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What The Heck Is DID Anyway?

Peacock

The Peacock at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Charleston, SC, by Jim Dollar

It rarely fails. When I mention to someone that I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), I’m met with a blank stare. Then, I know, I have some explaining to do. Usually, I go to the place of the old definition: Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). It seems a bit easier for folks to grasp. For some of the people with my “label” it even describes their condition better.

My “disorder” used to be called MPD, and some people still relate better to those terms. You see, just because the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) changes its valuation, it doesn’t make the PEOPLE it’s describing any different. Our “diagnosis” is just a measure to tell us that there other people like is, and to show us how those other people have coped.

I’m always amazed whenever I hear people who are talking about me using superlatives or boxes. “Deneen,” they will say, “is a very sexual being.” Well, yes, Deneen is…and Deneen is not. It depends on which person in here is facing forward; who is running the show. “Deneen,” they will say, “is very good at talking to people.” Sometimes, that’s true, but I also have selves inside here who cannot speak at all. Literally. Sometimes, we have no voice. Nobody can reach the voice-box of the body to make it go. Do you want to know why hardly anybody knows that about me? Because, when we can’t talk, we don’t! You will never get to speak to my person who cannot speak! It’s only logical that my friends and loved ones are largely unaware of her. As a matter of fact, you would be hard pressed to get some of the people who know me to believe that I am ever quiet.

Often, I have different parts of myself triggered to come out with different people. When I’m with my friend and fellow writer, Charlene, for instance, I’m a giggly Fourteen-Year-Old-Girl who is having the time of my life. No matter what else was going on before I walk through any door to Charlene, I eventually morph into the person who blends with her, who enjoys her, who knows her. Chances are, if you spend enough time with me, you’ll have a “person” in me who comes out to be with you. It’s not always a new person. It rarely is a new person, although new people do get invented when there’s a need.

You see, inside my head, it’s like a big parts factory. Parts labeled with likes and dislikes, happiness and sadness, silliness and seriousness, work or play orientations, the lists go on and on. In any given situation, there is an unconscious process that goes on inside my head and says: What does this person/situation expect from you? What tools do we need here and who inside of us posses them? Is there a consistent character here that this person/these people, expects to see?

Sometimes, if I’m the wrong “person” when another person is needed, the person who IS facing forward (the Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now, which represents different “me’s”), we play act. Sometimes, we just know what the “usual” person who is expected would say, and we say it. Even when we don’t feel it, believe it, or want to. It’s a way to function and SEEM like the same, stable, solid person to the outside world. We like to think that it helps us to interface better.

The brain of the person with DID is a complex brain. It’s a creative brain. It’s a marvelous brain, really! Throughout my life, I’ve needed different sets of characteristics in order to survive. I’ve needed to be able to respond to my environment in a way outside of my emotions. Splitting myself into people who handled difficult, often traumatic, events, it just makes sense. Hiding the fact that one “switches” is also the job of the brain, so amazingly intricate selection processes and story-making takes place inside the head to explain away inconsistencies. Our brains hide from us for a long time the fact that we are not one, continuous-memory being.

And there’s the rub. Everyone has different types of selves that come out at different times. No doubt, the person reading this has a work self, a play self, a romantic self, a depressed self, and an enthusiastic self. This is all normal and how it should be. The difference between your selves and my selves is that your sides usually will share a solid/same base core memory, set of morals, set of likes and dislikes. You don’t abhor plaid one day, and wake up the next thinking it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. You don’t get married and go out with friends, run into a stranger who kisses you—and forget that you are married. You may CHOOSE to ignore it, but you don’t forget that there’s a waiting spouse at home. Not really. That can happen to me.

So, what do I do about it? I learn my triggers. If going into a certain environment or around a certain set of folks has triggered me to go into a personality that I do not wish to be, I avoid those situations. I also work on group communication. We try to talk in here and remind one another what we’ve all agreed to, commitments that one or the other of us has made, whether or not the rest of us agree. It’s a committee of The Deneen.

You may wonder, when you’re with me conversing, “How do I know who I’m talking to?” Chances are, you won’t. Not unless we tell you, and, hell, most of the time, we don’t even know who the “we” is that’s facing forward. No matter who has control, that controlling entity just feels like “me”. It feels as if they are ALWAYS there and “me”. It’s taken a lot of getting used to to realize that whoever the “me” is, she/he has to accept that there were “me’s” here before, and that there will be “me’s” after, and that the Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now won’t know what the other “me’s” have done. Not unless they tell me. That’s what we’re working on. Our goal is to have all of us telling one another what’s gone on, and to what/whom we’ve made commitments.

Another thing on which we are working is being aware of what some of our people can’t do. The-me-who-is-speaking-to-you-now may be capable of leading your support group, helping you build a dog pen, write that article that we are both excited and psyched about…but the one who is there when the deed needs to be done, well, that may be a different “me” entirely. Sometimes, we get very tired of trying to keep up with the commitments that others have made in our stead.

What does this all mean in terms of how you interact with me, or someone else who has DID? Well, for one thing, if we DO allow you to see us transition, that means that you are in a very trusted spot. How you respond to that transition tells us whether or not it’s safe to let you see it again. If we decide you aren’t safe, it’s not like it’s something we can talk ourselves out of later. That unconscious programming takes over and the ones in charge inside here will not allow us to be vulnerable again. A layer is put up between ourselves and you, and we remove ourselves, one step back. Its hard to explain and I don’t know if I’m doing a good job of it…but we’re getting tired now.

That’s another thing. When we all try to talk/write/do things jointly, it burns a tremendous amount of energy and we often must drift into neutral. It’s like floating in a pool of water with nobody in control. Floating in nothingness as nobody in particular—and the potential to be anyone, absolutely anyone, that we need.

Want to learn more about DID? What is Dissociative Identity Disorder?

This post is dedicated to my friend/fellow-traveler/soul-sister/cheer-leader: Charlene Marolf

Eternal gratitude to: Jim Dollar Photography. Your pictures make us better, and the world a prettier place in which to be!

Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder.

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Once Upon A Time

Barn Swallow

Barn Swallow, Santee State Park, Santee, SC, by Jim Dollar

People wanted me once. Once upon a time, people were excited about me. Had made plans around me. Had planned ME. It seems surreal to me now to think about those people in that way. Those people who were my parents.

Where are my parents NOW? Oh, they’re still around. Both still alive. Not together, but still alive. Are they still excited about me? About my existence? I’d say…not. Do they love me? I think they both have loved me with as much love as they were capable of giving.

What happens to us that we get SO excited about the prospect of the birth of a child…and then lose it once the child is born? Our genetics seem to carry this need to be excited about new things. Perhaps, it’s an issue of bonding. Maybe the adrenalin of excitement is needed for that. All I know is that far more human beings are excited about a new puppy than an old dog. It might be the possibilities that attract us. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, all things are possible…until we know what those things are. As soon as a thing is gotten, it often loses its value—like a new car driven off the lot.

I’ve met some people who aren’t like this. Folks to whom newness equates unfamiliar/unpredictable/dangerous. I think we need more of those kinds of people in the world.

While I’m musing, I have to ask myself: What of my own children? Do I tell them often enough how very much I miss them? How if I had a time to live over, a choice to make, I’d go back to when they were small, when I was younger, healthier, more energetic? I’d spend more and more and more time with them and I’d help them to plan better for their own futures. My children are often suffering, and as a mother, at least the kind of mother I am, that is the most imaginable suffering of myself that I can fathom. I want them to be happy and to see life as a big and happy adventure, with just the merest tint of angst.

We can’t stop our kids from suffering. My parents certainly didn’t prevent it in me. Suffering is a part of life. A big part of life. An unavoidable part of life. All that I know to do is to be there when my children call. To encourage when I can. To tell them, often, how much I love them, moreover, to show it.

My own parents, I doubt they think of me much. My father has made choices that have forced him to live a life without his birth children. My mother thinks of me. I suspect, not often. She has her own life and three other children, so I’m not really required to carry out any duties where she is concerned. I often compare that to other friends of mine who are the only children of their parents, and I wonder if I were an only child, if things in my life would be different. If more effort would have been made on my part in terms of happy relationship.

