THE COLOUR OF MADNESS
A Blog About Living with Mental Illness
I Am Me
I’ve always had a thing for artists.
I’m a lush, in particular, for wordsmiths.
Writers, poets, lyricists, those who can craft meaning from madness and immerse you into a whole new world simply by scratching markings upon a page.
Sometimes art is so enticing it’s hard to breathe.
A picture, a texture, a sentence takes you away on a journey so personal that you lose yourself, within yourself, until you are elevated somehow; connected to a higher plane of existence, floating far above the world.
You know lust when it hits you. You are instantly intoxicated by it, addicted to it, lost in maze of mirrors reflecting the truest desires of your hammering heart until you know you must tear yourself away or your mind will disappear into it’s vortex forever.
Lust will own you if it gets a chance, it will rob you of your senses and masquerade as love, tricking you into believing it’s wishful promises and fantastical tales.
Lust holds no boundaries. I may never lay eyes on an author and yet I can find myself so entranced by beautiful words that their creator takes on a physical form in my imagination. Lust gifts me with tantalising waves of light and energy so immensely captivating and desirable that my heart forgets it’s rhythm and I find myself flustered in a way I can only compare to a cliché Hollywood film.
It took me a long time to understand this intense level of connection I felt to creators and to learn the difference between lust and love and what attracted me to verse and story above matters of the flesh.
Perfectly crafted sentences can make me tingle and squirm orgasmically in ways I have never otherwise felt. Published authors however, have never impacted me in the way those anonymous wordsmiths toiling away on their personal blogs in the forgotten corners of the internet have.
I found my most intense pleasure came from the tragic biographies of these authors who had felt pain the way I had. Authenticity, honesty, bravery all tied into poetic phrases cutting in such a deeply relatable way that they branded me with permanent scars and then left me begging for more.
The stories themselves didn’t turn me on, certainly not the pain or the horror. It was the magical way in which they shared them. The openness. As someone so lost for so long, with so many confused selves all trying to live together in one mind, my life had been a desperate attempt to blend in. A lifetime spent closing parts of myself off, trying to adapt and survive, wearing masks and hiding in plain sight.
A woman I never even met stole my heart for the first time. She was broken, strong, frightened, kind, fierce, dreamy, brilliant and above all else, honest and open in a way only the anonymity of the internet allows one to be. The way she crafted her sentences left me breathless. She could break my heart and give me new life all within the confines of a paragraph.
Next came the shattered angel, desperate to be free. The thousands of miles that separated us disappeared into nothing when we wrote. They were electric, her words and mine. The sparks between us flew like fireworks and while we never saw each other’s faces, our unspoken lust was intoxicating. But we were too powerful, too intense and we sent each other into the depths of madness.
After that, The Jester. His cloak of wool and words of silk taunting us until we succumbed to a deep enough depression to choose between self reflection and death. Awareness, a parting gift from his sparkling ghost.
I was trapped and craving freedom, lonely in a crowded mind, disoriented in a world that didn’t understand me.
I didn’t know anyone else felt like I did, I thought I was alone, crazy, irreparable.
As I read the tormented writings of other lost souls, I felt seen for the first time. I felt as though somehow I was the answer they were looking for as they had seemed to be for me and I fantasised how together we could dance blissfully off into the night, no longer held captive by our traumas and magically healed by our mutual understanding of what it meant to survive.
But I was not really feeling romantic love for inanimate words, or even the authors of the haunting memoirs I still drink down like an elixir of life. I can see it now for what it is, an erotic transference of sorts as one may find in a close therapy relationship. I’m a human being wired for connection who didn’t easily find it as a child.
If I thought someone connected to me, I felt like I need to give some sort of payment for that connection, like I owed them something for acknowledging my existence on this planet.
As a child I had learned that sex buy’s attention, particularly from men, even from those who normally disregard you. To a child, attention is love. A disconnection with my self and a life time of feeling worthless and undesirable made any approval, kindness or sense of connection seem like potential love and I would often start looking at the situation through a sexual lens.
Once I made this realisation, I was able to begin the painstaking task of un-shaming myself for my very natural human need for affection and attention. This allowed me to become curious about what I actually found attractive in another person rather than my usual play of desperately trying to fill their needs in the hopes that they’d find me just useful enough to keep around.
