Tired

I’m so tired. I am so tired of always being accused of being the drama in my home. I am so tired of always being told I lie, or I do things for attention sake. I am tired of people telling me what goes on in my head. I am tired of feeling like I am shit and the rest of the world is just fine. I am tired of feeling guilty for upsetting other people. I am just plain tired. I finally got tired of hiding who I am, who we are. I finally got tired of arguing with and lying to therapists and gave in to a diagnosis that I am now bloody fucking tired of defending to others.
Let me ask you all something, do you think this is the life I thought I was going to lead? Do you think that I dreamt my whole life of never being able to be completely self-sufficient? Do you think I wanted to be a lesbian, or childless or partnerless at this point in my life? Do you think I wanted men and boys to do the things they did? Do you think I wanted a mom who was absent when I needed her most in childhood, only to find her embedded in every aspect of my life as an adult? Do you think I wanted my relationships to fail? Maybe you think I want more than one voice, one person living in my fucking head. Do you really think I make this up for attention? I do a lot of things for attention, I cry, I talk too much, I try to be funny, but I don’t feign mental illness for attention. I would never disrespect the illnesses of others by faking one of my own. When you get migraines or get depressed, do people question your motives or the validity of your complaints? If I had multiple physical disabilities, would you question me then?
I am sick to death of people who know a little something about psychology deciding they know what is going on in my head better than I do. If I don’t know everything that goes on in my head, how in the hell can anyone else even begin to understand? If you have never seen me switch, or known that is what you are seeing, does that mean I never do it?
I have been the one in my family to tell the truth, and been called a liar for it. I have been the one in my family to know I am fucked up and seek help, and been criticized for it. I have dared to share family secrets, and caught hell for it. I dared to love my brother’s kids, and been accused of trying to steal them from him. I have needed my parents help, been honest about it, grateful for it, and accused of being a leech for it.
Let me tell you that I had a dream of being a writer, a lyricist, poet, and teacher. I had a dream of a life with a partner and raising a child of our own. I have had a dream of living alone somewhere in a little studio with my bed, TV, a computer, and of course at least one cat. I had dreams of being a good friend, a loved friend, a good person. I had a dream of weighing 150 pounds again. I have had and still have many dreams. But here is my reality, I am not self-sufficient. I am not living alone. I don’t have a partner or child of my own. I am not teaching college like I thought I would. I am not published. I have mental health issues. I have anxiety so bad it keeps me from holding a job for any decent length of time. I have flashbacks to nightmares that were real and didn’t happen when I was sleeping. I have nightmares that flashback to reality. I have trouble relating to people. I don’t know how to act socially. I don’t know how to feel it when people love me. I don’t know how to stay present during lovemaking. I can’t stop buying things for people I love. I can’t stop loving once I start. I can’t stop feeling like I need to fix everything for people. I can’t stop feeling like everything is my fault, even stuff that couldn’t possibly be, like oil spills and earthquakes. And I can’t stop resenting feeling like it’s my fault.
The world just isn’t the same for me as it is for other people. People are fond of telling me I can’t expect to be taken care of forever, well no shit! But I also can’t take care of myself very well. Left to my own devices with my meds, when the dark times come, I can’t trust myself not to just take every damn pill in every bottle. As a student I can keep track of assignments, read what I should, write and turn in on time my papers; but as an adult person I fuck up things like remembering to clean the cat box, or put food away, or wash my clothes. I remember to shower daily, but I think that is my OCD more than responsibility. I spend my money even when I know I have bills to pay and I do this because I went without things when I was young and I keep trying to fill that void.
Every minute of every day I am aware of what a failure I am as a human being. I know my family thinks of me as a failure. I have friends who see my application for disability as proof of my failure. I fail to know when and where to do or say things. I say the wrong things at the wrong times. I post things in public that people think should be private. I can’t speak in private of the things that I should be able to. I have known safety, total safety only once in my lifetime; and that was with a person, not a particular place. I still feel safe with that person because for some reason I know she will never hit me or yell at me or make me feel small. But I don’t get to be close to her anymore because I have used up all of her goodwill. She has come to my aid too many times. She and so many others, see my cries for help as the boy who cried wolf. Part of that would be my suicidal feelings that drive me to seek help at a hospital, but then my anxiety overrides the darkness and I need to be home, my home. So it looks like I am not serious about being suicidal. I go home and I want to suicide, but then how does that look? I go for help, and then do it anyway? The truth isn’t that my suicidal dark feelings aren’t as real as can be and as serious as death, it’s that I fear fucking it up and surviving brain damaged and I hate the idea of my father dealing with a second child dying in suicide.
I did not choose this life. I did not choose to be this fucked up. I can say a lot about it being my reaction to the events, and in some ways that is true, but the events sucked, there were horrifying, terrifying, and they weren’t only childhood. My tormentor has taken this into our 20’s. He beat me down over an argument I was jokingly having with my mother. And I’d like to see how others would react to the same suck as events; how many of them wouldn’t splinter into pieces, allowing alters to take some of the pain for them? How many would survive at all? At least I survived, in pieces, fucked up, disabled to a point of being unable to really take care of myself, but alive and high functioning enough to know I need help and getting it.
I have been raped, beaten, force fed, threatened, and all manner of other indignities. I have been thrown in dumpsters, had hot sauce poured in my eyes while sleeping. I have been hurt. I’ve been forced to watch one of my parents have sex with a stranger while so drunk there was no memory of it the next day for the parent. I have had my life threatened, my cat’s life, even my mom’s. I had a cat mysteriously die when I got us caught cutting school.
I don’t make up these things. Truly so many rotten things could not, should not happen in one family, but let me say that in this family, all of this and much more happened in my family. Somehow the word victim got imprinted on my face and everyone saw it, the school bullies, my brother, other older boys, strangers on the street, everyone saw it, even me. I looked at myself in the mirror and I saw a victim, a punching bag, a receptacle for unwanted bodily fluids.
I have no idea what goes on in your head. Maybe I didn’t get to know you well enough; I don’t know how your mind works. I ranted about my life, perhaps because I just needed to be seen heard and believed. I don’t know how your mind works, what your demons are, etc, but you also don’t live in my head. You don’t know really what I think or feel unless I want you to know it. I can hide, oh boy can I hide. I lived through years of abuse, hiding bruises and my own shame; do you think I can’t hide parts of me from you? I managed to hide sexual abuse, tears and bleeding from my mother; do you think I can’t hide myself from you?
I am applying for disability because I am truly unable to hold down a job right now. I am applying for any aid I can get to help get myself out of this living situation. I am going to finish my advanced degree because I want to believe what I have told others so many times, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I love writing.
I reposted something on FB today that someone else wrote that had to do with why in the hell do we have to prove ourselves to you? Here is how I feel about it, you do not live in my head, you have not lived my life, you do not see the world through the same damn pair of cracked lenses that I do. You can’t prove or disprove the validity of my mental illness, my DID. I can’t prove to you that what I say is true. I don’t know that you don’t have alternate personalities in your head. I don’t live in your head and you don’t live in mine.
The damndest thing about everything I have written here is that none of the people who need to see it will because they won’t read my blog, too bad. Maybe someone else will copy and paste this someplace where it can and will be seen by the right people, but I don’t think that will happen either.