mental health/recovery side blog run by a DID system.
this is gonna be bad at tagging reliably because of memory issues but we try! sorry. please do ask if anything specific and we'll do our best.
more and more some personal blogging happens here but probably rb’s of mental health and recovery, trauma stuff, the occasional vent, art, whatever. i try to be nice. mostly i am just tired, i promise.
our main is @bonebirds
the more vent/emotional/angst/subsystem-specific blog is @pullingheavendown
one of us also uses @punslut to chill out on.
we're canadian, trans, diagnosed DID, trafficking and organized abuse survivors, and we what write about basically reflects that. i try to keep triggering content under a cut.
I don’t know how to reel in my frustration and anger and it’s starting to fester and snarl out of me. Which I wish did nothing, but mostly prompts my mother to find small ways to punish and ignore me until I am slamming my head into the wall to try to stop myself from switching or getting angry. I tried patience. I tried meditating and therapy and medication and telling myself it’s nothing and it’s fine and it’s just me or in my head or I’m being unreasonable, and it’s none of those things. It’s her. And after nearly three years of trying every other way to relate to her or work with her, I guess some part of me has given up. (Unfortunately, being a bitch and making her feel bad also gets results when nothing else has, so…)
Can’t talk to her about her own behaviour because that’s manipulative or selfish or ungrateful or lies (according to her). Can’t change my behaviour because I will kill myself if nothing changes and nothing changes if I don’t speak up. She’s spent the last 8 or 9 months gaslighting me (literally, really, truly) to the point I’m splitting in my head in real time and fighting with myself constantly and switching on a dime multiple times a day, but hey. Don’t be mean. God forbid you’re mean in response to neglect. God forbid you stand up for yourself. God forbid you remind her of promises she made years ago and hold people accountable. God forbid you don’t adopt a customer service voice at all hours to interact with family.
Anyway. Made a phone call I’ve been putting off for three years this morning. Since no one else will fucking say it: good for me.
I don’t know who I am half the time but I know he hates her and can’t contain it. I guess that’s a start.
“When making love and having a memory, I asked myself, Is the abuse happening now or did it happen in the past? I turned my attention, gently, from the memories to the sensations in my body or to seeing myself or my partner or the room I was presently in. The memories came up less and less often. What I did was a twofold process. First I noticed myself thinking thoughts like: Here comes another memory. It’s going to destroy this whole evening. It is going to ruin my life. I’ll never be able to have sex. I would see this mental process and say, oh, that’s just a mental process. It isn’t necessarily telling me the truth. I didn’t spend much time with the fear because when I noticed the thinking, I would bring myself to what was real in the present moment, such as a hand touching my arm. Its realness was more compelling. Of course, I had to choose other times, when I wasn’t making love, to stay with the memories themselves, giving them the attention they needed. If I hadn’t also been doing that, I don’t think I could have let them go during sex times. I didn’t practice meditation to get rid of the memories. Doing anything to rid myself of the memories always backfires. To this day I have to be open to knowing that memories will arise sometimes during sex. I still have them, but the frequency has been drastically reduced. My attitude now, many years later, is when memories come up, they come up. Sometimes it means I have to let go of making love and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the memories go away after a moment. The key is the openness to it.”
— lesbian sacred sexuality, diane mariechild and marcelina martin, 1995.
Applied to the college, got into the college for the fall semester and hopefully this is a gateway to rebuilding my life. There’s a lot of social justice and criminology pathways through the college to a nearby university in the city and while I don’t love criminology, most of what I want to do intersects with it, so… maybe.
I have communicated my feelings with my family and been called mean and only melted down about it for two days. In my defense: I’d been waiting on things for 8 months and my patience and pain tolerance hit a limit
Also in my defense; my grandma is dating someone who abused me as a kid. Obviously I’m not going to her fucking birthday party where he is going to be. And I only shouted about it once.
