Never Tell

What is this hell?
I dare not tell.
A dark creature,
claws my heart
and nibbles on my brain.

A tiny tearing
flesh stripped away
fiery balls of pain
playing nine pins with my nerves

What is this beast?
Its horrible feast
upon my soul,
draws my life
and pulls me toward insane.

A riotous ripping
spirit aching sore
icy needles of agony
stabbing holes in my tortured brain

What is this stain
across the terrain,
my slowly beating heart?
It gnaws my gut
and causes my blood to drain.

A searing seeping
dark spot spreads
anxious fingers tapping dread
a death knell telling me I’m dead.

Alone in My Room

Alone in my room
Feeling like crap
No where to go
No one to go with
No alcohol to
Drown in
No reason to live
No reason to die
Wishing I could
Hurt
The way I hurt
Put the pain
On someone else
The one who
Owns it
But that wont happen
Fear paralyzes me
Keeping me from
Returning it
All to him
Wanting to piss
On those who
Wont believe
Make them understand
How cheap I feel
For being the one
To stain his reputation
Even in the face
Of the hypocritical life
He lives
They see him the victim
Of my supposed lies
He skates along
Bright shining so
I stumble along
The lying bitch
How dare I
Tell
Such lies
How dare I be
So screwed up
Black sheep
Rotten to the core
I am the one
Who makes
All of the waves
Disturbing the waters
Showing the faults
Of all involved
They feel guilt
For never seeing
Or living in denial
Of what had to be
Seen
Bruises show
Bleeding is real
But all that I say
Is bullshit
Go figure

I just found this in my saved files. I don't remember writing it, but I must have. It is not a flattering look at myself. I am not even sure I should post it except it is honest. I feel these things about myself. It seems I wrote this a while back, at least a year. I have made some changes since then. I know my mom loves me now, I feel it as much as I can seem to feel love from anyone. I still don't think I really feel love from people, or I don't allow myself the freedom of feeling love because as soon as I let someone love me, it will be taken away, or I will do so dumb fucking thing that destroys it in an instant.




Self portrait
Who am I? What do I look like to others? What do I see in the mirror? What is inside me that no one sees?

I am a lesbian, teacher, learner, daughter, mother, sister, friend, poet, writer, genius, idiot, likeable bitch, drag king, singer, performer, trickster, joker, creator, artist, neurotic, dork, and the list could keep going. I am those things, but who I am is really such a complicated thing. I am unwell. I have issues. One of my issues is manipulation. When I am most unwell I am most likely to try to manipulate people into paying attention to me. I am supposed to remember that making people feel sorry for me is not making them like me. I am too smart for my own good sometimes. I know how to get people to do things, pliant people who have issues of their own. I know how to find their issues and use them to my advantage. I am sick.

What do people see when they see me? A sick person? Or a confident one? That depends a lot on who is looking. Some people never see the dark icky side of me. But it is always there. I think I fool myself into thinking people don’t see my dark side but I think maybe more of them do than I let on.

I see myself as fucked up. I see myself as a useless person. The only thing I am really good at is showing affection to people I want to impress. I am really good at lavishing gifts and attention on people I love. I fell in love too easy. Fell, I meant to say fall. But either way I think it might be true.
The measure of my mood can be seen in how any relationship I am in is going. I have a pathological need to be in love. I always feel lost without it. I never feel love from people who say they love me, but I feel love for them and that is usually enough to keep me coming back for more. I am addicted to the feeling of being in love. How fucked up is that? All I want is for love to be like it is in poems and stories. I want it to be on both sides. I want to feel it and believe it the way people in movies do. Something in me that should know what love is seems to be broken. I think I know my dad loves me. I hope my step-daughter does. I think my nephew does. My mom says it, shows it and yet I still can’t really feel it.

I keep forming relationships with women who aren’t able to love me. I want them and I just charge ahead, knowing I will fall in love. Knowing I will get hurt, and yet I just go on and get hurt. I think that makes me about as dumb as people have always told me I am.

I hate that I can’t feel love. Its one of the reasons I want to die. What is the point of a life without feeling love? I want to stop taking my meds because I think they dull my feelings. My life feels like it has no point; I am 47 years old. I have nothing to show for my life except a collection of writing I am too afraid to submit for publication. I don’t have a job, a family, anything. I have a job, not a career I don’t have the life a 47 year old should have. I am alone and I hate it.

