How I first noticed it

I was writing out some stuff which I might or might not manage to give to my therapist tomorrow (oh, for a therapist who reads email, because right now, I'm okay with giving it to her, but I'm not convinced I'll be able to tomorrow).

Anyhow, it made me start thinking about when I first noticed that something was awry with myself. And I'm thinking it was when I was fourteen and fifteen.

The first part was observing my stepfather doing something to my younger brother, and I'm thinking it probably triggered my first flashback. I walked out of the apartment immediately (I'd been heading out for church youth group anyways), and distinctly thought, "As soon as I'm living on my own, I NEED to get therapy. Things are not okay." And then that thought went into the way, way back of my head, and didn't emerge again until college.

The second part was noticing all of the little parlor tricks my brain could do that other people couldn't seem to manage to the same degree (thinking two or three distinct threads of thought simultaneously; writing two different things at the same time; letting the parts of my brain that wanted to nap go curl up somewhere, and just having the necessary parts out to cope with stuff around me).

The third part was in 10th grade English, when the teacher wanted us to write about a childhood memory that we could clearly visualize. I was shocked to discover that most people have clear memories starting when they're around five or six. I had figured up till then that it was perfectly normal to be really vague about things that had happened longer than a year or two previously. The teacher thought I was just being a pain when I insisted that I couldn't remember anything at all before I was about twelve.

The fourth part was just me coming up with ways of either coping with or taking advantage of the way my brain worked. I created a "computer" to keep track of things I needed to remember and otherwise keep track of. (Potentially, this was because otherwise, I'd find out, for instance, that a research paper was due the next day; a research paper I could have sworn I'd never heard anything about.)

And I learned that the inside of my brain is an infinite space, and created all kinds of places for what I now think are different parts to live. I thought about that in the context of creating mental "shields" for myself... but all of them involved moving whatever part of me was vulnerable waaaaay far away from whatever was threatening, rather than anything that was based around having immediate contact with my body.

So I guess, on a lot of levels, I was aware that something was up, but I didn't really engage with it, or take a lot of time to think about why it was that I seemed to be different.