trauma survivor

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.

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.

“I think we need to ban the scale.”

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

My eating disorder has been out of control.

And my life factors have made it so much easier to go along with it. No money this week? Perfect. We don’t need food anyway. We can stretch out this last cup of rice and make it last a week.

But it’s so much more than that. There are times when I am in such horrible denial that I have a problem. People ask me if I’m okay because I don’t look well. Well, I ate the other day. Isn’t that enough? In those moments, I can’t process that no, going days without eating isn’t normal. I can’t process that, in that moment, I look like hell because I haven’t eaten.

And then I sit in therapy and battle with my therapist. Did I eat today? Well, I had coffee. Coffee is food. Just stop. What is the big deal? I am FAT. I don’t need food. I ate the other day. I am still alive and doing just fine. What is the big deal? No, I’m not about to pass out. It’s the lighting.

I was so angry at myself during our session on Monday because I had gained three pounds over the weekend. THREE POUNDS. I had lost 23 pounds in the last 17 days, but now that I gained 3 back, I only really lost 20. And I was pissed. I told my therapist I couldn’t eat this week until I made up for the gain.

“I think we need to ban the scale,” she said to me. “It’s becoming a problem.”

I weigh myself every morning. Obsessively. And I know that. It is a sick obsession, but I need it. I need to know how much I weigh because I need to know if I deserve to eat that day. Am I too fat today? Someone will notice that extra pound and judge me for eating that bowl of rice. I just can’t do it. We’ll try again tomorrow. It’s a sick and twisted cycle that I keep getting caught in.

I go through periods where I can manage quite well. And then there are times, like now, where my eating disorder becomes full-fledged and affects my everyday life. I sit in therapy sometimes, half out of it, unable to think, because I’m tired and haven’t eaten. And I can sense the frustration in my therapist as she tells me we can’t work through much if I come to therapy starved. I can’t work through my issues if I’m not fulfilling my most basic needs. And I know she’s right, but I keep fighting it. I’m fat. I don’t need food. Why doesn’t anyone understand this?

Why can’t I just have a normal relationship with food? Why did my mother have to point out how fat and disgusting I looked all of the time? “Pull your skirt down, no one wants to see your disgusting legs!”

Why did she have to complain about how much our food cost her? To make us feel guilty for having basic needs. How dare we have basic needs and take away from her. Why did she have to take it away so much? Why did she send me to school with nothing and then yell at me when school would call that I didn’t eat? Why was it my fault? She set me up for failure every time. Food could never be a simple, fulfilling experience.

Why did I only get food if I deserved it? Why did food always have to belong to her or my brother? Why did she turn food into a tool of manipulation?

Do you know what it’s like to be told you can only eat certain food once it goes bad? Do you know what that does to your sense of worth? It destroys it. Whatever sense of worth I had left was no longer. It didn’t seem to bother my father that he and I were treated like shit. He looked forward to when some of his favorite foods were nearing expiration.”I see those doughnuts are just two days away from expiring!” and he was so  excited about it. I was horrified. I saw it as my mother’s way of telling us we were worth nothing. But hey, she can say she feeds us, and she wouldn’t be lying. Sick. It’s sick.

I’m not sure I have ever mentioned it here before, but I have a sixth sense for scoping out expired food and beverages. I can walk past something and just get this feeling that it is expired, and sure enough I check, and it is. It helped me a lot at my last job, as I cleaned out a lot of expired merchandise in their grocery department. I’ve also filled up baskets of expired foods while shopping at stores and dropped it at their customer service areas. I don’t know why it happens, it just does.

And I never made the connection before, until I was laying in bed last night and thought, have I trained myself to scope out expired food because that’s what I had to do at home? Have I done that without even realizing it? I don’t know how else to explain it. It makes me sad.

Deep inside, I still feel an immense sense of worthlessness, that I am in many ways unworthy of food, unworthy of the basic necessities of life. A piece of her is still inside of me, telling me I am worthless.

And now, thanks to all of this shit I’ve dealt with, I can’t even eat like a normal person. Every time I consider eating a piece of food, I have to go down an entire mental checklist. Do I deserve to eat today? Am I fat today? Is this going to make me fatter? Do I even want to eat this? Am I even hungry? Should I bother? I’m too fat to eat this. I can’t eat today. I’m bad. I didn’t earn this. I can’t. 

