Saturday 15 December 2018

My Dissociative Life. Amazing. And Amazingly Shit.

Yesterday:

Do amazing things. See amazing things. Be with amazing people.

Get home. Burst into tears. Yet again. As the voices and parts say and shout so much.

Today:

Do amazing things. See amazing things. Be with amazing people.

Get home. Burst into tears. Yet again. As the voices and parts say and shout so much and I have to argue even to have a cup of tea because one of them has been seeking to impose a 9pm curfew on it.

....

Some things I laugh about. The banana argument two of them had this week is funny to me even though it resulted in my head hurting quite a bit from being hit. But what's now been recognised as this complex dissociative disorder is pretty damn shit. I would not wish this on anyone. I laugh because what's the alternative? I might be able to do some kind of stand up comedy about it but it's mostly horrible to live with and I do have to hold back or the comedy would get very dark indeed. (Very fortunate to meet someone this year with an equally dark and macabre mental health comedy streak.)

...

I wrote a rant about something today. I wasn't going to post it but Beth says that I should. She supports and understands and has endured twenty-five years of my mental health with the highs and lows. I've been bloody fortunate to be married to someone who stuck by me through so much and for so long.

And this rant is where a few things get very honest. You ain't seen nothing yet! Some people won't like it one little bit.

They don't matter. The people I nearly cried on massively earlier this evening about it supported it. Probably because every one of them knows me - we've met together for quite a while - and has seen at least some of what it's taken to be a part of that group. It's taken a lot for all of that group to be there.

I'll post the rant tomorrow. It'll be extended. With more honesty about childhood, family, dissociation, and so on.

But there will also be gratitude. For all the people, groups, and organisations around me at different times that have stood by me in my struggles to not only stay alive and exist but to push myself (sometimes rather too far for me) into recovery (with set backs - it's only a couple of weeks since I very, very, very nearly committed suicide - I can perform some kind of theatre show but I am far from being well) and a live that's more than worth living and is filled with things beyond anything I dreamed would ever be possible for me.

Without all those other people I would not have made it through this year. I am incredibly fortunate to have all those people. On the other hand I only have them due to years of sodding hard work to get to the places where I've met them and done amazing things with them, often being enabled by their own wonder.

Being incredibly fortunate is one thing. But DID - or DDNOS - is crap. Very crap. Clarity isn't bringing peace. The beginnings of clarity is making things many times harder. In the short term. No, as I said, I would not wish this on anyone even though I were filled with infinite hatred for them. Nobody deserves this.

Wednesday 12 December 2018

My Head Hurts - Dissociation and the State of the World

First post here in a very long time. There's such a lot to tell you. It's been a very full year with lots of highs and lows. I end the year having done plenty of things I thought were impossible for me. I also end it on a waiting list for treatment for a complex dissociative disorder (some form of DID or DDNOS) that we uncovered in psychology appointments this year having fought for those appointments for a very long time. Tonight - after a bad day in which parts in my head have not made life easy. It's not an easy head. But I've also managed an autism group in Gateshead and have got to choir and at home have gone through the comedy part of a play I'm performing in this week. The play is just another "impossible" thing. I need to write a list of all the new things this year. This life building thing can be achieved and I have a few long term goals. But my head is more than a challenge too. This year we've discovered part of the reason why. Next year we can start to deal with it in therapy. I've had mental health issues for all my life and have tried all kinds of ways to overcome them. It turns out the this complex disorder is the kind of thing to maintain all the other mental health issues. Everything I've tried has in effect been a bit like deciding I hate leaves on trees and chopping them all off manually in the autumn before looking proudly and happily at a leafless tree, believing I'd solved the leaf issue. There's a good chance that this year has revealed the areas we need to look at in order for the mental health issues to not be maintained. It's going to be bloody difficult to look at them. But at least we know they're there and I will have a good help in the place I've been referred to. What's been consciously revealed is tough. Unbearably tough sometimes. But it's incredibly positive to have revealed it. ... Owwwwwwwwww.

