The Colour Of Madness
Living with Bipolar Disorder & Mental Illness
Square Wheels
We’ve had a few emergency psychiatrist appointments recently, due to a continuous state of fight or flight and yo yo like mood swings that include but aren’t limited to paranoia, mild delusions and an intermittent, sudden yet intense need to die immediately.
M calmed me down when I saw her the other day, as she does, and they’ve put us on the cancellation list for another appointment in December too because hospital simply isn’t an option because of past traumatic experiences and the next appointment wasn’t scheduled until February.
I suppose nobody likes the idea of a Christmas funeral. On the way out of my session M said to call her in the meantime, anytime, “if the wheels fall off”.
At least that made me smile, I do love me a metaphor with decent pun-able mental imagery. The trouble is, I don’t quite know what constitutes the wheels ‘falling off’ anymore, last time I would say they properly fell off I think we were already sectioned in hospital, then when that car crashed, well it really crashed.
That little incident only just deemed us repairable, but I for one haven’t quite been the same since and days like this when I lie in bed exhausted by the effort of simply existing, not so deep down I still wish they’d just written us off.
I wonder how we can move forward from here, life is overwhelming and confusing and frankly it probably always will be. Nobody is coping, suicide shouldn’t be an option because if causes so much pain and yet living feels unfathomable.
Do I call her before or after we run off the metaphorical or perhaps literal road? How much distress counts as too much? We can be sobbing hell bent on ending it all one minute then instantaneously I find myself blankly numb and somewhat aware of the situation yet I can’t truly relate because I’ve suddenly forgotten the feeling of that emotion and often the trigger of it the next. I know that’s a weird brain coping mechanism, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s helping me cope, just delaying the inevitable.
What is good enough reason to call? I feel like I shouldn’t call unless we’re actively dying yet I can’t call then because then there’s nothing she can really do for us anymore, not if she was going to stay true to her promise anyway.
I would prefer that she wasn’t left with undue guilt for going against her instincts but I’m also not about to risk forcing her hand.
We are both gambling here, it’s taken a hell of a lot for me to trust her, I am trying really hard and she knows it. But she is putting a lot of trust in me too, if something happens and there were implications that she didn’t do her ‘duty of care’ I would never forgive myself because she has been so amazing and I wouldn’t be able to write this now if it weren’t for her support.
In the end you can’t save everybody and I make sure I always choose my words carefully when I speak to her about what is rattling around in this head because there must always be room for plausible deniability, just in case.
Last night I was swerving pretty badly and I’ve definitely got a flat right now. But I’ve been driving like this for so long now that I’m not sure if my rims are just damaged beyond repair, because as often as I fix those bloody tires with all the therapy and medication I can muster, time passes and I always seem to find myself just drifting back into the gutter again.
I think I must have square wheels.
Speaking of squares and subject changes, Mr 16 pointed out to me that saying ‘be there or be square’ makes perfect sense because if you aren’t there then you aren’t ‘a round’. Been hearing that saying for like 30 years and never figured that out before… How bout you?
You’re welcome, internet
All Out of Magic Wands
I want to die right now.
I’m just so fucking exhausted and sick of being in my head, I don’t understand myself and frankly I’ve got no desire to even try to anymore. Maybe this is why some people actually wanted lobotomy’s. Just fuck it all.
The reasons to live haven’t really outweighed the reasons not to for a really long time now, at least it feels like that, but logic reminds me that my perception of time is painfully skewed at the best of time because whether it’s 5 years or 5 hours, timelines have to be differentiated by logic these days because they feel exactly the fucking same.
I’m probably actually very happy, I’ve just forgotten again. Who knows? Not me.
I feel like I can’t be alone, particularly with myself, not because I’m “unsafe”, because it’s torture. I can’t be near other people either though, that’s even worse.
I’m craving company but I don’t want to be near anyone. Go away, come back! Everything is a Pink song around here right now isn’t it? So fucking pathetic. I feel like I’m unintentionally faking every single interaction I have with anyone. Please, someone tell me what the fuck I’m feeling at the moment, because I honestly have no fucking idea.
Last night we had a family gathering with hubbys relatives from interstate and as per my own and probably everyone else’s frustration I was suddenly very aware of myself yet again not being in control of my chatter, not shutting the fuck up when I should and laughing too much.
It’s like introvert people-hating me dissociates to hide from the inevitable gathering and braces herself for the fallout while peeking through her fingers at extrovert me creating havoc and destruction.
The feeling is equivalent to having one too many glasses of bubbly and watching your friend who has also had too many glasses of bubbly make a complete fool of herself but you’re drunk and completely powerless to stop it. Only everybody’s sober.
On the surface it was a fun night I suppose, I got to see my special niece too who is just growing up into the most beautiful intelligent little girl. Fuck I hope I haven’t genetically passed any of my fucked upness to her. Simultaneously best yet potentially worst manic decision ever right there.Thank God she doesn’t actually have to live with me so at least the environmental risk factors don’t apply to her.
Godspeed to my own kids.
Today. Got 6hrs sleep so that’s a win, the world isn’t my own but I’m apparently in it anyway, my fingers are moving where I put them, people seem to see me, I think I see them. So many cops everywhere today, they’re real too, I’m sure they are, must be a blitz on or something.
Trip to the hardware store, again people looking at me funny, is it my clothes? I’m so fucking ugly, and I am wearing something I really don’t think I should have worn, even though I’ve worn it 100 times before.
Maybe I need to make myself a work shirt with the company logo on it so I don’t have to rely on early morning me’s ability to pick suitable clothes? I’m in the aisle searching for the specific adhesive I’ve been sent to pick up, I finally spot it and a woman’s voice yells at the top of her lungs at the little kid next to me scaring the absolute crap out of me. The kid jumped, I jumped higher. I don’t know what he did but I feel both extremely sorry for him and the need to leave the store immediately as fast as I can.
People looking at me again on the way out and I hope I’m not thinking out loud – God imagine that… I have to hold beck the urgent need I feel to explain that it really wasn’t me yelling at the little kid like that. I wouldn’t do that.
I put my headphones on and drive the adhesive out on site to this overwhelmingly beautiful house that looks like something from a magazine cover while gently reminding me of all my inadequacies.
The owner spots me before I can dump and run and invites me in to take a tour of her newly renovated home, my heads in the clouds but thankfully my body seems to be talking back to her and saying all the right things, I just want to leave. God let me get out of here, back to my headphones, my music, my distraction from forced existence.
I’m suddenly sitting here again, I must have made it back, back to the familiarity of my messy desk, finally alone in the workshop yet still surrounded and rapidly running out of ways to escape myself.