Authenticity. The quality I was so desperately seeking in others, was indeed the quality I was lacking and so desperately searching for within myself. The writers and poets were in fact mirrors to my own deepest self-needs and self-desires.
By freeing my own passion for writing and setting aside my deep fears of allowing us to be authentically “us”, I was able to begin learning how to love myself and all the parts that make up “me”.
By the time The Story Teller arrived, possibly my favourite writer of all time. I was educated in the ways of my heart and mind. With years of therapy under my belt I no longer mistook my need for relatability and connection as ‘love’ and the pangs of lust remained firmly with the pages of elegant words and did not extend to their creator.
I finally allowed myself to raise my head and look around at the world in which I lived through my own eyes, not the eyes of fear, judgment, stigma and expectations and I realised that other than authentic well formed words, it was in-fact the beauty of the female form that stole my breath.
I was gay.
I find myself here, writing this as a middle aged woman with dissociative identity disorder. I’ve already been married a long time, a gay woman married to a man who is lying next to me snoring. I find myself sharing a dying body and mind with others who are a part of me yet some do and some do not feel the same way about life love and the world in general as I do. I look around at my life, filled with traumas and contradictions and yet I feel incredibly blessed because I’m finally not confused.
I’m not sad for what I will miss out on, but glad, elated even, because I finally understand who I desire. I know what I like, I know how I feel and I know where I stand.
I finally know who I am.
60 Second Story – Summer Rain
“Let’s go for a walk!”
“What, now? It’s raining!”
“And?”
“And I don’t have an umbrella.”
“So what? That’s the amazing thing about being a human, we’re waterproof!”
Her eyes danced as she grabbed my hand and spun me playfully around in a twirl towards the door.
“Come on”
“The neighbours will think we’re crazy…”
“Who cares. Maybe we are!”
She flung the door open and pulled me out into the garden with her. I screwed up my face as the rain got heavier.
“I just don’t think…”
“Oh no I’m meeeeelting!” She screeched cutting off my reluctance mid sentence before throwing her hand across her forehead and dramatically falling onto the grass.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Shall we then?” She leapt to her feet grinning, linked her arm in mine and marched me off towards the road.
It was absolutely pouring now, big, icy droplets drenching us in seconds, but I could feel the warmth radiating from her body as we continued arm in arm down the steaming street.
I looked over at her, long hair plastered awkwardly to her forehead, bits of grass stuck on her wet jeans. She was absolutely glowing.
She met my gaze, her eyes twinkling, and as she smiled that devilish half smile that lit up the whole world, I realised she was the most beautiful person I had ever laid eyes on.
Bring it on, 2022.
Okay, so I may be a touch pessimistic but I refuse to come here and say “next year can only get better” because I started saying that in 2015 after our suicide attempt then in 2016 I broke that mirror & Robin Williams died (for the 1000th time I’m sorry) and it started the snowball of bad things that turned into the avalanche of death and destruction you are all familiar with. I’m pretty sure, in my narcissistic mind, that I am totally cursed and have accidentally taken the entire globe down with me.
All our daughter wanted for Christmas this year was for us to be together as a family with “nobody sick and dying”. This request came after last year when we were in the thick of Cancer surgeries and her Grandad died. This year we have been hyper focused on getting our mothers house ready for sale after she’d moved into a retirement place and were a tad Scrooge like about the impending Yuletide. So my poor little cherub ordered her own Christmas presents online and then wrapped them and put them under the tree she’d set up one night while I was busy painting.
So, feeling suitably guilty about my neglectful parenting I ordered a ton of good Christmas food online and organised a last minute Christmas family extravaganza and promptly came down with Covid and had to cancel the whole shebang.
She took it well. Too well really because she just sighed that ‘of course something was going to go wrong’ sigh and good naturedly opened the Christmas presents she’d wrapped herself and took selfies with them while I tossed and turned feverishly in bed complaining about everything being crap.
Well 2022 is a mere 12 hours away now, and if my pessimistic legend is true, my assigned 7years of bad luck should be about coming to an end. I’ve already given the rest of my household Covid this week (Merry Christmas) so at least that’s out of the way (for this varient at least).
My New Years resolution was going to be to try and be more Martha Stewart like (preferably excluding jail time) so I decided to bake raspberry muffins with the fresh berries from our garden, but the oven wouldn’t turn on.