My beard looks incredible
Started painting the basement and it’s going to take a while because my spine is wrecked but that is Fine
Replaced my mattress with one that isn’t going to be enabling my joints drifting and dislocating every night, so my god the world is my oyster once I adjust to it and my spine can stop being wrecked
Haven’t yet punched someone to steal their smokes on the street so that’s good but I’d fucking do it sometimes I swear to god
Trying to consider my emotional outbursts as me resocializing myself and training myself like a fucking dog who still sometimes snaps at people when I’m misunderstood, rather than being a horrible person who deserves to be put down? Does that count?
Sometimes I eat twice a day now instead of just once
Been a year since that disastrous psychiatrist appointment and I am objectively doing better now than I was then, so overall the trend is toward healing and that’s all I ask of myself some days.
Trying really really goddamn hard to connect with people and ride out the internal storms of panic/fear/paranoia/apathy/shame/everything else and I feel like I never make any progress but at least I haven’t given up.
The persecutor alter we’ve been trying to coexist with has… not disappeared but seems less intense after some sort of switch a few days ago.
I have spent. Like. 100 hours in the Legend of Khiimori beta and it’s rekindled my insomnia coping strategy of “play a chill game with a horse when I can’t sleep”. As a teenager I used to ride around aimlessly in Zelda games all night, then AC games, then Red Dead, and on and on. I dunno. Letting myself do something unproductive is better than ruminating or stewing until 5am every day!
I’ve been playing Whiteout Survival for 6 or 7 months now, and as a game I only started as a way to gently nudge my social anxiety a bit: great success. My alliance is great. My state is written up on Reddit for the drama at least twice now pretty great nowadays. I’m getting more confident at being a Leader and directing activities and stuff when I remember to show up rather than freezing every time I have to say something in chat. I am really enjoying being strong enough that I get called in to protect my alliance members if they’re being bullied, lol. Like yes ping me and let me fuck someone’s day up please I need the outlet.
Trying to explain the Canadian sorry to everyone is futile though lmao
Really can’t overstate how much I regret quitting smoking but my asthma is much better. Like, obviously, but it’s still worth mentioning. Wanna hear me ramble irritably in breathless run-on sentences? Good news, that bullshit is back on the menu.
Have a breakdown every other hour of every other day.
For three weeks.
Or two months. I forget.
Months ago, I told my therapist I had completely withdrawn from writing or journaling about any of it. "It." There came a point where you could not, gun to my head, get me to say the word "alter" out loud. But there also came a point where I was hyperventilating on the floor of my bedroom and had been crying for two days, off and on, and my cheeks are still red and raw from scrubbing them so much; my nose is peeling like it was sunburnt. I don't think I have ever cried that much in my life. I don't think I believed myself capable of crying that much in my life. Or crying that much about my life.
(If it is my life. Do the memories ever stop feeling fake? Do I get to stop standing back in my own mind when I hear myself talk about things, wondering if some part of me is actually remembering what I'm talking about or if I'm just lying on autopilot? I don't know.)
I was expecting this, sort of. In that way where whenever things are going too well for a little while, I start to worry about when it's going to fall apart, but it's an anxiety very specifically about being too real. Existing too much. Things being a bit too objectively undeniable and feeling far too embodied for me to not slingshot out the back of my own mind and into passive observer mode again. Healing is not linear because consciousness is a rock in a slingshot, and travels in a fucking parabola.
Maybe I should have seen the breakdown coming regardless. It's hard for me to point to any one thing being the final straw. The Epstein files? The trafficking discourse? The strange, unmoored and dejected feeling when I realized no one offline in my life had a thing to say about it? The amount of dysfunction at home and trying to manage the emotions of family members responsible for putting me in harm's way originally? The fact my grandmother is dating someone who molested me as a child now, replacing my very beloved grandfather with… that? The isolation of living here, the endless cycle of screaming for help from a caregiver who'll lie and forget and gaslight my best efforts until I am on the floor crying in pain because I cannot go one more day with a dislocated shoulder and the pain itself is making me dissociate to cope now? The endless frustration that comes with a yearning to connect with people only to be shut down fear every time, leaving me in this loop of physically painful loneliness that I can't do anything about because just the prospect of talking to someone makes me panic?
