I live to live

~ KJ ~ 6 Comments

No matter how shitty (or great) I feel, I wake up at 4:30 every morning, take a shower, get dressed, and go to work. I could have slept two hours; I could have slept eight hours. It doesn’t matter. I continue to do it because I need to, and because I want to.

When I fell in the street at the end of last August, I picked myself back up, wiped the blood off of my hands and knees, walked to the bus stop and went to work. I didn’t stop. I went to the hospital afterwards, where I found out I had fractured my right foot (and sprained my left knee). Even then, in a cast and crutches, I woke up at 4:00 the next morning, took a shower, got dressed, and hobbled my way to the bus stop to get to work.

When I neared the end of my undergraduate career last August, I put my heart and soul into my work. Despite moving out, being hospitalized, working, and being officially diagnosed with DID within the course of a month, I managed to complete a research project and thesis and receive a near-perfect score (99). I graduated with top honors, despite the chaos going on around me.

When I ended up in the hospital in the beginning of August, I worked my ass off to get out. Right after I was released, I walked right to my therapist’s office and had a session. I went home, unpacked my things, and worked on my thesis, a chapter of which had then been overdue. Then the next morning, I woke up at 4:30, took a shower, got dressed, and started my first day at work, less than 24 hours after being released from the hospital.

When I ran away from home prison on July 10th, 2015, I did so against impossible odds. I managed to hide money away in separate online bank accounts that my mother didn’t know about. I managed to find a place far enough away to keep me safe, but close enough to a competent therapist and to a school where I could fulfill my dream of being a counselor. I managed to free myself and physically leave through the front door of the apartment, the same door that my mother slept just feet away from every night, as if she were a prison guard on duty. I could have been hurt. But I escaped. Despite everything, I found freedom.

I have consistently shown that I do not give up. Life seems to knock me down quite a bit. Sometimes it really gets to me, but I have never stopped living. Even in the darkest times, I continue to live.

I can’t change some of my circumstances.

I can’t give myself a biological family; that’s gone forever. But I have a family that consists of my friends from the new life I have built here.

I can’t grow money on trees. But I can keep working and find ways to survive until I find success someday.

I can’t cure my DID or take a pill and forget everything that happened to me. But I can keep going to therapy, even if I have to go for the rest of my life.

I may not be the best at life. Considering where and what I came from, I think I am doing a damn good job. I am living. Despite everything, I am living.

And I have died so many times, but I am still alive.

I am a work in progress, just like anyone else.

How resiliency screwed me over

~ KJ ~ 8 Comments

She’s a strong girl. She’s got this under control.

No, no I don’t.

Please stop calling me strong. Please stop saying I’m resilient.

You know what resiliency got me? Nearly 30 years of abuse. Why? Because even though I lived in hell, I managed to appear quite normal on the outside. I got excellent grades. I stayed out of trouble. What did that get me? It got me a longer sentence in hell.

Maybe I could have been saved a lot sooner had I done so poorly, had I acted out in school. Those are the types of kids that get the attention. No one worries about the bright girl excelling in her classes. They just assume she’s got it all together; they assume her parents are teaching her well. The only thing my parents taught me was how to hurt.

No one noticed that I never wanted to go home. No one questioned why I would wander the halls after school was over, looking for something, anything to do so I wouldn’t have to go home. No one questioned why I was constantly wetting my pants, why I was always so on edge. No one questioned anything. They only saw my academic skill set and put blinders on for all the rest.

She’s going to be something some day.

Yea. I’m going to be dead. I wanted to be dead. Why didn’t anyone hear me? I couldn’t speak, but I tried so hard to tell them. And no one heard me. All they saw was a bright girl with a bright future. All I saw was a life of intolerable pain that I wanted to end ever since I was a child.

Resilient children don’t want to die. Resilient children don’t try to kill themselves. I was a hopeless child, going through the motions and waiting for the day she would kill me or I would kill myself. That’s not resilience. That’s not strength.

I was a broken child, who grew into a broken teenager, and then into a shattered adult. I have not survived my childhood. I’m still reliving it.

 

April 25th

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

On April 25th, many years ago, I tried (unsuccessfully) to end my life.

I should have died. I planned ahead. I did all of the calculations. This was supposed to be the time that it worked. This was supposed to be the end to my suffering.