After a woe is me meltdown about my “curse” destroying the entire world as we know it, Hubby walked over to the oven pressed something magical and it whirred to life immediately, proving to me that it was not in fact “also fucked like the entire planet” and I was, just maybe, slightly over reacting. He then assured me even if it had of been, life was not about to end because I couldn’t bake a batch of muffins at that exact moment.
He gently suggested that maybe, just maybe, my pessimistic attitude is the real problem here. Then he told me to “breathe” and so I threatened his life and grumbled off to my room.
I mean EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE! Right? So much *insert laundry list of shitty things here* has happened, shouldn’t I be entitled to moan complain and whine all day, every day?
Then one of the wiser parts of us pointed out that maybe we are entitled to be frustrated, annoyed, and to complain, but what exactly is that helping us achieve? It’s certainly not curing our cancer or bringing Robin Williams back to life. Really it’s just slowly driving away the people we care about and then what? We’ll have more to complain about and nobody left to complain to! Except maybe M, but technically it’s her job to listen to us whinge for an hour a week so she signed up for it.. (Love ya M!)
She’s right of course. Yes, it hurts me to say that. So I’ve decided my New Years resolution this year, rather than try to find my inner domestic goddess and drag her kicking and screaming to the kitchen or saying for the 7th year running that I’m going to finish my book (one day), my goal is to try and change my attitude.
Less wallowing and more appreciating. If I at least try to play the positive reframe game, even if bad stuff keeps happening, I should feel a bit better about the little things that go on between crisis’. Catherine wants to learn new sciency things, Ezzy wants to draw more often, V wants to “actually finish” our Mums place, Callie wants “twinkle lights” and Gregory wants to meet a dinosaur. These things actually feel achievable, except maybe Greg’s, but maybe he can play with a lizard or something instead.
So bring it on 2022, nothing shocks us anymore and we’re ready for you! And a massive HAPPY NEW YEAR to you, our dear readers and your loved ones too. May you all have opportunities to cherish the little things that make the world worth living in, laugh at a meme, listen to a great song, admire the stark beauty of a dead tree at sunset. And whatever this year brings you, the highs and lows, may you learn things about yourself that help you to grow as a person.
I’d love hug you all in celebration but I’m infectious as hell and kind of sticky (raspberries), so metaphorical hugs all round.
See you next year!
💜 Kate
Good Tidings to All
Tis the season, so they say, in which to be jolly. Despite the abundance of masks, the check in’s, the delta, the omicron and the bumblebee’s, you lovely people out there in blog land have followed along my little adventures and held on through thick and thin. You’ve listened, offered tidbits of sage advice, shared a laugh and a tear while generally making this world we live in an easier place for us to wander.
So from the bottom of our heart we thank you for coming along on this ride with us and from our house to yours may we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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Content Warning ⚠️ discussion of suicide which may be disturbing to some readers. Please decide if it is safe for you to continue & contact lifeline or your local suicide hotline if you are struggling.
There is a gun lying at the bottom of the bed as I write this. Sadness wells in my heart as I stare at its polished timber stock and realise that for the longest time I would have preferred to put that black barrel into my mouth and pull the trigger than spend another minute riling in the mental confusion and emotional agony that has seemingly dominated my world for so long.
All in all, I’ve likely spent more time wanting to end my time on earth than I have spent simply enjoying its wonder, and right now, that makes me sad.
From the time I was eight years old I felt suicidal urges. Having children, getting married, having kind friends and good jobs never did change the part of myself with a core belief that I was a worthless piece of shit and I did not deserve to live.
Subconsciously compartmentalising our life was probably the only way we could feel one way and live another. We adorned a series of masks until we lost whatever once lay underneath completely.
We would become absorbed in one section of our world and all others would fall away as though they’d never existed at all. Me at home couldn’t remember me at school. Me the girl of good morals and values couldn’t remember the me that let others get hurt in her name. Me the wife and mother couldn’t remember me the poet and the dreamer. The Me that fell in love with our husband didn’t know the Me who could only ever be attracted to women. The Me that succumbed to years of Anorexia as a teen couldn’t compute any other state of being and the Me that accepted chocolate on our first night out of home couldn’t remember why it had ever been scary.
The emotions of our different selves can bleed into all of us, we often feel things suddenly and out of context. The urge to cry or laugh or roll our eyes can hit in the oddest of moments, as can the urge to self destruct. I know now that the part of me that saw death as the only way out of an agony she couldn’t understand, didn’t know or believe it was possible to ever feel any differently and when her despair flooded into my heart I could only feel the world through her pain.
