Mental health dumping ground. Trials and tribulations of life inside my mind. (Official diagnoses: autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia spectrum disorder, C-PTSD)
Here is as far back as I can kinda sorta remember. Though not all of it is actually remembered, some of it was told to me. My memory is really stupid–it forgets things that happened five minutes ago, but can remember all this shit from when I was 3, 4, 5 years old.
It’s finally time to write my memoir. And yes, this is really about ME. This is not RiffRaff or any of my other fictional stories. This is my story. About me. And how everything eventually ended up going as wrong as it finally did.
I’d been meaning to for a long time now. But everytime I tried to write it…I always just deleted it and gave up. I guess because the story wasn’t ready to come out and because I was worried what others would think of me if I came forward about this kind of thing. Would they be able to look at me the same again, and all that. But now even I don’t look at me the same again, so it doesn’t matter. I don’t have anything to lose, since I already lost everything I could possibly lose. So it’s time to face reality. And get it out there, too, because I can’t face it if I’m still trying to hide it.
I’m going to be plagued by the memories forever anyway. Might as well do something with them. Except this part is about what I can’t remember, and what someone else had to remember for me when I was finally old enough to put all the pieces together. I got Room of Angel going in the background and Walter Sullivan from Silent Hill 4 is a whole mood, so here it goes.
I didn’t get to hear my full, real birth story until I was in my late 20s–primarily because it took me that long to ask for it. When I was a kid, I accepted, “We had only wanted to have one baby, but then you came along.” As a teenager, I learned that I came after 2 other pregnancies that were terminated. Later on, I found out that I was nearly miscarried “early on in the pregnancy,” as my mother told me. She had to be on bed rest and take medications to keep me from sliding out of the womb, dead, two or three months in. Do you know how many times I’ve had to hear her say, “I wish I NEVER took those pills!”? It was a lot.
I'm honestly having trouble understanding. Are you saying you hate the world because you had to spend lockdown with your abuser? Or just that you hate lockdown as a concept?
I have a lot of posts to make that are going to go more in depth about the whole thing in the coming days.
But to answer your question based on what I already posted, I have a lot of reasons for giving up on the world. After all, it gave up on me. It’s failed me so many times--every time I attempted to live in it, actually--and the lockdown was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back,” the catalyst that finally pushed me over the edge and made me realize that this world is nothing good, and has nothing for me in it.
My entire life has been spent being pulled back beneath the waves everytime I was finally able to reach for the shore. As I said, last year was the single greatest year of my life...and now I know I will never have a year like that again (if anything, I won’t LIVE to have one). I had finally had it made, or at least, I was finally 100% certain that I did. I was finally living freely in both of my worlds, accepted in both, loved in both. I was a real person, who had finally been able to integrate into the human experience--something I had been denied for my entire life and had had to spend five long years fully integrating into. I could finally start to break away from the abuse that haunted my past; because I had a home. There is nothing I had ever wanted more than somewhere I could feel at home, and now I had one.
And then the lockdown happened.
Lockdown took literally everything away from me, except for my soulbonds, one or two friends, and the man I’ve been seeing--who lives in another country. Most of my friends left me because it turned out they were only friends with me because we went to day program together, and now day program was gone. I lost a friend I’ve known since September 2012, who I was hoping I would NEVER have to go through the pain of losing. He left because we got into too many fights after the lockdown happened. Everything that I had finally been able to call home, was gone. The support team that had worked so hard to give me a space where I could be loved, be appreciated, accepted, HUMAN...they were gone too, and so was our space. They’re still gone. All of the events, the parties, the festivals, the concerts...the things that made me feel like I was really part of the human experience...gone. My home, gone. My only escapes from my abusive home and all of the horrific memories that were connected with it? Gone. I had nothing left but to sit and REMEMBER things that I had been fighting desperately never to have to remember ever again.
Of course I hate the world. The world betrayed me every time I attempted to be a part of it. And now, when I was finally so sure that I had succeeded...it went and betrayed me again. This time for the final time.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used the blogs for this purpose. I know most of you are used to seeing my happy smiling Disney character outfits, my cosplay pictures, some dance routines, occasionally a picture of a flower or something that I took because I thought it looked nice. Those of you who come here primarily for the Disney content may be a little shocked to discover this side of me. Those of you who have known me for the entire time I have been on Tumblr (seven years, dios mio) probably understand that I have always had it. Maybe you thought I’d gotten rid of it. I don’t blame you for thinking that, because I thought it was gone too.