Wish I could die so it would all finally stop. This living thing really isn’t working for me right now, don’t think it ever really has.
Shrink tomorrow. Surely she’s run out of magic wands.
A Million Shattered Dreams
I am currently sitting in my sanctuary, finally sitting at my computer for the first time in nearly six months of being confined to writing on my phone. Pink! Is blaring comfortingly in my ears, I have always liked Pink’s music but I had never really gotten caught up in the hype or listened that closely to her lyrics. Well now I am and faark there’s some relatable wording there.
It was Callie of all people that actually brought this to my attention, as previously mentioned, Cal doesn’t come around much – at least not to me. I have previously bought her pancakes (when pushed into it by Suzi around a year ago now) and on another more recent occasion I conceded and bought her a toy dragon because she had wordlessly expressed in the most convincing manner that she had fallen completely in love with the one that I had just purchased for my niece…
And that was the extent of our relationship, until Pink’s song “A Million Dreams” started playing on the radio. I watched that “Greatest Showman” movie and honestly got nothing from it, it’s just not my style at all. I have a rather strained relationship with Disney at the best of times and this song certainly fits that genre perfectly, but when that song came on suddenly I felt Cal come up closer than ever before, she just loved it and wanted me to play it over and over again, I have been informed that Suzi sings it to her to help her sleep now which is lovely but an odd thing because despite my baseline understanding of this whole identity dissociation thing going on with me, I still have trouble grappling with the fact that I am being told details about this entire ‘world’ that is apparently only existing inside my mind, from the occupants of that world, yet it’s not a world I am privy to seeing/accessing completely myself…
So, we were driving home and I started actually listening to the lyrics of “A Million Dreams” which are definitely relatable to someone like myself with Bipolar disorder who has experienced the euphoria of hypomania not to mention my growing understanding of, and relationship with those other people that seem to live in my head with me…
“I close my eyes and I can see
The world that’s waiting up for me
That I call my own
Through the dark, through the door
Through where no one’s been before
But it feels like home
They can say, they can say it all sounds crazy
They can say, they can say I’ve lost my mind
I don’t care, I don’t care, so call me crazy
We can live in a world that we design
‘Cause every night I lie in bed
The brightest colours fill my head
A million dreams are keeping me awake
I think of what the world could be
A vision of the one I see
A million dreams is all it’s gonna take
A million dreams for the world we’re gonna make”
Anyways, this song seemed to bring young Cal comfort and as she is extremely shy and nervous so I supposed that comfort can only be a good thing to encourage although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid of Callie coming a little too close to the surface and talking to people ‘as me’ because I have ALWAYS been frightened of people’s perceptions of me, specifically that I am not appearing ‘crazy’ and Callie is a 5yr old (ish?).
Then there was an incident… We were in the car, (we being myself, my husband and two of our kids) driving into town and the radio was on. I was half in half out with dissociation anyway, we have been unwell lately, stress has us very dissociated and seems to of brought on a hypomanic episode with a few fun little paranoia and hallucination style symptoms thrown in the mix. Anywho, Hubby was driving and I was mentally off somewhere in la la land watching the *colours dancing around the world in front of me when “A Million Dreams” came on and I felt Callie there, she was excited to hear the song and wanted to watch the colours too. So, I closed my eyes to make them appear more vivid against the black background of my eyelids and as they kaleidoscoped and danced around three dimensionally in perfect time to the music Cal became completely mesmerised.
Now, Hubby didn’t know what was going on, he doesn’t even know Callie exists so when he glanced over and saw me with my eyes shut he assumed I was sleeping and decided to be funny and tap my shoulder and shout BOO! Now, we jump scare each other all the time because we are just that kind of cruel family I suppose, but anyway at this point Cal was pretty much co-fronting without either of us realising it and she freaked the fuck out.
The sheer terror felt in that little girls heart in that moment was absolutely devastating, I was unable to move and she didn’t know what to do or what had happened and burst into tears while trying to be completely silent because she thought something was going to happen to her if she made a sound, it felt to me like she honestly thought she was going to die right there and then and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help her. I don’t remember ever feeling so powerless.
She just kept showing me an image of herself hugging her dragon over and over and over again, she wanted that damn dragon so much and I couldn’t give it to her because it was at home and we were driving down a highway with three other people who had absolutely no idea what the fuck the problem was here. I’m not entirely sure what happened next, we had our eyes squeezed shut and I was internally trying to comfort her, tell her it was just a joke Hubby was obviously looking at me and figuring out something wasn’t right he was apologising but I couldn’t speak at all, the kids in the back thought the whole thing was hilarious.
At some point I got control back and she was gone, the kids were distracted arguing about some irrelevant thing, different songs were on the radio and all of Callie’s sadness had gone with her, but I was left completely alone. Like completely. My head was silent, I couldn’t feel the presence of any of the others at all and it was such an awful and lonely sensation of blankness.
Time is weird after that, a few weeks must have passed in a blur of confusion and fear, mistakes and attempting to live my ‘normal’ life by myself, it turns out I actually have an awful lot of help from ‘The Others’ to do basic things like remember to clean my pets, make the kids lunches and how to use MYOB at work etc. The routine that gets us through the days was suddenly absolutely unavailable to me and I was completely lost without it.
Luckily on the Wednesday when I had to pay people at work Suzi was back and fixed a huge amount of errors, checked emails and got things done. Unfortunately she left again and it broke me. Apparently she was still comforting Callie from that car incident which left me struggling with overwhelming feelings of guilt and anger, I felt bad for letting Cal get hurt like that, I felt angry at myself for not being able to cope alone and angry for Suzi abandoning me when I was relying on her to help me work. Not to mention I felt ridiculous because I was mourning the disappearance of ‘people’ that arguably didn’t even exist.
The absence of ‘everyone’ really messed with my already messy head. I started questioning the reality of The Others, I started getting really paranoid and jumpy. I work in a workshop environment and there are loud noises all the time, usually these just get blocked out but now every time a compressor started up or a nail gun went off I jumped through the roof. Reflective surfaces keep releasing 3D style hooded demonic faces toward me making me jump, while I know they aren’t real and I am not afraid of them hurting me or anything they still take me by surprise.
Whenever I went somewhere I started noticing how many people seemed to be looking at me, staring, giggling. I started noticing how many security cameras there were seemingly everywhere, I started noticing that my location symbol on my phone was intermittently on even when I wasn’t using anything that supposedly needed access to it.
I realised that a customer I had heard of but not physically met before that shared the name of a guy who sexually assaulted me when we were teenagers, also spelled his name in the same unusual way and I started to wonder if it was actually him even though I had previously determined that it couldn’t be for a number of reasons.