Or maybe it was just the fact that acknowledging it was all real and happened to me necessitates a fucking reckoning, one way or another.
Or maybe it was just the time of year. March is a heap of anniversaries, most of which I don't even remember recalling now because… the not journalling thing. I refused, and that refusal did not matter.
Every single day there was a voice in my head telling me that he was in charge now, and it was my turn to learn what violation felt like, followed by either a fragment of memory that was enough to turn into a fullblown, immersive flashback, or him forcing me/the body (y'know what I mean) to do something the system normally wouldn't. Like get so high I had heart palpitations and thought I felt my heart stop repeatedly, or relapsing in the first place, or self-harming in other, inventive ways.
Frustratingly? Ironically? It was also a very productive few weeks because whoever was responsible for getting shit done enough to keep the doctors off my back, managed to squeeze a week's worth of shit into an hour or two every day and now I have a college application to deal with, the basement is getting painted, and I am going to have to come to terms with the fact that I am at my most productive when I am at my most frantic. Alas.
We are still ricocheting off each other mentally. I guess I can get into the weeds of it here: we've long suspected (or known) S has a subsystem that houses a great deal of traumatic memories. S can't really consciously access them, but he knew. Alters started fronting in therapy sessions talking about specific memories that he knew bits and pieces of, but not the context for. Years ago, when we were first diagnosed by our current therapist, the pattern was similar: an alter who was willing to be violent who had been responsible for guarding memories that weren't supposed to surface, who eventually held our host hostage, sliced our arm open to prove he was real, and demanded the host take him seriously or die. I guess this is similar in that it… feels that way, emotionally, but there is absolutely no room to negotiate or compromise. Just doors opening in that subsystem's hallway, or whatever, and all of them feel like a piece of S that he forgot he'd ever known. Held hostage in memories while this one alter revels in how fucking much it is breaking me. Us. S. Mostly S.
Just my entire person and all my willpower and my belief that I am in control of my actions, up in smoke.
(But also not, because we also quit smoking three weeks ago, and have been learning that the human brain is willing to do anything it can for nicotine, including unearth yet more flashbacks and memories. The torture will stop if I have a cigarette! Just have a fucking smoke! HAVE A FUCKING SMOKE-)
So I guess I still have some willpower.
Stupid thing to do on the heels of March, though.
1:22AM because I can't sit down and write out a thought from beginning to end like this. It's just noise and mess and little fragments showing up when I try to put them into words. Remember the teddy bear with the blood on it? Remember the nose bleeds that one trafficker was always making fun of you for? Remember the hotel room, remember the specific hotel, remember the address in your hometown, remember that woman who always made you change before your volunteer shift where your grandpa (the bad one) worked, remember how that was so he'd be happy and she just did whatever he asked, remember that one room with the blinds, remember that one room with the blue fishtank, remember the look on your dad's face when you told him it was bad actually, that the rape and incest was all bad, and it wasn't better just because it was him doing it now?
Well, too bad. Now you do.
And now you have to live with it.
And now you're gonna cry for 48 hours non-stop until your cheeks are raw and your nose is peeling and you've rubbed the skin off on the inside of your wrist and you've bashed your head against the wall until your forehead is bruised and you're gonna scream at the people who care about you and you're gonna hurt yourself for screaming at them and you're gonna hyperventilate with shame and you're gonna live with it. And you're gonna spew for an hour to your therapist about how it doesn't make sense, because trafficking means you were wanted, even if it was just for torture, and you've spent your entire life so dead fucking certain that you're too ugly, you're too malformed and barely human, that people's lives are made worse just for seeing you in the street when you walk by, so how is it possible that anyone was willing to traffic such an ugly piece of shit? How is it possible the self-loathing and shame is wrong and not realistic, how is it possible that I was hooking up in university and don't remember, I can rationalize and wrap my head around everything to do with trauma and dissociation but not the part where I forgot that people wanted me, liked me, tried to be my friend, because my personality for the past 20 years has been built around the fact that they don't.