Sometimes the walls between our mental compartments begin to dissolve and I remember things long lost to me. The gun at the foot of my bed let me remember that we had argued with our old psychologist, The Guru, over multiple sessions that our depression was absolutely terminal. We had told her (and fully believed) that we should have the right to end our psychic suffering with euthanasia and we were 100% certain it was impossible for us to feel any differently.
But We were wrong. I was wrong.
I am only alive right now because of medical intervention, because of family and friends and worn out mental health professionals that wouldn’t give up. I’m alive right now because this gun and I only crossed paths today and we did not meet back then.
Another important thing that is oddly difficult to admit to myself is that I’m alive right now, because I choose to be.
I used to incessantly search for ways to end my life, a voice inside at the time was very firm about having to do this. They portrayed our suicide as being inevitable, it was our destiny. It stated that we must know every method available, that we must be prepared to engage at any moment, in any situation. We were built with one purpose, to enact a hit, upon ourself and it was presented as a quest we must succeed in no matter what. For reasons I can’t understand let alone explain, we accepted this without question and without logic.
Funny how once you have spent enough time searching for ways to end your existence, the habit of scouting for options never completely goes away, even when we no longer have any desire to use them. I see a gun and I am immediately overcome by the urge to point it towards myself and pull its trigger.
For so long We thought the men in white coats were after us, reading our mind somehow from afar and seeing the darkness within. We were soldiers in a huge and imagined conspiracy, fighting against a system Hell bent on capturing us, while in truth it was simply a war by ourself, against ourself, that only we knew about.
We felt we could be interrogated by doctors or police officers at any minute trying to force us into abandoning our ‘quest’ and while we didn’t ever doubt the validity of our mission, we knew they’d accuse us of being crazy. We likened ourselves to the position of accused terrorists facing a Guantanamo Bay style situation and felt we had to know how to survive any efforts to break us. Ironic, considering the whole objective was our death anyway.
Thanks to “training” from The Empress as a child, we knew we could hold our breath under water and pretend to stop flailing while being held down so we felt we could withstand waterboarding. We knew we could take punches and we could block out pain quite well should we need to. I’m not entirely sure why we felt admitting we needed psychiatric help would be something that would have to be tortured out of us, but we believed we were sane and the world was crazy & out to get us, so… I guess delusional denial is a strong beast.
Being ‘caught’ and hospitalised was the most terrifying thought in the world to us, at the time I’d rather have bathed in spiders. I won’t pretend it made sense, phobias seldom do. Fear of being crazy was probably initially related to a fear of being rejected, memories of our father yelling about how all crazy people should be locked up might have something to do with it. But anyhow it escalated into madness at some point.
Looking back, it’s pretty sad really.
I glanced at the closed bedroom door and picked up the shiny 22, it was surprisingly heavy for a small caliber weapon. I examined the rifle, turned it towards myself and looked down the barrel, you could see daylight, it wasn’t loaded and the clip was out. I put the gun in my mouth somewhat compulsively, couldn’t help myself. The metallic taste of ice cold steel felt oddly comforting, like I now held an important power. I reached down awkwardly and fumbled with the trigger. It’s doable, I thought, but awkward due to the length of the barrel, you’d need to sit on a chair or something, use your toe. I caught myself suddenly and realised what I was doing and thinking wasn’t okay. Old habits die hard.
I put the gun back down and sighed. It filled me with an odd sensation, grief. Grief for us. Grief for all the time lost to self doubt, self hate, anxiety, regret and fear. Grief for the death of hope. Grief for the death of suicide as an out from the pain of life.
Now that I’m aware of my compartmentalised self states and they of each other, I see our life through a different lens. It’s no longer ‘mine’. It’s not okay for me to end our life anymore because I know I’d be ending the lives of the others and that, well, that feels decidedly wrong.
Our life has been complicated, fascinating, beautiful and heartbreaking. I have had the opportunity to feel many things in many ways. The chance to view the world through so many perspectives is something I am very grateful for, and yet as the urges to self destruct finally subside I find myself in the strange situation of dying anyway.
This time there is no gun to our head, no pills to swallow or trains to leap towards. Now cancer has taken the choice from all of our control and after a lifetime of essentially being Co dependent with myselves, it’s kind of nice to let go. We are all going to die, that’s unavoidable, but now we all have to decide whether or not we want to live first. Even me.
