WHOOOT! I am so tired. It’s nearly 3pm and I’m in my dressing gown still. I submitted my journal and drawing portfolio last night, and the lecturer said I had ‘a strong body of work’. Yay. Here’s some photos for you – some you’ve seen part finished, and one I did yesterday in a style I’ve never tried before. I submitted 9 complete works and a folder of experiments. All are A1 size (some are close-ups). I’m pretty proud of myself. 🙂
The Hearing Voices Network is taking off! Everything is due at college tonight. o.O I’m flat our replying to emails, arranging meetings, bring people on board, and finishing my drawing journal and portfolio. My lounge is full of easel. Green smoothies have made their way into my diet. I am tracking ovulation in the mornings which means no first trip to the loo mostly still alseep and crashing back to bed because I have to pee on things and read results. I did my crazy massive tutorial for Art History class on Monday and got a HD. 🙂 Things are happening! Well, things except much sleep. >.<
A couple of people I’ve never even met have blown me away by sending me money. When I discovered this, I seriously went to bed and cried! How amazing! A number of months back, as part of my ‘try to adjust to the idea of getting paid for some of the things you do’ campaign (ie hours in therapy with my hands sweating, having panic attacks) I decided to set up a ‘donate‘ button on this blog. Lots of bloggers ask for a little money, a cup of coffee (chai, in my case, thanks) for those who can afford it if they’ve got something useful from the blog. I’ve always been ambivalent and anxious about possibly exploiting someone vulnerable and appreciative who can’t afford it. I hope that’s not happening! But wow, to have someone reach out like that, it’s just… incredible. Seriously mind blowing! I haven’t touched it yet, I can’t figure out what to do with it… I could print welcome packs for my networks! Or buy Christmas gifts. Or add to the car repair fund.
It makes me feel like I’m doing something useful. It gives me hope that if I can just untangle the 17 books that are trying to write themselves through me and get ONE of them out, in some kind of coherent order, that people might actually buy it. Or pay for art in an etsy store. Something! Something where I don’t have to work at the icecream packing store down the road but can actually do some of the things I’m so passionate about to support my family. Not that the ice cream packing plant doesn’t come with perks. I don’t know. I’m in a massive ‘doubt everything’ hole at the moment – just signed up for more college art degree classes next year, didn’t hear back (yet?) about the mental health job I applied for, still don’t know if Rose is going to be employed by Christmas, trying to get pregnant… argh! And so grateful to all of you, even the ones who read but have never spoken to me. You’re part of my world, part of my community. You guys all, in one way or another, help a freak like me to have a place in the world. I don’t always feel it and I can’t always express it, but seriously THANKYOU. Thankyou for listening, for reading, for sharing your thoughts, for reaching out, for donating money, for bringing soup, for knocking around on facebook with me, for hiring me for work, for playing cards, for coffee and chats, for sharing books, for being part of my world. Thankyou so damn much. Thankyou.
I painted this the other day… love the vibrancy of oil colours. Trying to decide whether to use a different medium for the image for each of my websites (business, the DI, the HVNSA) to give them a different flavour.
I still really love this image as a metaphor for both multiplicity and community – diversity, coming together with one heart. I’d like to get it as a tattoo one day.
So, it turns out I’m not one of the parts who knows how to cook pancakes. Damn.
I’m off all the hormones now, counting days and figuring out how to track ovulation. It does seem to involve a fair variety of things to lick, pee on, and other odd behaviour. Yesterday we picked up an ovulation tracking kit. We sat in the van outside the chemist reading all the instructions together and Rose asks me ‘so what method do you think you’ll use, peeing on the stick, or peeing into a cup and putting the stick in it?’ I attempt to explain with dignity that I have limited experience in peeing onto or into anything but shall practice.
Rose and I are desperately excited and also daunted about how challenging this could be and how long it could take. It’s kind of hard to be rational, I feel like I’m either going to pregnant the first month, or not for a year. I can’t make myself believe it might be, say, month 4. We’re preparing for a trial run of inseminating with our awesome donor in early December. We’re also going to get a blood test on day 21 of my cycle to double check I am ovulating.
Rose is sick again, her psoriasis makes her terribly vulnerable to these awful ear infections. Each time she uses antibiotics she’s at more risk of developing an antibiotic resistant strain of the bacteria. Apparently she’s also increasing her risk of knocking her skin bug balance out badly enough to wind up with a fungal infection in there too, which is what the doc reckons has happened this time. She started getting better after going onto the antibiotics then a day later went downhill badly. So her face and neck hurt like hell, her jaw is stiff, she’s weak and sleeps all the time. It’s kinda scary to be honest! I miss her when she’s like this. She slept over last night when the locum didn’t get to us until almost 1am, and I loved the way she reached out in her sleep or held my hand whenever I rolled over.
Everything’s become infused with this last glow… We talk about Christmas thinking it might be our last without kids, we have a lie in on Sunday mornings and tell each other we should soak this up while we can. And the possibility of months or years trying is something we try to adapt to, but every time I say it to myself, something small inside me squeaks like a squirrel that’s been kicked and curls up into an unhappy ball. We had a chance to visit a birthing suite at our local hospital and it was pretty cool, very different to a delivery suite, large and comfortable with a big bed and a spa for soaking in. It was really exiting and a bit frightening. I felt a long way away from my own territory. I’m doing my best to give myself lots of space to process things before they happen. I’m hoping that book writing will give me a project to focus on while we try.
I’m not quite back in the zone I had going for work before the surgery yet, still struggling to walk far or eat regular meals, and work is erratic because college stuff is due next week and Rose is ill, not to mention I’m behind on housework. Between the surgery and choosing to link my mental health work to my face painting, I’ve scared off about $2,000 worth of work in the past few months, compared to this time last year. I’m expecting that loss to double by the end of this year. That’s sad and hard, but hopefully as I pick up more mental health work it will be worth it. It has been really nice to be in less physical pain from all the painting than I was at this time last year.
Life goes on hey.
Charcoal and pastel. Haven’t quite finished the jacket yet, I’m always so slow! I’m definitely improving with practice though, this was daunting as hell and it’s not a bad effort for a couple of hour’s work.
I see myself, standing in the forest of Princess Mononoke. I’m robed, head down, hands outstretched, holding a wide, shallow basin which holds dark red blood. I’m offering it.
In my mind, silently, I say the words over and over “this is not something you’re taking, this is something I’m giving.” It’s done with the full awareness of pain and distress, of past trauma. They are not gone or silent, they are present, and yet it is still done. It is a choice, it is a cost in pursuit of something of value, an exchange, a sacrifice. These are things I understand.
