The Crazy Definition of Normal

I’m wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. And the day before. My hair has not been washed. I did brush my teeth. Daily, even, so I’m not completely gross. Today my goal is to groom. I think I will heat up the sauna and wash in there. When I go back to work next week, I’ll have a schedule that requires my hair and face get washed daily. The armpits can go two days. I will have to wear clean clothes, but the definition of “clean” can be loosely applied. I’m depressed and anxious, with pockets of feeling normal.

Right now, at this moment, I feel normal. I can use that word, because when I’m feeling that way, I know what the feeling is – it’s a feeling that I can get through the day. It’s a feeling that doing the tasks before me is not overwhelming. It means I’m not focused on how to commit suicide or cut my arm off. The pit of horrific lead in my stomach is the size of a kiwi seed, easily ignored, not the size of the Jupitor. It’s how I feel when I’m motivated to create interesting and rigorous lessons for my students. I feel normal enough to know I should change my underwear and wash my hair. Normal is good.

Mostly I’ve been feeling suicidal. Depressed. Anxious. The dog peed on a corner in the kitchen and I walked past it for two days. I got myself in the car to go visit my dad and was unable to sing to the music on my favorite CDs as I was busy imagining taking all the sleeping pills and seroquel in the house. I was pretty sure everyone who knows and loves me would be relieved, because really how long can a loved one put up with worrying that their child/friend/spouse is going to off themselves? I was afraid, briefly, that I would live and Luke would leave me, unable to deal with my mental illness anymore, and I couldn’t blame him. That little fantasy strengthened the resolve to complete the act – be “successful.”

A little voice said, “not today.” I agreed, not today. But the malevolent voice said “it’s only a matter of time. You will kill yourself. The question is when.” It’s tiring. And a little freaky that “normal” consists of feeling like I can get up and shower and keep the suicide at bay long enough to justify not calling 911.

I'm hoping not to bore you readers too long with this depressive episode. I'm hoping at some point I can write about clawing my way out of the hole, inch by agonizing inch, with brilliant flashes of insight illuminating my past and my present. I'm hoping, which is a good sign. But even in hope I hear and believe "it's only a matter of time."

My Logic Is Sound- When the Victim Blames Herself

One of the most difficult aspects of my psychological make-up is that I can intellectually know something, and believe it, but cannot relate it to myself. For example, I know that sexual abuse is not the fault of the victim. I know that the victim will often blame themselves for abuse, but that it’s not their fault and healing comes through letting go of that blame. My mind can completely grasp this concept. I could, with great feeling and passion, share this information with others. But you know what comes next, don’t you….I have overwhelming and oppressive shame. I think everything is my fault. I know it’s not my fault, but it feels, without exception, all the time, like I am not only at fault, I AM faulty.

Imagine watching tv and the channels keep changing. If your spouse is a channel surfer, you know what I mean. This is my mind. The channels keep changing and this makes identifying what happened to me very difficult. I can slow the channel changing down a bit sometimes, and I can write or speak about what happened, but the act of writing or speaking is detached from what is happening in my mind. My mind won’t hold that channel, so I have great difficulty identifying the solid, realistic events of my past. I often wonder if what I have said happened, really happened. I wonder if the brief view of my past is real, or if it is a fabrication to justify the intense and horrible reality of my emotional state. In truth, I wish it was a fabrication…

Before I went to the hospital that had a special program for treating dissociative disorders, I wrote my therapist a letter. In the letter I wrote down what happened, for the first time, and said something like “I know this is true.” I was afraid the hospital staff would try to fuck with my memories and I would come out with some crazy story of horrific abuse that wasn’t true but that I believed nonetheless. I wanted proof for myself that what I knew, I knew. So I know. But it doesn’t seem all that bad. It seems like I should just be able to accept that it happened and move on. But it profoundly affects me. The worst way that I am affected, I think, is that I feel incredible shame for what happened and have spent my entire life re-enacting in some way the role I played then, compounding the shame and solidifying the belief that I asked for it, I liked it, I participated willingly in it, and that makes me a monster. Additionally, I think I created the sexual component of the behaviors. What was done to me was meant to be loving, nurturing, and normal and I am the monster that made it something sexual. I cannot escape this belief. And since I was a child, the shame is exponential as a sexual CHILD is most certainly a monster.

