Who Can I Talk To Anymore?

Some days I have an extremely good or difficult session with my therapist and I want to talk to someone about it, but I can’t. No one wants to hear about it. Even if I go to the few people who don’t mind listening to me, most of them don’t believe me about half of what I say happened to me, or about being DID. I leave group, and it’s 10 at night and even if people believed me, it’s too late to call them. I want so much to talk to someone, to share my breakthroughs, my setbacks, and my new insights into the way my mind works. I want to talk to people about perceptions, how I see the world, how they see it. Yet I never get to talk to anyone but the therapist or the other woman in my group who is DID. I feel like my friends have let me down, betrayed me because their friendship is limited to when I am being a “good girl” and asking questions of them, and keeping my deep darknesses to myself. I feel as though the friendship they offer only goes so far.

I realize I don’t ask questions of people. I don’t because I was raised to believe it was nosey to ask and that if anyone wanted me to know anything, they would tell me. I was raised to not ask, and certainly not to tell. About 20 years ago I started letting go of my secrets, telling people that I thought I could trust, the truth about me. I started talking and I have found it difficult to filter out what I shouldn’t say now. Boundaries weren’t big around my house, secrets yes, boundaries no. So I let my secrets go and my boundary issues have kept my mouth running.
I can and do listen to my friends, but I tend to wait for them to bring things up. I am happy to listen, just afraid to ask anything. I ask some friends, others I am more afraid of, yes afraid of people I think of as friends. I’m afraid a lot. I am afraid of making mistakes, taking missteps. But no matter how I try to be a better person, I always seem to make mistakes.

I know DID isn’t easily or well understood by most people. I know that living it means answering to Maureen when that is not who I am at that moment. I am afraid of this DID thing. The first therapist who told me she thought I was DID had a box of Kleenex thrown at her head. I have rejected the diagnosis out of hand over and over again because it’s just too stereotypical that a survivor of trauma is going to be DID. I know that I do a lot of covering for losing time around friends. I have flat out argued with partners that they have not told me something because I don’t remember it. I have covered many times my mistakes of talking like someone else, making a joke of it.

I have a few really good friends, most of whom believe me, but a few who don’t. I want to post this somewhere that people who know me can read it, but where would that be? Even if I posted it with no names it would be obvious why and who posted it. I don’t want to piss off my friends. I want people to know that I have a real chance at recovery for the first time in my life for surrendering to the DID diagnosis. I am learning who my alters are a little at a time. They all seem to know who I am of course. Which is weird to me, and yet their whole existence has been to protect me from harm, so it makes sense that they know me. I have had many “blackouts” while not under the influence of alcohol or drugs. I have gotten really good at coming to during a discussion and being quiet until I caught on to what is being discussed.

It’s a lot like trying to solve an equation that will cure your own cancer. It’s hard. Everyone tells you that you are not a doctor or physicist or mathematician, and that you can never solve the equation. It’s even worse than that because you know you have this cancer and your life depends on solving this equation; but your friends won’t even believe or acknowledge you have the cancer. There is someone who can help you, but she has to be paid, and you can’t pay her as much as she needs. And then you only get to see her alone to work on it every other week. You see her with a group of other people once a week. You feel as though you are holding your breath and cannot breathe until that day comes and group happens. But then there it is, you really, really want to share this whole experience with someone, but who? How? When no one believes you are sick, how do you get them to listen to you talk about unraveling the crazy equation that is your mind?

My mind is an equation, a puzzle, needing a solution, or at least reassembly. But reassembly wouldn’t really be the correct term because in my house things were always weird so my mind has more than likely never really worked like a “normal” person’s. But then I wonder what in the hell is normal? Are there really families where everything is perfect and good? Do some people really grow up without any distortion to their thinking about things?

Me, I’m an attention whore. I know it. I am working on how not to act on it even though the feelings of needing people to notice me are constant. I know I am annoying. I know I don’t ask questions and get to know people. I actually try, but it goes so against my childhood programming to ask a lot of questions of people. I try not to talk about myself so much, but then I just get word vomit and off I go, throwing up all of this shit about me. And I see myself, from outside, doing this and I keep screaming, “Shut up!” But I don’t shut up. I think one of my alters is the one that talks too much. I have others who are shy and don’t talk at all. I have been asked at times why I am so quiet, and at others why I don’t shut up. There are actually parts of me that know how to behave in social situations, but for the most part, I am not good at social. I always feel left out or I try too hard to be a part of and make a fool of myself. I’m not stupid, I know these things. I just really never knew why I feel outside myself, powerless over my behavior. I never knew why I felt compelled to be the way I am.

Shoplifting, another compulsion; I stopped at age 40. I didn’t want to steal or like to steal; it was like I was again outside myself watching, unable to stop my body from taking things that didn’t belong to me. It finally stopped when I was scared enough over getting caught to break the cycle.