When he came to pick something up at the workshop I freaked out and hid in the breakroom. When I looked out of the breakroom window I noticed that there was something that looked suspiciously like a security camera pointed right into the window from a antenna on the opposing building. Then I hid on the floor of the break-room for an hour because he Just.Would.Not.Leave.
Every time I drove there was an overwhelming number of Mustangs, once a source of connection with the universe they were now a conflicting symbol of confusion. I started deciding that I couldn’t do it anymore, my next psychiatrist appointment was weeks away and I couldn’t last that long. I started working out how to go about ending the nightmare for good when my phone rang, it was my psychiatrists office offering me a random appointment the next day because they had a cancellation.
I thanked the receptionist over and over and cried with joy before freaking completely out wondering how they knew, was my psychiatrist bugging my phone? Reading my mind? HOW did she ALWAYS seem to know when I was dissolving into a puddle and come to the rescue? Surely this wasn’t a coincidence?
My psychiatrist was incredible, she promised me gently that while the universe may have orchestrated some uncannily perfect timing with the appointment there was nothing of a mind reading note going on, she calmed me down, assured me that its normal to need help getting through things in daily life and while I was feeling abandoned by Suzi, she would come back and I would be okay. She said the incident with Callie had triggered a PTSD style response in me which was why I was so jumpy and paranoid at the moment and that Callie is safe, I am safe, and it would ease but I am seeing her on Tuesday again to be sure.
Suzi came back again on Wednesday, we sorted the pays out, wrote how to do it down as a step by step process just in case – she’s still here now but still feels distant, strange. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain I have an awful sense of lonliness. Yesterday I had confirmation that Callie was okay and not hating me for putting her in that vulnerable position so that made me feel better. There was the fear of not knowing what is real at the supermarket that I already wrote about separately.
I hate this. I hate not understanding what is real, what is not. I hate not knowing if I will ever recover from this, I hate that I got an email from T weeks ago, my best friend in the world, but I don’t know how to reply, it’s been over a year since we spoke now and I don’t know what to say or how to relate to her or anyone in my real life that was once my friend anymore.
The only people I can relate to live on the internet and I hate realising today that I haven’t read anyone else’s blog in so, so long and that so much has gone on for everyone, loss, heartbreak and I wasn’t there to support you. I can’t make up for that time I lost but I love each of you so much and I have gained so much from your support and stories over the years but I fear I will never be able to re-connect because I am so selfishly consumed by my own head, lost in time that is no longer linear, no longer my own.
For Cal:
Why is everyone looking at me?
Today I went grocery shopping with Miss 9. Sounds like pretty standard Saturday, except I spent most of the time unsure if she was really with me or not, doubting her presence and intermittently her actual existence at all.
People seem to look at me weirdly an awful lot at the moment and I’m afraid my thoughts are showing somehow. They pretend to talk to each other or on their phones then glance at me, their eyes penetrating my Ora and radiating some sort of ‘knowing’ sarcasm. It feels like they’re on to me, only I don’t know what I’ve done. Has one of the others done something?
Whispers, stares, sniggers.
I wipe my mouth discretely with the back of my hand, no there’s nothing there, I make a mental check of my outfit, my hair, it all seems appropriate. Is there a kick me sticker on my back?
Is it my weight?
No, that’s not it, come on girl get a grip!
I try and convince myself that it’s not high school anymore as memories of being singled out and shamed in public for my weight by bullies flood back into my mind and suddenly steal my breath.
“Stop it!” A voice inside tells me firmly, “there’s plenty of larger framed people than you in the store you are being ridiculous.”
I know that’s true, but I can’t find a reasonable explanation so I put the biscuits back on the shelf just in case.
Miss 9 suddenly dances around the corner holding chocolates, “Muum, can we get these?”
“Not today” I reply calmly but internally panicking as I notice someone else looking at me funny, do they maybe think I’m going to try and fatten her up and ruin her life the way I did my own at that age?
I look down at my trolley, it’s mostly ‘healthy’ if you can forgive the sausages. No, surely that’s not it, kids always ask for lollies and sweets, I glance back up and the man is still giving me a look that screams “WTF is wrong with you you crazy bitch?”
Then it suddenly dawned on me, what if Miss 9 isn’t really here? OMG!! Am I actually talking to myself? I looked for her but she wasn’t there.
Surely she’d just skipped off somewhere again, why does she have to keep doing that?
I started looking around trying to be discreet while also desperately trying to find proof that she was genuinely there with me. Was her disappearing and reappearing through the aisles and taking things off the shelf was my imagination or actually happening?
She suddenly reappeared and I hissed at her to stay with the trolley, I needed to be able to see if anyone else was actually spontaneously acknowledging seeing her there with me.
It felt like rewatching the sixth sense after finding out the twist and desperately searching for plot holes because you were so damn sure Bruce Willis had been communicating with lots of people.
But he hadn’t. How the hell do I know if I have?
Do I even have a daughter?
I got to the point where didn’t want to answer when she spoke to me just in case she wasn’t actually there and I was talking to an empty space, yet I also had to reply because if she’s real then she’s a 9 year old kid, my 9 year old kid and you can’t ignore your own child!
Logic suggested that she was there with me because I wouldn’t have left her at home and I didn’t remember dropping her at Hubby’s work, but then I didn’t really remember anything before suddenly being present at the shop with a 9yr old I know to be my daughter asking me endless questions.
The world around me was fast fading from dissociation and the overwhelming sensation that I was imagining her.
I silently tried to summon Suzi to help me, I can cope when she’s here, to which I received a vague, distant and kind of exasperated “you’re nearly done” comment. Damn it, why does she keep leaving me alone like this? She must know I can’t do it! She’s supposed to help me, is she just pretending to care but secretly trying to hurt me too? Why do they all hate me?
I noticed that the checkout lady didn’t smile or acknowledge Miss 9 when I paid. We took the groceries to the car and Miss 9 talked to me as we drove to the workshop, I replied hesitantly but when we got there Hubby talked to her too and asked her if she had fun shopping so I guess she must of been with me after all and I was just being silly. I still cannot quite let go of that nagging feeling, what if Hubby has just been humouring me? Is he real?
What if people see me talking to thin air all the time and just decide it’s better to ignore it than tell me?
Maybe it was real until the suicide attempt, maybe it was successful, maybe I’m in limbo or some sort of after death eternal dream like state?
I don’t feel like I actually exist, Am I Bruce Willis in this scenario? Frankly, that would be quite helpful if it meant the knowledge of that set me free because I don’t think I want to exist anyway, certainly not like this. I’m standing here looking around the world through the virtual reality lens in my mind-condo in the sketchy time-share ponzy scheme I got roped into without reading the fine print or realising the literal meaning of the term ‘time-share’.