Even writing it down and re-reading it, I can’t find the faulty logic. Children are not responsible for the abuse perpetuated upon them, but my experiences weren’t abusive, I MADE them sexual so I’m the one to blame. Certainly, in the manner of a true dissociative mind, I can step back and ask the logical one inside to make a comment on this. And he says “the behaviors were sexual in nature, and since you were a child you were not to blame. The perpetrator was abusive. The perpetrator was meeting her sexual/emotional needs through you.” Immediately my mind spins, my stomach develops that bottomless pit of sickness, my flesh crawls, and I want to scream and hit myself. It’s easier to blame myself. It’s relaxing and calming to imagine punishing myself. It’s normal and comfortable and safe to blame myself. The awful, threatening, deeply disturbing pit in my stomach disappears as I reject the logic of “she was at fault” and embrace the belief that “I am faulty.”

I also know that there is more to this story. It’s not just about the confusing her-me relationship. It’s about someone else, because I can smell him. I can see, before the channel changes, brief scenes. It set the stage for everything else. I just cannot, for the life of me, determine whether or not it is a fabrication to justify my feelings (and my behavior) or if it happened. I once said to my therapist, “I know for a fact that this happened, and also I know for a fact it did not.” If only I could unlock that part of my mind, and see what happened, and know that it wasn’t my fault…then I could transfer that to the her-me shit. Change the channel.

Book information at http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/

Massage Therapy

They say a massage can bring a person to tears. I didn’t have that kind of release, far from it. It felt good and all, but I had to keep telling myself to relax. I didn’t think I was going to make it for a bit. Despite the fact that all I do is sit around the house “getting better” (whatever the fuck that means), I have still had to deal with intense shit. Every day mom calls, and today was our day to go get massages together. That would be intense all by itself, spending an afternoon with mom, but I preceded the whole affair by stumbling upon a blog. Said blog was written by a mom whose daughter was molested by her dad repeatedly for 3 years. Said daughter is someone I know. So this blog, it was a raw and unbridled telling of the truth – how she felt as a mom, how she was abused as a child, how she felt when he fucked her….it laid all her emotion out there, along with her reason for writing – to be a voice among the silenced many who won’t share their truth because they are victims. And she refused to say she was a victim or that her daughter was a victim. She professed that they were survivors. I never heard all this from a mother’s point of view. I never wanted to connect with my own mother’s point of view.
Any time my mother approaches the subject of “why I am the way I am” she gets tearful and her pain engulfs me and I get lost in trying to take care of her. So I read all about it this morning, all about this woman and her daughter that I know, all about the devastation brought on by this man….and I remember once talking to the girl. We were eating, and she said “I hate my dad. He’s an asshole. You don’t even know.” Only it wasn’t said with the usual child’s intense but normal passion. It was said in a heartfelt, “I would kill him if I could get away with it” kind of rage. I just looked at her, not wanting to poo-poo it, but not knowing how to respond. I didn’t know he was molesting her. I wonder if I should have pursued a line of questioning, right there in the lobby, “why do you hate your dad? Is he fucking you or something?” But I’m kind of tied up in my own victimhood. I don’t really actually want to deal with anyone else’s. And I don’t know how. So I didn’t. And I feel guilty about that. Now that I see how this family has dealt with it – with a public blog using real names, with an article in the town newspaper, with friends and family being invited to the courthouse on sentencing day, with a strong mother making a strong statement that HE is the asshole, her daughter is the SURVIVOR, and damn anyone who tries to sweep it under the rug…well…I wish I had that. Instead I have shame for what happened, shame for having shame, and shame for hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. I’m still a victim. But hey, I didn’t cry when I got the massage. I barely relaxed. So good for me – and yay for the ability to hold it all in. I will take our secret to the grave, mom, for you.