If you or anyone you know is struggling, please contact lifeline Australia on 13 11 14 or Google mental health hotlines in your area.
Fade
In a world filled with warmth, colour and fragrance I can’t help but feel surrounded by a dull, cold, vagueness and it seems that perhaps the echo of winters bite still haunts me.
I feel like it might be coming time for us to move on from here, this blog, this life, at least for a while. Once upon a time writing was the only thing separating our fears & dreams from reality. Writing was cathartic, it saved me from the ruminating thoughts of death and pain and allowed safe passage to the voices inside us begging to be heard.
But I can’t seem to write freely anymore.
My words are tangled with theirs, my feelings too intertwined with the others and too complicated by contradiction to even understand myself let alone begin to express coherently to the world.
I can’t be real on here anymore. I can’t shout my secret needs or darkest desires into the ether in case they are accidentally heard. My emotions seem to strengthen in their divide with every passing day and I’m left paralysed and numb as I try to make sense of the nonsensical. I’m watching a magical world dance and twirl around our dying soul yet we are unable and unwilling to join in.
Anonymity is no longer my luxury and for us to be real enough to stitch these wounds inside us we must remain nameless, faceless, invisible.
While life feels so unsafe right now, I realise that in truth it is only my mind and my memories that threaten me. My perceptions are clouded by experience and doubt, my reality is mine alone, it hurts that I can never know the truth, yet that has to be okay. I don’t want to be fixed anymore. I don’t want to be heard or seen or respected.
A brief moment of chance spent with a medium, we saw her and then I saw her see me, then as an explosion erupted inside us, I saw her see all of us. I saw her react and then try to compose herself, I saw her read our soul, I saw her flash a look of excitement then fear at our energy and as I struggled to pull the others back and quickly ran from the room and realised, I don’t have control, I am not strong enough.
Today I looked at a photograph of my grandmother sitting inside a church praying and wondered how she hadn’t burst into flames simply walking through that door. She still dared cross that threshold and beg to be saved. In that moment I realised that I don’t even want forgiveness, I don’t want God’s love or anyone else’s for that matter. My darkness, my sin, these, like my grandmothers are things that should not be forgiven. These are things words should not undo. I cannot forgive myself, I will not forgive myself and if I can’t trust God to punish me then perhaps I do indeed know better than Him and can do His work.
I would wear a crown of thorns, spear nails through my wrists, I’d burn, I’d bleed, I’d have my body bruised and battered until I died, not for you, not to save the world or teach about love or sacrifice, but for me, because I’m selfish. Because I deserve to feel the wrath, to feel the shame, to be punished, not to be remembered or martyred but to simply atone. I just want to hurt, I just want to be forgotten by the world, I just want to be able to forget myself and slowly fade away.
Making Paradise
Life has been hectic. The weekend away with our sister & her family was all kinds of cathartic though. We spent hours talking, taking walks around the neighbourhood and along the beach and simply connected. It was perfect.
This week has been back to sorting out our mums place ready to sell. It’s been a hell of a big job, she’s been hoarding quite a lot and so there’s been a lot of stress through the sorting process but despite arguing about throwing away expired canned goods in the beginning, she has become much calmer about ‘letting go’ now and it finally feels like we are really getting places. Her official moving out day is next week and we have signed with a realestate agent for the house to go to auction in December.
So the next few weeks will be filled with painting, gardening and generally beautifying the place so we can get her the best price possible.
This week I am grateful for the ability to compartmentalise. 💜
Mini breaks & Mini Breakdowns
Hello blogland. What’s happening out there?
I am lying in a bed in the spare room of my sisters house with a cracker of a headache and an overall feeling of quizzical numbness that’s wrapped in something I might label as apprehensive excitement. I should probably just switch off my screen and attempt some sleep for the sake of my head and yet here I am. I feel like I want to write but I don’t know what to say so have some dot points and I’ll elaborate later if I remember:
a.) After sorting clutter all week I finally got to head north & visit our sister’s house for the weekend. It’s really great to be here.
b.) Helping a person on the hoarding spectrum move house is extremely frustrating.
c.) Have spent a lot of time sorting old photos. Memories are weird things.
c.) Someone in my head is excruciatingly depressed and someone else is angry (and not about point b) but I don’t have the energy to care or try and figure out why or how to comfort either of them. Many suicidal writings and woeful poetry, I wish they’d just shut up, too tired for that shit, and apparently, compassion.
d.) My nibbling told me they have just been diagnosed with… drum roll please… DID. Yeah, so I accidentally came out at that point and they’re over the moon that they have someone who ‘gets’ them. I’m feeling a tad exposed but maybe we can be helpful to them?
e.) I want a tattoo but all the places are shut.