But it didn’t turn out like I had planned. I ended up vomiting non-stop, my face and limbs were blue and purple, I lost my hearing, and had pain throughout my entire body. I was scared. I thought I was just going to die. This was not what I had intended.

Out of desperation, I told my family what I had done. I wanted to go to the hospital. I wanted someone to help me. I wanted to die, but not like this. This hurt. This was scary.

But they didn’t take me to the hospital. My mother didn’t want her reputation ruined. It was always about her. How could I do this to her? How could I do this to the family?

Instead they took my phone away so I couldn’t call for help. My brother went in his room and played video games. My father sat in the living room and watched Survivor on TV. And my mother laid on her usual spot on the couch muttering about how much of a failure I was.

And I sat there, alone, in tears, scared, and completely hopeless. Because in my darkest moment, I reached out for help, and I realized that I didn’t matter. I could have died. I should have died. And that didn’t matter to any of these people. They went on with their lives like usual, as if I weren’t sitting there deathly ill, as if I didn’t exist. Because my existence didn’t matter.

That is a feeling I will never forget. That is a feeling I will never get over. The small bit of hope I still carried with me that I meant something to my family, that one day my mother would love me, that one day my family would care…that hope was crushed on April 25th.

All of this time, I’ve been struggling to figure out why this day brought up such strong emotions for me. I think I kept assuming there must’ve been some preceding event that occurred on that date.

But I don’t think there was any preceding event. I think the damage caused, the hope that was crushed by my family on that date is what has made it continually difficult for me in the years since. I’ll never forget what that felt like.

Alone

~ KJ ~ 4 Comments

In times of struggle, I realize that I am essentially alone.

I’ve been playing out this scenario in my head for the last few days. I pack my bags and go back home, knock on my mother’s door, beg for her forgiveness, and she takes me in and I have a family again. But she wouldn’t do that, because I broke her rules and betrayed her. I ran away from home and let people know what she did to her children. I’ll never be her daughter again.

I’m just so desperate. I’m alone.

When others are struggling, they have people to turn to, family to lean on, a significant other to cry with. I don’t have any of that. My family is gone, and I am alone. I struggle alone. I cry alone. I suffer alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.

I’m constantly reminded of why I can’t trust people. Then I feel even more alone. Trapped and alone. Living life, barely scraping by, and by the end of the day I am completely drained. I’m not even sure why I keep going through the motions. Does any of this even have a point?

I’m drowning in debt, some of it that isn’t even mine. I’m in school for something that I’m not even sure I can handle. I spend most nights wondering when it will all end. When will my struggle end?

Yes, I’m being selfish and pitiful right now. I’m tired of getting shat on in life while undeserving fuckheads get shit handed to them that they don’t even need or deserve. What the fuck. This is not a life I want.

I have no stable home base. I have no family. I’m losing all of my connections to the life I lived for so long.

What did I do wrong?

Significance

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

Have you ever wondered why certain dates are so significant?

I mean, most people know why a date is special. Why they feel a certain way on a certain day. Maybe it’s someone’s birthday. Maybe it’s the anniversary of someone’s death. Maybe it was the date that something particularly impactful happened to you so many years ago, enough that you still feel it years later.

But what do you do when you have no idea why a certain date is so significant?

I have no memories of April 25th. I don’t understand why it is important to me in any way, or why it would matter. It’s nobody’s birthday. It’s nobody’s death anniversary. I don’t remember anything happening to me on that date.

Yet three times over the years of my life, on April 25th, I have tried to kill myself (and failed, obviously).

Is that coincidence? Possibly. But what are the chances?

I’ve tried so hard to remember some type of significance for that date. What the hell happened to me? Something had to have happened. But will I ever remember anything? Do I even want to remember?

It’s funny how trauma and DID affects the brain. Clearly, a part remembers something. And here I am, not remembering shit. And it’s frustrating. And terrifying. And I hate it.

Why can’t I feel anything?

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

I had therapy this morning.

It started out okay. But I knew my therapist wanted to talk about my parts, a topic we haven’t been able to delve into much because my life has been a clusterfuck lately. Talking about parts is not the most comfortable thing for me, because parts come out and I hear things that I am sometimes not quite ready to deal with, or things I don’t want to deal with.

