Fractured.

 I'm typing this up as I wait for dinner to cool off. I am having a hard time staying in the present. Some of it is recurring flashbacks. The anti-anxiety medication is helping with that to some extent. Some of it is I keep losing time. I have suspected for a very long time that I have dissociative identity disorder. It's creepy and disturbing when people talk to me about conversations we've had that I have absolutely no recollection of. It's equally disturbing when I'm told how I acted in situations that I don't remember. These are not people recounting trauma situations but just common occurrences that I happened to have been entertaining or said something memorable. 

I don't know what to do about this. I have felt like there's more than one person in my head since I was a child. I've been journaling about it off and on for the last three years. It's really hard and rather distressing. There's at least six 'others' in my head, probably more lurking in the dark. Some come out when I am handling distressing situations. Some come out when I am overwhelmed and just barely holding it together. When I go from distressed to suddenly calm, I've switched. I don't know 'who' is in the driver's seat. Sometimes, I have the impression of watching what is going on. Other times, I just am not there. Ask me later about any element of the situation and I may have a vague recollection of the beginning and then nothing after that.

I had a therapist laugh off my concerns and telling me it was impossible because I didn't change my clothing or mannerisms around them. I stopped seeing that therapist not too long after that incident. Another therapist took what I said and encouraged me to write about it. I would have continued working with them but they moved to another practice. There's a reason why I am not obvious about my fractured psyche. 

As a kid, if I didn't act what my parents viewed as 'normal' I got punished, severely. I was verbally, psychologically, and physically abused by them for a very long time. It wasn't safe to let the 'others' be known. They stole out when things got to be too much and carried the weight of the situation. It didn't happen all the time, I've got plenty of trauma that I remember clearly, but it happened enough that I don't remember almost a solid decade of my life. Some people tell me "Oh, that happens to everyone." It doesn't happen to everyone. You don't have a blank slate where your memories are supposed to be and a gaping sense of dread and terror.

There are bits and pieces of my life before I turned 20 that stand out clearly. There's bits and pieces of my life after I turned 20 that don't stand out clearly with this foggy sense that it happened to somebody else. People have laughed at me and said 'You're so random.' with out knowing that different parts of me come out to handle situations that are high stress or hit certain emotional buttons. People have laughed and said that I was the 'craziest' person they knew in high school but they didn't know that I was struggling with undiagnosed bipolar II and this other horseshit of having a brain that doesn't function right because of repeated trauma. They just figured that I was 'random' and 'eccentric'. 

Here I am in my early 40s and I'm trying real hard to figure out why I can't remember things. I'm trying to process trauma. I'm trying to figure out why in hell I can't sleep at night with out some heavy hitting sedation. I don't have a therapist. No one in my area takes my insurance. I tried to switch to the one that everybody takes around here but I got denied because I have diabetes. It's bullshit, but it's the way it is. So, I take what the one therapist who said "Ok, let's explore this concept and see what we find." and I give it all an effort to make it work.

It's scary as fuck. It seems like the more I work on this, the more there is to do and the more I find myself in weird situations that my brain just doesn't work right in. I don't wander off. I never have. I wasn't allowed to leave. There was no where I could have gone anyways because we lived in the boonies. (Farther out in the boonies than where I live right now.) So, I built interior worlds and hid there while things went down.

But now those interior worlds are bleeding into the real world. My brain is desperately trying to process something and I don't know what it is. All I know is that the last three and a half months have been difficult. And that I'm hearing them in my head again. I'm not hallucinating. But, the 'others' are getting vocal again. I don't know if it's because I finally feel safe enough to let this happen. I don't know if it's a symptom of some kind of major traumatic memory about to surface. I have no idea. And that scares the fuck out of me.