It usually takes some kind of big shock or trauma to make me stop any behavior, and even then I can’t always change. I’ve always thought this was all me, just very different aspects of me. I have argued with therapists who suggest I am DID. I have rejected it. I have lied about losing time because I’ve never lost huge chunks of time, not days or months at a time, just hours or minutes. But I have felt like I am completely out of my body watching my body do and say things I would never do or say. I have spent whole days, even weeks, unable to shake a Southern dialect. I missed the math part of school for two whole years, but I hated math, so I didn’t care.

Drunk I have found that I flirt with men at times. I’ve even made out with them. I wonder if I would ever have slept with any of them. I’d like to think not. I would like to think that all of my alters now about safety. I know that my boy Mikey likes other boys. I know he feels guilty for liking it when big boys fucked him, because he knows it wasn’t supposed to feel good.

Other people feel guilty in me for enjoying things they weren’t supposed to. Some of them did things back as though they were playing the game too, even though it was always motivated by fear. Once my therapist opened that door in my head, in fact catching me in a dissociated state as Mikey, all of the alters have started to come out and try to tell me their stories; I am overwhelmed. I don’t want all of these memories now. I don’t want to be switching between this one and that and me again. I have been having serious migraines for a while now, I’d say at least 4 years and prior to that just chronic, nasty headaches. These apparently are either from switching or fighting the switch.

Now that I have written something I think people without DID should read. Where do I put it? How do I get my friends to see any this or know any of this?
I’ll tell you this from a bumper sticker, “Children need to be seen, heard, and believed.” Well adults who have lived through traumas, whether one big trauma, or a series of smaller ones, need to be believed as well. Yes, there are people like me who cry out for attention. We do it because we never got the kind of attention we needed to when we were young, and now, no amount of calling out for attention can actually ever make us feel ok because we can never get back the nurturing attention we needed when we were young. Paying attention to me isn’t bad, it feeds a need, but it’s a little like remembering to feed your goldfish after it’s already dead. The part of me that is crying out for your attention is 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 16, 17, you get the idea, and no one can give those parts of me the attention they needed.
Perhaps the one good thing about being DID is that all of those ages at which I needed and didn’t get the nurturing still exist as alters and they can get the attention, if people care enough to try. If people closest to me learn who the alters are by body language or sound of voice, then they can acknowledge them by name and give them the positive attention they have been seeking all of this time, then maybe the screaming need for attention would die out. I don’t know. What I don’t know about mental illness is huge, what I do know is living with it is fucked up.

There is a lot of stigma that goes with mental illness. Friends tell me it isn’t ok to post my feelings on Face Book or MySpace, but I didn’t have any place else to put this stuff for friends and others to read until now. I know I have posted inappropriate things about relationships and about family, so now I am trying to keep my posts all fluff and light so as not to upset the apple cart for my friends. I have friends who post updates all day long about they are going to nap. Or shower, or this or that inconsequential thing, and apparently that kind of boring shit is quite all right, but don’t show any real emotion, don’t tell the truth, don’t say things that might make others uncomfortable because then you are a bad person who makes others angry. Just being mentally ill, or fucked up as I like to call it, is enough to piss some people off. They judge me by their behavior, their standards and claim I have no respect for them. They say I don’t know them. The thing is most of them only know what parts of me I have allowed them to see, they don’t really know me. Even a partner of 8+ years only knew what I was willing to show. I am never judged from where I come from. I don’t get to get all indignant that people have not bothered to know me well enough to know I lose time.

Here’s the whole damn thing, I am who I am because of where I come from, and how that past is never out of my face. I don’t get to put my past behind me because a raised voice can trigger me to switch, it can trigger me to anger, or deep fear, all as if some horrible thing from my past is happening now, right now, this very minute and I am again that age I was when that thing happened. I have this tumor called mental illness that needs to come out or be shrunk. To get it to shrink I need to be able to talk about it. I need to be able to ask friends to help me with that damn equation that I know if I can just solve, I can be well. But I ask and I get scoffed at. I put my troubles out there looking for help, let me say that again, looking for help, and what I get it criticism and anger.

Face it folks, this is me. I’m damaged goods. Does it matter if my version of events doesn’t match those of the drugged out brother or the drunken, absent mother? Does it matter that my version disagrees with the father’s? No, actually if you said it does, you are wrong. What matters is that I experienced these things, either actually or in my mind, and the end result is I have issues, lots of issues. I am no longer seeking love in a romantic sense, because I am too messed up, with too much to sort out on my own, and I don’t need to drag anyone else into my twisted riddle/equation of a mind and life.

If you read this and are pissed off at me, so be it, but do me a favor, keep it to yourself. I need no more guilt heaped on me. I need no more hostility. If you are a friend or acquaintance and this has made you decide never to speak to me, well that is the chance I took. Guilt over hurting other people is what usually drives my worst depressions and sends me to the emergency room looking for someone to help me when I feel the blackness closing in. Guilt over hurting other people or upsetting other people is what makes me scratch, burn, and otherwise self-mutilate. I don’t need your guilt or your anger. I need friends who can, paraphrasing Roy Croft, reach into my heart and pass over all the foolish weak things you cannot help dimly seeing there and bring out into the light all the beautiful belongings few else have looked far enough to find.