I don’t really long for my parents. As a matter of fact, I think having no parent with whom I am close has opened the way for me to see other mentors as parental figures, and frankly, those people have had more skills and knowledge about how to navigate the world than my parents ever did. Not that not having those skills was my parents’ faults. It was not.

Overall, I guess I should be grateful that I was planned, that I was wanted, because it is the thing that got me here. And at least I started off my life in a family that contained great love for me. Love doesn’t always stay. That’s the thing about love. It’s evolving, ever changing, often fleeting.

I don’t believe in time. I think it’s a false product brought about by our occupying these “mass” bodies that we have. Often, flashbacks and memories take us back to times past, and we feel them and relive them, ARE them, again. So it does bring me comfort to realize that the love and blessings of my parents, whether or not I have it today, it is eternal. That moment, the day I was born, when they both set eyes on me, dreamed for me, wondered about me, that instant that they felt pride for the mere fact that I existed, and that they were responsible for that—THAT MOMENT—is encapsulated…forever.

It has to be, enough.

Many thanks to: http://www.jimdollarphotography.com/

Posted in My Life Today, Where Am I Now?.

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With Sugar and Spice, Everything’s Nice

Queen Anne's Lace

by: Jim Dollar Photography

The last time I wrote a blog entry, I had planned to write about, had even previously posted a warning for my lesbian friends regarding, the numerous guys in my life. Yes, I have had many men, and they have been WONDERFUL! Make no mistake. I’ve had guys who were macho…and intellectually challenged. I’ve had guys who were just intellectually challenged, except for that important, seemingly-un-teachable bedroom prowess. I’ve had guys who were fully intellectual and soft like the underbelly of a kitten. I’ve even had guys who were girls, trapped inside the body with the penis. I’ve had nerds, of both sexes, and lots of nerds, and were I not in a monogamous, committed relationship (with a nerd, I might add), I just might be agreeable to hunting up some more of them because I LOVE ME SOME NERDS!

I’ve come to realize, though, that this is not what I first want to write about. This may be a factor in my not coming back to this space for a while. I needed some time to settle in and discover what to talk about next. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about or remember the guys. I do that, and I’ve done that, and we will do that here—but not now. Not now, because that is not what my “now” life is about and, no offense meant to the many amazing men out there, they are not my calling. Not the men with penises anyway. No, I’m made up of the stuff who likes a woman with a little bit of man in her. That’s not a “cutsie” way of referring to a threesome, either.

I think that the people I most admire in this life that we’re living, are the people who encompass characteristics of both genders. It’s not just in the way that they look, but in the way that they carry themselves and the activities that they choose to pursue. There are lines that are crossed by many intellectual males that cause our cultural judgments to label them as more feminine, and I’m not sure that this is a truth, but it is how they are perceived. I don’t know if being a “thinking man” who likes to care for children and keep himself groomed is truly “feminine”. I know plenty of stupid, dirty girls who are horrible mothers, and we don’t label them “masculine”. Nevertheless, when we see a man like the one I’ve described above, we think of him as feminine—and I’ll take it! LOVE men like that! They aren’t LESSER men. They’re BETTER men.

On the flipside, if a girl doesn’t like to wear makeup and lace, if she’s good with tools in her hands, and I don’t mean in the bedroom-prowess way, if she doesn’t mind grease, bugs and ballcaps, she’s often culturally seen as masculine. We even have a phrase for that: tomboy. I’m here to tell you that not all girls like these girls feel boyish at ALL. If you were to ask them to describe themselves on the inside, you’d find them to be just as moody, sensitive and romantically-inclined as any girl with fake nails, plucked eyebrows and a short skirt.

My point is this, I don’t know or understand all of the differences in the masculine and the feminine, and I’m not sure that anyone does. Once one starts to delve deeper into these labels, they make less and less sense. What I do know, is that there is an undercurrent in some people, there is this coating and slathering of energy that reaches out to me and says, “I am both male and female; I am a complete being.” All wrapped up in that neat little emotive package is also the sexual energy of the individual. It’s this plus some kind of pheromonal concoction that draws all of us to one another when we wish to couple-up.

I’ve encountered, as I’m sure have most of you out there, sexual energy in people that has transcended anything else that they might be sending out. This has nothing to do with gender, and often, nothing even to do with sexual preference. Some people are just SEXY! It’s a part of their makeup, and I’m not sure that THAT has anything to do with the business of being masculine or feminine either. I can say that, from certain folks, I feel very drawn to something that feels like masculinity, and from others, something that feels like femininity. There’s no proper way to really describe it, because I’d need words that we don’t have in this language; words to describe the emotions and energy exchanges that pass every day, unnamed (and this is not the same thing as unexpressed), between people. It’s not about what they do, what they wear, or even how they choose to act.

We humans like to think that we are long past the acting of hormones and the wild call of mating desires that throb through our species—but this is simply not the case. At our core, we are animals, and there is nothing that puts me more in touch with this fact than when I’m in the room with a certain type of woman. If there’s a butch lesbian or a transgendered man (a man who resides within the physical body of a woman) around, I know it. My mind and body find her/him. My spirit senses her and turns our energy to her. And she finds me. The same thing is happening with her. I can not tell you how many times I’ve looked across a crowded room full of “normal” folks, and briefly met the eyes of a woman that our culture would label lesbian, then looked—quickly—away. But the look is enough. From even before the look, there is this connection that reaches out, the connection that sparks the look, beyond any awareness of ourselves, and links us together. It feels to me, like destiny. It always has.

I’m not sure what this means, or if it “means” anything. I’ve long thought that there is a balance of all things in this Universe we currently occupy. If a thing exists, then so does its counterpart. As a matter of fact, it would not surprise me to learn that the moment a “thing” springs into existence, its counterweight spontaneously appears. This type of reasoning, I apply to my own sexual leanings. There are, in existence, human beings who are everywhere on the gender scale from male to female, and everywhere on the sexual orientation scale, from heterosexuality to homosexuality (and may I remind you that gender and sexual identities have nothing to do with one another). For each of these individuals, there is their counterbalance in the form of a partner who is seeking out that which they are able to give. For me, the individual that I am most successful at lock-and-keying-it with is the woman, as I said before, with a little bit of man in her. —Or a lot.

This is not to say that there aren’t people who don’t fit that description to whom I don’t also find myself extremely drawn. Sometimes, that’s because they’re one of the “just-sexy” people. Sometimes, frilly and feminine women with no expressed hint of maleness attract my attention, because I am a lover of ALL women, and not limited in my appreciation for the feminine presence and form. There may be other things about myself and another person that mesh; a joining of intellectual energies, moral commonality, spiritual journeying, or other shared traits to which sexual expression has attached itself and strung along the lines of other-connectedness. However, when it comes to raw, animalistic, almost-unfailing sexual energy, it’s the girl/boy who gets my attention the fastest, holds it the longest, and fills-me-to-the-brim with intensity.

I remember the very first time that I felt this phenomenon, and from that first awakening, it has never, not ever, stopped. Nor do I expect it to—or even want it to. There’s no reason to wish for things to be any different. One of our greatest challenges as beings, here, is to accept ourselves—learn to recognize, and rejoice in, that which we are. This doesn’t mean that we can’t take side roads, put on a coat of a different color, try something that we never thought we’d try. All too often, people put themselves in little boxes with these unending sides, with only previously-approved allowable contents. This includes their self-professed gender and sexual identities. It seem silly really, for why else are we here but to experience ALL that life has to offer? What God would gift us with all of this, set a bowl of confection before us, and beg us not to eat of it? Well, the God of the Christian Old Testament would, but that’s a complaint (maybe a blog post?) for another time!

For now, and first, I plan to share with you the wonderful sweets who have been the girls of my life, some of the girls who’ve been boys in my life, and I’ll probably throw in a couple of “just boys” (if there truly, really IS such a thing) as I go along. We shall see which stories come to the surface, and I’ll hope that you will enjoy with me the delicious tales that make up the experiences of the whole of the entity: “The Deneen”.

Thanks, as always to Jim Dollar Photography.  You make my blog, not to mention my life, pretty!

Posted in My Life Today, My Loves and Lovers, Where Am I Now?.