I have lost everything. Well, not everything; my guardians and my other soulbonds, of course, are still with me. In fact, our bond is stronger than ever now that I’ve lost literally everything and almost everyone else in my life. I spent six (six!) years working my ass off, first at junior college and then at my four year school, to earn a scientific degree in a field that there is now no longer an outlet for. I spent five (five!) years slowly, gradually…but successfully, for one fleeting moment…integrating myself into this world that you all call “real,” finally finding the harmonic balance between my two worlds. For one fleeting moment, I had finally proven to myself–to everyone who had ever doubted me, really–that I was capable of being a person. A real person, living in the real world, among other real people…the number one thing that I had always secretly longed to be for all of my life. These stupid, childish personas I would make up for myself–”superhero,” “soldier,” “dancer,” “artist,” etc etc etc–they were just my way of trying to say “real person” when I didn’t know how.
Well, as I said, it was only for a fleeting moment…
So after 2 years of research into the topic and 27 years of desperately wanting to find answers for my unique life experience, I’ve finally completed my first big independent research paper.
And you all can read it, here on my scientific blog: Raised By Computers: A Firsthand Experience on How Early Primary Attachments Affect Brain Development.
This is my first foray into neuroscience or anything based on human biology; I’m primarily a wildlife researcher and most of the content on the blog focuses on wildlife analyses and animal behavior and ecology. I will be linking the blog in the sidebar on both of my blogs from now on for anyone who wants to take a look. :)
Is Autism Speaks really as bad as people say it is?
Having been forced to deal with them and organizations like them, I can safely say “No.”
It is obscenely worse.
You see, any idiot can look at things like “we need a cure” and their anti-vaccination advocacy and realize how ridiculously stupid that it.
But that’s not what they sell to children’s hospitals. Instead, they push extremely unconventional medications to “help” autistic children (usually by sedating them into a catatonic state). I mentioned earlier that Risperidol eases overstimulation, but Autism Speaks doesn’t like Risperidol because it’s not controlling enough.
Autism Speaks absolutely loves “treatments” and “counselling” based around controlling everything autistic children do. Stimming, self-coping mechanisms, even strange and oddball quirks like kids who wear gloves everywhere, all of these are taken from them and doled out as privileges. It’s all about turning anything an autistic child likes into something they can control.
They treat these children like fucking animals and really enjoy forced isolation as a punishment. The IWK has several “Secure Isolation Rooms” that they will place autistic children in their care into for hours at a time unsupervised when they start acting out. And not “having a meltdown and might accidentally hurt someone” kind of acting out, even just mouthing off or getting lippy with a nurse.
I am personally convinced that the whole “cure” motto is a sham, because studies into Autism long ago disproved the theory that it was something that needed curing. Autism Speaks behaves more like a eugenics organization. And they are slippery bastards about it too.
I’ve had the displeasure of having to interact with them directly because they have such a stranglehold on Nova Scotia’s youth mental health that any counseling group inevitably gets calls from them. Speaking to them and hearing the tone with which they spoke about these poor kids made my fucking skin crawl.
If you’re an autistic child and they’re talking to your parents or counselor about you, they won’t even use your name. The Child, The Patient, and The Boy/Girl are all common ways to refer to these kids. On several occasions they’ve referred to some kid as “it.”
I’ve said before that Tumblr especially doesn’t quit know what Autism Speaks is, and that’s because their public persona is very carefully crafted. Their reputation is so cartoonish that doctors who don’t know better won’t believe it, and so they swoop in with a lot of pretty language and faux-politeness. The skeezy, contemptuous way they behave when they think they’re doing business is enough to make you fucking vomit.
You quickly learn why so many hospitals willingly work with them. They are very good at getting their claws into health care organizations because they have this almost sinister “Friendliness” to them, and when you combine this with the fact that a lot of child psychologists have absolutely no concern for the actual well-being of children (just making the parents happy so they continue footing the bill) you have a recipe for a truly horrifying experience.