About 15 years ago a traumatic incident triggered a sudden phobia of blood tests and drips for me. I’ve battled it mostly unsuccessfully since then, seen trauma specialists, dissociation specialists, and anxiety specialists. Nothing much has worked. Sometimes it’s been so bad I can’t sleep the night before a test. My hands sweat, I tremble, go white, dizzy, weak, and vomit. My head explodes with distress, people screaming and crying, begging us to get away and get the nurse away from us.
This week we went off for a session of hypnotherapy with a woman who’s particular interest is blood or needle phobias. Of course, we had to do some work to calm her anxiety about working with a multiple, as she was quickly overloaded by the complexity of our situation, and embedded in a ‘dysfunction’ model of multiplicity. We said to her “forget all this, this is just details. We’re still human. We have the same needs and fears.” She said to us “hypnosis is just dissociation by another name”.
She did a session, talking about safety. We switched a lot and had an intense inner conversation, figuring out what the block has been (the parts who are not afraid do not inhabit tender body places such as inner elbows), which part is needed (our night poet who is deeply familiar with ‘strength in vulnerability’), what the challenge was (they live in night, in solitude or under stars, fluorescent lights and a blood clinic are about as far from their territory as we can get), and some work arounds for it (draw on the skills we have in theatre to take over and own a space, dress in their clothes, they don’t have to be present for long, use a character or setting that fits to focus on).
So we did, and it worked. Yesterday was the first blood test I’ve had in 15 years with no trace of phobia or trauma reaction. The shrink didn’t do it to us, or fix us. She came into a space with us, that’s all. It’s the same space our night poet inhabits naturally, it’s the same space we access when we do focusing. In that space, we connected with each other and had a complex conversation that lead to answers. We can do this ourselves. We will start a new journal for focusing. This is powerful. There’s hope in it.
There’s also risk. The phobia has been sustained by many things, including an attempt to prevent self harm. We made a call that stopping self harm was no longer going to be our focus, that it was not the real problem. Pain, loneliness, and self hate were the problem. So the phobia isn’t needed. Other things are in this box we’ve tipped over, like traumatic memories of medical procedures as a child. Like a desire to claim and own our own body. Like fear of and fascination with the medical. Like a history of Endo and Adeno that involves a lot of pain and blood. I don’t know where it will take me, but I’m ready to find out. I don’t want or need this bogeyman, this self induced nightmare to try to protect me anymore. I’ll risk disruption and self harm to be able to actually engage with this territory and make some progress through it. I’m not finished, it’s not over. I’m just beginning.
Today was trans day of remembrance, all around people are lighting candles and holding events to remember those trans people who have lost their lives.
You may be trans or have friends or family who are. You may know a little about it or nothing at all. You might understand it intimately or find it deeply strange and unfamiliar. It doesn’t matter, you don’t need an in depth knowledge of gender to get that violence against this community is wrong. Horrifyingly common and deeply wrong.
When trans people are constantly ‘othered’- treated as freaks rather than people, when they’re talked about in the media in a sensational way, when they’re always the serial killer, always the punch line of the joke, when the worst thing in the world that could happen is discovering the person you’re out on a date with is trans, we set the context in which this violence occurs. People are bullied, harassed, beaten. More subtle but just as devastating, finding and keeping employment, safe housing, maintaining connection to family, all can be so much more difficult. Rates of homelessness, mental illness, and suicide are frighteningly high. In healthy, inclusive, safe environments, they’re not! But so many trans people have to live in anything but safe places.
So, be aware. You don’t have to understand a lot if you don’t want to, that’s fine. But notice the sense of threat, fear, and revulsion that underlie the jokes and ridicule… They’re the same things that feed the violence. People are hurt, and every year, people die. Help your spaces; your family, your college, your church, your playgroup, your workspaces, be safer. These people are not victims or freaks. Trans people are highly diverse, just like all people, ranging from angels to scumbags. But no one deserves to be killed for using the ‘wrong’ toilet. We can do better.
Rose and I are closer to starting to try for a baby. I’m down to 1/4 of the dose of hormones that keep my endo and adeno under control. We have a wonderful donor on board. I sleep at night cuddled up to a full body length pregnancy pillow and rub oil into my tummy to prepare dry skin for being stretched.
Hope and hopelessness grow in equal measure. “With dreams of a bright future comes also the dread certainty of loss.” You can try to ignore it, stuff it down, run from it, but it will speak to you in nightmares, it will wait for you at 3am, it will shiver in your bones and be a scream that only you can hear, beneath the humming of the world.
So we turn, and sit, and face the unthinkable thing. We are trying for a baby, who may die. Three weeks alive, or 6 months, full term stillborn, early death, accident, terminal illness, disappearance, suicide. To love on this earth is to open your heart to the guarantee of grief. My darling Rose has suffered the loss of six pregnancies. Each deeply desired, dearly loved and hoped for. Each child dreamed of and nurtured with everything that she had. Sometimes love is not enough.
Rose and I have struggled with grief. We’ve had very different needs and approaches and experiences, and this has torn us apart at times. We’ve navigated the loss of friends to suicide and sudden death, the anniversaries of miscarriage, loss of friendships and relationships dear to us. We’re been given many shadowed days to begin to understand each other in grief, to sit with the terror, and start to find our own ways through. We have often grieved alone. Grieving together with a partner or in a family is different. Denied grief, overwhelming grief, grief that shatters lives and tortures the mind is something we’re both familiar with in different ways. We know we’re vulnerable.
Everyone is vulnerable. Our culture often isolates the grieving. We do not speak the names of the dead, we do not know what to say, we visit avidly in the first month and when we’re most needed in the 6th month when the shock has worn off we’ve moved on to other pressing matters. We’ve pathologised much of the process of grief, and presented ideas of joy and sadness as being opposite poles a spectrum rather than separate, legitimate, and overlapping responses to life. Ask anyone who has lost a close friend the same week they gave birth to a child. Ask anyone who has fled an abusive relationship and grieved the loss of their hopes just as intensely as they experienced joy in their freedom.
You cannot ever be really ‘ready’ for loss, because when we think of this idea of being ‘ready’ we picture someone who will be unaffected and unchanged. This is not how grief works, any more than it is how love works. It changes everything in us and in how we see our lives. Some things suddenly become meaningless while others are lit up in the most intense way. You cannot be ‘ready’ when this is what ready means to you. But you can certainly be set up to fall hard. Beliefs such as ‘if god/the universe takes my child away it’s because I was not going to be a good parent to them’ will cause terrible suffering.
