I hit a couple of triggers tonight that flipped us from content and coping to wildly distressed in a heartbeat. My brain is full of screaming pain. This is my new wrist poem:
It reads: “Some nights, it has to be okay to be broken… to be without hope… not to believe…”
I’ve hit a rough patch the past few days, really distressed and overwhelmed. I’m not sure what’s going on, this year has been tough with these. I’m still sleeping and somewhat eating for which I’m grateful. The dog is restless and the cat has taken to peeing on the rugs, towels, and any clothes left on the floors. I have a lot of washing to do. I seem to pick up for a few hours here and there in between panic attacks and depression. I’ve been canceling most of my commitments and I’m just keeping my head down until it eases, my next shrink appointment, or things crash badly enough that I look for more intensive help somewhere. Rose is looking out for me, took us down to the beach tonight to let Zoe have a run and talk about how we’re going to manage this. I’m lucky. I’ve friends, a home, a lot more than I’ve had when I’ve been in trouble some other times in my life. Just got to stay safe until I come through it. I remember the first time I went and bought blades. The build up was appalling. I was in year 12, under massive pressure, with no opportunity to find emotional support. I had PTSD but had been offered no treatment and no possibility for recovery. That day I walked to the newsagents and I didn’t feel broken by pain. I felt powerful, I floated. I had found another way out of the trap, of the pain of bullying and loneliness and alienation, of being forced to spend hours a day in a place I hated, where I felt without value, where I longed at times for the physical abuse because at least that left a mark I could show. At least that garnered a response from the adults. I couldn’t escape my situation, but I stumbled onto a way out where my body stayed but I broke out of the rules instead. The rules about decorum and what is appropriate, about how to live and what to value and that the little people must learn to ‘take it’. Alone at night my body became my thing again, mine to do with as I chose, to use as an instrument on which to play out my pain, to prove my agony. I felt powerful and defiant. I felt less suicidal. It was a way to stay, to settle into the trap and obey the path I’d been given to walk. I felt above pain.
There have been days when I wake up and look at my wrists and feel so revolted by myself, such intense shame and self loathing that self harm is not enough, I want to annihilate myself entirely. There are days my wrists feel so naked and vulnerable, shivering before my rage, that I have to cover them. I wear sleeves or gloves or cuffs. I sit and find my fingers stroking stroking stroking the skin, like you stroke a distressed child or a hurt animal – it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, I won’t hurt you. There are days when I see self harm marks on someone else and there’s such a leap of longing inside me, such desperation – ‘how come they get to do it?’ ‘How come they can be hurt and they are still loved?’ And then I feel so very small, and ugly, and alone.
I’m so tired of the struggle. I’m tired of the shame. Trying to walk carefully around the things that trigger the impulse, trying to find other ways to ease the pain. I sat on the floor today and talked about what it was like to be at school, what it was like to be so desperate to escape it that at 10 years old I was bashing my writing hand with a brick so that I wouldn’t have to go in. “It’s still so raw” she said to me. Yes.
Somewhere, between a house to live in, and pets and friends and a garden and a wonderful girlfriend, I feel like I’ve lost the rights to my own pain. How can I paint scenes of anguish and despair now? How can I write? Too many confidences to betray. Too many people looking to me to see if it’s possible for life to get better. So instead, there’s the longing for blood, the need to see scars, to prove pain, to connect to it and disconnect from it. To find a way not to drown in the pit of self hatred. I’ve lived my hell in the daylight, in a world oblivious to it. “You survived” she said to me. “Parts of me died!” I snarled. “Things were taken from me they had no right to take.” Nothing makes up for that.
There’s good days. There’s so many good days, things I’m excited about, new hopes and dreams. How quickly we begin to speak the language of the daylight, to conceal the wounds, to deny the pain that lingers. I’m trying to listen. I’m still here. I’m looking for self compassion beneath the fear. I don’t want to go down. I need a better way through this. I’m looking. Ink, not blood.