They just don't.
And you're gonna have to live with the fact that they did, actually, want you. But not in ways you had any say over. And not in ways that make sense to most people alive and breathing. God forbid you mention your history without a trigger warning or without precise, careful framing and a hundred apologies for still breathing after it all happened.
You're gonna have to accept that you've been wrong for years and you were human the whole time, actually. That the shame was a shell and reality is so objectively full of people who have tried to connect with you over the years, and you didn't even notice because it was a violation of everything that felt real or true.
1. Six weeks of my brain burning out on flashbacks and switches, cured by finally collapsing and sixteen hours of sleep, oops.
1a. Apparently the sudden collapse of any denial and feeling real and all of that also means so many memories coming back, and somehow I did not anticipate that part.
1b. oh my god.
2. Fuck March.
3. Fuck splits.
4. Fuck spl- wait when did we quit smoking? Do we not smoke now? Holy shit. Good for me.
5. What do you mean we’re going back to school in the fall? And have been exercising and dieting? Who course-corrected my life while I was gone?
Embarrassingly bitchy post about having to live here.
Wow. An apology from my mom and all it took was dislocating my shoulder for the tenth time in two days, her hearing me swearing and crying on the floor because I’m so tired of trying to get her to give a shit, and she finally admitted she spent the money we’d put aside for a new mattress or anything that would help with physio because she didn’t think I was being serious for the past, oh, eight months of telling her it was getting worse and will continue to get worse if something doesn’t change.
Same person who was in the room when I was a teenager and diagnosed with degenerative muscle issues. Same person who’s known this is real and serious and has disabled me in the past for twenty fucking years.
She spent the money on an upcoming trip to England for funsies.
But hey! Wow! An apology! And if I skip therapy for three months, I can afford a mattress that won’t dislocate my joints every night! You know. That thing I told her it would do three years ago but which she refused to return the mattress about because it won’t be that bad and I’m just looking for things to complain about! Which is why I stopped bringing it up or asking for help and now my shoulder is permanently dislocated, the migraines are back, and I’m randomly exploding in rage because I can’t bottle this level of frustration up anymore! I’ve been dealing with these injuries for YEARS, I know what I’m FUCKING TALKING ABOUT and I KNEW IT WAS GETTING WORSE.
But she gets to go to the UK and feed her current obsession (the origin of a random piece of lace she found online one day) so you know. Fucking whatever I guess.
Woke up feeling closer to normal than I have been in two weeks, at least.
A few weeks ago I was talking about recovery with a friend who also has DID and how the more fragments were integrate, the worse the stereotypical DID symptoms get. And. Yeah. We’ve hit that textbook place where there’s an alter who’s just… aggressive and hates us.
cw for self-harm and SA mentions.
He fronts and starts dislocating our joints on purpose. Does a fuck load of drugs. Lashes out at people over nothing. Pops an adderall before bed so we don’t sleep. And his rationalization for all this is that it’s what we deserve, and what he knows: our traffickers drugged us into oblivion sometimes and he’d wake up in a new place, too sedated or high to move. They’d assault us so violently our joints would dislocate. We had insomnia so bad we wouldn’t sleep for days.
He’s using the memories as ammunition. So many little flashbacks that are so vivid I lose track of what’s in front of me. I don’t know why but I know he’s doing it. And likes it. Sometimes it feels like revenge and he hates us because we get to forget. Sometimes it feels like he’s trying to share who he is or why and refuses to be shamed for being sadistic and self-loathing and knowing what he does, and this just comes with the territory of knowing.
