Stupid Teenagers

I am the teller. i do not like those stupid teenagers and i wish we didnt have to share a body cause they are dumb and super bad and i dont like them. they want to run away and they will make me hafta go with them and i dont like them i dont want to run away not one bit cause i like it here and i want THEM to just go away.

they are stupid and mean and they are NOT GOOD. they are not my friends. not one bit. not AT ALL. all they do is be mean and be bad and w---- doesnt like me when they are there she says she does but i know she doesnt cause they just be mean to her and then she wont like me anymore cause they are just mean and bad and i dont like them

they will not eat and im sposed to eat three times every day and they dont eat not one time and they make me forget to eat and the grown ups too they go in to get food and then they just forget and its cause of the teenagers and they are super bad and i dont like them. thats all.

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Flashbacks

The angle of a shadow, the brief touch against my body, the quality of light, a smell.

And all of a sudden, I want to run away, hide, lock doors, sob, throw up, lash out.

I don't remember anything, in the sense where "remember" means "know of specific events that cause me to feel like that when something happens." I hear the voices of parts, chiming in to say, "This happened to me, that happened, it was bad, it was hard." But it's so separate from my self, the me that is writing. I don't remember these things, I have no conscious knowledge. I know of some things that happened, and I can use reason and logic to determine that it's likely other things happened. But it's separate from me.

I tell myself, "You wouldn't have flashbacks if nothing happened." "You wouldn't feel like this, if there were no reason." But it's so hard to believe. My mind leaps and contorts, trying to figure out a way that I could just be imagining, could just be misinterpreting the past. Because it seems so unbelievable that it could have happened to me. It's so hard to accept that my family could contain such a large secret as that. Things that happened over and over, year after year.

There was no predicting what would make it happen. When I was little, I thought that saying my prayers every night would keep away the nightmares--the breathing, the weight, the feeling of pressure, the sense that everything was out of control.

Often, after flashbacks, my mind shows me image after image of violated locks. Locks that were broken and destroyed, over and over as I was growing up. There was no way I could consistently keep a door locked, keep a space where I was the only one on my side of a door. I can understand this, because I remember those locks, and I remember the despair I felt when they were broken. But the lingering echoes of why those locks were so very important, that's harder to accept.

But what advantage would I gain, from making this up? Nightmares? Wanting to throw up when I'm touched? Distance from my partner? Inability to just get on with my life and do the things I really want to do? I can't see any reason for making it up, but it's so hard to accept that it's real.

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One of the hard things

One of the difficult things about DID is maintaining a consistent belief that that's what's going on. This makes sense, of course, if not all of my parts are willing to accept it.

The hardest part of this is that, so often, I have these nagging fears that I'm just making it all up, for reasons that I can't discern. No matter how often I tell myself, or other people tell me, that it's really happening, I worry about this.

I think some of this comes from a simple fact. DID, more than anything else, is designed to let me cope with my life, despite anything that might be going on. And it worked surprisingly well for years. There have been times when my ability to cope has stumbled, but it's really only been over the past year that my coping skills have fractured so badly that I can't maintain a convincing façade of being all right.

And it's also hard, because I remember, fairly clearly, making a decision after I was in the hospital last February. I decided to stop blocking out all of the things that have been making it difficult to cope for the past months. I can't say it was a bad decision. I made it because the alternative was to know that I would definitely go through other periods of feeling suicidal, and doing so without the resources to break away. And the parts of me that watched that particular suicidal depression, doing everything it could to keep it from happening... they pretty much decided it was time to stop blocking everything out.

I spend a lot of time trying to sort out whether my perceptions of the world come through the lens of DID, or whether I'm just exaggerating things that happen to everyone. And even though I'm mostly confident that this isn't caused by my therapist (for instance, I was thinking this was what was going on even before I first saw her), I do worry that the way I present myself misled her into thinking I have DID.

I can rationally say, "There's absolutely nothing I gain from faking." This is true. But I still have those voices in my head that accuse me of lying, of making things up, of just being too lazy to maintain the ability to keep all of the voices and impulses under sufficient control to do the things that have to be done, to be the person I need to be at any given moment.

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In a related note: sometimes, I wish I were able to trust members of my family if I were to talk about all of this. I came very close to saying something to my next-older sister the other day. She's the one who, ten years ago, told me her therapist had diagnosed her with DID. I doubted her at the time, but the further I move through my own process, the more I'm starting to wonder.

Anyhow, she was mentioning headaches, and said something about getting bad migraines several times a week. I know that my own headaches, which have been diagnosed as migraines, are closely related to doing a lot of switching. And I've found that as I establish better internal communication, the headaches have reduced in frequency and severity. So I nearly mentioned this to her... but I stopped myself, and I think it's for the best.

Despite the fact that, clearly, my family has taken the philosophy of not talking about things to a high art, somehow, none of my family seems able to keep a secret. And I know my sister would inevitably talk about me saying anything about DID, and all that implies. And it would be unsafe. If I were at a point in my life when I was willing to give up contact with my family, I might go ahead and talk about it. But I'm not.

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