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We Had a Dream

Milkweed Pod

Milkweed Launch by: Jim Dollar Photography

This morning, I had the privilege to be presented with the vision of two more of my personalities. I was dreaming of them when I awoke, and at first mistook it for an ordinary dream. But, as I ran my mind over the details of it, from inside of me, someone piped up and said, “That’s us.” I knew, right away, what she meant:

“Get her out of here”, the matronly woman sitting at the head of the kitchen table says to the strong and authoritative man standing before her. He nods in acquiescence, gently placing his hand on the crook of the arm of the waiting young girl — to whom he looks, and feels, like family.

They are gathered in the kitchen of the old farmhouse, a summer day pouring through windows that wear minimal curtains, even those flowered bits of cloth being shoved open in tight bunches against the end of their cheap, white rods. The table itself is nothing of fashionable note; its woodsy-green veneer supports a half-filled pot and a growing stack of peelings as the older woman works-up potatoes in preparation for some future meal.  Momma’s face is round and soft like her body, her light-brown hair caught up into a sensible bun, her build a bit portly. Her dress is a non-descript thing with a distinctively home-made look, short sleeves cutting into her ample arms a bit. The faded pattern of her old-timey clothing extends down, right to end of her knees, the whole, straight skirt tucked tightly underneath her legs so as to prevent them sticking in the summer heat to the cheap vinyl chairs that complete the dining set. Her hands are her most remarkable feature. They are round and dainty, with well-kept longish fingernails.  Already, they are beginning to wrinkle and knob with age and hard work, but strength exudes from them. Their strength is what has brought the work that has etched itself into their surface, and when these hands gesture and point with an order, not a single person in their presence would ever question the authority they, or their owner, conveyed.

“Wait!” the young girl protests, casting a furtive look from deep-brown eyes into the matching eyes of the Man-At -Arms who would command her away, and out the door. “What about her?”

The sound of Momma’s knife against the skin of the root-vegetable stops, and the man steps forward a bit and turns so that all eyes are focused on the other end of the rickety table, directly across from where Momma sits at the head.  The girl, at whom they all stare, is looking right back, somehow managing to gaze deeply into all of their eyes simultaneously. She is younger than the rest of them, and seems even tinier than she actually is as she postures herself tightly against the back of the chair, almost fading into it, and exuding a barely quelled fear. As everyone looks on, ghostly figures approach the diminutive form, the wall behind her becoming first transparent, then, fading away altogether. She doesn’t break the visual connection with the others, even as abject terror begins to form in the deep, dark pools of her eyes in response to the, growing ever louder, murmuring sound of voices starting to engulf her. The translucence of what has become an approaching crowd is beginning to dissipate, as two figures, gaining solidity, step to either side of the younger girl, each one firmly grasping an arm while gazing down upon her with stern and disapproving looks. Holding the right arm of the little girl is a woman who seems to be in charge, and her mouth moves, giving muffled and indiscernible orders to those poised and waiting.

“Get her out of here!” Momma’s voice breaks the spell, repeating her previous directive with more force. “She doesn’t need to see this.” Man-At-Arms only nods, turning away from the younger and more helpless of the two girls, tightening the grip on his charge. He turns, attempting to turn her with him, and point her out through the open, wooden door-frame.

“NO!” she protests, trying to jerk out of his grasp, looking back to the scene at the table’s end. “We can’t leave her!”

“Child, you have to,” Momma says, not unkindly.

“I’m not going to leave her. They’re going to hurt her!”

“Now, you hush up and go on out there. She’s stayin’ so that you can do that. You have people outside, right now, waitin’ on you. You have to go and talk to those people. That’s what you have to do. Don’t you worry, now. She’s gotta’ stay here for you, and she’s agreed to stay here, and she’s gonna’ stay here, and that’s just how this works.”

Momma looks at Man-At-Arms. “Taker her on out now – and hurry!”

The older girl struggles a bit against the strong man, glancing back at her other self, all the while distracted by the feeling of other attentions that are, indeed, tugging at her from somewhere, far outside herself, leaving her with an uncomfortable feeling that there is something she’s being called to do.

The younger girl is becoming smaller, fading with her accompaniment into the background, and beginning to lose her focus on the scene in the kitchen as more and more hands grab at her, pulling her away, holding her down, beginning to produce hard metal instruments, cruel looking corkscrews and levers and a basket full of mysterious things.

“No! I can’t let them hurt her, NO!” still adamantly affirming herself, the girl looking on, nonetheless, complies allowing Man-At-Arms to orient her towards the door outside as, deep in some other part of herself, she knows that the hurting can’t be stopped. The best that can be hoped for is that it is endured. She casts one more desperate look into her escort’s immobile face. He has short, soft brown hair. He is taller than her with a broader body that is well-muscled without being bulky. Self-assurance exudes from him, along with a toughness of spirit, and an unquestionable air of authority. He is purposeful, but not unkind. In fact she can feel the empathy from his warm and soft eyes, feel it even in his touch, as she attempts one last plea. “Please! They’re going to take it all out of her!

Indeed, the older girl doesn’t even have to look back at the younger, because she can see through her eyes, feel her spirit the same as if it were her own…because it is. “They’re taking the carrots!” she finds herself blurting in panic. She doesn’t even know what that means, but she feels the giant corkscrew being laid lengthwise along her abdomen.  As the sadistic crowd surrounds her, looking down, her seating dissolves in a smooth motion that lays her upon the floor, and someone begins to turn the handle of the device, inserting it into the meat of her. The basket appears to slide its way, in a floating fashion, through the crowd that it seems to be a part of, its journey coming to completion in the hands of the female leader.  Carrots flow out of it, and other vegetables wait, mostly hidden as they form a line out of the basket, disappearing into the crowd.  As the metal device begins to turn, carrots are being forcefully and painfully wound through, up and out, as it rips its torturous way into the girl’s opened flesh. She begins to scream –

–But Man-At-Arms shoves her through the door and out, into the open air, and the scream of her other self evaporates along with their psychic connection as other voices command her attention. She becomes aware of the presence of many smiling people, milling about in the happy and brightly juxtaposed back-yard of the house. Man-At-Arms is no longer holding onto her. He is behind her, keeping and guarding her back. “These people,” he says, “are expecting you. You must go out and talk and mingle with them now.” The young girl can feel the truth in his words, feel the safety with him at her back. The painful screams, still exuding from her other self, are but a speck on her awareness and will soon be faded to nothing.

Even her protector is forgotten as she steps off the porch of the house, into the real world; out into the sunshine, her face genuinely beaming at the waiting guests with happiness, and a lack-of-concern. All pain is forgotten. All suffering is gone.

“Oh, you guys!” she says, opening wide her accepting arms. “It’s so good to see you! I’m so glad you came!”

Man-At-Arms waits in the wings, unnoticed and unacknowledged, arms crossed across his broad chest, watching her proudly. When she has to interact with the outside world, she really brings it! He smiles, secure and delighted in the knowledge that this part of her, is also a part of himself. Momma steps up beside him to look out, wiping potato juice from her hands with a checkered, kitchen dish-towel. The two exchange a nod, and gazing out into the summer yard where stands their protege, a smile.

“Our girl,” Momma says, “she’s doin’ good.”

“Yes, she is,” concurs Man-At-Arms.

“We’re all gonna’ be alright,” she adds, wincing, but not doubtful as her awareness hears the continuing screams from inside the kitchen. “We’ve all just gotta’ keep our parts.”

We wish to express our eternal gratefulness to Jim Dollar , for he is somehow able to capture the spirit of the feelings within our soul, and lend them to images in his photographs — which he graciously allows us to use.

Posted in My Personalities.

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Tree Gazer

Fall Trees From Ground

Tree Tops:Â by Jim Dollar Photography

 

It should come as no surprise to me that most of my life, I’ve been afraid of being alone.  Whenever I am alone, the shell-overlay that keeps me together starts dropping, disintegrating, and I am left with the shattered pieces of what makes up my selves, all vying to have their voices heard and their needs met.  I can remember, when I was a younger girl, getting an extreme sense of panic whenever I was alone.  Not always, though.  At times, I craved that time of sole being, connecting with nature and the world around me; connecting with what I then called “God”.  There do seem to be more parts of me that are afraid of being alone than that revel in it, though, and there is this underlying lack of being able to catch my breath that streams out from me whenever I am left to my own thoughts.  It is confusing, to even me, this frightening unknown regarding which of these thoughts, which personalities are going to come barreling through – and face forward.

