Aw, shit.

Dear Colon:*

You are not Texas, so stop trying to secede from the Union. Why would you want to be like Texas anyway? They’re so crazy they have signs on the front doors of Walgreens that say, “No guns or missiles allowed.” (True story, bro.) Like, what, you forgot you had an ICBM in your back pocket? “Is that a cruise missile in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?”

Anyway, if you really feel it’s necessary to start a civil war in my digestive system, could you not do it at 2:00 in the morning? That’s just rude.

But really, it’d be better for all of us if you just knock this shit off–metaphorically and literally. I don’t wanna end up having to haul a poop bag around for the rest of my life.

Sincerely,
Hope

*If you catch this joke, you are my new favorite person.

Do I see abuse everywhere?

Contains mild spoilers for The East

Last night, I went to see The East with the BF. The blurb we read online said it was about an operative from a private intelligence firm infiltrating an anarchist ecoterrorist collective, so I was expecting a Jason Bourne-esque spy thriller. There was certainly plenty of that, but there were also weird, sometimes uncomfortable sexual overtones that I wasn’t expecting. Most of it wasn’t explicit, although there was one sex scene and one attempted rape scene.

All of the terrorist attacks the cell carries out are personal to a member of the cell. There is a scene in which Ellen Page’s character confronts her father, who runs a coal power company, at a company benefit. He makes several comments about her being “a woman now, a grown-up” and tells her she’s beautiful. She makes it clear that she hates him with every ounce of her being. She’s confronting him about intentionally polluting the water in the town, causing cancer and deaths of people who can’t afford to move away from the town. She never mentions any other grievances, and she doesn’t seem like she knew or was close to the person who died. To me, her rage at him seems more concrete and specific, personal to him more than his actions.

After the movie, when BF and I were discussing the movie, I made a passing comment about Ellen Page’s character having been sexually abused by her father.

BF gave me a bewildered look. “Where did you get THAT from?”

I tried to explain to him: his comments about her womanhood seemed like veiled references to her sexuality, and her rage seemed too personal to be just about pollution–there are plenty of other worse polluters she could’ve targeted. But he still couldn’t see how I would extrapolate “just from that” that he’d sexually abused her.

To me, it seemed crystal clear. It was like reading “Hills Like White Elephants”: no one ever says the word “abortion,” but it’s obvious the characters are discussing it.

But it made me question myself: am I just seeing abuse everywhere because I can’t come to terms with my own trauma? Is this just one more way it’s poisoning my mind?

I guess it’s possible that the BF wasn’t seeing it because the signs of incest are often subtle, and someone who’s never experienced it easily might miss those signs.

Still, I can’t help feeling flawed and broken, possibly bordering on delusional. Am I seeing abuse where it doesn’t exist because I don’t want to feel alone in my experience. I’m not alone, of course, but incest is by nature isolative. Even if the abusers never threatens more abuse if you tell, you know instinctively to stay silent. No one would believe you, you know. I mean, he’s a police officer. They’d believe him.

Your silence leaves you completely alone, but what you most desperately want–need–is for someone to know and to save you. No one does. You start to believe you deserve to be hurt–what other choice do you have?–and that means it’s your fault no one has rescued you. That learned belief leaves you most alone, much more than the abuse itself. You stop hoping not to be alone–hope is forbidden to you because you deserve all of this.

Fuck.

I feel broken. Irreparable.

“And at the center of the self,
grief I thought I couldn’t survive.”
–Louise Gluck, from “Aubade”

But that at least implies that the grief was survivable, I think, I hope.

Organizing Fellowship

I’m thinking of applying for a fall organizing fellowship for Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America). I don’t know if it’s a good idea or a bad idea. Possibly both.

I’m just tired of feeling bored and useless. I do better when I feel like I’m accomplishing something, doing something that matters.

It’s a volunteer internship; i.e., not paid. I can apply for a 15-hours-per-week fellowship or 40 hours. My all-or-nothing inclination is to apply for the 40 hour, but I should probably just apply for the 15.

One of the application questions asks you to describe a time you worked to build a coalition among people of different backgrounds, and I have no idea what to say for that question.

There’s another question about what you learned growing up in the community you did, and, god, I could write essays on growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. So much different from New England–much more conservative. I remember being particularly affected by its civil rights history, and later by the abortion clinic bombing–both of those affected my political development deeply.

I’ll probably start working on those answers tonight. Assuming I can come up with something for the coalition-building question.

And the fire in earnest

I find I don’t have many words of my own lately. I don’t know if it’s about fear of being found again or something else.

So here are words from somebody else that resonate with me right now.

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All those who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas….

Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln–

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

–Louise Gluck, from All Hallows

Mandala Series, Part 2

Life, maybe? Hope? I was trying to feel hope. The outside–dark, dead, flat–was how I felt. I wanted to believe in the green, the life at the center.

Whirlpool. Depression, hopelessness, sucking me into the black hole in the center. Other people said they liked it, liked the sense of motion. I felt misunderstood: drowning isn’t beautiful.