Today I shall do what I can and no more. I shall work with my hands to make my world whole, to sew up the tears and sweep out the shadows that cloy at the mind. I had a nightmare, and it came over my face and my eyes, it screamed and would not stop screaming. I screamed within it and my world went dark, full of fire and fear. It bound me a future I could not bear, to a fate that twisted me, a destiny that compelled me to become a twisted thing. Such is the burden of those who have been wounded as I have, such are the shadows that follow at our heels. When we name them truly, they run from us, for a time. Today I can see clearly. There’s a wind in my soul, a peace in my heart. All is as it should be. I rest my heart in the hollow of the hill.
In bed
I build
A little fort of books
To keep away
The bad dreams
And the memories.
My paper moat
Is filled with people of courage
Compassion
In the face of brutality
Wisdom,
Patient rage,
Love-
All the things that are monsters
To the monsters that hunt me.
Here I lay, naked
In the dark, and alone
But not without defence
My authors speak on my behalf
When I am lost with weeping
They shape the dark
Give it name
Whisper to me
The limits of its lies.
Walking into the adult world
layers of illusions peeling away
and the emptiness beneath us all coming into view
the veneer of our security so thin
we are a lost race on a world
falling into space and our dreams
are a taste of death, first thing in the morning
and the last hour of night
in my minds eye
everyone I love is gone
it falls away
No island so remote
as to be beyond the touch of tragedy
we destroy it all and it destroys us
we live on borrowed time and the pain
catches up in the end
we pay for all our sweet days
all the debts are collected
There is no peace.
There are moments of joy.
Touch on my skin
love in their eyes
dreams in my heart
but the dark always comes
and the light is so frail
all our hopes unwoven
our allotted happiness
spent like sand through glass
and what does it all mean?
I hold her hand
and I can feel her slipping
night has its teeth in her skin.
We live, we love, and we die.
Each moment is pulled like a cloth
over the emptiness beneath us
over the screaming terror and the helplessness
the hours that torture and the dreams that sustain
we fly a little, and then we fall.
This is the final project I ‘submitted’ for my Concept Development class; my own left arm. I decided on a brocade inspired glove with a variegated background and bronze metallic overlay.
This is my first decent size body painting art work and I am hooked. I got a lot of comments and compliments, and a couple of offers to model for me too. 🙂 I guess it’s the weather for that now!
The inside of the glove ‘opens’ to show bare skin and a poem.
I decided to paint the poem with black skin paint rather than my usual ink. It’s more time consuming but more harmonious. I quite like the script that my no 2. brush creates when I flatten the tip too. I’m learning more with each project about how to handle the brushes and paint. It’s exciting.
Tee hee hee! This was me at 2am this morning. In some ways, it feels like my entire life has been building to this point: body painting. I’m the oddball kid who used to turn up to church with flames painted in eyeshadow on my fingers. To a casual clothes days at school with dots painted in watercolours on my throat. I discovered that gems can be glued to your skin using clear nail polish (these days I recommend liquid latex instead). I’ve been trialling different colour and poem combinations for my project due in today. I will be submitting my left arm.
I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. Love my life.
This is inspired by my long tradition of writing poems on my wrist as a self harm alternative. I love the idea of combining poems with body paint. It just sings to me.
Finishing a journal is always a slightly fraught time. I need another journal like I need air, the anxiety spikes until I have one. Choosing one is difficult for a multiple. We generally all write in the same journal, except for when writing at the computer, or out and about on buses etc when we write in an Evernote app on the phone. This means each journal needs to be acceptable to everyone in the system, else some will refuse to write in it. Sometimes journals get abandoned part way through for this reason. A single journal just makes tracking down a particular bit of writing so much easier than looking through 15 journals that each cover many years. Most of my journals cover a few months to a year depending on their size. I have over 30 now, as I’ve been writing since 14.
This time we decided to buy a bunch at once. Maybe they wont have to be so exact if there’s a collection of other types waiting to be used next.