The way losses are explained can ease or deepen pain. Rose was once told by a doctor “your body is killing your babies, we don’t know why” which left her distraught and suicidal, with terrible self hate and conflict. Later on, coming across many other explanations for miscarriages, including things like “sometimes there is a problem and the body cannot sustain a pregnancy” or “sometimes babies are not put together right and they die early”, there were other ways to understand what had happened that were not personal and didn’t indicate intent to harm.
Not so long ago my sister’s beloved little cat Kiki died suddenly. It was horrible and a huge loss to her. It brought to mind our families rituals of grief around pets. Whenever a pet or rescued animal dies, we’ve always buried them in our yard. Sometimes wrapped in a cloth or placed in a box, but always in a grave that’s filled with flowers and leaves from the garden.
Kiki’s grave before burial
We don’t permanently mark the graves, although we do often place rocks or tree stumps over them to keep them undisturbed. The gathering of the flowers has become a very gentle way of returning the bodies to the earth, of connection with the cycles of nature. Pippi and Tessa, my darling rats, were buried under winter lillies. Charlie under autumn leaves and the last of the roses. Kiki under snowdrops. There’s something much gentler about heaping earth onto the plants instead of directly onto a body.
Rituals and other things that mark the loss can be deeply important but also difficult to come up with in the shock of grief. Having a history of them can give us a connection to other losses that’s both painful and encouraging, raising past pain but also reminding us that this is part of life and that there will be new joys.
In early miscarriage there’s often the challenge of not having a body to bury. A ritual such as placing flowers, visiting a tree, lighting a candle, or choosing a date to remember the ones who died can all give a ‘home’ to the grief. In infertility, likewise there is no defining moment or ritual to share. When a previous long term relationship of mine became abusive and broke up, I grieved the children we’d planned together, but I grieved them silently and alone. Grief consumes us with loneliness when we cannot share it, and without a place, date, or name, we don’t have the language to.
People have found ways to work with this. I named the child I’d been planning for and wrote them poems. I lit candles for them when I felt them near and the grief was strong. Rose and I are collecting two lists of baby names, one for living children, and one, pretty but impractical, for any that die. I’ve found an Australian Not-for-Profit called Heartfelt who provide cameras and other services to families who’ve had a stillborn or terminally ill infant. I’ve come across other unconventional ways to mark loss such as this photoshoot of a wedding prevented by death of the groom to be. I’ve read about death and loss and grief, and watched heartbreaking documentaries such as Losing Layla and the follow up Regarding Raphael. I’ve come across instructions on arranging the funeral for a baby, and how to get a certificate acknowledging the loss of an early pregnancy. I’ve found a local funeral company who are creative and flexible and offer home funerals, The Natural Funeral Company.
We’re still not ready. It’s not possible to be ready. But it is very possible to be in denial, under-resourced, inexperienced, and paralysed by fear. That, I’m determined not to be. Grief can destroy relationships. Rose and I hope to journey together, without regrets, whatever the outcome. We walk into the future, full of hope and fear and love, death in one hand and life in the other.
There is a lot going on. The ground under us is slippery.
I realise this is not news to those of you who follow my blog/facebook/have met me… But wow. What a week. Rose and I have done the high of proposing, and one major low of a respected friend who has always been comfortable about her being queer attacking her for the meaningless waste of money that was our engagement because she’ll fight to the end to prevent people like us from ever being allowed to get married. Random crap from strangers we’re pretty used to, but it’s hard when it’s someone you respect(ed). Queer relationships face a lot of stresses that straight ones just don’t, which is really sad and needless.
It’s been very up and down! There are a lot of pressures and changes happening. I’m peaceful, hopeful, scared, grieving, triggered, excited, confused, and tired. Most of the time I feel like I’m juggling it all okay. Sometimes I need to sit and cry about it all. Sometimes it’s been really hard and you start to do that thing where you wonder if it will always be this hard, and never easier, and you wonder how you could possibly bear it. Worse when we’re both triggered and down in a deep pit of loss and pain where it feels like we’ll never laugh again or touch without flinching or feel hope for the future. Then we weave a rope out and hold each other, weeping with relief, because sometimes the only thing more frightening than being alone in your pain is being deep in it with someone else who is just as lost.
We saw Tori Amos in concert last night. She was beautiful. I wept through half the songs.
I am embroiled in a lot of paperwork. I have done a lot of housework. We have put a LOT of stuff for our hard waste collection this week. College is wrapping up and I have 3 more major assignments due. I have handed all my tax related paperwork in for the past several financial years. I am waiting to hear back if I need to work more on them. I can’t wait to have it done, and have college done too. Christmas is coming up fast and I’m horribly unprepared and very broke.
I just found out that I received a HD for my Art History essay. Whoot! 🙂
Last night I halved again my dose of hormones. I’m nearly off the meds and ready to try for a baby. OMG! We have a steady trickle of baby things coming into the house. Last night Rose bought home a huge full length pregnancy pillow to hug when I sleep, helps reduce strain on hips and back. I bought three waterproof bags on special to stuff with cloth nappies when we’re out and about. Our collection of baby clothes and cloth nappies and soft carriers and very tiny shoes is now too large for the big zipped bag under my bed.
There was a big hot button topic on the discussion group on the huge DI facebook page I admin, and my head didn’t fall off. I’m pretty thrilled about that. There were a lot of follow up conversations with me in private that did make my head fall off a bit, but also clarified a lot of my ideas about the DI, what I’m trying to do and why. Which is pretty cool. I’ve finally realised that the biggest difference between what I’m trying to do with my mental health resources, and that of groups, organisations, and resources that I’m frustrated by is the value of Diversity. This can be a guiding principle for me in responding to my own multiplicity, it has moved me from a place of chronic threat to a place of relative peace and community. It’s now been written in to the home page of the DI and I’ve updated the other values too, and changed what used to be called Recovery to Dignity, which is the best word I could think of to encapsulate the principles of the original recovery model rather than what recovery has come to mean as the word has been distorted.
Check out the homepage: Diversity is welcome here!
Check out the new values: Diversity, Acceptance, Respect, Safety, and Dignity.
Month by month I understand more, I can articulate more clearly what I’ve been trying to do, what distresses me so much about the current models, and what we can replace them with. It’s exciting! I’m building something I care deeply about. It’s a legacy. I got several more messages recently from people thanking me for this blog or the DI or the other resources I’ve been putting out there. I stuff them in the space around my heart to keep me warm when I feel useless and insignificant. I’m considering applying for some jobs to give me more money and contacts in the mental health world while I’m trying to build my business. We’re still waiting to hear if Rose is getting her contract renewed. Life is in a strange state of flux. A cat that is both alive and dead in a box we haven’t opened yet.