Black hole. I came straight from individual therapy to art therapy the day I made this. I couldn’t stop crying. Usually I worked on large paper, up to 12″ x 24″. I couldn’t start–the blank paper and my life were both too overwhelming. The art therapist cut me a small piece of paper, 6″ x 6″ with a small circle. But instead of a circle, all I could see was a whole.

Unfinished. Again, trying to convince myself of hope radiating out. It did make me feel a little better.

Depression. But still trying to believe in the possibility of hope: white at the center. Again I used the oil pastel “crumbs” intentionally. I also added gray chalk pastel outside the circle at the last moment, on a whim, because it felt right.

The art therapist pointed to the circle and the flames. “Self and others?”

“Self and other self.” I was dealing with intense attacks from introject parts and trying to protect myself and other parts from them. I’m the outer colors–burned, dark, but inside it fades to blue and white, like a sky full of air to breathe.

Both of these were done with parts, as sort of a nonverbal communication. I’m not sure what they mean.

A symbolic representation of my system. In the back, behind a wall, a tangle of indistinct parts I barely know. In front, bigger than the rest, two introject parts, representation of my parents. My father burning from the outside in; my mother burning from the inside out. I can’t get past them to the others or I’ll be burned up into nothing.

Another representation of hope, or at least the wish for it. The circle–the self–split in two and buried…but then it can grow. Oil and chalk pastels.

Hopelessness. The self darkening, sinking, disappearing into darkness. Oil and chalk pastels.

Shielded. Anxiety about going home–meteors hurtling toward me. But they grey-white shield protects the green life deeper down. I did most of the mandala on white paper to get true colors, cut it out, glued it to black paper, and added the shield and the meteors.

This was about leaving and the work I did while I was there, but I’m not sure how. I worked a lot on the blending, particularly the slow fading from intensity to lightness.

Mandala Series, Part 1

At the trauma unit, we had art therapy twice a week. I got major performance anxiety, froze up, and had no idea how to start. The art therapist traced a circle on a sheet of paper and put that and a box of oil pastels in front of me.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. I was terrified of doing it wrong, whatever that meant.

“Just play with it,” she told me. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

That’s what I did. I discovered I like oil pastels. They’re thick and definite, but you can also get in there and move and blend them with your fingers. Messy, which feels honest to me

This was my second piece. I didn’t feel blended–I felt sharply divided, but all in dull, dead colors.

This started out as a full piece about anger, anxiety, and tension. Then there was a bad night where somebody in my system shredded half of it.

I had trouble getting containment (one of the skills they teach you, to put troubling things away to deal with later) because their techniques were all imagery-based, and I suck at imagery. My therapist asked me to create a containment image in art therapy, so that’s where this came from. The white at the center is the space for containing. The yellowy-green is an anxious color for me, but as it shifts to the blues and purples, it starts to feel calmer.

Anger. And radiating from the center of the self, darkness that gets wider and wider.

Comfort. I made this for a particular part who likes purple.

Denial. This one came out of a very intense period of denial, so bad that I truly couldn’t tell if I was making it all up and couldn’t trust my memories, my feelings, or anyone around me. Moving from black to grey to white to grey to black, seemingly unendingly.

With oil pastels, you often get little “crumbs” from the crayons. Usually they annoy me and I try to keep them from marking up the empty space outside the circle, but this time the smears felt right, and I added more on purpose. The art therapist said that in mandala work, the circle often represents the self and the outer space represents external factors.

Knowing

“You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone.”
–Elizabeth Berg, from Open House

I know things, and I don’t know how I know them. It scares me somewhere in my core.

I’m not talking about random, pointless trivia I read somewhere in the fourth grade and somehow still remember. I do have a lot of that sort of knowledge, and when I share it, people look at me funny and say, “Why do you even KNOW that?” I can tell you, for instance, that wild boars increase in size as you move from western Europe toward the east, and you can sing any Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of “Amazing Grace” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Knowing things like that doesn’t scare me.

What I’m talking about is knowing things about myself and my internal experience without being consciously aware I know it. That scares me.

I guess that’s normal in people who don’t dissociate–although I know a lot of non-dissociative people with no interest in the paths their minds travel. But I assume they don’t surprise themselves in the same way dissociative people do.

When I first got to the trauma unit, Dr. M asked me to map out my parts.

“How am I supposed to do that? I don’t even know who there is.”

“I’d like you to try it anyway. Just see what comes up.”

And suddenly I had produced this map, subdivided into several subsystems, with all these parts I didn’t know existed. It was in my handwriting, and I vaguely remembered doing it, but the knowledge didn’t feel like it came from me.

It scared the hell out of me. When Dr. M started trying to ask about it, I went into a dissociative trance or switched. She quickly stopped trying to ask about it. (We did, of course, still do parts work, just not with the map.)

I think the fear is that if I don’t know where the information comes from, that’s because I made it all up for attention. This was a major issue several times while I was there, once so bad it earned me “with psychotic features” tagged onto my major depression diagnosis.