This head hurts so much but we're proud because we made choir and did a good job.

We are struggling so we're going to write a garbage post which will make us sleepy enough to turn to sleeping. It's been too much this afternoon and tonight but we did well at choir and it is always good to see the people there. I don't know them as well as I'd like but every one of them is marvellous. And we're fiercely feminist too. The national media said so.

Also hurting:

That we have the government we have.

That my head and my mental health is infinitely more strong and stable than the current Conservative regime.

That the USA has an even more crap head who has a tantrum when the country doesn't want to pay for a stupid and racist wall that he promised another country would pay for as one of his unbelievable number of false points in his garbage verbal campaigning.

That every Brexit option stinks but 52% (2 years ago before we all knew more about it that wasn't just lies and spin from the likes of Boris, a man who has only been sacked for lying several times and whose welcome to other people includes words like piccaninnies and I can hardly believe he got away with that one. "Sorry I'm a fucking racist shit." "Oh, that's alright, here be foreign secretary." Would a supposedly non-racist PM make a fucking racist shit foreign secretary? Boris may look lovable and cuddly (or not - I wouldn't. Yuck) but so does a puffer fish.

That too many Americans fell for Trump. That too many British people fell for Boris. That most of us fall for shit things a lot of the time.

That our government deliberately chooses poverty for the most vulnerable members of our society and thus deserve less than zero respect. Mrs. May and all other Christians in the party should be beaten round the heads with hardback copies of the Peace and Justice Study Bible. And as for Jacob with his justice and love denying brand of Catholicism, anyone who does the no abortion thing (which I don't agree with but understand within Catholic belief systems) but doesn't do the preferential option for the poor thing (which I do agree with and understand within Catholic belief systems) has made themselves into a devil and the Bible itself says they won't be accepted by God because of works - in verses quotes in the Catholic Catechism.

Climate change. We have 12 years so stave off total collapse and ensure a bit of suffering is limited. And already there are mutant hybrid species of puffer fish coming into existence. In a month we can say we have 11 years.

Fundamentalist creationists who deny evolution ask bloody stupid questions about whether anyone has ever seen a new species come into existence. There are many millions of these people in the USA. See its even more crap head.

Racism. Trying to understand racism hurts my head. Not its effects. Those are understandable. But its existence. My head can't fathom hatred based on anything even slightly linked to melanin.

The way far right activists critique Islam, sometimes in ways that ex-Muslims and reformers agree with, but in such a way as to demonise a billion people rather than to just be philosophical religious critique without which religion stagnates. And how acceptable and important rational critique of things becomes unacceptable when extremist and prejudiced tosspots transform it into fear and loathing of people who should not be feared or loathed.

The way the moderate right has become closer to the far right and how the far left is polarised in other ways that aren't realistic or inclusive.

That it does no good to point out glaring errors in conspiracy theories or in posts by people who believe them because what good are facts in the face of conspiracy? Even when things are glaringly wrong and when a bit of research and reading gives ironclad proof that they're wrong there's still no point granting to a conspiracy theorist the results of that research. They have stuffed their ears with more cotton wool than you would think possible.

That sometimes I do that research and point out the glaring errors that I could prove in the strictest court of law were errors, even though I know it won't do any good at all and that anything said against a conspiracy theory won't be listened to by the theory believer because it's like a fundamentalist religious belief where cognitive bias and so much else won't entertain the possibility of error.

It didn't for me when I had a fundamentalist religious belief. We saw doubt as weakness of faith. I've read other religious people since who see doubt as a place of strength.

So many things can make a head hurt.

Tonight and today it's been the interplay and argument between different parts. And that one of them has hit me too much even while another was trying her best to stop him. I hope the waiting list for therapy isn't too disastrous.

"Not-God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and the courage and energy next year to be more involved in activism to change the things I can ..."