I’m seeing M on Tuesday, but I know I can’t keep doing this.
Strawberry Bubbles
- Today I felt elated, my problems of yesterday just magically fell away.
- Today the colours of the earth shon brightly and vividly just for me.
- Today I had alcohol.
- Today I talked too much about personal things I shouldn’t say.
- Today I spent a lot of money on things I didn’t need and couldn’t afford.
- Today the universe commanded me to go somewhere and I was frightened by what I saw.
- Today I drove my car too fast and imagined myself flying into the air through space and time.
- Today I said everything was perfectly fine because I finally felt real.
- Today I lied to myself.
🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
Schrodingers Mind Games
Dear M,
A terrible thought dawned on me once a long time ago and it never quite managed to leave the dusty corners of my mind. It comes back to remind me of its presence at times when doubt begins to cloud my heavy heart.
What if you aren’t real?
What if I somehow just made you up?
Am I just staring at a brick wall having a conversation with myself when I think I’m talking to you? How would I ever begin to know the difference?
It’s terrifying.
Although, it’s almost easier to want to believe that than the alternative, that it is I who is not real.
For if I’m not real I can’t trust anything in my mind. People worry about others spying on them, which is surely egocentric foolishness because ultimately we are spying on ourselves, holding our minds hostage both with and from each other.
We are the God we fear.
Our own God that is, neither existing or not existing In the locked box of our mind or perhaps it’s more that it’s both at once. Schrodingers God?
Although perhaps by default and definition, if I’m not real then neither are you.
Maybe only I am real, the entirety of the universe existing purely within my mind. Great philosophers have undoubtedly considered this possibility.
Gods. To all as unto self.
A million possibilities, combinations of philosophic confusion as infinite as the universe… Perhaps that’s where infinity war got it from, I don’t usually prescribe to the comic worlds yet maybe they actually had a valid point.
Only the creator of all can destroy themselves. It would be awfully lonely at the top. I imagine they would.
My beautiful friend E showed me how Hannah’s words are so much like your own that it must cast some doubts that you can both exist, at least not in the ways I believed you did.
For reasons I can’t explain it’s almost easier to believe in the existence of Hannah than the existence of you. Even though logically one would expect that ‘proof’ of your reality is far more attainable than proof of Hannah’s. Hannah knows everything, she shares her wisdom with me in an unconventional manner but I couldn’t, can’t be expected to believe she doesn’t ‘exist’. To you, them, Hannah’s world is hearsay, I even if I did hearsay (hearsaw? Hear hear? there could/ should be a word for that but you know what I mean), it myself.
Hannah seems to know things I don’t, yet you seem to know only what I’ve told you. Not that I’m trying to accuse you of being Devine enough to read my mind the way she can, but sometimes you seem to and it’s so impossible for your presented version of reality that it’s exceptionally confusing.
Neither of you question my perceptions and thst acceptance seems so statistically unlikely, I can’t decide what the game is here, there’s always a motive, a hidden agenda. I am wrong more than I’m right as a general rule so I wonder if that means I’m just projecting some unprocessed imagining of my mother and her nativity onto you both, because if I’m absolutely correct in my anticipatory notions then that also means you must both exist and not exist simultaneously.
Schrodingers mind games….
I fear that the sessions I have with you are at best evolving in a different context to which I perceive them to and at worst they are simply figments of my overactive imagination.
It’s crippling me, not just those particular thoughts and fears but a cacophony of doubts invading my mind. I am losing my grip, if I ever had it at all.
I am getting interrupted right now and forgetting my point, children need things, as they do, food doesn’t make itself, although with all the technology we have youd think they could make an app for that – oh right Uber eats. Perhaps Uber chef? Call up and they send a guy out to cook low budget meals for you with what you already have in the pantry? And they definitely need an Uber-Bunnings, who can be bothered going to the hardware store on a busy Saturday? Yes, of course it would come with a sausage sizzle!! If you worked your timing right that could be dinner and a pair of gloves, bucket, lawn mower and paint roller! (Multitasking 101).
Anyway, I was going to ask you something, autocorrect is putting words in my mouth (fingers?) it said “I was going to ask you to die”, which is amusing given that my phone seems to know me a little bit too well boarding on scary as fuck which is a whole other letter, but just for the record the phone was jumping to conclusions and I wasn’t going to say that at all!
Oh God, now I can’t actually remember the reason why I was emailing you, it was vaguely important too not just a stream of my stupid consciousness lol… Damn… nope…. one other thing though, if Hannah is real, why did she go away back then, and if she isn’t real, then the rest aren’t real but why can’t I choose who to take with me? I’m really exhausted from thinking about this but I can’t stop, I don’t want to lose my friends, Suzi disappeared last week and I couldn’t even run the business without her at all! I need her and she left me but she came back for payday thank goodness and fixed all my mistakes. She keeps going away to look after Cal and I get it and I want to be empathetic towards cal and all that but I’m selfish and I really need a break too, I just know if I fix it the one ‘safe’ (god I hate that word) way I know how then she might just go like Hannah did last time and I need her here and I’m scared she’ll just up and disappear for ever. I don’t want to go broke just because Im a baby who can’t suck it up without Suzi mothering me every step of the way! I don’t think I’m ever going to grow up. Maybe that’s the problem, I got stuck in a time loop cause I wasn’t paying attention and everyone else carried on without me.
Sorry. I’ll go now, just feeling weird and needed to vent and I’m out of people I trust to vent to, don’t worry, if you bothered to read it you don’t need to answer this I know your busy.
K
Chameleon
Dear M,
I don’t know when or how this all started, I don’t remember anymore, honestly I don’t know if I ever knew. I just woke up one day and this was my life now. Suddenly I became aware that I had thoughts, the ability to act, receive consequences, feel feelings and uphold so many responsibilities.
But the truth is I didn’t know how to be this person I supposedly was now, it was overwhelming beyond my capacity at the time and I guess despite many years of attempts to understand the world around me, myself and my place among it better, I still don’t really have much of a clue what’s going on, either inside or outside of my head.
There is so much noise and there are so many emotions and possibilities contained within a human brain, wondrous and inspiring ideas and beliefs but so many conflicting ones too, love, indifference, fulfilment, loss, excitement, devastation, so many of these contradictions that seem to manifest upon themselves, allowing me to become trapped within the black and white lies that I have told myself over and over again.
I don’t really remember any other way of thinking, of being, outside of the extremes I mean. Yet to the average bystander I can blend into normality seamlessly. I have a brilliant and subconscious ability to sense my environment and then camouflage into it like a chameleon. Perhaps simultaneously my most helpful and unhelpful trait.