When your week has been long and you’re working through the weekend too, this is how to start the day. 🙂 Eaten with apricot jam or lemon and sugar, in the garden, with gorgeous company! Suddenly the weekend looks pretty rosy. 🙂
Dissociative amnesia is not often spoken of. It doesn’t have the fascinating glamour of other forms of dissociation such as ‘multiple personalities’ or fugue states. It seems at times that there’s little to say of the losses of memory, of how frail our sense of the world is when we can’t recall it. It’s subtle but insidious, far more important and powerful than people think.
Some people with multiplicity also have very high levels of amnesia, a form of dissociation in memory. In this case, memories are laid down and stored in the brain, but the dissociation between different parts prevents access to them. So people can live in this surreal twilight world of ‘coming to’ and trying to figure out from context where they are and what has been happening. Life is a bewildering series of changes, something that slips through your hands as fast as you try to grasp it. Other parts live according to their own values, needs, fears, and understanding of the world, and you return to inherit their choices. The world of cause and effect can become brutal when you cannot recall the causes but must live with the consequences. Between skips of memory can pass hours, days, or years. Like Rip Van Winkle, you can wake to find your whole world is unfamiliar.
Other people experience amnesia without multiplicity. Sometimes it gets forgotten that this is very possible. People are told that if they cannot remember great chunks of their day – or their life – that they are probably multiple and other parts must have been living them. It’s actually very common to have amnesia without dissociation in identity, trauma both physical and psychological will often affect our capacity to remember, as can a massive collection of physical illnesses and injuries. Emotion is a key aspect of memory, so dissociation or disconnection in emotions can also affect our capacity to remember. Our ability to remember is also linked to our awareness of the passing of time. Memory is very complex and not particularly well understood.
We’re familiar with the challenges of minor memory loss, the scattered way of life when you’re constantly looking for your shoes, keys, car, phone. It’s not hard to extrapolate that to bigger, but still tangible losses – having found my car at last in the shopping centre car park, I can’t remember where I live. Standing at the checkout desperately trying to remember my PIN number, crying with frustration because I’m 19 but it feels like I have dementia. Trying to fill out welfare forms and having to ask other people what my birth date is. These bigger gaps are like black holes in the world, only in your world. Other people walk over an unbroken path, I fall through, into an emptiness. I float in a void and hope desperately I’ll find the other side of it, pick myself up quickly, dust myself off and keep walking, hoping no one notices my lack of normal functioning.
Other losses can be profound, harder to imagine. People who recall nothing of their lives before the age of 35, except small scraps. People who find that amnesia follows them, at a distance, like a stray dog, eating recall of all memories older than two years previous. People who wake in the morning next to their partner of 20 years and find they don’t recognise them. People who look in the mirror and are bewildered and surprised by who looks back at them. That moment of panic as a stranger approaches you in the street with an easy smile and greets you by name. For some there’s an overwhelming sense of shame, of being damaged and desperately trying to pass for human. For others the loss takes even the grief of loss, there’s a shrug, or a little wistfulness, or even relief. For some, behind the shield of amnesia, dreams and nightmares and all the things they once felt deeply about lurk in their shadows, haunt their sleep, beat against glass walls in their mind, evoking terror.
Without memory, it is difficult to have a stable sense of self. State-dependent memory cuts off a sense of connection to other parts. Each part has their own memories of life and draws their own conclusions based only on their own experiences. Mood dependent memory is the way we recall with ease our happiest moments when happy, and drown in all our saddest when sad. For people in the grip of intense, flooded emotions, such as some who are given the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, their whole lives and sense of self changes with each feeling. We sparkle when happy, and our whole world is beautiful! We are generous, kind, loving, full of good humour and good will. We bathe in the milk of human kindness, nothing is too big to forgive, too much to ask. When sad, the world is black, bleak, dark, terrifying, choked with misery, full of bad omens and evil portends. We radiate despair and flood everyone near them. We are preoccupied, desperate, overwhelmed by a sense of doom, like prophets who understand the world is ending and shake our warnings at people too blind to stop their partying and take up the ashes and sackcloth. When threatened we are sharp toothed, short of temper, we jump at shadows and see danger everywhere. We bite hands that come too close and nurse the aching wounds of all the wrongs ever done to us. We see the world as violent, unpredictable, deceptive. We look for the trick in every gesture, the hidden meaning in every word. We live with our teeth bared and bite before we’re bitten.
There are a thousand shades of emotion that people don’t even consider, like shades of colours. We are swept from heights to valleys, through quiet contemplation, deep sorrow, burning rage, cheerful spring mornings, restless wild moods, agonising pain, mischievous playfulness. When these states are split off from each other, people’s sense of self changes with each of them. Our sense of the world completely changes, our values and goals change, our expectations of the future changes, our approaches to our relationships change. The thread of consciousness that gives us our sense of stable self is snapped and chopped into bits. What has the potential to be a deeply lived, vivid experience of life becomes fractured, tormenting, and without growth.
For people with parts, fractures along these lines are common – one part will remember all things wonderful in life, another all things painful. When switching and trying to understand the self, multiples get lost in the many versions of self that leave evidence in their lives, the many handwritings in their journals. As a child I sometimes asked other people to describe me, feeling devoid of clarity about myself and seeking to use their eyes as a mirror. There’s an empty feeling beneath shattered memory that can make people feel like they don’t exist. Switching can be like forever walking into a room at the moment someone else walks out.
I once watched a documentary about Clive Wearing, who suffers from chronic severe amnesia due to a virus that damaged his brain. He has almost no recollection of his past (although he has what is called procedural memory, that is he can still do things he once learned to do, such as walk, dress himself, and play music). Clive cannot hold onto to new memories for longer than about 30 seconds. He lives entirely in the moment. He has a diary that moves me deeply. Each previous entry he crosses out, as he cannot recall having written it. Each new entry is achingly similar.
8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
There’s an agony here, an awareness of loss and a claiming of life that turns out to be without permanence or meaning. It’s deeply painful to see his distress and be unable to knit back together the damaged areas of brain that leave him in the void. The process is familiar to me, I recognise echoes of the same voids in myself and others.