It always surprises me when I meet a new one.  There are so many facets of me that are yet to be discovered.  I’m not exactly a diamond in the rough, instead, I am cut by some mysterious jewel-maker into differing reflecting sides.  These sides aren’t all symmetrical, and they aren’t all polished.  Some don’t seem to be sides at all, but little juttings-out or material that form a small ledge, or bump, off the main formation.  Often, they are sides that I’ve never seen, having equally, no idea of their existence.  In the quiet, when only my inner voices are heard, when the distractions and confusion of my outer world grow still, a small voice can sometimes make its way to the surface of us.

As I am outside doing menial chores in the crisping air of descending fall, this is just such a day, as it brings out another of us while I am taking care of the animals that make up so much of my present life.  One of those very rough-cut or jutting sides surfaces — comes forth from within me.  It begins with the changing out of the waters for the wolf-dogs.

Whenever I am using hosepipes, the smooth rubber molding sliding with a familiar fit into my smallish hand, whenever I am dipping animal foods from bags, the powdered scent of the processed bits clouding up to assault my nostrils, I am taken back to periods of time from my childhood, spent in the barns and coops and pens, yards and woods and pastures.  I see the hoses that we used on the farm when I was a child.  The animals of my memory come and take drinks.  I see the rusting metal bowls, the upside-down hubcaps, the wooden troughs.  Dogs walk through my mind’s eye and lick up the cool liquid:  Jo-Jo, the German Shepherd, Chigger, the feist, Terry, the Bulldog lapped the water as it emerged from the spigot, Sirius, the old, sick stray that I’d befriended, daily delivering water – right up to where he sat.

Water slides down from the pipe in my mind’s eye, filling to overflowing the containers, as Hogs push each other with dirty snouts.  Gathering in the ensuring mud, they jostle for the prime positions for the best fare being slopped from my father’s metal bucket.  The splash of water against the side of stainless-steel bowls calls to multi-colored, glittering yard-chickens.  Coming in an awkward run, they dip down their feathered heads, lift orange-yellow beaks to the sky as the cool well-water slides down their parched throats, and my eyes scan the grassy tufts from which they emerged, trying to decipher there the hidden nests of fresh eggs.  Cats weave and twine betwixt my legs, attempting to trip me up as I progress from one animal’s station to another.

This youthful environment provides innumerable opportunities for me to join with, and appreciate, the soul of nature.  Skip forward to the current scenes that make up my “now” life, and it is easy to see that my current environment, full of dogs and cats and woods and sun, reflects this same connection.  These similar experiences build bridges that, inadvertently, drag me back and forth across times.  Flashbacks start.  My senses are confused.  I’m not sure where or “when” I am, or who I’m connected to.  I’m not sure which of my personalities is supposed to be “facing forward”, and I may even forget who the important people in my life are.  I have lists of people who are critical to me at any given point – but the lists are rarely ever tied to any independent feeling of where they belong in time.  I depend upon outside, experiential, environmental clues for that.

I stand at the home where I reside in what you all know as the current time.   Above the enclosures for the wolfdogs tower large trees and my eyes are drawn up the length of them to stop where their branches meet the sky.  The sight of deciduous leaves and evergreen needles create a lace fabric, fractals upon fractals revealing their primordial patterns in this limitless, visual canvas.  This day, as my eyes fall upon the pattern made by the deep green of the trees against the bright blue of the sky, I morph.  I shift.  I become a thing, a beast, stopped in time — my gaze locked on that beautiful mystery of nature that must have invoked feelings in the innermost heart of those who originated our species, from the time when our newly opened eyes first ever saw the scene.

Looking up into this tapestry of nature, some primal self awakens within me.  I am drawn up, into the trees, my spirit, my very existence seeming to bond with them.  My body, on the ground, is frozen, as affixed to its spot as any rooted tree ever was.  I am immobilized – – outside of time.  Everything is stillness, and stillness is Everything.  The air blows through me, the very act of my breathing a thing of non-happening.  I am one with the earth, therefore, in flesh, I am nothing.  I am Tree Gazer.

I’m not sure what has gone on in the life of Tree Gazer.  I’m not sure why he looks at dissociation into the trees as an escape from events in this mortal plane.  He can see nothing around him; only above.  He is aware only of the fact that he is an invisible part of Earth.  Nothing can touch him, nothing can harm him; he cannot move, for he is not.

As soon as he slips into our primary train of conscious being, I know him as myself and my brother, both.  For The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now remembers stepping aside, and back, letting Tree Gazer come in to become one with the beauty of the forest, to become invincible in his nothingness so that goings-on did not affect us.  The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now suspects that these days were days at school, in the forest behind the playgrounds, or at the farm, past the pastures, lying atop fallen leaves on the gentle, tree-laden hills that led to the creek in our woods.  Then again, perhaps, at our Grandmother’s house, behind the old out-buildings.  These are places where our physical form was most likely lying – while Tree Gazer stopped our pain, taking us up – – to join beauty, up and away into the most majickal of places where the trees meet the sky.  Where all is well!  All is well when All is nought.

We are stuck, Tree Gazer and I, staring into the treetops, and as liquid begins escaping from the top rim of the metal washtub in the enclosure of the wolfdogs, Jupiter and Merlin, there is a part of us that is aware of what you all perceive as “now”.  There is a knocking at the door of our awareness from some unknown someone else inside who is saying, “You must re-engage with this life – for there are other living beings who need your waters, and there is a bill for it that will have to be paid, so you mayn’t stand here, staring into space like one devoid of your senses!  WAKE UP!!”

And with a sigh of resignation, deep down in our spirit, we climb our awareness up to the top, and out, and descending, falling from the Heavens, slowly, ever so reluctantly…we Awake.

Thanks to:  Jim Dollar Photography, for this beautiful representation of what Tree Gazer sees!

Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder, My Life Today, My Personalities.

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The Cutting Edge

Trout Lilly

Trout Lilly on Black by Jim Dollar Photography

 

I’m going to be put to sleep again.  Another surgical procedure – though this time it’s only a biopsy and a couple of lights and cameras.  At times past, the repercussions to my body were much greater.  Every time that I face being put under, I ask myself the questions that are probably normal questions for everyone to ask.  What if I don’t wake up? What if this night is my last night on Earth?

After all, there are people who don’t wake up.  One has to sign that “Waiver” that basically states, “If I don’t wake up, nobody has the right to sue you because I know that those are the risks I am taking.”  Still, I don’t think anyone ever PLANS to not wake up.  Maybe some people have, and it would be interesting to know whether or not those people woke up.  The one time that I planned to not wake up, life thwarted my plans — but that time had nothing to do with a surgery.  After that rude awakening, I walked around feeling like a ghost for months.  Looking at my life from the parallel place that would have been my non-existence, trying to imagine how the world that I was reluctantly seeing before me would have performed without my physical presence in it.

Surviving operations, having health problems thwarted via modern medicine, these experiences have left me with the same sort of perspective.  If I had been born in a time or a place without modern medicine, I’d have died as a teenager, while giving birth to my first daughter.  Most likely, she’d have died as well.  As it was, it took a valiant effort and an extreme amount of suffering to bring her forth into this world.  When it came time for her to birth her own first daughter, it again took a team of people to help my granddaughter arrive here safely, and alive.  I think about how this is against the evolutionary progress of the species, realizing that my genes would have been culled out from those of the fittest, the most survivable of our race.  I ponder what it means that we are a people who take care of the weak, the injured, the deformed, the imperfect.  It’s unclear to me if this is evidence of our becoming stronger as a species because we are showing compassion, thus an elevated plane of “living”, or if it only serves to weaken us so that any beings we encounter who do not share our reverence for human life will slaughter us quickly, mercilessly.

This morning, my worry isn’t about this survival of our species, but about my personal survival.  Surviving has presented a conundrum for me all along since I seem to have been born without that basic appreciation for life that I’m told I should have.  Mostly, it’s about the suffering, these feelings in me that my living is a thing too difficult to be borne by the mere mortal that I am.  It seems that I need more than this one lifetime in order to work out why the living is worth it in the balance, or that I’ve lived enough lifetimes to know that it is not.  That is not to say that there are not times when I am exuberant about living!  Excited about living!  The mere present made to me of a full-of-color fall leaf, or a multicolored stone, the breathtaking landscapes of Earth, the overpowering brilliance of a sunset, I suspect that I drink these things in more fully than most humans do.  Perhaps it is this lingering at death’s door that makes me even more appreciative of the miraculous beauty in every part of living that I make it through.  I would not trade any of those sorts of time in my living for dying.  It’s the remembering them when I am so overwhelmed that is the crux of my problem.