Book information at http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/

Step at a Time

I’m working hard to suss out the events of the weekend. I can’t begin to unravel it unless I travel back at least a week, maybe a month, maybe a lifetime. I know the darkness has been with me for a long time, my companion since childhood, my “out” since I created myself in the space of this walking corpse’s mind. This shadow has no name, except the one given it by society, but that’s so clinical and clean – suicide. The real thing is so multi-dimensional and deep and powerful that it has no name. It cast its shadow on my life yet once again, though I thought I had slain this beast years ago. I thought I chose life. I made lists upon lists of all the things I loved, things that gave me pleasure. I made myself visit those lists and practiced the art of feeling good over and over: walking in the snow and listening to the crunch underfoot (winter), pausing to hear the birds sing in the ash tree in my front yard (spring), gazing upon the peonies or wild mustard or Indain paint brushes or daisies (summer), picking up a maple leaf and crumbling it in my hand slowly while watching its reds and oranges sprinkle the ground (fall). I practiced and my brain created more serotonin and I lost the shadow of darkness that infected my soul. For awhile.

When did I again begin to question the wisdom of staying alive? When did the shadow begin to haunt my heart and soul and mind? When did suicide become a viable solution yet once again? I knew the touch of his hand and softened under his caress rather easily, slut for darkness that I am. I opened my arms for this old lover and let him fuck me again despite all the work I’ve done with my lists and my therapists and my medicines and even despite opening my heart to love my friends and husband in a way I never thought possible.

It was surprisingly easy that day. Most of me was worn down to threadbare nothing like jean knees that have seen too many days in the garden and scrubbing floors. Nothing was left to protect me from his seductive crooning. All day in my classroom, as I struggled to grade papers and smile at children and offer praise and suggestions for their hard work I heard him – and I answered him as well. I told him “I don’t want to die. I want to go home and lie in my husband’s arms and fall asleep with the sheets touching my cheek.” But he was relentless. “Just take one step at a time” he said.

It started in the morning when I grabbed the two pill bottles and hid them in my work bag, enough to overdose. It continued, despite my protests, as I wrote a suicide note and ordered all my medication refills over the phone during a break. I argued with the Shadow, telling him I wanted to live, telling him I loved my family, explaining that to devastate them for my own relief was unethical. He quietly answered with “just take one step at a time.” And I did. I entered grades into my grade book and made appointments with parents and held onto the thread of life that was the rest of the day. The next step was stopping on the way home to gather pills from the pharmacy and buy a soda to wash them down, but I refused to turn into the parking lot. I won for a moment. My next victory was leaving a message for my therapist.

But he whispered again, “one more step” and I bought that soda at a convenience store and parked in a rest area 20 miles from home, did a quick search online to ensure I could OD from the pills I had. With sadness and relief I found I could. But I have a long history of making suicidal gestures and landing firmly in the psych ward, and I didn’t want to be in the psych ward over the weekend. I told him, “I want to sleep in my own bed tonight, and knit while my husband watches football on Sunday.” I chose again to live, and drove home.

Exhaustion overcame me, then, like a too heavy blanket over my head so that I couldn’t breathe. I took my 2 sleeping pills, allowed by prescription. The next thing I knew I had an open bottle of hydrocodone pills next to me, and my suicide soda at my side. I cried out to my husband. I faded in and out after that, overwhelmed with seeing my husband’s face distorted in disbelief and pain as he tried to comprehend what I had done and what he next had to do. Somewhere lost inside I heard him tell me to get my clothes on, that we were going to the hospital. The Shadow counseled me to fight, to cut my wrists, to down more pills, to drink rubbing alcohol, and to do whatever else I could to delay and poison and kill myself. But I told him, “just one step at a time” as I put one foot in front of the other to get my clothes and get to the car. I wanted something comfortable for the psych ward. I wondered if I would slip into a coma. I wondered why my therapist hadn’t called back.

I was still trying to work it out the next day in the hospital, and the next, as I argued back and forth about the meaning of my life and my responsibility to live so that others did not have to grieve as I grieved. I didn’t understand at first why I was in the hospital, as I had chosen life in the rest area. It wasn’t I who took the pills, why was I the one in scrubs not wearing underwear and shivering under the too thin blankets with the paranoid schizophrenics and borderline personalities? The Shadow told me “because you are the dissociative disorder.” And I wept as I looked at my hand which was his hand also.

But I refuse to let my diagnosis define who I am. I have built a life around the shadow and he will not rob me of it. I don’t know how to cast the sun into his corner of my soul, I just know that today I look into his darkness and whisper back “Life, just one step at a time.”

Book information at http://inandoutoficeglass.weebly.com/