For those of us with multiplicity, even when co-conscious, the emotional distance of watching but not living all our lives can create subtle breaks in our sense of self. Disconnection in emotion can fragment our ability to emotionally process our lives. Switching can be our own version of suddenly feeling awake. We sweep aside all the knowledge of other parts, sometimes even of our own previous memories, with this sudden conviction that now, I am truly awake. That now, I am really alive. This time, I understand. That this time, I’ll make it work. We do the same things, with the same tools, from the same values, backed by the same seeping aside of our history, and are horrified, surprised, and devastated when we get the same results. We cut ourselves off from our own wisdom, learn nothing from our history, disregard all previous insights. We make abrupt, unsustainable life changes, that change only the names and places, but repeat the same crisis dynamics over and over. When we are briefly aware of this sense of being trapped in a cycle, we feel so helpless and ashamed that it’s a relief to let amnesia or switching sweep it all aside. It’s like having an internal reset button, we go back to the start of the maze and go looking for the cheese all over again, often with the support of people around us and mental health staff who are pleased we’ve stopped being paralysed by our awareness of our futile cycles and are tackling our lives with vim again.
Health and recovery is sometimes sold to us as stopping this process. Limiting the extremes, preventing the switching, shutting down the states. A single part is chosen to be the ‘real’ one, a single emotional state or small collection of them are selected as the ideal, calmest and most rational. All the knowledge in the rest is discarded, all the wildness that gives life deeper mythic meaning, the wrestling with angels and demons, the being moved by things we can’t name are suppressed instead of connected. The goal becomes staying still instead of learning how to dance through them. Life becomes staid, the suppressed grow wilder and stronger, we find ourselves fighting not only with our weaknesses but also our strengths. We dissociate more and more from ourselves and our experience of life.
These processes are not unique to multiples. We all use dissociation to contain memories and feelings, to compartmentalise our worlds so that we can function. Not enough dissociation, being unable to contain emotions and memories can be just as destructive. It can be very difficult for any of us to step back and see the whole, to watch our own patterns and honour our history. We are all partly dependant on the stories we’ve told through which we understand ourselves and the world, and the perspectives of others. Sometimes they help, something they make us blind or tell stories that do us harm. Step back too far and we become numbed observers. Remain forever utterly in the moment, and we fall into the void. In that place, we run to anything that makes us feel better, calmer, safer, no matter how crazy. We self destruct with passionate, spectacular indifference. We search for a sense of self that the search itself destroys. The experience of the void can induce a sense of absolute panic, a desperate, frantic need to DO something, anything, to feel like you exist. Even blood, agony, the fireworks from your whole world being destroyed can feel better than the void.
For me, my journals – and now this blog, are the trail of breadcrumbs I leave for myself to help me see my selves. I write, and then I read, and re-read, seeing my selves through different eyes, charting my life. I find causes for effects. I learn about those people who have the most profound impact upon my life, but whom I have never really met – my other parts, the rest of ‘Sarah’. I am startled by the complexity of life, all the things I do not see that they do, the vast spectrum of colours I cannot perceive, of feelings I know only as words. There’s a sense of being blind, but learning life and self by its feeling in my hands, its taste in my mouth. Sometimes someone comes out who is missing so many threads of information, so much of what we have learned and how we have changed. Sharing our history connects them back to us, to the present moment, to all the gains and losses of our life.
I reconnect the thread of self by honouring that I am alive now, and that I have always been alive. All the parts are real, all the emotions are meaningful, all the experiences are important. I look for the common ground between all the states and parts, and I also learn to celebrate such wildly diverse ways of experiencing the world. I find the things that stay the same no matter what – a fear, a value, a need, a tiny chip of identity. I look for ways to carry them with me through all the changes, I notice the way that feelings or switching changes a value like kindness, the way different light sources make a gemstone look like it’s a different colour. Ideas are refined. A sense of self is not so much found as created. The void remains, but it no longer consumes everything, and my life is no longer spend running from it in fear and back to it in need.
This is the poem we wrote for Rose to propose with. We read it to her before revealing her ring.
How do you get engaged when there’s more than one of you?
There’s a million different ways. I’ve written before about multiplicity and relationships, and also about how switching affects relationships. Some people don’t know they have multiplicity when they enter into long term relationships. Some have a single part bond – one part is engaged, the others may have reactions ranging from excitement to indifference to horror, or be entirely unaware this is happening until they come back out maybe months or years later. Some may have group bonds where many parts have relationships of various kinds with the other person.
I’ve done romantic relationships before I knew about parts. They were tremendously challenging. Things would be going brilliantly and suddenly completely derail without warning – what I now know was being caused by different parts switching and needing completely different things. Child parts would be distraught at being kissed on the mouth, wild parts would need to run in the night, the poets needed ink and solitude and contemplation and freedom to be melancholy, the researcher craves new information and sharp minds to discuss with. The experience for the partner is one of ‘consistent inconsistency’. Some days I drink my tea this way and some that. Some days I love licorice and some days hate it. Some days I sink into a hug and some days flinch. Part based roles make it challenging to engage relationship boundaries – this part remembers all the good things, that part the bad. When the former part is out they are happy, easy to get along with, generous, and malleable. When the latter is out, they are frustrated, suspicious, and desperate to repair whatever trust has been broken or boundaries violated. Hence the bounce between ‘everything is awesome’ and ‘everything is broken’.
The real challenge was in discovering that they are both right but also both a little unbalanced because of the skewed information they have to work with. For years we thought my part who recalls the painful and frightening things was simply us being ‘depressed’, and that we should ignore everything we think and feel during those times as merely being the product of mental illness and low mood. Turns out she actually had some really important points, and that without her perspective we’re really vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. On the other hand, most of her proposed solutions were drastic and destructive. We had to take her input and work on something more useful to do with it.
I’ve also tried my hand at romance once I knew about my multiplicity but wasn’t ready to share it. That was challenging in a whole different way. Concealing switching was easy because that’s how my system usually works anyway, but trying to get a partner not to take it personally or think they’d done something wrong when I needed things to be platonic for child parts, for example, was really hard for me. I found that I started to feel like a sleeper agent with a cover story. There were real feelings and people and lives around me, but a central secret about who I was disconnected me, and the constant need to conceal and the terror of being outed caused me tremendous distress.
I’ve been in romances with multiples as well as singles, guys as well as girls. They are wildly different in some ways, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as fundamentally ‘easier’, just different. I’ve found that we gravitate towards people who have access to a wide range of ‘sides of themselves’ if they’re not actually multiple. That is, what we usually mean when we talk about parts of ourselves; ‘part of me wants to study tonight, part of me wants to go hang out with my friends’. People who have found one way of being in the world and stick with it through all circumstances tend to confuse and sadden me. I can often ‘feel’ their buried parts or cut off emotions, and struggle not to interact with those sides of them. I can find myself impatiently waiting for them to reveal more of themselves – particularly when their approach to life is clearly not working for them – why don’t you switch already? Sometimes I feel like the lucky one and people with so little access to other perspectives and ways of being in the world feel like the ones who need help.