I can’t fully articulate just how sickening they are. Take however bad you THINK they are, multiply it by a hundred, and then think about how Quentin Tarantino would inflate that to make a movie out of it.
That’s how fucking gross and vile they really are when they think nobody is watching.
Ironically, I didn’t even realize that my previous reblog was about how brains that have experienced trauma have physical differences to regular brains. But that’s what this post is gonna be about. Brains and the emotional things that end up fucking them up physically.
Because I found out the nature and cause of my brain damage and it isn’t pretty. I also had no idea this shit could happen to a brain.
So, it turns out that yes, my brain has indeed been damaged and that yes, this did happen during the years in which it was trying to develop. I spent years muddling over how the fuck I could have ended up with brain damage when, as far as I know, I never had any severe head injuries, no blunt trauma to the head (well minus the time I cut it open and had to get stitches when I was like 3), never been exposed to chemical/toxic fumes or anything like that, no fetal brain damage. Yet my symptoms were presenting as brain damage. Where the fuck did that come from?
Well, I found out where the fuck it came from. And it turns out, I even knew what was happening while it was happening. But all my pleas to fucking help me were ignored and my symptoms brushed aside as “You’re just trying to get out of something/you’re just trying to get something you want. It’s not gonna work.” I have a nasty feeling that even at the end of this post they’re still gonna be brushed off as such.
There’s something called a psuedoseizure or a “psychogenic nonepileptic seizure,” which is seizure activity that occurs with no seizure disorder present. It’s not a true seizure (due to the lack of seizure disorder), but mimics the symptoms of one, including convulsions, “absence” and loss of attention, stiffening/seizing up of the body (your legs may forget how to be legs, you might pitch forward/fall backward, etc), etc. Since there’s no physical component to this type of “seizure,” it’s not going to show up on brain scans unless one is occurring right at the moment of the scan. Which explains why this shit did not show up on the EEG or MRI of the head that I had when I was a teenager.
So what’s the cause of psuedoseizures? Psychological trauma. Basically, when exposed to ongoing trauma that just. Won’t. Stop. The brain ends up firing all these neurons all over the place, and becomes overloaded as it frantically tries to protect itself from all of the distress that it’s getting all at once. With no other option, it legit just “turns itself off and back on again” because at that point it just doesn’t know what the fuck to do anymore. And then the psuedoseizure happens.
I’d run out of fingers and toes if I tried to count exactly how many times throughout my childhood my body just froze up and I was caught just...zoning off into space. My dad would call it “mooning,” and say “Oh, she’s mooning again.” And during these moments, coherent thought is replaced with bullshit like a single line from a song repeated over and over again like a skipped record, or one single word on repeat (e.g. for an example, my brain would get “stuck” on, let’s say the chorus line of Default’s “Wasting My Time” and just go “not wasting my time...not wasting my time...not wasting my time...not wasting my time...” ad infinitum until it’s ready to be a brain again). There were times when I’d be just sitting in my room, or in school, or...wherever, and suddenly everything locked up, my eyes would fixate on...well, nothing, and I’d go catatonic. There were times when my whole body would sort of “lock” or “twitch.”
Later on, when I got my guardians, they were there when it happened. They saw how after a particularly fucked-up situation I would drop everything I was holding in my hands, and they’d have to help me hold things again for the next few minutes. They’ve seen me pitch forward and have had to hold me on both sides when it happened. They’ve been caught in the fucking center of traumatic situations with me as they desperately tried to protect me or remove me and saw how I’d fall to the ground--I’d be sitting in a chair and then end up on the ground, with my guardians circled around me and holding me and me just...breaking down because I was scared and didn’t know what was happening to me. They’ve seen me start shaking and my entire body cease to work, how I’d be hyperventilating and they’d have to fly me over to the nearest chair or bed or, barring that, the fucking floor. They’ve had to help me walk because my legs would fly out from under me and lock up. They’ve held me while I convulsed in their arms...and cried, because they just didn’t know what to do but they knew something was horribly horribly wrong and they just wanted it to stop...but it wouldn’t. Nobody who could make it stop would.