I also suffer from survivor’s guilt.  Isn’t every woman some mother’s daughter?  Every son, some father’s son?  It seems unfair to me that I have access to modern medicine, that when my gallbladder and ovaries and uterus all went haywire, I was able to have the offending parts removed and continue living the life that is deprived of others who are not so lucky.  Not just the people who lived in our past before our surgeons got this good, but the people who die in the here and now, today, in the jungles, or on a cot lining the halls of a non-sterile building in a non-air-conditioned medical center, their faces, their presences, the ghosts of them flit through my mind.  Who decides who lives and who dies?  Who decides who gets to live when, and who gets to live where?  I’m not the only one who ponders these questions.  These are questions for the ages.  Even if these questions are answered in my next incarnation, I am certain that other mysteries will come to replace the present ones, and I will still be left wondering.  This seems to be a terminal condition of my now evolving life-form.

Another thing that some might consider an oddity is that I have wondered why we allow ourselves this act of sleeping through the violence done to our physical form.  I firmly believe that our higher self is awake and aware of every thing that ever happens to us, and that these realities are ingrained within our soul whether we are conscious of them or not.  That has certainly proven to be the case with my Dissociative Disorder.  As a child, I asked myself why people wanted to be put to sleep when it was obvious that their bodies would still KNOW what happened.  It seemed better to go through it consciously, so at least one would understand WHY there was damage to their psyches.  I was determined that if I ever needed surgery, I’d want to be aware of what people were doing to me.

A friend of mine has been unfortunate enough to have woken up during surgical procedures, and hearing her tell the tale makes me know that I would not want to be awake!  I’ve read enough true and invented tales of people who are aware and alert while losing limbs, being disemboweled, having layers of injured skin peeled away, that I know my childish idea was one better left dismissed.  I’m not even saying that it isn’t true, the thing that I believed about our knowing all that has happened to us physically being better in the long run, but I’ve experienced enough of my own suffering to know that my naive notions of wanting to KNOW what has happened to my body at all times is a flight of fancy better left fanciful!  There must be a mark left upon our overall being, though.  There must be some residual, “What the fuck was that dissociation through medicine that you just did, and then you let a stranger poke knifes in me and carve me up while you were gone?” feeling left over in our bodies somewhere.

Being alive in the time that I’m in is a thing for which I’m grateful.  Having doctors who can repair bodies is a thing for which I am grateful.  My son would not be alive today if surgery had not been performed on his tiny form, barely a year old, and as he makes his own way down the path of a medical career, I realize that he is a part of the perpetuated cycle.  Modern medical techniques save a life that would have been lost, and that life continues to study more in the annals of medicine so that future people can be saved and contribute more to this world.  So, what does this mean for us, this fact that we now sometimes get to decide who lives and who dies?  Because, that’s really what it is.  When my gallbladder attacks got so bad that I could barely eat and was in a constant state of pain, because I was born in America, because I was smart enough to work the system and obtain a physician, because I acquired the resources to pay someone to cut me, and because someone agreed to cut me for a fee, I got to live.  At that same moment, I’m sure that elsewhere in the world, another girl, in the same physical circumstance, lay dying.

The point is that with all of our “evolved” thinking, with all of our progress, I’m not sure that we are making progress in the way that I would consider true goodness.  We live with blinders on.  Some of us on this planet live with so much to eat that our health is affected in very negative ways.  As a person who is overweight and who has type two Diabetes, I’m only too aware of my own participation in this system.  Others of us on this planet live with so little to eat that our health is affected in very negative ways.  Intelligent, worthwhile people, people like my son, those people starve to death or die of untreated diseases and afflictions every day.  Tick, tick, tock, tock……  Lives wasted.  Opportunities wasting away.  It’s not just the people who are dying who are losing out.  We are all letting the geniuses of our species go undiscovered, wasting away, suffering into little evaporating pools of nothingness due to the mere circumstances of their births.  Who knows but what we might have already discovered immortality for us all if we truly knew how to harvest those richest of intelligence treasures amongst us?  It is true that the people who are dying in Africa have the most diverse genes, the most potential for helping the whole of us.

It leaves me to wonder if our species here will ever get it right.  When a problem as simple as one side of the planet getting too much to eat, or too much of the wrong things, and another side getting not enough to eat, so much so that they are never really viable humans, (which leaves me to wonder why the pro-lifers aren’t worried about THIS type of death), when seeing something this glaring not being fixed, I have little hope that our quest for enlightenment will ever come to fruition.  We are like worried mothers who complicate things well past any plausible solution.  We make excuses for ourselves and we blame others.  I know this technique well, for it’s one that I’m currently attempting to face head-on and outgrow in this microcosm that is my selves.

So, what do I want my legacy to be?  I ask myself this question as I go to the table, as I go to sleep and go under the knife, yet again.  As my unconscious body cringes inside at the things that I’m allowing to be done to it, I wonder what would be said about me if I didn’t come back.  After all, one day, I won’t.  One day, I will sleep my last sleep, sing my last song, write my last word, draw my last breath.  Death is coming to us all.  This is the one appointment that we all must keep, regardless of which side of the planet we find ourselves being born, regardless of what type of medicine we have access to, because, currently, we have not found that way to physical immortality.  Recently, someone said to me, “I think that you are an interesting person.”  I guess that’s as good a legacy as any.  Perhaps I can at least mirror for others what it is like to connect to life’s spark – even though I often do it reluctantly.  Maybe this act of being fully engaged, fully “awake”, makes me stand out from the crowd.  Maybe I can inspire someone else to have the courage to be considered “interesting”.

This life is all that we know will ever matter to ourselves.  It’s the only thing of which we can be sure:  The present moment.  It may be that whatever we plan to do with that doesn’t mean anything in the long run.  As a friend of mine said, “If life means nothing to you, if you don’t want to be alive anyway and none of it means anything, then why would you care what other people think of what you do?”  It’s a good question.  A fair question.  Something inside of me must not fully believe that this moment is all that exists.  But, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what else does.  I do know that being asleep later today, on that table, some part of me will be looking out, wondering, “What the fuck?”, and waiting to awaken, yet, again….

This post is dedicated to:  Those needlessly dying, in acknowledgment of their suffering, and as witness to their having lived at all.

With Appreciation to:  Jim Dollar Photographywhose images always stir my soul to appreciative living.

Posted in My Life Today, Where Am I Now?.

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Shaky Girl

 

Oak Limb in Fog

Oak Limb in Fog, Blue Ridge Parkway, NC by: Jim Dollar Photography

I now know that I must intellectually come to terms with the fact that some very bad thing happened to me.  I don’t want this to be true.  It’s a good thing that I’m not in my right mind, because who, in their right mind, would want to come to such a realization?  If one had the chance to forget, to lock something bad away so that one could live one’s life without the haunting memory of the thing, wouldn’t that be the reasonable path?

Well, that’s what I’ve done.  Must have done.  The problem is that The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now doesn’t exactly get to escape the ghost of my/our past — because, inside of me reside the people who KNOW what happened.  Not only do they know, but they are stuck.  They are encapsulated in the moment of the terrors, forever in that shocked state of the denial of a reality that was so much for them to bear that they broke off from me, sacrificed themselves for me, so that I could go on living the normal part of our lives.

In the wee hours of this morning, I awoke from a dream that was fleeing my conscious mind, as dreams are wont to do, and the dream itself had nothing to do with reality and didn’t even seem that symbolic.  There were emotions though, in the dream, and such was their nature that they left me feeling helpless and hopeless.  I’m not sure if that’s what triggered her, or if she was just there because of built-up stresses over the last couple of weeks, (for I’d felt her timid presence trying to break through several times), but something reached far into the sleeping depths, and awakened Shaky Girl.