That’s not to say that these other ways can’t work! At one point I was in a relationship, as an undiagnosed multiple, with another undiagnosed multiple. When it worked it was beautiful, a synchronicity, us against the world, at last someone who functioned the way I did, needed the things I needed, saw the world the way I saw it. When it didn’t work it was agony. People find themselves in very different situations and navigate their relationships in different ways. There’s no right or wrong answer here, just different ones, and the challenge to love without harming or being harmed.
Rose is the first person I’ve been involved with as an ‘out’ multiple. I vastly prefer it! It means that the night one of my deep, very wounded parts came out and had a panic attack when Rose touched her made sense. I could explain what happened. Rose could adapt. Rose now recognises almost all of my system by sight – how we talk, walk, hold our body, the colour of our eyes. She knows our individual personal names. Even when she can’t tell who it is, she can tell the basics that she needs to know – adult/teen/child, male/female/other, romantic/platonic, reassured by touch/traumatised by touch. With that information we can both navigate the switching and build and maintain relationships between everyone. She’s met most of us who switch out, and with most has formed a strong relationship of some kind. In our case, there’s several who are romantically involved with her, then there are friends, ones who relate more as sisters, ones who only get involved occasionally, and so on. We’ve proposed as a group, and so we didn’t ask her to marry us, but to be our family, because what we’re asking for and offering is different for each of us.
There’s challenges! Everyone doesn’t always get along. Parts have different needs. It can be easy to fall into a carer/caree dynamic as that is how we are seen in the mental health world. There’s the added pressure of being treated as ‘trailblazers’ who are proving that relationships with multiple are (or are not) possible. Rather similar to the way that our relationship is seen as representative of all lesbian relationships in friendship or family circles who haven’t been directly exposed to any others. There’s the challenge of embracing Rose without writing her into my system – letting my child parts love her but not treat her as a parent (that’s our role), not catching her up in the inevitable rescue fantasies that most of us who have at some point been deeply hurt find written into our approach to the world, not seeing her as others who have hurt us when things aren’t going well.
There’s also upsides. Like the time she asks for the part who handles physical aggression when we’re walking at night and group of guys is watching us in a scary manner… and I can say to her – already here love, don’t worry, I’ve got your back. It’s late night video games with my kids, it’s climbing trees with the wild ones, it’s sharing stories of homelessness with the survivors, and having huge conversations about peer work and youth work and social work and community and mental health and power and families. It’s Rose having someone who gets her experiences with flashbacks, nightmares, body shame, and self loathing… and can make her laugh about them. It’s about us having the stamina to switch out the tired ones and make it through a week of Rose in hospital, also keeping the pets alive, easing her trauma reactions so she doesn’t wind up sectioned as well, being there through severe pain, and putting all our needs on hold until it’s over. It’s about the contradictions that make up all people, writ large; the edible glitter on cupcakes and the goth nightclubs, the gardener and the naked body painter in a psychotic whirl, the person who takes lizards off the road and nurses orphaned kittens and the one who burns with rage when Rose is being hurt.
As I keep saying, multiplicity is normal human function, writ large. It’s a dance, between adult and child, light and dark, male and female, the apparently functional and the apparently wounded, the ones who fit in and the ones who don’t fit anywhere. We dance together, sometimes she needs me to make her laugh and my cheeky imp turns up and turns the house upside down. Sometimes I need her to hold me and tell me “don’t worry love, everyone gets to see your charismatic ones. I’m privileged to know the ones who don’t stand up in front of crowds”.
There’s days she cares for me but she’s not my carer. There’s times she feels deep empathy for me, but she’s not with me because she feels sorry for me. There’s needs she has that I’m good at meeting, but we’re not together to exploit my capacity. There’s ways in which we’re similar and also big differences. Navigating multiplicity is a key aspect of every day and every part of our relationship, and in another sense, it’s irrelevant. Once you get used to kids turning up in the lolly aisle at the supermarket and know not to be scared and wander around hand in hand talking about the virtues of kinder surprises vs gummi bears, knowing that I’ll switch back to an adult in time to drive home, it’s just not that big a deal. Once you’ve learned what helps in a bad night, then swinging into action to rub my back and listen empathetically as some wounded soul howls or flashbacks or recounts a nightmare is just part of our life. Trauma is part of our world, some times a big part to manage, sometimes so small it’s barely there, but it’s just something to live with. It’s not a source of shame or fighting or horror, we make plans around it just like we would if I was still in a wheelchair. We don’t compete about who is in the most pain, we don’t treat my experiences or my multiplicity as worse or more important or more amazing than Rose’s experiences of trauma and loss and triumph. She is neither healthier, nor sicker, nor luckier, nor less creative, than we are.
We’re both just people, frail humans, with capacity for light and dark, with frustrating and enduring weaknesses, with amazing strengths. We work to keep our power in balance, to love each other, to own our own stuff, and to make a great life together. Just like anyone else. Love is love.
I proposed to beloved Rose over the weekend, and she accepted! We’re now engaged. This is her gorgeous ring, a rainbow of 23 princess cut, ethically mined sapphires in different colours, two strands entwined. We can’t actually get married here in Australia, but I felt that we needed to rebalance all the forms, paperwork, lawyers, and bureaucracy that has become part of putting our lives together… we needed some heartfelt romance and rituals of love too.
I’ve been quietly asking little questions and gathering her feelings about rings, proposals, and relationships for months. I was able to put together a good idea of what she’d love – a surprise proposal, somewhere private but beautiful, a story to be able to tell the kids (or grandkids!), a non-traditional looking engagement ring chosen for her, with no diamonds and lots of meaning. I’ve been using my month of recovering from surgery to sneakily put it all together and keep it secret and hide the ring in the house where she won’t find it and I won’t forget it (tip – tell a friend!), and get over the weird ‘worms wriggling in my guts’ feeling of spinning a whole web of plausible lies to keep the surprise, and asked for help and input from various friends. Plans unravelled more than once and needed to be completely rethought, and I was nearly overcome by emotion on several particularly moving nights before the big event and wrecked it all by giving her the ring on the spot, but somehow we kept it all together, and it worked!
She loved it. She said yes. We cried. We made happy memories of the most wonderful weekend. When I can get my photos off my camera I’ll tell you the story. She headed off to work this morning and kissed me goodbye and wished her fiancée a good day. I don’t think that’s getting old for awhile. She’s so gorgeous, and I’m so happy to make her light up like this. I’m humbled. I’m so lucky that she loves me.