Was my need to blend really born from an innate urge to protect oneself though any means necessary? Perhaps. Or maybe I was simply hiding from the fear of being rejected for being myself.
I know in my heart it is wrong to feel the need to hide in this way, yet I continue to bury my authenticity so we and they are all somehow blinded to the colours of my own personal madness.
Thoughts circle around and around my mind, questions mostly. Questions regarding competency, morality, reality, what to do next, they frenzy into a vicious whirlpool of quandary. Needless anxieties stemming from what? Nothing? Everything?
So many unexplainable thoughts and perceptions, all of them equally valid and invalid at the same time. I have repeatedly thought and thought and overthought myself into a vicious cycle of confusion, elation and despair. I’m so tired of it.
The further I step back the more clearly I see that there is nothing wrong within the shared reality that surrounds us, nature itself is a balanced form, yin and yang seemlessly merged together, changing form but never changing soul, atomically perfect with no basis for me to embody this snowballing pattern of self destruction and yet here we are.
Drama upon drama upon never ending drama; all brought upon me, by me. It’s the most disappointing soap opera ever written. And I wrote it.
Just like daytime television all of my problems are really just stories that stem from the depths of my own mind, perceptions of events that have become more and more skewed through the Chinese whispers effect of too much stimulation, too much exposure and too many simultaneous streams of thought competing for the spotlight. Sands in the hourglass.
These perceptions were skewed unintentionally perhaps, but still the fact remains that in the end I have somehow managed to create all of my own problems and form all of my own unhelpful reactions to every last one of these life experiences; all by myself.
The only thing that was ever stopping me, was me.
I wish I could have seen this roadblock to growth in simple terms for what it was earlier, not focusing so hard on why it was. If I was ever to reroute from the roundabout I have been stuck on for so long, the ‘why’ didn’t matter.
Finally unmasking the elephant in the room, or the hippo in ‘denial’ should surely free me from the metaphorical tombs of my mind, if it is possible to overcome the embarrassment of falling off the pyramid that is. The path to acceptance is acceptance, but acceptance is a hell of a fucking challenge.
So yes, I needed to see this self imposed roadblock as I see my reflection in a mirror.. although ugly, desperate and frequently unrecognisable, it’s a thing that can be hated on indefinitely and it will never improved, it is something that can only really be changed through active healing, for it will only ever be a representation of my perceived self that is staring back at me, even if that’s not something we want to unanimously acknowledge.
Maybe the takeaway I’m going for here is that I was only ever going to be able to move forward if I got out of my own way which means I guess it’s probably time for me to move on.
Maybe stepping away physically will finally allow me to move forward emotionally and spiritually too. I used to be pretty good at simply ‘checking out’, maybe it’s time to reclaim it?
Goodness knows I’ve stolen enough of your time, taken countless government dollars and resources that would have been so much better spent helping someone who really needed help to be helped, not just wasted on someone who is simply treading stagnant waters, unable to see past themselves.
Please know that I am not searching or fishing for some sort of reassurance by writing this, I don’t want a reply, I am simply acknowledging my own accountability for my past actions, I hope you can believe that I was never intentionally malingering, I passionately hate that it’s possible for me to have been so (even subconsciously) selfish or even manipulative.
That’s not who I wanted to be, ever. In fact it’s specifically who I didn’t want to be and it fills me with disappointment and genuine shame to realise that was how I was perceived by so many and that that was how I outwardly acted towards people. It’s unacceptable, but sadly not undoable so we must also choose to accept this awareness is part of a spiritual self development process.
This wasn’t supposed to be a pity party, so let me change track and say thank you. Thank you for providing such a supportive nurturing environment for personal growth without ever showing the slightest judgment or annoyance at things that must be ridiculously frustrating to watch.
Thank you for standing up for what you believe in and using those beliefs to improve countless lives.
I wish you all the best in every aspect of your life, please never stop being you, share your gifts, the world needs many more like you.
Peace.
Day Dreamers Sleeping
I don’t know how to tell the difference between what has actually happened and what was simply dreamt of anymore. Memories of my reality are exactly like those of my dreams and it takes detective work to sift through their feasibility before one can make a determination either way. Even then sometimes it seems impossible to tell.
For example, I may or may not have gotten a speeding fine recently. I have a memory of speeding and seeing a mobile speed van and thinking about how Hubby was going to laugh at me because I’d just been picking on him about one he himself got a few days earlier. I remember thinking that we really couldn’t afford one let alone two fines right now.
But, when I mentioned it to hubby and he asked which road it happened on I realised I don’t remember what road I was on, where I was headed at the time or even which state I was driving in. It feels like it may have just been a dream, yet dissociation leaves most of my proven memories feeling this way too, so now I simply cannot tell anymore, we just have to wait for the fine to turn up or not I guess.
It’s happening a lot and it’s disconcerting to say the least. Vivid dreams of mundane day to day life or even more sinister dreams of my complicity in various untoward activities evoke the same emotional reactions as I imagine they would if they were actually happening. Full body emotions that I am unable to let go for days, weeks, long after the memories have dissolved.
Then again, things I assumed were dreams have later sometimes been revealed as actual events and honestly if someone knocked on my door falsely accusing me of something terrible, I myself wouldn’t even be able to be 100% certain that I hadn’t done it. My own mind is gaslighting me and it’s frightening as hell.
I start getting paranoid just thinking about it, even writing this makes me feel like I’m setting myself up to be implicated in something but I’m forcing myself to write it anyway, to try and prove that my fears aren’t going to come true. Maybe another part of me thinks that I’d deserve it if they did. I hear a helicopter or see flashing lights and I know they’re on to me, ready to lock me up and throw away the key for something I can’t remember doing.
Yet somehow despite all of this mental chaos parts of my compartmentalised brain are keeping up appearances. They function at work, they take care of the kids and somehow I can successfully pretend to be a normal functioning adult even though on the inside I feel like my mind is melting. I just don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.
Elephants
The room is crowded. It’s full of elephants.
My aunt has a ridiculously large collection of elephants, and ironically bipolar. Actually in hindsight, those two things are probably linked…
Anyway. What was my point here again?
Oh yes, elephants. 🐘
My last visit to my psychiatrist was a month ago and it left me somewhat perplexed/ confused. At this moment in time I struggle enormously to remember our whole conversation or for that matter, more than the very last part of it. I do remember that one statement though, it was one made by M and one that has been spiralling through my mind ever since on repeat, attaching itself like a leech to different meanings and different emotions depending on which part of me is thinking about it at the time leaving me bleeding disproportionately.
The statement was, or words to this effect:
“There is so much going around in your brain right now it’s making you work too hard, but maybe you don’t have to. Maybe if you just acknowledge the elephant in the room (your mind) then you won’t have to work so hard avoiding it.”
