High Functioning

Someone recently got me thinking about how "high functioning" is defined.

By my own standards, I'm definitely not there. I'm able to do only the barest minimum of the things I used to do, or the things I would like to be doing, or the things I should be capable of doing.

On a good day, I can eat three times, and do a couple of routine tasks. On a bad day, I focus on making it from one end of the day to the other.

And yet, I know that in a psychological sense, I count as "high functioning." I'm not sure how this works, although I've seen people who don't count as "high functioning," and I can see that I'm different from them.

I suspect that for psychologists, it comes down to whether I am capable of living independently. And since I'm capable of maintaining a relationship with someone who is willing to support me financially, that counts.

In some ways, this is good, because I definitely don't want to be in a psychiatric facility. But in some ways, it's immensely frustrating, because it's hard for me to understand how I am unable to do so much, and yet, it looks like I'm ok.

So there's still that struggle to accept that there's really something wrong. I think a large part of my identity has been wrapped up in being high functioning. In being competent, and able to just overcome the things that should have held me back.

I mean, coming from a family where half of my siblings dropped out of high school, I not only went to a prestigious four year liberal arts college, but I also made it into an Ivy League graduate school.

And here I am, unable to jump that last hurdle. And whether or not I finish my dissertation, right now, I can't conceive of getting even a low-end retail job, let alone the kind of job my education should have prepared me for. There are just too many days when the absolute extent of what I can cope with extends only as far as feeding the cats.

But I still count as high functioning. And, what's more, I'm still at the upper end of functioning for people in my family. I remind myself of this, on the days when I start to believe that I must be making up the trauma.

It's still hard. Hard to believe that things I could successfully block out of my memory were that bad (because, yeah, people only block out happy memories). Hard to believe that the things I do know happened were bad enough to be causing the effects I'm coping with. Hard to believe that the people I know now would have done the kinds of things I remember. Hard to recognize that the things I remember happened to me when I was small--that I didn't have the resources and strength I do now, that my body was half, or a third, or less the size it is now.

And it's hard, on the days when I remember not to push past what I can cope with, to remember why it is that I have to be so careful.