I’m engaged!
Eeep! I have been really enjoying painting these tiny glass eyes (they’re 6mm) for use in my polymer clay sculptures. They are so awesome! So much fun and sooo fiddly. Even a cat whisker brush stroke looks clumsy on these. Here’s a little example of a sculpture I’m still working on using a set of my eyes:
Isn’t it gorgeous!? They actually follow you around the room, no matter where you’re standing. 🙂 I am so enjoying sculpting in miniature, even in my tiny new studio space I can pull it off. I’ve been missing my classes so badly since I have to finish all the rest of my first year subjects before I’m allowed to take on any more sculpture classes, and that’s been kind of heart breaking. 😦 But these little artworks make my heart happy. They take forever, I wound up doing this one at my computer in front of photos of foxes because it was so challenging to get the nose/ear/eye/face shape right. But it will look gorgeous once it’s finished, fired, and hand painted. 🙂
I’m being encouraged to try selling on Etsy and I’m feeling rather tempted!
Dogs! Bull terriers are described as being like 3 year olds in a dog suit. That’s pretty accurate. Now that Zoe is more than 2, she’s moved out of her mad puppy chewing phase. This is great! I had to replace my couch twice, and she went through a lot of shoes, sheets, trousers etc. She also kept chewing up her outside water bucket. In the end I gave up and put one of my cast iron pots out there. She’s had it for a year, but as few months ago I decided it was time to reclaim it. So for two months I had both the cast iron pot, and a new plastic bucket outside for her. She didn’t chew the bucket at all. A month ago I brought my pot in, soaked and scrubbed it for a week, and all was well!
Today it reached nearly 40C. I leave Zoe with a full bucket of clean water, and a huge frozen ham hock to chew. I get home from work to find a badly heat stressed dog who races inside and drinks a litre of water immediately. TODAY of all days she has chewed her bucket into small pieces! WHY!?
So I soaked her down and she covered my house in mud. And now I’m off again running around in peak hour dropping people places. Thankful for vehicles with air conditioning. Kind of want to hug and strangle my dog. She’s certainly been a good introduction to parenting!
2 hour charcoal drawing from objects arranged by our tutor. I quite enjoy these, they’re challenging. The subject matter is extremely dull, but our task was converting colours to their tonal value of grey. The funnel, bucket, and lantern are actually all primary colours.
“Extensive and severe” are not the words you want to hear when a doctor gives you a new diagnosis. Frankly, I personally feel that I have reached my quota for diagnoses, and that if anyone wants to give me a new one, they should have to trade in an existing one. Pick a card, any card… Sigh. So, I’ve been having as bunch of tests over the past few months to check up on my fertility. I’ve already been diagnosed with mild endometriosis, and donor assisted conception can be wearying for both families involved so we wanted to do all the checks we could and get any treatments needed before wasting a lot of time trying to conceive if there was a problem. So far a lot of the news has been good; I have healthy ovaries and lots of eggs. A few weeks ago Rose and I received the news that I have severe adenomyosis. It’s a bit hard to process, and I find it harder to share about physical illness and disability than I do about my mental health, so I’ve sat on it for awhile.
On the one hand, having a name for it makes no difference to what I’ve already been living with. On the other there’s a huge weight of sadness and fear. Perversely, there’s also a sense of vindication. I was frequently ignored and had my terrible symptoms downplayed by medical people and others, especially as a young woman. It was devastating and made me feel profoundly alone and overwhelmed.
A crash course in the conditions, not for the super squeamish. The womb has three layers, the outer one is muscle, then there’s a layer of tissue, and lastly the inner layer which is called the endometrium. This is the part that grows and swells up ready for a pregnancy, and then sheds and bleeds every month as a period. A healthy endometrium is essential for a fertilised egg to implant (that means link up to the womb via the umbilical cord) and be nourished and grow. In endometriosis, (endo) little patches of endometrium grow elsewhere in the body. Most commonly they are elsewhere in the pelvis, such as growing on the ovaries, intestines, and other organs. More rarely they are elsewhere in the body such as the lungs. It is very rare, but possible for men to have endo.
Nobody knows for sure how or why these patches occur. They’re like weeds, growing all over the place where they shouldn’t be. The big issue is that they try to function like the endometrium does, every month they swell up and then shed blood. This blood doesn’t drain away the way a period does, so there can be issues with pain and infection, and sometimes they can chew into places such as ligaments or patches of nerve cells. They can cause fibroids and adherence where tissues glue together, such as sticking the ovaries to the pelvic wall, which can cause worse pain. If the affected tissues are delicate areas such as the fallopian tubes, endo can compromise or destroy fertility. It’s also common for the extra blood loss to cause iron deficiencies. Endo is usually diagnosed through a laparoscopy, a surgery where the gut is checked out with cameras through small holes in the skin around the belly.
Treatments for endo are more usually about managing it rather than curing it. There’s a range of options from surgical removal, using hormones such as the Pill to prevent periods and therefore stifle the endo growth, dietary changes and so on. Some people find some approaches way more effective for them than others.
Adenomyosis is similar, in that again it’s the endometrium cells growing where they shouldn’t. With adeno, the endometrium invades the tissues of the womb itself. Pockets of endometrium cells swell and bleed into the tissue. In severe cases, all the womb is affected. It’s swollen and heavy with the pockets of extra cells, there are issues with pain, excessive bleeding, and cramping of the muscle layer. In some cases the adeno prevents the clamping down on blood vessels that supply the womb, causing chronic pain and bleeding problems. With severe blood loss, the body struggles to replenish the supply of red blood cells and severe anaemia can result. There’s only currently two ways to diagnose adeno: one is performing a hysterectomy, that is, taking out the womb, and then examining it. This is obviously not appropriate for young people or those hoping to have a child. The other is through an MRI scan, which is not quite as conclusive, but gives a lot more information than other scans such as ultrasound.
It’s only been fairly recently that adeno had started to be diagnosed, so not very much is known about it and sources of information are conflicting. It may increase failure rates of implanting embryos, miscarriage, preterm labour and other fertility challenges. Treatments are very limited, in some cases surgical removal, or hormone blocking to shrink the growth – sadly this only has a very temporary effect. Three months of hormone blocking will provide about three months of adeno-free cycles.
Both endo and adeno usually respond really well to pregnancy, and it used to be common for daft doctors to suggest pregnancy as a management tool. This is partly how the hormones help -they mimic pregnancy in the body and when taken continuously (without sugar pill breaks for ‘periods’) they suppress the growth of each. Both endo and adeno can be odd in that how severe they are and how bad the symptoms are don’t always line up. Some people with severe endo have few or no symptoms while others have mild endo but suffer terribly. The location of the endo may have something to do with this – for example endo that chews into areas with a lot of nerves may cause a lot more pain than endo in areas without many nerves. Some people have awful periods and problems with pain and no clear cause can be found, which can make figuring out a treatment incredibly difficult.