It’s been a busy week. I’m thinking of taking up drinking.
Dear Lavender
Dear Lavender,
I don’t remember our last conversation.
When I left the office I was in the throws of mania, I’d lost all sense of self and reality and life had turned into a blurry upside down mess. When I think of you, I think of a small woman yet an absolute force of nature. I remember you having a heart of gold, an intense mumma bear love for your children and an admirable willingness to stand up and fight for what you believed in, no matter what.
It’s been around eight years since we last spoke but you’ve been on my mind a lot lately. Getting that message from you the other day meant so much, I needed that and you knew it. Thank you.
You mentioned you had thought I was diplomatic and a peacemaker, I didn’t know you had recognised that quality in me, that job took so much from me and I feel I should have been more supportive of you and others and less in my head so that it was nice to hear that sentiment.
You also mentioned me being on the receiving end of your iconic sharp tongue a few times. I know that is true, but I want you to know I didn’t take it personally, all my insecurities weren’t surrounding your comments. I guess I could feel you had demons too and that was oddly comforting in a time when I was finally being forced to begin confronting my own.
We had so much in common, yet we never really had the opportunity at the time to find those things out about each other. We probably could have been good friends, maybe if I had just been more authentic and talked a little less and you had been more receptive and talked a little more.
Despite the fact we didn’t get to know each other on a deeper level, you were the most impactful person I met at that work place. If I’m brutally honest, your choices after I left impacted me so intensely that we would not have attempted to take our life in the manner we did had you not made them and yet ironically, had you not made them, I probably wouldn’t still be here to write this now.
It’s one of those bizarre butterfly effect scenarios where it seems only one of us was destined to survive that year, and in the end it was you who drew the short straw.
I didn’t realise just how alike we were until you died. A parallel version of myself was reflected by every speaker at your service. In some ways it’s as though your death both gave me permission to die and subsequently allowed me to live. It was left up to the hands of the universe and I walked away as the earth reclaimed you.
When I got cancer anyway, I couldn’t help but wonder if things didn’t happen the wrong way around. Our positions could have so easily been reversed, perhaps the universe made an error and now eight kids would lose their mothers instead of four.
Thank you for being you, sharp tongue and all. I guess I’ll see you again quite soon after all. Perhaps then we can catch up over a cuppa and finally see what friends we might have been.
Love always,
Kate
True Colours
Do you know yourself?
Do you trust your memories, your feelings, thoughts and opinions to tell you who you really are?
Let’s do a little exercise. If you are a regular reader here I want you to pretend for a minute that you don’t know me at all.
I can describe myself by physical appearance such as body size, hair colour, clothes I’m wearing today – this gives people an image and a stereotype they personally associate with that image.
So I’m wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt with a black hoodie. My hair is dark blonde with highlights and I’m a little chubby.
Then I can go a little bit deeper, I can describe what I do and what surrounds me. I can inform you that I’m a wife, a mother, an Australian, I live on a farm and I drive an SUV. This can be enough for most people to conjure up an opinion about my personality based on their experiences and stereotypes.
Then I can talk about current life experiences, like I can explain that I have four children, and have recently had chemo therapy for cancer – this might change the mental image a bit, perhaps you will see me as being a little older or having a little less hair.
Now I’m able to tell you all of these facts about myself without once telling you how I feel about anything or what my personality is like.
I could mention a few other things, perceived ‘bad’ qualities: I’m forgetful, easily distracted, don’t call people back as quickly as I should and my house is a bit messy.
Would you make excuses for me so that I continued to fit inside your mental image of ‘me’? Like ‘she probably has chemo brain’ or ‘lots of kids keep you busy’.
What if I were to say I suffer from mental illness?
Would that change the mental image you have formed based on the facts I gave you?
What if I told you I had depression? Would the mental image of my house suddenly seem messier?
What if I told you I had bipolar disorder? Would you start to question my parenting skills?