Some people might take issue with the fact I give my personalities such odd titles; mere descriptive terms instead of proper names.  It’s even tempting to imagine that they might get offended by the sheer silliness of how I chose to refer to them.  The thing is that they/we understand that to become more and more integrated, to become all one big person, this is the goal of our communication, and so we try very hard not to make people who are more and more distinctively separate from myself.  Our lives are actually one life, broken into snapshots, better yet, little time-elapsed reels of experiential video.  We are all the same person, but we cannot all access the memories of the entire being.  Thus far, in our lives, this has been a very good thing.  Without it, we would most likely be already insane (more insane?) and at an even less functioning state that what now serves us.  As it lies within us now, there are still differing parts of my selves who have contracts to deal with certain things that we encounter in our lives. The Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now isn’t aware of all of the terms and conditions of the contracts.  I only know when someone nudges at the control center of the mind, pushes on the membrane of the symbolic wall that separates those who are in control of the body at any given moment from those who are not, letting me know that someone else has something pressing that they must say or do.

As I was awakened this morning, this was apparently the case, because I came directly out of a sleep state into the State of Being that is Shaky Girl, my body jerking and spasming.  She is what she sounds like.  Someone who shakes and shakes, and shakes some more.  From an outside perspective, it looks as if my body is having a seizure.  It’s as if I something cold has stricken me to the core.

I believe that Shaky Girl is more aware when things are wrong with me than I am.  My entire lifetime has been built around hiding from myself what I am feeling.  I’ve gone to such extremes to do this that I’ve invented people who can hold certain pains for me, and I’ve constructed various Shell People that I can wear so that I appear to be functioning to the outside world when, inside, I’m not functioning at all.  Inside, there are always people screaming.  Perhaps Shaky Girl is closer to the core of my true self than my “presenting” self is.  I believe that she can hear the people screaming and knows when trauma needs to be dealt with.  She allows herself to be used as a release valve for all we are running through our already overloaded capacitor.

Shaky Girl has not revealed to me where and when she was born.  Perhaps she doesn’t know, herself.  When she comes into my being, as she did this morning, I’m not even sure that she is aware of me.  She locks her spirit into the body-shell that we share and overlays herself.  She takes the body and I can not get it back until her shaking is finished.  I’ve tried speaking to her and telling her that I need the body back (especially when this has happened in the presence of a person who is distressed by my apparently seizing self), but she does not seem to hear me.  No one else would hear me either, for our speaking to one another always happens inside my head — all the better to hide from the outside world how disjointed we truly are.  Once, during a time that I really needed to come back, I tried singing to her in my mind, with the same melodious tunes that I had used to comfort my birth children when they were infants.  To my great surprise, this worked!  She never responded or gave recognition to my presence, but she did begin to calm.  She was able to let go of the body and go back to where-ever-she-goes, and I was able to stop shaking.

After a visit from Shaky Girl, I am left exhausted!  Often, my muscles are sore from being drawn up so tightly and shivering all over.  When she is needing to express herself, I can feel her for days, tapping at me, wanting to come out.  My clenched teeth will be noticed, and a background, constant hum of calming will be running through my mind.  I’m not sure who the gatekeeper is, who decides who manifests and gets to control the body and who doesn’t, but I know that it is not in my conscious control.  Whomever is the gatekeeper, this entity is apparently aware of when it is safe to have someone manifest who cannot function at all, or when it is best to let no one function (as is the case when Skeleton Man shuts us down in order to prevent acts of self-harm to the body).  This Master Controller doesn’t agree to let Shaky Girl out when I am driving, or standing in an office surrounded by potentially dangerous strangers.  When sleeping in my bed, I guess it is deemed safe enough to allow her the time she needs to process her traumas.

When I come directly out of a sleep state into the Being of Shaky Girl, my body having been hijacked, quakes ripping through me as earthquakes do the planet, this is a frightening thing to have happen.  It is especially frightening because I do not know what it is that is wrong.  I cannot hear or see anything through her.  I’m not sure that she hears or sees, either.  Our experience is that of an intense emotional state, the tension of which causes painfully knotted muscles giving me great incentive to get Shaky Girl to stop her control of the body.  It isn’t a comfortable feeling to have one’s self taken away from oneself, and while she is relieved to be able to process and manifest, I am unable to move or speak –  or stop shaking.  That’s one of the irritations of sharing a body.  What affects one, affects all of the others.

There also is no assurance that allowing Shaky Girl to come forward will actually help me, or her, in any way.  She seems just as “stuck” every time.  She doesn’t seem to be able to be reasoned with, and when I allow myself to meld with and become co-conscious with her, I can see or hear nothing beyond the emotion that is happening.  I have no idea why she is distressed, why she can’t speak, why she is shaking.  I have no idea what has happened to her, what has birthed her.  I would like for this to change.  I would like to help her to get “unstuck”.  I think that whatever experiences she holds for me, they must be pretty horrific to her.  The thing that I want her to understand is that “we” are no longer stuck wherever she is stuck.  That things that were unbearable for her might not be unbearable for us now.  I want to be strong enough that she can trust me to handle whatever knowledge might come forward from her.  I hope that I am.

This morning, for the first time, Shaky Girl parted her lips – and made a noise.  To my knowledge, it is the first sound that she has ever uttered.  It is the first time that something other than shaking has come through.  It was hardly a word.  It was a guttural, animal, low calling out.  A distressed beginning of a shriek; but it was something.  At least she is trying.  I am proud of her for that.  I’m proud of her for having borne up to the task of holding some awful secret for The-Me-Who-Is-Speaking-To-You-Now for so many years.  I would like to find a way that Shaky Girl and I can be there for one another, comfort one another, share experiential memories with one another.

In a lot of cases where one person is divided into many, as we are, the separate consciousnesses of the self fear that to integrate is to die.  Since I can’t really access any thoughts from Shaky Girl, I have no idea how she feels about this.  It is my guess that her only fear revolves around her memories, and like the others residing in this form co-consciously with me, she is not afraid that she will cease to be when we are, at long last, all of us, merged.  Most of us have realized that we don’t have to be afraid of becoming One.  Becoming one continuously, linearly remembering/experiencing person does not mean that any of our individual selves will cease to exist.  To disappear into the whole does not mean a total disappearance of any one self, because that one self must exist in order to construct the whole.  It only means a difference in the way we function.

It is the same sort of thing that will happen to the whole of the human race in the eventual.  We are all already One — tied together in an inescapable, undeniable way, hurling through eternity, each of us needed to produce the glorious manifestation of our vastly different experiences.  All of the positive, all of the negative, all of the traumas, all of the victories, all of the living, all of the dying, one day, we will all remember.  This connectivity is already there, and we are all, already One; it is a simple dysfunction in our communication that makes us seem otherwise.

Dedicated to my now departed friend and fellow writer: 

Paula Arnold

~ with whom I appreciate being joined in the great One, and with thanks to her presence in the place where so much of her heart still dwells:  Heartfriends Inn

Heartfelt thanks, as always, to my brilliant fellow traveler, who lends me his beautiful imagery for visual representation of my story (and who tells great ones of his own):  Jim Dollar Photography

Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder, My Personalities.

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A Way To Life

Multnomah Panorama

I did a very brave thing.  It’s not a thing that seems that brave.  I mean, if anyone else had done it, it would probably have been no big deal.  This weekend, I actually drove down the driveway of the house that I lived in when I was growing up.  Well, was driven down the driveway, to be more accurate.  The point is that I went down the driveway – at my own request.

Now, it doesn’t seem like a brave thing, to go down the driveway of one’s childhood home.  People do that sort of thing all of the time.  I’ve even heard fairy stories about how people return to these places because they feel SAFE there.  For most, I guess it’s not that traumatic or unusual an event.  For a select group of us, however, it’s a bit like going to sleep and saying, “Hey, I’m going to close my eyes and lose consciousness specifically so that the nightmares have something to do tonight; I invite them into my head and my desire is to run the night with them, toss and turn, getting no real rest, finding no peace in the quiet.”

Don’t get me wrong.  My entire childhood was not horrible.  That home where I lived from the age of five until the age of fourteen, it taught me a lot of lessons, and made me fall in love with a lot of things in life that have served me well.  On that forty-acre farm I learned to love the land.  I became a part of the animals, a part of the plants.  I learned to feel the heartbeat of Earth, herself, travel her flowing waters, traverse the very veins of her that give life.  I’m sure that it was there that I began to feel the stirrings of the web that was woven around me, and the particular fibers spun out from me that would be followed by some, tugged on by others.