I don’t really know what to do other than what we always do, which is try to be understanding while trying to keep it under control. Mixed results so far but today is better so far, so…
I’m going to need to find a physiotherapist or something because our joints are so ruined again. It’s just discouraging. And he’s so self-loathing that it’s like he doesn’t care and would rather spiral until we die because wouldn’t that be better than being Me.
It’s a lot, basically. Trying to force myself to write this out so I don’t forget what’s going on again but my vision is blurry and there’s what feels like a steel spike being driven into my left eye.
Still. Got the garbage out. Wind storm today so I tied the stuff on the porch down. Had to fix the fence that blew over. Cleaned half the bathroom. Holding it together at the seams still so this is going better than the last time a persecutory part was this active, which involved him slashing our arms to prove he was real to our host.
(Which I guess worked because those scars are considered a system contract now to not forget and to take this seriously? The method was extreme but it helped. Trying to hold onto that too. His methods are extreme but he means well in whatever way.)
😮💨 If nothing else at least I managed to slide my hip back into place this morning and we have a giant tube of voltaren, lol.
I don't know what our aversion to journaling has been for the past... year, or so, but it's fucking us up. Our therapist just cycles through the same revelations with us over and over. Which is to be expected with DID, but like... y'all.
His suggestion was just to write one or two sentences about what we remember but we can't even make ourselves do that because there is some refusal to risk it. To risk being seen or read or found. And when we do manage it, we delete it, or shred it, or hide it somewhere no one can find it. Either we don't want to risk being "found" or we don't want to risk writing it online somewhere in case we get shouted at or dog piled or miss a trigger warning or like whatever fucking minor thing the internet will drag you to hell for because everyone everywhere is looking for a thing to be angry at lately, it seems like.
And I am just exhausted. We outright collapsed last night, like fainted, very suddenly and without warning, and then didn't wake up for nine or ten hours. When we did it was just because we were so dehydrated that we had to drink something, so we slammed two cans of water and promptly fell over again.
I don't get it. And maybe it's just our brain rewiring since it feels like things have been... much more online the last few weeks, and it was a lot to suddenly have to absorb, but I still don't know what the solution is. Everything I try to arrange or make possible, we forget about the next time we switch anyway, so it's just constantly starting from scratch.
Which is. Fine. And all of that. It's fine. But god I'm burnt out from so many things all at once suddenly and just wish there was someone I could go to for, I don't know, shoring up or something.
Really, really tried to go to a social thing the other night and instead I ended up hyperventilating and crying on my bedroom floor when I was supposed to leave. Some part of me remains convinced that the only safe way to meet people is to not meet people, and I end up on the verge of fainting if I try to push through it. Wasn’t really helped by the fact a friend triggered the shit out of me that day and there’s that to sort through somehow, too.
So. Okay. Things to work on, but also… what is the solution to the dire isolation here if I can’t even try. Because at some point I start to get the urge to reconnect with people who were very bad to/for me just for someone to talk to and connect with, and that’s worse!
Feels like a trap where there is no winning and I just have to find a way to survive entirely on my own because otherwise my own brain turns into a torture chamber 😮💨 I thought I was over this. I was so excited and confident when I signed up for the thing. I know it was a switch, but I don’t know how to communicate that it’s fine now, either. Weird little catch-22 where they want someone to demonstrate friendship and safety but can’t handle the idea of anyone who’s friendly being safe or not turning on us or secretly trying to trap us.
But we will keep trying 👍 It is the trying that matters, not the failing.
i’m glad revisiting this book if only because some version of “I can’t ring the doorbell that’s not allowed” has been happening to me my entire life, and only in the last few years have I started to be able to pick it apart.
[“-pite having acknowledged that we needed each other, we also needed to move on, and every conversation, every visit, brought back a slew of memories we were trying to forget.
One night the seminar was given by a specialist who was pointing out the difference between children who’d been abused and children who’d been neglected. Neglected children felt invisible, as if their presence had no bearing on anyone or anything. Abused children felt all too visible, as if they were the center of everyone’s world, because they had been the center of someone’s world, the recipients of an abnormal amount of attention.