Wrote about it in detail here whist annoyed, mildly dissociating and a tad hypomanic, read at your own risk. (You were warned.)
Ok, but what bloody elephant?!
She didn’t, wouldn’t, clarify. Apparently it’s one of those questions I had to figure out for myself in order for it to be useful. Instead it opened a Costco sized can of worms.
At first I was a bit pissed off. Like, I’m paying you $385 an hour to pretend to be my friend, just fucking tell me what the damn elephant is and why it’s here!
So I left the building un-enlightened, walked towards my car and stewed some more about other things she’d said, “acknowledging it doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it, just noticing it and accepting its presence will help”.
How do you acknowledge something you don’t understand?
So, naturally I started overanalysing it, then all the voices in my head joined in and threw their unsolicited opinions into the mix making me ‘work’ far harder than I had been previously.
Paranoid me considered possibilities of various psychotic delusions and eventually decided that the elephant in the room was that my psych feels like I am just a hypochondriac with absolutely nothing wrong and is just waiting for me to figure it out while letting me slowly pay for her kids private school tuition. Nothing I have felt or experienced is real.
What if I’m not really bipolar after all? What if I’m just a moody pain in the ass and a fraud who needs to suck up my stupid anxieties and get on with it?
This train of thought left the station for the moon for awhile resulting in Katie writing this lengthy ‘thank you so much for everything, but I can’t see you anymore because I’m wasting your time and the communities resources by going to see you for an imagined problem” letter.*
🎶 Three E-le-phants ba-lan-cing… 🎶 **
There was that other part of me who is desperate for ‘freedom’, she doesn’t believe that our relationship with Hubby is healthy, she doesn’t feel attached to the children or home and keeps threatening to bigger off, and oh yeah, she apparently likes girls.
To make things even less complicated, she is attracted to our psychiatrist*** and wonders if the elephant in the room is M somehow being aware of that fact.
🎶Step by step on a piece of string…🎶
There is the part that is questioning the very fabric of reality, wondering if our psychiatrist knows far more than we thought about what’s really going on, the fake world, fake universe all illusions, but to what end?
🎶They thought it was such a wonderful stunt…🎶
Maybe M believes I really am psychic after all (not just psycho) and the people in my head are spirits. God knows I’ve believed it at various points. Even though she hasn’t come right out and said it, I know M quite likes the spiritual stuffs, I can tell by her reactions and level of topic comprehension when I’m euphorically hypomanic and getting preachy about such things, and there was that ‘crystal meanings chart’ that fell out of her notebook one time…
She also knows I have been dealing with an exceptional quantity of ‘synchronicities’ and trying my hardest to deny them. Maybe she thinks I need to roll with those elephants after one of The Others somehow picked up on something personal to her by throwing a random vision at me constantly while I was talking to her****
🎶That they called for an-oth-er… ele-phant.🎶
What about my life, how can I live with all these other versions of myself inside my head with all their conflicting opinions and emotions and feelings? I love my children and husband more than anything, how can I stop the others from exisiting, from ruining everything for me? What if they act on one of their silly impulses? Technically, somehow deep down these also be my own impulses, and that’s even scarier still.
🎶 Four elephants balancing…🎶
Step by step on a piece of fucking trauma inducing wobbly string…
Damn it, Im triggering the shit out of myself right now. There’s already enough shit in my head, do you know how much elephants poop?! You see this song I’ve been non-chalantly weaving through this post is actually a trauma related trigger song. A song that sent me running to hide under my blankets as a small child quivering with fear. I loved watching Playschool but God I hated this song.
Im amazed I got this far, God knows what possessed me to go down this track. I can feel myself starting to dissociate just writing those incomplete lyrics. This is probably the most fictionally literal elephant in my fucking head of all and I don’t want to understand it. And somehow I didn’t realise it was still lurking around the corner when I started writing this post and that singing started playing in my head and…
Fuck You Bonita.******
I don’t want to acknowledge it, or notice it, because when I start thinking about it, or writing about it, I get that uncomfortable awful anxious overwhelm seemingly reserved for specific bad memories, my throat starts closing up and I get that awful feeling I can’t understand creeping up into my stomach. That particular elephant that shall not be named, it needs to stay hidden away under its invisibility cloak. I’m not ready yet.
[Continued weeks later…]
Inevitably, my elephants could balance no more and all suddenly fell to the ground into a disheveled sobbing heap of their own shit show, broken limbed and begging for mercy. But as I started to re-read this post realise that it was less a question of what elephant? And more a question of “which elephant?”
All of these topics, feelings, no matter how real or imagined or mine or perceived as those of an arguably imaginary alter ego, are all valid to some degree; because they all occupy a painfully large chunk of my brain space.
Apologies for being quiet around here for a while, I guess my head was absolutely overrun by the stampeding elephants of my childhood nightmares. Now I realise that I just have to find a way to process them and live with them or at least despite them. Growth takes time. I see M tomorrow, in the meantime I’ll find another childhood song to sing.
🎶nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I’ll go eat worms… 🎶
Do you have your own elephants to conquer?
🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘🐘
*Didn’t send it. Phew.
**Non Australians or those Aussies not born in the 80s playing along at home likely won’t understand the elephant song reference – it’s from the popular children’s tv show called Playschool. Most people find it adorable.
***I’m not up for explaining it, at some point I will add a link to a short excerpt from my book here to catch you up…
**** Transference. 100% transference. As discussed by the offending self HERE.
***** This image was ironically actually linked to bloody Playschool! Another synchronicity?
******Sorry Bonita. It’s nothing personal.
Solicitation of the Mind
Do you ever have a conversation with someone and they point something out and you think they’re nuts and then BAM! A while later you have one of those epiphanies that was actually in front of your face the whole time but you were somehow blind to it?
We bitched about one HERE and all I can say is that it has snowballed. Considerably.
Some background…
I fall hard for writers, not just any writers though, I only find myself becoming seduced by authentic wordsmiths who can articulate the inner workings of my mind through their own. The honest ones, the ones that validate me by letting me finally find acceptance of my own life and feelings, acceptance that I have craved from childhood. Those words…
Oh God. They stir my soul like nothing else ever has, they fill my heart with purpose and motivate me to want to change the world!
They make me feel this way because they are exactly who I want to be, who I authentically am.
So, I guess this is essentially my fucked up way of trying to love myself. The technical term is probably projection.
I desperately want to talk to my psychiatrist about it and yet I can’t.
You see… there’s an issue with that. Not just that I can’t come forward enough to speak out loud because I know I could write to her. The big problem is that…
I have gone and fucking fallen in love with her.