Many of my personalities were developed there, and they were created to enjoy or perform certain tasks, so in some ways, I think I got a fuller experience, was able to manifest interest in more areas than my friends and family who are all stuck in one mode of being.  If this mental disorder that I have is responsible for making my life today difficult, it also has come with some blessings that I never fail to recognize and even, on the good days, be grateful for.  I’m sure that, on more than one occasion, my dissociative disorder has saved my life.  Our lives.

The thing is that when I return to any place from my past, I’m not only returning to memories of a past time, but I literally become the person from my past.  It’s not the action of watching a movie; it is being the action.

I will attempt to explain for people the difference in how someone might react “normally” (and I use this word reluctantly but can think of none to replace it) to returning to a place that invokes childhood memories, compared to what I experience in such a place.  There are triggers in seeing certain things that wake up in me states of being that were present at the time that memory tracks were laid down.  The Awakened One turns his or her face up and out, vying for a portion of my thinking consciousness.  When I am faced with stimuli that spawns many different presences to come forward, then they are all speaking, feeling, being, all at the same time.  Things don’t feel as if they are in my past, but in a current, present moment of beingness.  That state of being is very different from my “normal” (there’s a form of that seemingly inescapable word again), current self.  My “now” self gets lost and I often can’t even feel parts of my body.  The first things to go are my face and my hands.  My mouth has no feeling, and my speech seems forced through lips of wax that don’t belong to me, my fingertips numb and are unable to send signals to my brain regarding the things that I am touching.  Perhaps my brain is too busy to devote precious resources to things like mere physical feeling.

It works like this:  As I take the gravel-covered dirt-road to the old farmhouse, I see that the mailbox has moved.  It’s on the opposite side of the road – at the top of the driveway, and not across the road.  The Artist me sees it and remembers crossing that road many, many times, admiring the details of everything, longing to take out a graphite pencil and trace the lines of it all onto paper.  She would sit and look at things until she could merge into them and BE the thing.  She‘d then try to spit that experience out on some sort of canvas using all sorts of mediums.

As we turn into the driveway, the Little Girl me who used to walk to the bus, the one who was terrified of everyone and who cried before school almost every morning, is surprised at how short the driveway seems and that it is not at all as steep as she remembers.  The cold feeling, structure, and even the smell of the green metal bus seats come back to her as she recalls boarding the bus, plopping down and immediately staring at the ice crystals formed on the glass of the window.  She loved creating fantasy kingdoms in her mind and making up the people who lived there – while hoping that no one would speak to her and draw her back to the real world where there were no beautiful Ice Castles.  She remembers the tears running down the cheeks of her mother on some mornings, and her mother saying, “But, you HAVE to go to school, Deneen.  They’ll put me in jail if you don’t.”  I don’t know why she was so frightened or upset, this Little Girl me – but I remember her being so as those feelings are brought into the “now” of my existence.  The “now” me feels sorry for the mother, and understands better now the mother’s position.

Glancing at the bank that lines the red-muddied & graveled road, I remember climbing it, pretending to be a mountain climber.  I fantasized about actually being a mountain climber, and in my mind, my feet KNEW where to find the small outcrops to gain leverage  to propel me up the side of steep cliffs!  All of this practicing made me unafraid of heights and jumping off things.  I became one with the earth that I was using as my personal gym.

Once, while I was playing on the bank in this manner, I encountered a snake and met the “Me Who Fears Snakes”.  She screamed her first scream, my not knowing where the sound was coming from until I puzzled out that it was emitting from my own open mouth.  Silly, really, because “I’VE” never been afraid of snakes.

The Male personality, who is somehow tied to the mountain-climbing-person, sees the curve of the drive and pays attention all the way down because he LOVES riding his bike down this road!  He goes very, very fast, can ride with no hands, can ride standing up on the pedals – with no hands – just coasting so fast, the wind whipping through our hair, laying into the curves with our body and feeling the delicate balance of being caught between fast motion and the gentle pull of gravity.  We come to a gravel flinging skid at the bottom of the hill.

The side of me that loves burying her toes in freshly turned soil, who loves picking ripe strawberries, hot from the sun, and popping them into her mouth, who brings her mother the huge cucumbers thought to be past their prime with a request that they be peeled for her, this Earth Connected part of me mourns the loss of her gardens as she sees the barren soil to the left of the driveway, bearing only fences and grass as its current fruit.  Where are her grape vines?  Where are the mounds for the strawberry vines?  Her heart sinks as she recalls losing more and more of her blessed plants on other occasions – but those are other stories and will be told, some god or gods willing, at another time.

The Suicidal Girl barely can stand to rest her glance upon the spots where she sat, wishing to die, trying to not want to die, crying into her skirts, or wetting the fur of her dog’s coat while she murmured and wailed into his side, muffling the sounds from those who might notice or come to ask her what was wrong.  She’d learned a long time ago that she should never REALLY answer that question.  No one really wanted to know what was wrong.  People wanted her to say that nothing was wrong, that she was fine.  She was expected to avoid people, or if caught up by one, to smile and express her joy so, when so caught up, she’d go away and step aside for one of us who could properly handle the social interaction.

There are more people present than these.  Some of them are smiling and playing.  Some of them are screaming.  Some of them are cutting grass or kissing boyfriends.  I think that the above descriptions are enough to reveal to you.  I’m aware that most people aren’t used to dealing with the idea of a constant parade of people marching through their skulls.  Especially simultaneously!

For most people, they may see their childhood homes and be stricken with overwhelming memories and images – but they aren’t thrown into several States of Being at one time as I am.  At least this sort of thing does give all of the people inside of me a chance to try to all be present at the same time so that we can all become aware of one another and the parts that we all play, and that can lead to co-consciousness and better cooperation inside this splintered head of mine.

This visit was only possible for me because I had a strong, accepting person along for support.  It is critical for any person with any sort of psychological or metal disorder to have supportive people around.  Without them, we rarely have the strength to begin traversing the frightening and difficult roads to facing our demons.  After all, my personal demons are so disruptive that they literally split me to pieces – and I have yet to even meet all of the pieces I am, or gaze full-face upon all of the demons who helped create the me’s.

Now that the voices of the people inside me are awakened and all jostling for attention, now that even more memories are pouring in, I wonder how long this road will be and who and what events I will encounter.  Living a life where one can crumple into a ball of dysfunction over things as simple as spotting a certain stitch on a quilt, or hearing a certain phase, enduring the internal screaming and the overwhelming panics that plague the inside of my head (because God forbid that we show the public our ACTUAL state), it all begs of me certain questions.

Number one:  Will I ever be well, or is “normal” (that damnable word again) functioning a pipe dream to me?  Is trying to integrate the right task, or should I further suppress everyone inside of me and smother their voices and panic and build a “functional, dissociated” me?  A walking shell that seems normal?  Should I be the literal manifestation of a zombie?  Living without life?

Number two:  And this all follows the attempted logical thinking of number one – Was going down that driveway, searching out my demons ACTUALLY brave?  Or, was it simply the stupid act of a woman desperate to try to fit into a life that makes no sense?  Am I destined always to be the square peg beating the crap out of myself, trying to get into the round hole that is “normal” functioning?

I don’t even care if I function normally.  Just help me function any way!  Any way at all!  And help me not to die.  I’m not praying to any one.  I’m just making a general request as is my right to ask the Universe since I am a being who has been given the spark of life and conscious thinking.  Help me to use it.  Help us find a way to life in some sort of consistent manner.  Help us to want to live the life we‘ve got – whether or not we can EVER make any damn sense of it.

Dedicated to:  My Support System (You know who you are.)

Thanks as always to:  Jim Dollar Photography We love your work – and we love YOU!

Posted in Dissociative Identity Disorder, My Inheritance, My Life Today, My Personalities, Where Am I Now?.

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Gestation: Reflections On the New Year

Louisiana City Cemetery Scene

City Cemetery, Louisiana by Jim Dollar Photography

So, it’s that time again.  Time for a New Year and the wonder over whether or not there will be a new me.  Perhaps, several new me’s.  It seems that I have a brain and a life that is always reinventing itself.  Sometimes to my betterment, sometimes to my detriment.  Still, I’m never that.  Never “still”.