I thought about my own ridiculous attachment to what others might be thinking of me. When I chose a seat on a bus, I often thought the people I had not sat next to were taking it personally, that they’d assume I’d avoided them because of their race or their weight or their age. Thoughts like this churned and reeled in my brain until I talked myself out of what I knew was a particular form of narcissism.
And it wasn’t just with strangers; it extended to jobs and relationships. The idea that I could not quit an assistant job because everyone was depending on me, that my boyfriends would be devastated without me in their lives. I had an incredibly inflated concept of my effect on others, a misconception that trapped no one but me.
One night, a friend dropped me off at the apartment I shared with six random people on Ashbury Street. I had forgotten my keys. Because it was after ten o'clock, I refused to ring the bell. I climbed back into my friend’s car and told her I had to spend the night at her house.
“Well, didn’t you ring the bell?” she asked.
I told her I wasn’t going to ring the bell. It was after ten and I was in the wrong. She assured me that my roommates were probably awake and, even if they weren’t, one of them would come to the door and go back to sleep. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Instead of ringing the bell I did several laps around the house, trying to determine if anyone was awake or if there was an open window I could climb into. My friend was getting annoyed. When I got back in the car I said I’d rung the bell and no one answered and could I please just sleep on her couch.
“How many times did you ring the bell?” she asked.
“Trust me. Enough.”
She didn’t trust me. She insisted on getting out of the car and ringing it herself, until I broke down in tears and begged her not to.
“Why’d you lie?” she asked.
The tears were really coming down. I just wanted to curl up on her couch and go to sleep. It was a Sunday and both of us had to work the next day and I was dressed in shorts and hiking boots, which meant I would have to borrow work clothes from her. We sat in the car for a while. She was annoyed and I had shut down. All I knew was she didn’t get it. She didn’t get that I was in the wrong and I had to pay the price. I didn’t get just how much of Dad’s thinking I’d accepted as my own.
“You can sleep on my couch. You can sleep on my bed. It’s not that. It’s just so stupid that you can never be wrong, Rachel.”
“But I am wrong,” I said. “And now I can’t go home.”
“Shit happens,” she said. “You’re not gonna ruin anyone’s life.”
I hadn’t seen it like that. I had come to know my fear as martyrdom. I went back to Erika’s, crawled into her sleeping bag on the couch, where I lay awake until one in the morning. Then I put my hiking boots back on, walked to my apartment, and sat on the porch for a good half an hour before I rang the bell.
“No worries,” was what my roommate said when he came to the door in his bathrobe.
For days I avoided going home when my roommates were around. I’d convinced myself they thought I was negligent and selfish. I’d opened the door late at night for them, but it seemed an entirely different situation when I was standing outside without my key. I, who was larger than life. I, who would ruin their night, leave each of them awake for hours, lying on their backs thinking of me, hating me, knowing how irresponsible I was for forgetting the key, how selfish I was for waking them up. Overcoming the internalized belief that I was at the center of everybody’s world, that I could ruin somebody’s life, was my biggest battle.
And yet, talking about boyfriends and classes and jobs, Jenny constantly said, “They don’t hear me,” and “They don’t see me,” and “No one even notices I exist.”
She yelled and cried and threw fits. It was something I envied, her capacity to make noise, her desire to be seen, her determination to communicate how she felt. I had remained and continued to remain silent. When I was hurt, when I felt wronged, when my friendships and relationships depended on my speaking, I shut up and retreated inside myself. Now I was trapped by what had once saved me.“]
no one talks about how draining it is when your mood is constantly switching between "its okay, i don't care. l'll be okay" and "I don't know how much more I can take"
fyi. being intensely self critical is not the same as being self aware. if you’re really self aware you’ll be aware of the good stuff too. just in case anyone needs to hear it. don’t mistake constantly dissecting what you see as your flaws for some kind of personal enlightenment.
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