So, we have no way of knowing how the adeno may impact our baby plans. I’m having a lot of trouble with experiences of severe depression when we make even minor changes to my dose of hormone to manage these conditions, so at this stage we’re avoiding the hormone blocking treatment because I think my head might fall off or spontaneously combust. We’re tailoring my dose down carefully, hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll be completely off the pill and ready for my first cycle! I’m taking iron supplements already as the severe bleeding leaves me badly anaemic, which is not good for me and particularly not good for a developing baby. We’ve also made the call that my efforts to be restored to a ‘natural’ cycle at some point are pointless – when I’m not trying to get pregnant I’ll be using hormones to keep these in check. The longer I’m off the pill the worse the symptoms get, so we’re hoping for a 6 month try at pregnancy then we’ll re-evaluate. We’ll be tracking iron levels pretty closely and if I’m lucky I’ll get pregnant quickly before the adeno makes it impossible to work. If I’m very lucky I’ll also have a good pregnancy! Lots of unknowns, but a little more information than we had before. And certainly all worth it for the chance at being a Mum.
Rose and I are both sick with a tummy flu, and serious case of the doldrums. Siiiiiiiigh. I’m finding being sick so depressing it’s hard to breathe. I’ve had a bad headache for three days now. Or one month, it’s all blurring in together with sinus infections and surgery. I saw an ENT at the hospital the other day, he’s happy with the surgery and said everything is healing well. He also said I shouldn’t still be having facial pain and should see a neurologist. He was a bit of a dismissive ass, to tell the truth. Everytime I hear about how people with mental illnesses would be so much better off if they were treated the same as people with physical illnesses, I kind of want to laugh, in a hysterical, jaded, painful, coughing-up-a-little-blood kind of way…
I don’t really know what to do with that. I know I have issues with chronic tooth infections, and I’ve had basically two years of sinus infection near constantly. I also have issues with TMJD, pain caused by muscle tightness in the jaw. And I’m nearly four weeks out of surgery. At this point, I think it’s pretty reasonable that I’m still in some pain, and if the surgery healing isn’t causing it, likely one of the diagnoses I already have is. Despite a letter from the jaw specialist, and me reminding every single person I saw about this op, including the damn surgeon himself in the actual theatre, the request to scope my left check while I was under and check if there was infection or just scar tissue showing on my xrays was ignored. So I’m going to have to go all the way back to my dentist again and try to figure out if my root canal has gone bad and infection is eating my jaw, or if nothing is wrong and we leave it alone… Bastards.
In Drawing class, which I think I’m still just possibly attending often enough to maybe pass, we were instructed to make many multi media images of a single item. I chose a dried cob of maize.
This last one is my favourite. I love inks. (They’re painted on white gesso)
Rose has the best taste in baby clothes, she came home with this little gem the other day. It reads “this is our greatest adventure”. Couldn’t agree more. It’s beginning. I’m finally recovered enough from surgery to begin walking again. I’m tapering off my high dose contraceptive pill to a low dose one (quick changes in hormones send me into severe depression). And I’ve started on folic acid, iron, and skin care for stretch marks (dry skin, eczema, dermatitis, hives, hot weather, and pregnancy weight gain do not make for a happy person).
It’s scary, exciting, wonderful, confusing, sad, strange, moving, and uncomfortable. Definitely an adventure. We’re making our maps up as we go, having amazing experiences, getting lost, sometimes falling off cliffs. There’s no one I’d rather be off exploring with. 🙂
Rose and I have bought a van! Eep! It’s a Mitsubishi Starwagon, and we’ve called her Luna. 🙂 What’s so exciting about her is that she has a row of back seats that fold down to form a platform we can put a bed on to go camping! This is the best of both worlds for us, we can camp, and also put baby seats in the back. It has air conditioning and power steering which is perfect for me, it drives as light as a cloud and is easy for me to manage even when I’m tired and sore. We’re very excited about it!
We’ve had to borrow money to buy it, we’ve been able to save a lot this year but not enough for a swish vehicle like this. We’re waiting anxiously to hear whether Rose will have her contract renewed at work. If she does everything will go swimmingly. If she doesn’t but land one of the other jobs she’s been applying for, we’ll be okay. If she winds up unemployed for a stretch, we could be in trouble and may even have to sell it and buy something something cheaper or drop to one car between us. Fingers crossed! It was a big decision and we talked loads about it and crunched all our numbers and thought about everything else we could buy with our savings… And made the call that a second home on wheels would take some of the stress out of moving us both into my little unit. So we’re going to try!
One step closer to starting our family. 🙂 And we have two running cars again! I can go out during the week while Rose is at work and run errands! Life is so much easier. 🙂 As soon as we get the bed base braced we can go for a camp – I can’t wait!
I’m still very tired but slowly continuing to recover. The last few days have been kind of all weather in one day, lots of stress with loved ones going through really rough situations, intense conversations and so on, but also fun times, moving times, a walk on the beach, ice cream, and the end of season three of Buffy. I’m tired, grateful it’s bedtime, and looking forward to a new week.
I’m sitting outside my GP office and I can’t think straight. The last of my blood tests is back and I have a green light to start trying to conceive once I’m feeling better. I’m immune to everything I need to be immune to, not infected by anything I shouldn’t be, my liver is working at full capacity after the surgery. The only test left I could do is to see if my tubes are clear but given that it’s expensive and incurable and unlikely Rose and I have decided not to.
It’s been an interesting few months. I’ve received mixed news on the pre conception tests, mostly positive but some distressing. The process of trying to conceive could be very difficult, drawn out, and painful. Almost none of the meds I currently use are regarded as pregnancy safe so that’s going to be interesting as there’s no substitutes. And I can’t give birth to our baby in South Australia if we want Rose to have legal recognition as their parent. I don’t know quite how we’re going to manage this.
But we have a green light.
Oh my god.
Another day working on my free community resources. I’m still crook but able to get things done, albeit slowly. Very focused on the work today but also very dissociative and spacey. Hoping tomorrow will be easier.
Today I have
I would love to hear your thoughts. The DI site is almost to the point where I’m happy with it and ready to move on and properly flesh out the Hearing Voices site, then I can get on to the Homeless Care site and back to my own Business development. Tired! But happy with the progress.
Sarah K Reece 