I knew something was horribly horribly wrong. I was terrified. I knew brains weren’t supposed to get stuck and I knew bodies weren’t supposed to lock up and forget how to do body things. I didn’t know what it WAS, or what was CAUSING it. I just knew that it was happening and it wasn’t supposed to be and somebody please just make it stop. I remember it happening and then, when I “turned on” again, frantically tugging at Yuna or Rikku or Cloud or whoever and going “Help me, help me...” and them just holding me by the shoulders, rocking me gently, telling me, “You’re okay, sweetie. It’s going to be okay.” Then carrying me over to the bed--and being at a total loss for what to do, every single time it happened again and again and again.
I’d gone to the school about it because it happened a LOT when I was in school--in high school it got to the point where it’d happen constantly, because high school was an extremely hellish and traumatic place for me to be in general. I went to the school nurse ALL the time, the counselors, the teachers...pretty much everybody in the school who I could talk to. I’d tell them that it was so bad in there that it was making my body freeze up and I was experiencing actual physical pain, that my vision blurred and that my brain stopped being able to think thoughts, that I couldn’t hold things anymore...what could they do? They had no idea why the fuck those things were happening either and my parents were called countless times...and then they were told “She’s doing this because she doesn’t want to be in school. Just don’t worry about it.”
I went to doctors about it. My dad’s wife overrode the doctors and told them it was just “something I did when I didn’t like something” or “she’s just trying to get her way. She starts up on this stuff when things don’t go the way she wants them to.” In actuality, they happened when she was going at me, when I was being abused, when I was being bullied or exposed to overstimulation at school (you think middle/high schoolers give a crap? Hell, they found it funny and would keep on prodding me just to see that shit happen again). I had the one brain scan when I was 12 (EEG) and one when I was 15 (MRI) and when nothing showed up on either one of those, it was as if my dad’s wife had her “suspicions” confirmed about how I was making the whole thing up “to get something out of people.” When I was little I went to my dad’s wife about it because she was the only one I had to go to about it--no guardians back then. She told me “That doesn’t happen to you.” I told her it does, it really does. “No it doesn’t, stop it. There’s nothing wrong with you.” I told her it does happen and it hurts when it does. “Then it’s something YOU’RE doing to make it happen. YOU tell yourself to make it stop happening when it does. It’s all YOU.”
(For the record, what the fuck benefit would a 9-to-16-year-old girl get from faking seizure activity???)
It happened a lot when she was going at me or after she had gone at me. It happened a lot when I was in school (like I said, there became a point in high school where it happened ALL THE TIME). It happened a lot when I was being bullied or abused. Now I know why. But back then how the fuck was I supposed to know, especially when something was clearly happening to me and my soulbonds saw it happen, and yet I continued to be told I was either making it up or causing it to happen.
And that was my developmental years, ladies and gentlemen. That shit was going on in my brain throughout every single of the years my brain was just trying to grow and form into a brain.
So my brain wasn’t able to fully grow and form into a brain.
Every single one of those fucking psuedoseizures was causing actual, real damage. Because a brain isn’t supposed to just “turn itself off and then on again” and a brain also isn’t supposed to be constantly exposed to the type of stimulus that CAUSES it to have to turn itself off and then on again. I knew that. A kid knows when something horribly wrong is happening to their body. They know that they’re not supposed to be locking up and seizing every day, ESPECIALLY knowing that they don’t have epilepsy or some other seizure disorder that would explain that away.
But no. “You’re just trying to get something out of us.” “It’s all YOU. If you don’t want it to happen anymore, YOU make it not happen.”
So my brain destroyed itself because that bitch refused to take fucking responsibility for the fact that her own actions and the trauma that she was inflicting on me (either directly or by-proxy, by just letting school bullies and overstimulating maladaptive environments let loose on me with reckless abandon and then overriding any and all attempts to mitigate it) were actually causing it to destroy itself.
Of course, if she let the school intervene and I was taken to the doctors for more than just a 30-minute brain scan (I wonder what a brain scan would show NOW that the damage has been done?) then I would’ve found all this out way back then.
But that doesn’t do anything now does it? Now when I use “My brain got stuck” as an explanation for why I’m, well...the way I am, I can say it knowing that I know exactly how, why, and when it “got stuck.”