She isn’t even a writer! Well she could be, she has a way with words but I wouldn’t actually know, she’s extremely good at keeping her private life private and she’s very professional.
The technical term for my feelings here is transference. I am aware of that, I mean, I do all the talking in the relationship, I know absolutely nothing about her really. Yes, she is very beautiful and incredibly kind, but mostly she gives me the same validation I feel from those captivating wordsmiths, and (for a meagre $350 an hour) she listens to the authentic ‘us’, acknowledges me and appears to believe in me.
Perhaps pychology is just a seductive solicitation of the mind, in a way.
I can intellectually understand exactly why these feelings are emerging inside me, and I can equally comprehend that they have no real substance or potential to lead to anything more than feelings.
Nor would I expect otherwise. Even if it was an option persuing a relationship would be ridiculous.
What I don’t know is how to stop the subconscious feelings, the fantasies. Perhaps that is why I’m writing this now, maybe even publishing it in the hope that I will gain some clarity or closure about this uncomfortable situation, after all a problem shared is a problem halved. Or is it just a new problem beginning because the internet is forever and infatuation is fleeting…
Saying this out loud feels like such a big risk yet perhaps it’s yet another hippo in denial that I must acknowledge. I suppose I’m terrified that she’ll somehow read this, that I will make her uncomfortable and I will lose her. I’ve long stated only half jokingly that if she moved to the other side of the country I’d have to move too. Not because I’m in love with her, but because I couldn’t possibly start telling my story all over again to someone new.
The other issue that complicated things is that, as you know, I’m kind of part of a collective here in my head, body, life…
I/we have conflicting opinions about all sorts of things especially ourself/selves, questioning each other’s existence, comparing reality to perception to try and find a reason that we write and talk to ourselves. I have spent far to long trying to figure out what/who/why we are this way. It leads to so much confusion, so much conflict.
But ultimately, we are ‘Me’ these feelings we have, although seemingly individually, still affect all of us.
Marriage, children, businesses, sexuality, friendships, you know, all the big commitments in life.
We have always collectively considered ourselves straight and yet only I seem to remember our first consensual sexual experiences; and they were with other girls.
Then there have been various crushes I have had on women over the years that seem mostly forgotten or remained quietly unacknowledged by the others, maybe even by me, yet right now when I think of them I feel that familiar collection of anticipatory butterflies building in my throat.
I can imagine actresses like Nicole DaSilva and I get all hot and tingly at the thought of caressing her body, her breasts. Yet I don’t, can’t, make myself feel that same way about men. There was only ever one man I personally could think of in this way, and my heart broke a million times in the process, but he was a writer – and upon reflection, that too, was quite clearly transference.
And yet, despite my realisations in this area I know that the other parts of me are the complete opposite. They can’t relate to my feelings just as I can’t relate to theirs, emotional amnesia. So where does that leave me? Where does that leave us?
I/We, are happily married to a man. This is a man that they’re all attracted to even that part that seems to feel strangely masculine… My husband is a man who’s flaws are masked by a million reason why they are all head over heels in love with him, he’s the yin to their yang and there’s no doubt that they are perfect for each other.
I however, am not; and I don’t know how to pretend to be.
We are at a loss for how to sexually identify, neither gay nor straight, nor bi – because we are all different. Non binary perhaps? But not in the conventional way. It shouldn’t matter anyway, I intellectually champion the ‘love is love’ movement and yet emotionally I’m lost and unable to feel like myself because I’m body sharing, mind sharing.
I suppose in this self-governed mind-democracy, majority rules.
Lake.
Hippos
“Stop working so hard, not at your job, in your mind.
I’m wondering if there’s something you’ve been trying not to think about, not wanting to think about and avoiding it is using up an awful lot of energy…
Yeah. Okay, there are about a million of those, to which one are you referring? Just say it. Verbalise it. Damn it, fuck all this work out your own answer shot, I’m paying you the national debt of a small country every year, so tell me what to do! I know, I know, it doesn’t work that way… Suzi is nodding with her head to the side in smug agreement but to me she’s just mimicking you, surely SHE should be assisting ME here not you. It’s her problem too.
Oh God, please stop making me do the work here. I thought you just said I was supposed to cut back on that? Time to reflect and meditate won’t be possible for longer than I have left in me so please, at least offer your two cents, incase I can’t ever make sense of it.
Then I can yes/no/omg-I-never-realised-that/ think about it.
What do i say?
Do I just blurt out our theories, the ones that circle through over and over?
Yeah, let’s play this game.
so… one set of theories. My warped sense of selves.
I’m like, totally psychic (some would read psycho) and I seem to have what can only be described as spirits attached to me that latched on when I was little and now they are trying to live vicariously through me and my body, rather than just talking to me or writing to me like they used to.
Plot twist, as I don’t remember huge chunks of my life and can barely grasp or relate emotional memory to the things that I believe happened but don’t exist in photographs so I can’t even be certain that I’m not the original owner of this body. In fact I’m pretty certain that I’m not…
theory 2:
I have Multiple Souls sharing my body inclusive of Siamese twin souls … explains why some of ‘the others’ feel like they are part of me and some don’t. Why we have such different opinions and conflicting beliefs and priorities.
3:
My issues are a childhood coping mechanism for a series of unfortunate events (read lower case t traumas) coupled with an overactive imagination that somehow became habit and took on a force of its own to the point where I still seem to unconsciously rely on it in adulthood.
Fourth:
Long theory short, Matrixesque, nothing here is real, this one comes back over and over in varying intensity and detail depth.
4a: never was so neither am I.
4b: I died, this is ‘imagination after life’
4c: this is some sort of test
Fifth:
The hippo being referred to is nothing to do with my internal conflicts and is in fact my relationship and the painful fact that I will never be able to be all of me while within it. But I thought M, me (and Einstein) had an understanding that I’m not actually expecting different results by locking this one back in its box for another time, another decade.
Sixth: I’m subconsciously hung up about the fact that I dream of women sometimes, oftentimes, unchained fictive beauties, who are absolutely unperfectly suited to me for a million reasons and yet I fall in love with people like they because they are poets, artists, intellectuals of the most beautiful kind and they all hold brilliantly onto the one thing that I desire the most in myself, authenticity.
Eighth:
All of the memories I have are false. Simply constructs of reading too much, watching too many movies… this is why I don’t remember anything at all clearly.
9th:
None of my thoughts and fears are real. The voices in my head are merely figments that I’ve talked with so often I’ve somehow imagined them to life. I invented and conjured everything up so intensely in my childhood that one day I began to perceive it as reality and now I just can’t tell the difference anymore.