I ate today. But only because I weighed myself this morning and lost six pounds in two days. The cycle continues.

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

As I sit here at my favorite coffee shop, waiting out of the cold before I start work in half an hour or so, I’m thinking to myself how long am I going to make myself suffer?

I am running on two hours of sleep. I’ve just used up the last of my gift card for a small iced coffee that I am hoping will be enough to get me through my next eight hour shift at work. I have a case report due for my psychopathology class today, and a discussion on consultation for my ethics class due as well. And I’m already running on empty. The sun has just risen, and I’m already dead.

And this isn’t the first time. I go through this over and over again, telling myself that things will change, that people will change. But nothing changes. I have to change. I have to realize that I have enough worth in this world and I have to make a change. I don’t deserve the life I’m leading right now.

I have so much going on. It may not seem like a lot to some, but it’s a lot to me. I work a job that I really happen to enjoy, with coworkers that I really have grown to appreciate, love, and care for. I don’t care if you think it’s not a real job just because I don’t make more than you. I wake up every morning and go to work and earn a paycheck. I write my blog every other week. That’s real work to me, too. It matters and it makes a difference in others’ lives. And I deserve to be able to write my articles with a clear mind and in a decent environment. I should be able to move forward with my advocacy work, but I keep falling behind because I’m so exhausted and stressed out from everything else going on in my life that could probably be avoided. And school. Grad school is a lot of work. And I bring my books and my laptop to work just so I can get a few moments of clear thinking in because I just never know what life will bring to me elsewhere.

I’m fucking tired. I deserve peace and solitude and respect and love and care and decency and all of those positive things, but my situation is holding me back from that and it needs to change.

I just need energy, strength, courage, and maybe a rich husband.

The D Word

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

I hate the d word.

Depression.

It came up recently because my primary doctor put Major Depression on my record. And I, of course, flipped my emotional shit.

Because that word has such painful connections for me.

And sure enough, for the last week, the memory of my father has been playing over and over in my head. I’ll give you a reason to be depressed. Pain. Pain was all I felt. And then I felt nothing at all.

I genuinely believe a piece of me died that night. In all these years I have never been able to get over it. I still can’t hear the word depressed without hearing him yell at me. I can still feel my head hitting the wall. I can still hear myself begging him to stop. Fifteen years ago and it still plays like it’s happening now.

And I’m afraid of that label. I responded in anger when my therapist asked me what was wrong. “I’m not depressed! I fucking hate her!”

My therapist made the connection rather quickly on why I was against that diagnosis.

“If I were to pick up the DSM right now and flip to, let’s say, Persistent Depressive Disorder, would you say you wouldn’t fit that diagnosis? You wouldn’t fit under Major Depressive Disorder?”

“No, because I function just fine and I’m not impaired so therefore I don’t qualify for those diagnoses. And while I’m at it, I don’t qualify for DID, either.”

“I’m not talking about functioning just yet. Aside from functioning.”

I hesitated. I grumbled to myself. “Fine,” I said, “I fit every criterion. Every. Single. Criterion.”

“And while you do get up in the morning and go to work, and go to school, you’re not functioning all the way like you think you are. You are good in some areas, and really severely impaired in others.”

“I’m not depressed.”

“We don’t have to call it that. We can come up with another word for it if you want. But you can’t deny that it doesn’t fit. And I know that you know that.”

Damnit. Sometimes I hate being smart. I do know that. But I want to live in denial. Let me live in sweet denial.

Denial. That’s a d word I can handle.

Panic with a side of panic, please.

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

I had a horrible week last week. Really, these last few weeks have been fucking atrocious. But last week was a monster all its own.

I ended up spending St. Patrick’s Day night in the local emergency room with a bunch of people who got a little too carried away drinking. There’s nothing like being surrounded by deluded drunks, angry nurses, and the permeating smell of vomit.That’s exactly the opposite of how I wanted to spend my night.

I wanted to be at home sleeping. I was at home, lying in bed, preparing to go to sleep for the night when shitstorm 2.0 began.