I want a life that means something. I want to teach, I want to learn, I want to die. I hate living this way.

My self portrait seems to be self pity. I am a lot of things, many of them very good things, and yet I feel like the bad seriously out weighs the good.

I don’t want to quit smoking. I don’t want to be a nonsmoker right now. I know with my mom’s health I should quit, but I cannot right now. I cannot because I don’t want to. I do not want to weight 360 pounds again. I am sucking on my smokes and I am sucking my thumb again. I haven’t needed to suck my thumb for years, and here I am sucking it again. If sucking my thumb keeps me a little more stable, a little saner, if it keeps me from scratching, cutting, or flat out killing myself, then I am going to suck my thumb.

This self portrait thing isn’t going the way it should; this has been a stream of consciousness letter to me more then anything.

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.

Games He Calls Them Now

Games is what he calls them now.
Willing participant he calls me.
Fear for my life
Does not make me willing
I give in for fear
Light bulb tube
Inside me
I didn’t ask for this
Praying it won’t break
Cutting me inside
Objects
He started with objects
He turned my stepbrother on me
another prick to hide from
again not willing
just afraid for life
he watched
I threw up after almost every time
Who didn’t hear me
Dad or mom

Kaleidescope

I was asked if I hold on to things yesterday, funny about that, I do. I have something called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, and I tend to relive awful experiences over and over in flashbacks. I feel the same emotions from years ago today as if I am back in that moment when something painful or hurtful was happening. It’s a weird experience.
I was talking to another person with PTSD, actually a couple of them, and I kind of got this image that the rest of the world sees things straight on and clearly while we, the mentally ill, look at the world through a strange kaliedescope of emotions and confusion. Our vision of the world contains bits and pieces of every bad thing that has ever happened. The good things are harder for us to see. I think it’s different for people who don’t have mental health issues, but honestly, I wouldn’t know for sure, the world has always looked thins way to me. It’s as if it is impossible to let go of old hurts and stop reliving the bad stuff.
I wish for one day other people could see the world through my eyes, feel my feelings, experience my experiences, but that cannot happen.
I have been accused of attention seeking, and perhaps that is true. I know that parts of me want attention, but I think the attention seeking is still a call for help. I have a need for help. I have trouble making sense of the world sometimes from where I sit. Therapy helps, especially my new therapist, and meds help, but friendships help a lot too. When I am with my friends I can feel normal for long periods. It hurts to have friends pull away because they don’t understand what all of this mess in my head is. It’s ok not to understand, or believe, or want to know about it. I just need people to care about me as they have done in the past.
In a perfect world no one would have mixed up heads. No one would have to try to sort out what is happening now from what happened in the past. In a perfect world even if there were people like me, friends, wouldn’t care, they would just love and accept us for who and what we are, like being gay or lesbian. I didn’t choose to be a lesbian, and I didn’t choose to be “damaged goods” either.
In a perfect world pot would be a legal substance like beer, controlled, taxed, etc. but would be available to people who need it. It wouldn’t keep you from being employed, it wouldn’t be any worse than caffeine or nicotine.
I also have this damn problem with OCD, now it’s getting better because I am working at it. I have panic and anxiety issues, I am also working on those and they are getting better. I know I can be manipulative, so I work on keeping friends I cannot manipulate and try to avoid manipulating those that I can. I am not a bad person, or a crazy person. I am a sick person trying to get well.
I wonder often what it’s like to be “normal” and not relive every painful moment, be afraid of raised voices, be afraid of males touching me, or be afraid of so many other things, but the thing is I have no idea what it’s like in a “normal” mind because I have never had a normal mind.
I am writing this wth the idea that people who do not know what mental illness is like will read it, but where do I put it so that friends and family can see it? I am a very tired of trying to make people understand because honestly no one can know unless they live it. And living this is something I would never wish on anyone; a glimpse maybe, but not to truly live like this. The world in my head is unfun at times, and funny as hell at others. Darkness and anxiety follow me all of the time like a deep dark cloud.