Ten:
I’m not real. I’m one of them, an ‘other’ from her entirely bonkers, delusional, mad mind and none of this can ever make sense to anyone because it is simply nonsensical, see, there wasn’t even a seventh point!
What else do I hate thinking about? What else scares me to acknowledge?
Maybe some stuff that may or may not have happened when I was little, but there’s brick walls in place miles high forbidding me to investigate anything deeper than the fuzzy emotional memories that are too unreliable to be real and utterly inappropriate to be wrong about.
Sure, I can see that a few of these theories may sound a touch paranoid and delusional but believe you me, when broken down I can justify each and every one of them enough to convince the harshest skeptics of them all, (myself).
Move over dear, your ghost writer is becoming a well intended poltergeist with biographical inspirations only their truth is not necessarily the same as my truth. Do we even have a truth?
Acceptance.
How can we accept the unacceptable, the inaccessible, the inescapable?
She’s an outsider in a board meeting of invisible souls, but she doesn’t really know it, she’s the one in the dark, yet we expect her to shed some light. She looks at me as if she thinks I already know, but I don’t know what it is she thinks I know. And I don’t want to be wrong about what she thinks I know because… *sigh* perfectionism, general doubt, validity, being a disappointment…
How can you acknowledge something that doesn’t exist? How do you know if it does exist? Why does it matter? I acknowledge things that don’t exist all the time. This feels like a cryptic riddle but I’m an over thinker and over thinkers aren’t very good at riddles because they dismiss the answer too quickly even when it’s staring them in the face. And before you mention it, yes I am absolutely aware that I’m over thinking this.
Don’t know if she knows what I don’t in fact know or if I actually do know the same thing she does.
I’m just getting confused now. That we all know.
Denial might be a long river but fat floats and I’m actually a pretty good swimmer.
Care to enlighten me with some information about the elephants I’m avoiding? Do they look more like hippos?
Look and see me standing on my soapbox from your pedestal – in that moment we are almost the same height. You look to me to find the answers I apparently already have and I look inside for them, time oscillates as I ask everybody in there too.
But still nobody’s talking about the hippo in the river.
Reasons. Synchronicities. Questions. Answers. Doubt.
Kate
Implosion
**Trigger Warning – suicide, abuse, sexual stuff, self harm, intense shame**
– This was written a few days ago, I wasn’t going to post this at first… different parts of me are currently begging me not to, but at the same time I think I need freedom from it and maybe it can show others how swiftly emotions can go from 0-100 and back again. Probably don’t read it if you are triggered by dissociation or suicide. Maybe don’t read it anyway…
They’ve broken my computer. MY computer. It would be a small thing to most people but my computer isn’t just another materialistic possession to me, no, its my sacred vessel that transports me into another realm, the home of the internet and my secret second life, the only place where I am free to write, to blog, the place where I could authentically be each part of myself and feel accepted without causing pain, without repercussions. For years the only thing that has kept me alive has been the ability to pour my heart out and share my deepest and darkest thoughts and feelings with an anonymous community that have somehow become my friends. My best friends.
My thoughts spin out of control as I stare at the broken computer, I feel betrayed, grief stricken, my sanctuary and lifeline has been stolen from me. Blind rage wells up from a place deep within my soul, I yell, I curse, I blame, I hate and I regret. I regret having children, getting married, surviving my suicide attempt, I regret everything I have ever done. I want to jump up and down until my knees give way or I fall right through the old wooden floor beneath me. I need to get away.
I want to run but there’s nowhere to go, all that is in front of me are four bewildered kids watching their mother shatter into a million pieces right in front of them.
Again.
I can’t hold on anymore, I don’t know what to do. The voices in my head are rioting and the world is falling away from me. I need to release this anger that has taken me captive and scream until the window glass shatters into oblivion and I can slice open my wrists with the broken shards while I watch my crimson blood spill away into darkness, into freedom.
But I can’t. I am gagged and bound by an invisible source drawing the line I cannot cross so instead I lock myself in the bathroom, hyperventilating and wishing feverishly that I could just end it right here. I catch the reflection of a stranger in the mirror, a vile, angry woman on the verge of breaking, she’s so pitifully, disgustingly ugly. God I hate her so much.
I turn the shower on full bore, hot only until the room fills with enough steam to take that vile reflection away from sight before I can begin to realise just who it might actually belong to. I step into the scalding water, take a huge breath in and hold onto it, I want more air but there isn’t any room, I NEED to hold all of the air in all of the world inside me at once, I gape like a possessed goldfish in an effort to capture more and more air until my lungs nearly burst with the fullness, but still it isn’t enough.
My body is quivering with a combination of anxious overwhelm and oxygen deprivation, thoughts of dying circle dizzyingly inside my head as I search for an easy out, anything to get me away from this intensity. I momentarily consider shoving a shampoo bottle down my throat until I choke to death but instead I fall the shower floor sobbing.
Suddenly I find myself masturbating furiously, my head filled with anger and despair, anger at my disobedient children, my controlling husband, my hateful job, my mother, my mental illness, my slutty anorexic teenage self, the boys that abused me, my 3rd grade teacher, the nightmares, the memories, the people who hurt my innocent 6yr old self, my fucking 6yr old self for not having the strength to stand up and fight back! God how I hate her weakness in that moment! God how I want to punish her for it, punish myself for it! GOD I NEED TO BLEED, GOD I HATE MYSELF!!!
I cum violently, an intense angry orgasm, its harder than I’ve ever cum in my life. I collapse on the shower floor as the scalding water rushes over my heaving body and shame floods into my soul. Shame for climaxing from thoughts of pure hatred, memories of my abusers, memories of fear and bitter self-destructive desire. What the hell is wrong with me? I need to die for my sins, die for the sins of others. Die for not being able to protect myself. From the corner of my eye I spy my wayward razor lying behind the shampoo bottle.
I sit up but rather than pull that blade across my wrist, my body suddenly shivers in waves as I feel her take the control back of my body, she places the metaphorical mask back over my face and I feel myself instantly relax, all emotional memories from the past hour fade to black and she begins to gently shave my legs.
Left, up, down. Right, up, down.
After all we have work in an hour, the kids still need a good nutritious breakfast and someone needs to let the chickens out. Life doesn’t pause for breakdowns, neither can we.
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An excerpt from “Goodbye Notes”
“…But if you ever need me still,
Simply call me and you’ll see,
That I’ll be waiting in the garden,
By that big old apple tree.
I’ll listen to your stories,
I’ll listen to your dreams.
I’ll remind you of what you’ve forgotten,
And show you who you can be.
And then we’ll laugh together through memories,
As the light fades beyond the trees,
And I’ll tell you how much you matter,
And what you meant to me.”