I go to bed early. Hell, sometimes I’m in bed while it’s still light out. I have a horrible sleep cycle even when my sleeping is relatively stable; I sleep an hour or two, then wake, then sleep an hour or two, then wake. I have to wake up at 4:30 AM because I work early. When most people are eating dinner, I’m in bed reading a book and getting ready to sleep.

So anyway, I did not want to have any interactions or conversations. It was already past my bedtime. This really should have been respected. I was available during the day, but no, it had to be when I was tucked in bed. I politely declined a conversation. More than once. Initiate shitstorm. Screaming, yelling, cursing, name-calling, kicking, punching, whatevering my door. Well, I guess I’m not getting any sleep. And now I’m irritated, and upset, and frustrated, and scared. Violated boundaries. Flying off the handle.

It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is in an emotionally volatile state. I tried, but it wasn’t working very well. The entire time my heart was pounding and my internal world was imploding, until I finally broke and had a full-blown panic attack. I don’t even really remember everything that happened during the attack. I guess there were police there. I remember the paramedic and the ambulance ride. I remember being absolutely fucking exhausted and in fear that they were going to hospitalize me.

But they didn’t. Just an ER observation, thankfully. Got home eventually, laid in bed with my mind racing despite my exhaustion. Finally fell asleep only to wake up an hour later to shower and walk to the bus stop for work. Let’s just pretend like nothing ever happened. I’ve been so good at that all of my life. Nothing’s wrong here. Move along now.

I realized while I was waiting outside of work that I still had my hospital bracelet on. I was so exhausted, I didn’t even care. I just wanted to get through work. Somehow I needed to get through work. I’m surprised I managed to walk the mile without passing out. I was fortunate in that.

Work started out fine. I was visibly exhausted, but I still got my work done like a boss. I even finished my work early and started helping my supervisor out with another task. As my work day got closer to ending, I felt my anxiety getting worse. I was more on edge. I had less than an hour left of work and it just hit me. I started hyperventilating and walked to the back where no one would see me. I sat on a stool and tried to catch my breath, but after a minute, I knew this wasn’t asthma and that it wasn’t going to get better.

I started to panic even more, struggling to catch my breath and crying. My coworker heard me and went to get help, and before I knew it I was surrounded by my very concerned coworkers. I think I scared some of them. They weren’t sure what to do, if they should call 911. I told them no. I quite literally had just gotten out of the hospital hours before, I did not want to go back; that would have surely resulted in an inpatient hospitalization.

Someone brought me a bottle of water. My manager came and tried to calm me down. I was such a mess. I cried all over the desk, had snot all over my face, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t calm down. I don’t even know how long the attack went on for. But I know my manager stayed with me the whole time, rubbing my back and telling me I was safe and that it was going to be okay.

I eventually calmed down enough so that we could walk to the lounge. I still felt like I couldn’t breathe, but I wasn’t hyperventilating. I must have apologized to my manager at least 100 times, and I’m not even exaggerating. She continued to try to calm me down, asked me what happened to trigger it, and told me I didn’t need to apologize. I still kept crying. I felt so bad for taking up her time (it was at least an hour by this time). She stayed with me through the whole thing, until I eventually passed out sitting at the table from exhaustion.

I woke up a couple of hours later, still exhausted, though my mind was kind of blank. I stayed sitting there for a while, not really wanting to leave. I was in a safe place. My manager checked in on me, asked me if there was anything I needed or wanted, but I told her it was okay. She had already done enough. And she had a shitload of her own work to do.

I knew I had a panic attack, but didn’t really remember everything that happened during it. Coworkers had actually filled me in on some things that I didn’t quite remember. I got through it. And I realized that I had a really amazing group of coworkers who went above and beyond in their responsibilities, because anyone else I’ve dealt with would have just called 911 and been done with it.

I ended up staying at work for a while. I sipped on water and tried to keep myself awake. But I knew I couldn’t stay at work forever. I worked up the energy to gather my things. I found my manager on my way out and thanked her. She asked if I was going to be okay – and I gave my standard “I’m okay” response. She gave me her number and said if I ever needed to just hang out somewhere, I could call her. She must not know I don’t ever call people.