I’d told Dr. M I had trouble with groups because I didn’t want people to look at me, and in therapy I often hid all or part of my face. So when I’d tell her I made it all up for attention, her response was, “Yes, because we know how much you like the attention.” Pretty much the perfect response, since trying to convince me I did have DID would’ve driven me farther into denial.

I guess I should’ve expected the denial and the fear of knowing to recur once I got home, but it caught me unaware. It’s frustrating because I have no idea how to deal with it.

I wish this were easier.

Take 2

So. New blog.

Today I found out that while I was away, my whole treatment team read my blog. Apparently another employee who’s not on my team found it, recognized whose it was, and told my team.

I don’t even know how to react to that.

My immediate reaction was anger and fear. It was MY space, and they invaded it. They wouldn’t dream of reading my hard-copy journal, so why would they think it was okay to read my blog?

Then there was a little bit of guilt. I’m not always the nicest person, especially when I’m struggling. I get irritable and bitchy. I don’t recall saying anything particularly vicious about them, but I know I vented sometimes, particularly about my frustrations with P. When she was telling me all this, she made a point of saying, several times, that she wasn’t offended by any of it. I tend to think that’s a sign that the other person was hurt or offended, but I probably shouldn’t make assumptions.

And being mean on my blog is better than being mean out loud, right?

For years, my mother secretly read my journals. I didn’t figure it out until 8th or 9th grade. I was having emotional flashbacks to that and simultaneously trying to stay calm and in control.

Blogs and journals aren’t quite the same thing: a blog, after all, assumes an audience. I put it out there in the public domain. There’s not that expectation of privacy you have with a journal. And I didn’t really attempt to disguise my identity or anyone else’s.

Still, it feels like my space isn’t mine anymore. I thought about making it password-protected, but I still wouldn’t feel safe there. Now I have to carve out a new space for myself.

I know that, as a person who dissociates, I put a lot of walls around parts of myself and parts of my life. Everyone does that to some extent; exempli gratia, you probably don’t talk about your sex life with your boss. But I don’t know when it crosses a line from a normal, healthy boundary like that to a pathological wall.

There are parts of my life I want to keep separate. I don’t want people I know in real life reading my blog. It functions for me like a support group, and I need that. I need an audience, just not my treatment team. I assume they wouldn’t follow me to a support group and eavesdrop outside the door. I know that’s not quite an equivalent situation, but that’s how it feels to me. Also, benign voyeurism is human nature, I think

As a result of my parents’ total disrespect for my boundaries, I’m overly boundaried. (That’s not a word. Oh well.) But I can’t tell whether that’s what’s going on now. My mother introject part is telling me I’m being crazy and overreacting, but part(s) of me also feel like its legitimate to be upset. Just because something in the present brings up bad memories from the past doesn’t necessarily mean my reactions to the present event are invalid.

I just wish I could tell when I was overreacting to the present.

P did say that A, my trauma therapist from outside the program, declined to read it. I appreciate that she gets it. A little while before I went to the trauma unit, I mentioned to her that I have a blog. She asked if she could read it, and I said no. I was really proud of myself for that–I have a LOT of trouble saying no. I don’t know if she was remembering that conversation or just felt generally that reading it would violate my privacy and trust. Either way, I’m glad she didn’t read it.

Apparently Dr. M, my therapist at the trauma unit, knew all of this, although I’m not sure if she actually read the blog. But from what P told me, she advised my team not to tell me while I was in the hospital. That pisses me off, and I’m not quite sure why. Something about lack of autonomy and for-your-own-good dictatorship.

A week and a half before I left, there was a fire alarm on the unit. After the alarm, a therapist’s phone was missing. They went though everyone’s rooms, ransacked all our stuff, and strip-searched all of us. Dr. M didn’t understand when I told her it wasn’t my space anymore and didn’t feel safe. I got frustrated because I couldn’t find any other language to describe it differently. Maybe it’s a concept you can’t understand without a trauma history.

This feels like a similar situation in terms of space and perceived safety.

P kept trying to get me to react while she was telling me all this. I told her I didn’t know how I felt about it yet. Actually, it was that I was having too many reactions at once, and that’s hard for me to sort through until things calm down internally, and I usually need time alone.

I also didn’t want to get mad at my team. Not sure what that’s about. God knows I usually have NO problem getting mad. I had no trouble getting mad at Dr. M for not telling me. Maybe it’s a proximity thing–I feel safe getting mad at Dr. M because she’s not her and I’ll probably never see her again. But I’ve gotten mad at my team here before, so I don’t know why I want to avoid anger at them now. I will confess I was glad P felt guilty.

P asked if I would share my reactions once I figure them out. I told her probably not. I don’t want to talk about it with them–makes me squirmy. It’s like they saw me naked, but worse. I’m not ashamed of what they saw, nothing is wrong with it, but I’d rather keep it private and well-covered.

So that’s why I have a new blog. No names this time: mine, my team’s, the program’s, nothing. It’s what I need to do to feel safe again.

The Wild Iris

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

By Louise Gluck, from The Wild Iris