I search behind me and in front of me, looking for common threads.  Common events and relationships that define the base me.  Something of stability to hold onto in this shifting plane that is my life.  I have lived so many, many lifetimes, and I’m not talking about having been reincarnated.  I mean within this lifetime.

All of the lovers.  All of the different times, and the different ages that I’ve lived with the souls that interact with me as my children here in this place that I call life, on this planet that others call Earth, in these years that I’ve called “now” in the stair-step progression of the thing called time – that thing I flow through like an unfamiliar, alien liquidity to my awareness.

I awoke again last night in a familiar panic.  It’s a panic that I’ve felt on and off since I was at least as young as five.  Perhaps even earlier, but I clearly remember the panic from when I was five.  Then, like now, I became aware of myself trapped, here, in this physical form, owning the experiences that happen to these senses that are attached as input receivers in this physical self I occupy.

I panic because I don’t understand WHY I am in here.  I don’t understand WHAT it is all for.  I’m confused about this idea that my hand is my hand, and that another person’s hand is his or her hand.  I’m acutely aware of the fact that others feel, when they look down at their selves, this same sense of being trapped inside of something and looking out and wondering, “Why?”

Except, I’m told, most of them don’t.  Most of them aren’t wondering.  They’re just living.  Taking their being, and their right of being, for granted.  I envy them, really.  I envy their peace and the fact they aren’t awakened in the night with these troubled dreams of a spirit in chains to a physical reality that feels all wrong for them.  That feels like a pair of ill-fitting clothes smeared with heavy grime and mud and history.

Just as soon as that happens, though, just as soon as I get that feeling that I can’t breathe, that I’m suffocating in this flesh, that my life is a purposeless torture, a personal hell from which I cannot awaken…as soon as this perception of reality becomes the dominating factor in this organic machine that is my brain, I find the valley before me open onto a brilliant sunrise.  I come to feel the arms of Earth wrap around me, and the energy of a soft, rolling mountain range gather me to her bosom and hold me tightly until the blanket of night replaces her, wrapping Orion’s starry, shining gaze upon my comforted countenance, the eloquent music of Ocean’s tide lulling me back to peaceful slumber.  And then, oh, then, I am right, exactly right where I belong!

It is then that the wonder at the miracle of my being juxtaposes the knowing, painful mystery of it.  I am grateful for the fact that I am AWAKE, no matter how hard reality has had to pinch me in order to keep me so.  “One day,” I tell myself, “one day it will all come together and make sense to you.  One day, this same awareness that is you will be looking back at you, just as you look back upon your childhood self of this brief lifetime – and when you do, you will feel love and compassion for the confusion of the child that you currently are.  One day,” I tell myself, “you will be large enough to contain both the beauty and horror of existence in equal degrees, and this will pose no conflict for you.”

Until that time dawns, I guess that I shall continue to wake up in the dark, my heart pounding, a cold sweat dripping it’s salty burn into my recently opened eyes.  Until then, I’ll soak in the wonders when I can, spread my arms with loving as wide as they can go, and take my comfort from what ever pitying source crosses my path to offer it.

As I map out the ticking of the clock to show me into a New Year, a New Me, I keep in mind that it is but a mere shadow of another, important countdown.  The one where I find myself in that place called Heaven, Nirvana, Paradise.  That one where my AWAKENESS comes into synch with the reality I occupy, and I can and will, at last, don the clothing that fits exactly upon Me.  At least for a spate of rest, until I broach, yet again, another unrest.  Another spurt of discomfort whose purpose, like now, spurns me to grow again, and again, and again into the endless, wondrous, birthing process that we all must labor through.  The forever, neverending birthing of Me!

Special thanks, as always to: Jim Dollar Photography

Posted in My Life Today, Where Am I Now?.

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The Reality of 4-EVER

Cape Hatteras at Daybreak

CAPE HATTARAS AT DAYBREAKÂ Â Â Â by Jim Dollar Photography

I step out of the shower and look down at the painter’s helper, a little stool with a handhold cut in the middle.  It used to be hers.  Here it sits, in another woman’s house – just as it sat in storage at yet another woman’s.  My mind travels over the times, touches on the visual memories of how it was, what it went through, what it was used for and saw in the home that I shared with her.  The home that I shared with my Denise.  Soon, it will be four years since she left me.  Four years since she died and left me to deal with the kind of unrequited love that we people are destined to when we can not stop our love for one who still holds onto our hearts from the beyond.

I don’t know what this thing called love is, much less what this thing called “unconditional love” is, much less this kind of love and pain that reaches from beyond the grave to wrap around my heart and knock it around with some sort of never-ending comfort/pain/knowingness.

I want to be over her.  Sometimes, I want to be free of her.  Sometimes, I want a break from the pain and the tragedy that she and I became.

I say it over and over and over again:  “If she were here, if she were still alive, I know that she and I wouldn’t be together.”  It’s the truth.  A sad truth, but truth nonetheless.  For you see, I’ve grown since her death.  I’ve become the independent woman that she wanted me to be.  The kind of woman who would never continue tolerating the kind of abuses that her alcoholism and drug abuse put me through.

I’m not one of those people who makes others into saints just because they’ve died, just because they are no longer capable of making the kind of huge fuck-ups that we all manage to accomplish while we are traversing this rocky road that being alive is.  Death doesn’t erase our mistakes.  What we are/were, remains.

No, I WANT to remember her in her pure humanness.  All of her flawed beauty thoroughly intact.  After all, if she were perfect, if she hadn’t struggled, how would I justify the ways in which I failed her?  How could I stand my own imperfections?

None of us are supposed to be perfect.  Our cracks and scars are a part of what make us unique.  They map out the places we have traveled through, where and what we have been, the dirt and calluses on our feet bearing testament to our effort in climbing up the steep cliffs, taking the falls upon the sharp rocks that are always waiting below when we slip from our attempts to top the mountains of trial that are always before us.

And slip she did!  Just like me, she had parents who were deeply troubled.  Just like me, she had a childhood that shouldn’t have been visited upon anyone.  Just like me, she started off way behind the mark as life dealt her challenges that no person should have to bear.  Especially no person who is a little, tender-hearted, sensitive child.  Like me, she felt things so deeply that, at times, it was too much to bear.

Is this why I love her so, still?  Is she simply a reflection of myself?  I see this in almost every person, features of my own self looking back at me through the universal mirror of the eyes of others.

There were so many parallels of her life and my own.  Ridiculed by others for different reasons, I escaped into the books that dyslexia only served to make mere mocking, further dysfunctions for her.  She escaped into violence, and into alcohol.  I created worlds, even people, inside my mind, into which I escaped.  She made lines of white powder and snorted them up her nose so that she could skew her perception of her world into something bearable.

I used to get so angry when she was alive with me!  I would get so angry when she wouldn’t TRY to get better!  I wanted to be worth it.  I wanted US to be worth it.  I wanted her to know that SHE WAS WORTH IT!!

She didn’t believe it.  She didn’t feel it.  I don’t think she ever felt it.

Wherever she is now, if anywhere, I hope she understands, knows, at last, that she is worth it.  So what if she was transgendered?  So what if she was dyslexic?  So what if she was alcoholic, drug-addicted and bi-polar?  It makes her no less wonderful, no less a miracle for surviving as long as she did – and all the while, her tender heart intact, as covered over with bravado as it was.

I knew her.  In her glory.  In her failures.  In her humanness.

And I loved her.  Love her still.  Am as trapped as any trapped person has ever been.

We are intertwined, she and I.  In the awfulness and the wonderfulness of living and dying.  So, I guess that what I need to come to terms with is a simple acceptance of it.  An acceptance of the fact that when I was born, a part of her was already born into the history that would become the events of my life.  A part of her was born into me as my light came on in this world.  She was always, even before I met her, a part of what fueled my light.

For, if she is a part of the darkness and pain that has been brought to my self here, in this world, she is also, most definitely a part of my light and if it is evermore in no way except to burn the fuel that is me – – shine Denise Ansley!  SHINE!

Further Musings On Denise’s Death

…And More

…And Ever More Musings


Dedicated to: My Denise

Jim Dollar PhotographyThanks for your beautiful photographs – and all of the other beauty that you’ve lent my life.

Posted in My Denise, My Loves and Lovers.

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