I wish I was okay. But as I walked through the parking lot in front of my workplace, I felt myself panicking again. Fast, shallow breathing. Shaking. This was not happening again. Part of me wanted to turn around and go right back to work. I talked to myself, focused on my breathing, tried to remain calm as I walked across the highway to the shopping center. I convinced myself this place was safe. And I stayed there for a few hours, until the last bus of the day came. Then I knew I had to go home.

You would have thought I was practicing labor breathing exercises the whole way home. I sat on the bus consciously breathing out loud, telling myself I was going to be okay. I walked the rest of the way home, unlocked the door, went straight to my room and right to bed. I just couldn’t deal with anything else that day.

I’m still planning my days waiting for another panic attack to hit. I stay places where I feel safe. I try to distract myself whenever I can. I’m living on edge once again.

I need to pee.

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I made it a good three and a half minutes into my therapy session before breaking down into tears.

I was already feeling miserable. My foot was hurting so badly that I had to wear sandals, which I hate doing. I was tired. I was still angry about the doctor’s visit.

My therapist asked something about the doctor, I forgot exactly what it was. All I know is that is what started my emotional spiral.

“I hate her. I don’t need to see her again.” I turned away and started crying. My therapist sensed right away that something was wrong and gave me the box of tissues. She asked me what was going on. “Nothing,” I said, as usual. “It’s not nothing, I can see that very clearly.”

“She put COPD on my medical record. I don’t have COPD. I’m only 30. Why would she do that?”

Then I started crying even more, this time out of sadness as much as out of anger. My therapist knew about the COPD diagnosis, but didn’t really know what COPD was, or the severity of it; she’d only ever heard of the term in passing.

I told my therapist that this wasn’t the first time I heard the diagnosis, but it was the first time a doctor made it official on record. For some reason, there was something about seeing it on paper that made it sink in for me. And I hated it. I see COPD as a slow death sentence. There’s no reversing the damage. You’re basically fucked and doomed to a slow, suffocating premature death.

My therapist was doing her best to make me feel better. She said we had focused so much on preparing for how I would handle the actual visit, that we never went over how I would handle whatever medical problems may come up. She talked about how medical science is always improving and coming up with new advancements and treatments, and that a few years down the road, maybe there will be something for COPD and I could live a better life.

But I wasn’t having it. In my mind, I was envisioning a life on oxygen and a death before age 45. I spent 29 and a half years in hell only to free myself and experience a different hell altogether, for the remainder of my life.

I eventually stopped crying only to continue directing my anger at my doctor, finding other reasons to hate her. Then I started to get overwhelmed and stopped myself. My therapist asked what was going on.

“I need to pee” I said. It was true, I did need to pee, but it wasn’t why I had changed.

My therapist told me to go ahead and use the restroom. I told her no, that I would be okay. She told me again that I could go and come back and continue therapy. I said no, saying that my feet hurt and I didn’t want to get up.

“Well, you can’t pee in my couch.”

“I’m not going to. I’m fine.” This was not the first time we’ve had this battle. The humor quickly turned to seriousness. I clearly had to pee (my legs were shaking) despite my absolute denial and insistence that I was fine. My therapist asked me why this was so hard for me. I told her nothing was hard for me, that I was just fine. She asked, in a firm tone, why I couldn’t assert my needs.

I quickly responded without even thinking, shouting “because my needs don’t matter.”

And then I cried. Again. Because I realized the gravity of what I just said. And because I’m an emotional basket case. I was letting my mother’s voice overpower everything. I couldn’t have needs then. I’m still believing that now. It wasn’t about pee. It was about so much more.

On a positive note, I did eventually get up to pee. But only because I had made a horrible joke (that made both of us laugh) and ended up nearly peeing myself. When I came back, I asked if we could talk about the weather. I no longer wanted to talk about the COPD or the fuckery of my life. I just wanted to talk about the weather. She asked if we could talk about this again in the next sessions. I told her it was fine. I just need some time. It’s a lot to take in and I don’t think either of us were prepared for this.

My therapist reminded me that there are people who care about me. She cares about me, my other therapist cares about me, my coworkers care about me. The problem is me caring about me. I fall short when it comes to that, and I know that. My therapist reminded me that we all eventually die. Even if I only have 10, 15, or however many years left, I can still do great things. It doesn’t have to be a life spent in anger and bitterness. But I’m not there yet.

Let me be angry and bitter for a little.