What if I told you I got episodes of psychosis? Are you questioning if everything I’ve told you up to this point accurate?
What if I told you I have dissociative identity disorder? Are you questioning whether I might have an evil alter capable of doing something terrible?
How is your mental image of ‘me’ changing?
Humans are very quick to judge. In an age of social media, we hear some selective facts about total strangers and based on those alone, we decide who they are as people. If someone is smiling in pictures they must be happy. If they talk publicly about things that upset them they are ‘attention seeking’, if they are openly angry as a white woman they are a ‘Karen’.
If someone is accused of a crime or a morally questionable act, complete strangers will have an opinion, often a strong one, about how ‘bad’ they were and how they should be punished or excluded from society despite solely based on these publicised facts and not knowing anything about their thoughts, feelings or intentions.
If a Facebook page is shown on the news of an accused person and contains selfies then people will start throwing around the term narcissist. If a neighbour is interviewed who always thought this person was lovely and kind then they will talk about how they have now shown their ‘true colours’.
Everyone runs straight to the torches and pitchforks and I wonder if this is an effort to find something, anything, to seperate themselves from this person, seperate their friend from this person and to feel like they are safe in their environment.
What exactly are someone’s true colours?
Two people are in what appears to be a devoted and loving romantic relationship for 30 years, then one day one partner gets drunk and cheats with a stranger they met at a work conference. Was the entire relationship a lie? Was the cheating partner now after all this time showing their ‘true colours’?
Say a person volunteered in a soup kitchen every week for 25 years, attended church regularly, mowed their elderly neighbours lawn and were always kind to people, then one day they killed their wife. Are they a cold blooded murderer showing their ‘true colours’?
The truth is, people can both love someone and have a wonderful relationship then one day cheat. Humans can be kind charitable people and then one day commit a terrible crime. Life is not black and white, it’s full of nuance and those of us looking in on a situation from a distance, particularly one where selective facts are plastered across the media, have absolutely no idea of who those people actually are, but if we can seperate them from ourselves we feel safer.
The belief that a person was actually bad the whole time and only pretending to be good helps us believe we are good and therefore safe and incapable of wrongdoing. To believe that good people can do bad things is scary. It means people we love or even we could potentially do bad things and that’s too hard to think about.
Having Dissociative Identity Disorder effects my memory and my ability to have a cohesive narrative to my life. Other aspects of my personality have different opinions, reactions and beliefs than I do and yet we all co habitate a body. You can see why Hollywood jumped straight on the ‘what if one of the alters was a murderer!’ bandwagon. A terrifying prospect and a brilliant horror movie trope.
While having a murderous alter you know nothing about is about as likely as being struck by lightening the same day you get bitten by a shark, there is a very genuine and based in reality issue of not really knowing who you are. When you think you are a certain way but people comment that you are another, and another again – it’s extremely confusing.
When you have this disorder but can’t communicate with your alters very well it seems almost easier to rely on the judgments of others and question your own thoughts and perceptions. I thought I didn’t like sausages but you’re telling me I said I loved them at a bbq the other day so maybe I do and I forgot? I thought I was a kind person but you’re telling me I am mean? Slowly you trust other people’s perceptions of the collective ‘you’ more than your own fragmented one.
I’ve been called the following:
A monster, kind, cold and calculated, warm and loving, honest, a liar, a fraud, a thief, an ally, an enemy, a peacemaker, a shit stirrer, interesting, boring, intelligent, stupid, strong, weak, an attention seeker, stoic, introverted, extroverted, narcissistic, thoughtful, borderline, unemotional, psychopathic, empathetic, manic, depressed, delusional, sane, spiritual, atheist, demanding, easygoing, selfish, charitable, manipulative, altruistic, a coward and brave.
That’s a lot of contradictions.
If I were to be arrested for murder, there would be people who would be shocked, and people who would nod their heads and say ‘that doesn’t surprise me at all’. Those who were shocked would no doubt speak of me “showing my true colours” and those that found out about the DID would probably assume Hollywood was right.
So if I’ve been described in all those ways, what are my true colours?
Perhaps ‘we’ are all of these things, or have been at one time or another. “I” am nothing more than a part, a piece, a distinctly un-whole fragment of some greater “me” I can’t properly conceive of and yet perhaps I, like you, are neither good nor bad, but simply human.
THE COLOUR OF MADNESS 