I wonder what a brain scan would show now that my brain is done trying to grow. I’m going to see if I can get to a neurologist.
...And now when I think about SO MANY of the things that I did, or the things that happened, I can at least forgive myself because now I know that I literally was not, and am not, playing with a full deck. Of course my brain doesn’t do shit that normal brains do, or even that other autistic brains do. Because normal, autistic, or otherwise brains did not spend their entire developmental years fucking seizing because they were being abused so damned badly that they had no choice but to shut off.
Great.
Like I said, I’m going to see if I can get to a neurologist now that I know this shit was going on.
Your daily reminder that traumatised brains are literally physically different to a normal brain. Repeated trauma and abuse has a severe, long-term effect.
If you have difficulty maintaining social bonds, concentrating, sleeping, focusing, or regulating your emotions, it’s because you’re traumatised. If you’re not happy with yourself, if you worry you’re a burden, you’re toxic, that you don’t matter, it’s because you’re traumatised. If you struggle to make it out of bed, think straight, get motivated or distracted, it’s because you’re traumatised.
Have you ever been told you’re too dramatic, or emotional? Has anyone wondered why you trust no one? Why you analyse every person’s smallest behaviour? Why you’re paranoid of the most minor signs of history repeating itself? It’s because you’re traumatised.
Ty :) It was an organic chem exam (uuuuuuuuuugh) and I took it yesterday and tbh I don’t think I did very well on it. x.x Def not as well as my first orgo chem exam when I got a surprise B.
I got another exam in fisheries next Friday and I am MUCH better in that class ‘cause it’s bio oriented.
By the way, Youtube’s decided it’s gonna disable my comments even though I’m 26. -_- Sorry about that. If you want to comment just drop it here in my askbox. I’m trying to see if I can get this fixed but seriously this arbitrary comment-disabling has got to stop.
I’m too swamped with schoolwork (I got an exam) to make a post every day so I’m taking a break from that at least until I no longer have this exam to deal with
i hate when ppl make fun of me for trying 2 be positive and spread good vibes like fuck your bitter ass i spent a good portion of my short life being bitter and angry and suicidal if i wanna shoot sunshine out of my ass then i fuckin will
I just got my C-PTSD diagnosis. Any advice on dealing with the symptoms? It feels good to have a label to put on it, but its pretty frustrating.
Find a damned good therapist.
A DAMNED good therapist, and if he/she is damned good, stick with them.
C-PTSD can mimic severe personality disorders (such as borderline) and I’m not sure if that’s how it is for you, but that is how it was for me. My psych spent a year ruling out Cluster B (specifically BPD) until he came to the conclusion that the cluster-B-like symptoms were more likely the result of PTSD. I had to trust him enough to be able to open up to him about the shit that had happened to me in the past first.
Because the symptoms can be very similar to a cluster B personality disorder sticking with therapy is super important because it can cause severe social impairments and inability to form relationships or social connections. A good therapist can help with this so you’re more able to interact with others. Prior to my diagnosis, back when BPD was still being ruled out, I was told that all social interaction had to be in a structured environment because I just was not able to handle it without that structure and supervision.
(I know I forgot Pascal yesterday. Truth is I just didn’t have very much to say about Pascal. :( )
Meeko has always been my favorite Disney sidekick. It must be his playful, curious nature. Or his love of food. Or the fact that he’s just plain funny. Never really understood my fascination with this little raccoon, but when I was little I even had a big picture of him above my bed.
In real life I’m afraid of raccoons, because of their tendency to carry rabies. I think they’re great little critters and I love hanging out with them in controlled settings (like wildlife sanctuaries), but if I saw one in the wild out in my backyard I would most definitely head the other way. But cute little Disney movie raccoons don’t carry rabies. Meeko’s mischevious little, well, raccoon-like ways have always amused me; he’s playful, curious, fascinated by everything around him because everything around him is just so FUN and AMAZING, and he’s best friends with a hummingbird and that’s awesome. He’s got the kind of disposition that makes everything in the whole world an adventure, one big game. It’s the way I try to see life day to day, though it’s harder for me to do at this time of year.
Sometimes I can be just a little raccoon-like, and I appreciate Meeko for that. Other than that, I don’t have very much to say about him. :)
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