So, I thought I was losing my mind...

First, I need to open this blog post with two different things that make sense only to the people involved.

Stargazer, thank you so much for talking with me last night. That call helped me alot. While I'm still feeling incredibly anxious, I am not quite as ready to fly apart with it all.

Stormcrow, I'm sorry that my recent e-mails have been ... well... have like they have. I think this may help make sense of some of it.

For years, I've been terrified that I was crazy in a bad way. It's only recently (within the last 10 years) that I have begun to understand that even if I was, it's not a terrible end of the world thing. And, it wouldn't make me a bad person. It'd be like saying that the person with a bad head cold was somehow morally deficient because they caught the cold to begin with. Morally deficient people are not the only ones who get sick. Crazy in a bad way, by the way, means not able to really function.

I suppose I really should start at the beginning here. When I was a kid, I was regularly threatened with being insitutionalized by my parents, specifically my mother. This was the same woman who talked about me as though I wasn't her daughter when I didn't behave the way she wanted me to. She still does that to some extent and still even will talk about me as though I'm not even in the room. To be honest, I have always hated that and I think it is a toss up between which of those two I hate more. I was regularly accused of being a hypchrondriac, by both my parents and several others in my family. I was also reminded on a frequent basis that I was a difficult and expensive birth, that I was an investment and I had better not fuck up. The last bit of that statement was generally implied most of the time, but on occasion it was said to me by my mother.

If you're seeing a pattern here, it's not a coincidence. I found myself frequently in the position of having the blame for alot of different crap shoved on me and when blame wasn't shifted to me, I found a great deal of encouragement to blame myself for it. As a result, I lived alot of my childhood in my head. I've a fantasy novel that I'm working on that is based to a large extent on those years of retreating to inside my own head to escape the misery that I faced frequently. I feel terrible to admit it, but I was psychologically abused as a child. And I'm still struggling with the effects of it today.

So, between high levels of stress with this whole crap with our apartment, my on going anxiety over money, and dealing with a bit of depression, I kinda freaked out over the last month. I was corresponding some with a person who has dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder. As he was describing his experiences, I saw alot of parallels between my own situation. Then, this whole bit of hogwash started with the new apartment. I found myself in a difficult place.

I had found myself suddenly facing the echos of my mother's bullshit with the question if I actually had another personality. I looked at the 'voice' in my head and I became terrified. Did that monster in my head of my repressed shadow-side actually have a 'life' of it's own? What of the other 'aspects' of my personality? Did my bit of minor gender identification issues (which again are due to how I was raised) actually indicate a split personality?

These questions have been there for a long time. In the past, I had dismissed them as foolish. Or I simply refused to look at them. I was building up to something of a crisis on this matter and I think all of the stress in these other areas came together to reveal this. Between my having difficulty sleeping and dealing with some of my PTSD issues, I found myself suddenly flailing around in terror over a new possible problem. Last night, I had a conversation with Stargazer and I found reassurance that even if I did have multiple personalities, I was ok.

She then proceeded to explain to me that I never did manifest another personalitiy in the years that we'd known each other, and that being a cranky and surly person in the morning didn't count as that either. We talked for a while. Alot of the conversation revolved around my mother, as they frequently do. I came away from the conversation on stable ground. Suddenly, it didn't feel like I was just going to fly to peices.

It also left me feeling more then saddened by things between my mother and I. It had taken me almost two years of therapy to recognize that I was abused by my parents. It's something I've been struggling with ever since that recognition came to me, almost 10 years ago. It seems like there is always something new revealed as having it's roots back in my childhood.

My massive guilt complex, the anxiety problems, and my attempts to be superwoman all go back to that. I know that I've a long standing problem with depression. While some elements of it may be neurophysical, more of it is just because of how I was raised. I realize that my fears regarding not having enough money to buy food is rooted in my childhood when we had times like that. Sure, my mother may act like my brothers and I didn't know it, but we knew when she and my father didn't eat so that we could.

I don't know how to break away from this stuff. Stargazer suggested talking to a psychologist. I don't know if we can afford that or if it's even something that'd be covered by the health insurance that my husband has thru work. It is such a struggle not to just go find a corner and cry in it when the enormity of it all hits me. At least I can say that I'm not as bad off as I was afraid I was. After all, I manage to take care of my son and our home reasonably well. And I don't have mpd/did, just a lot of bad messages to get out of my head.