There has been an issue with some of my parts and therapy. Parts don’t want other parts talking. One part doesn’t want anyone (including me) talking about a particular event that several of us happen to share experience and memory of. It’s so complicated. And the problem is that this particular event was so traumatic even for me, that it is very prevalent in my life and I need to talk about it. But every time it comes up, it causes chaos on the inside.

I tried to explain to my therapist a little bit of what was going on without going into specifics, because I didn’t want to trigger myself into a switch. That didn’t work for too long, because I realized I was thinking about the event in question and it brought up feelings and feelings get you in trouble and off I went.

When you come out of dissociation, you ground yourself. You try to engage your senses. My therapist always tells me to put my feet on the floor. I’m able to bounce back pretty quickly at this point, without going through the entire process. She told me to feel the water bottle I had near me, and asked me what the temperature of the water was. I held the bottle in the palm of my hand, but I couldn’t really feel it. I tried to close off everything else going on around me and focus on just the bottle and my hand. I still couldn’t feel it. I think my therapist sensed my frustration. She asked me what was wrong. I told her, “I don’t know, I can’t feel the water.”

She got up from her chair, took the bottle from my hand, felt it, held it out in her hand, then held out her other hand towards me.

“Touch the bottle and my hand and tell me which is warmer.”

I grabbed the bottom of the bottle with my left hand, and reached out and held my right hand against her palm. I tried, and I still could not feel anything. I was frustrated. My therapist played it off like it was okay. She told me she thought her hand was warmer, and went and sat back down in her chair. I sat back and started to cry.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

I was hesitant to answer at first. I just wanted to tell her I was okay. My go-to answer. But she knew by my expression and my tears that I was not okay.

“Why can’t I feel anything?”

She asked me if I really wanted to know her thoughts. I already knew. I developed parts that shut off feelings because that is what they needed to do in order to survive. They believed that feelings were wrong. They believed that feelings resulted in pain and hurt (because they did). How horrible it must be to still be stuck in a world where you believe you cannot feel. The sadness I experience with not being able to feel the water, or my therapist’s hand…that doesn’t come anywhere close to what my parts (and I) have experienced in childhood.

While I was crying over not being able to feel a bottle of water, I was actually crying over a whole lot more.

CPCE

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

I got the results of my CPCE Monday night.

For those that don’t know, the CPCE is the Counselor Preparation Comprehensive Examination. It is a vital part of graduating your masters program and earning your counseling credentials. At my school, they have you take it in your first semester just as a measurement of progress when you take it again before graduation.

So when I took it back in February, it really wasn’t going to count for anything. Students fail it, and that’s expected and okay, because students are just entering the program and know absolute zero shit about counseling. The average score of entering graduate students is somewhere in the 50s.

The minimum score required to pass the exam and graduate is a 70. It’s 160 multiple choice questions divided into eight categories, all focused on foundations of counseling that you would learn throughout your masters program. It’s a lot of knowledge packed into one exam. Like an SAT of counseling. Students legit stress over passing this exam. And there are some that don’t pass.

Even though it didn’t really matter what my score was, I e-mailed the professor and asked if I could find out anyway. Just for shits and giggles. I met with her Monday before my class. Unfortunately for me, I had been mentally dealing with the stress from earlier in the day, so I couldn’t quite take in all of the positive greatness of what I was about to find out in in that moment.


I passed the CPCE. Not only did I pass, but I scored higher than the national average. I scored higher than students who had already been through the graduate program. I was not even one month into the program when I took this exam. Not even one month. I didn’t even try. I didn’t study. I didn’t prepare. This doesn’t happen.

My professor seemed so happy, and I broke down and cried. Partly because of the anxiety I was still experiencing from earlier in the day, and partly because I have continually doubted my ability to ever be a counselor, and this went against that directly. Here was proof, on paper, that I had the brains to be a counselor. So why is it still so hard for me to accept?

I think, no, I know, that other people have more faith and belief in my abilities to be a counselor than I do. And that in itself is a problem, and I recognize that. I also know that there are ways in which my life could be significantly easier than it is right now, and that is putting a damper on my outlook on life.

I have a gift to give. I have a story to tell. I have a heart to share. I have people to help. I have souls to reach. I have a world to change. And instead, I’m sitting here, waiting for my life to end, letting all of these good things waste away to nothing, because I’m too weak to take a stand for myself.