The next thing then is to find some more time to write in them. I keep adding new things into my life and I’m watching the overflow spill out. Poetry cannot become one of those things that spills.
More wrist poems…
She wrote this poem, with a little help from one of us.
Unseen and unbidden I’m carried inside
Through fire and darkness and brief times of peace
Without voice without choice without hope without name
No skin for my own to wrap up my dreams in.
Only the void and the places all hollow,
Only the terror the loss and the death
Without resurrection, no golden tomorrow
The failure beyond all hope of redemption.
I was supposed to make it all better
Bring life and give hope and make wings for the broken
Be pure, and good, and holy, and chaste
Unchanged and unchanging, untouched and untouching.
But here in the pit of the brain came the darkness
The place I was left when the light went away
And the monsters they caught me and made me their own
So all my light failed and all my love died.
A night for candlelight and inks and shadows and memories, fear welling from deep old wounds, and finding calm and comfort in the dark places where somehow, inexplicably, kindness waits. There are some things that do not live under the sun or walk within the day, and they need their hour also, their cavern, their softer lights. To speak and be answered, to hurt and be comforted. The night here is without rage, no violence, no cruelty, only the memories that smother, only the old wounds that ache. Here the breeze is cool and smells of stars, in the night where the trains run softly by, out to the sea.
To be heard by those with power you must
Strip your insights of
100% rage (bury it deep)
90% pain (show them just a taste so
They can feel proud of their ability to empathise)
Learn their language; use their words (they do not translate, they speak only their own language)
Dress like them (no green hair or tatts on display)
Learn to make them feel comfortable (project warmth, try not to
Flinch when they touch you)
Learn to imitate their casual way of handling power and judgement (vomiting or crying
For private toilets only)
And lastly
Try not to say
Anything they don’t
Want to hear.
Long into evening
the sky has aged grey
the streets are blown with empty wrappers,
the roads pour with cars rushing home
on my wrists is the smallest trace
of the perfume from this morning
like the memory of sunshine.
If this title is confusing you, read I am not Sarah first. :)from our journal, June 2011
F***!
It’s good to be alone
Here, I don’t have to be
Anything for anybody
I’m such a f***ing chameleon lately
Instead of the chimera I remember
So bloody adaptive
Being alone is like being able to breathe
And I become familiar again
Old pain and old perspectives return
Bougainvillea tattooed upon my wall
(Tried to save myself, but myself keeps slipping)
There must be a night to howl in
For the poetry to come
And we don’t let them
Out in the day anymore:
The howling ones
No one who actually feels pain
Or has needs
We are now
Everything they want:
cheerful in the face of pain
magnanimous to betrayal
indifferent to despair
No intensity. No bleeding
on their eyes.
Careful to disguise the darkness
Is this who we want to be?
But it’s working, isn’t it?
As long as we all get time –
And as long as
‘They’ know there’s more to us –
more of us – others
who think differently feel different
That the poets and the presenters
may be different entirely
Isn’t that enough?
Isn’t darkness and intensity and anguish and rage and defiance
Something to be saved
for the special ones??
Isn’t this what a team looks like?
F***
I don’t know.
I guess I don’t trust you
To come back for me
To give me my time
I don’t have any goth trash clothes
When are we going out to dance?
My life is left behind
And I fear
You’d leave me too
Except for my poems
I know, I know
I’m trying.
It’s okay to be angry
Remind me you’re here
I don’t want to forget you either.
I’m incomplete, driven and hollow without you
You’re my shadow
I need you too.
Not just for poems
But because
You are part of my soul
You’re my dark of the moon
Stars falling in my sky
I need you to be whole.
So keep banging on my door
Paint me dark things
And force me to remember you.
I feel my lack
I feel my eternal sunshine
My hollow bones
I fly
I fly
But you are
My dark shadow
Always waiting
Upon the earth
For me to return
Angry, bitter, brutal and intense
Defiant, you dance
In the bones of the real world
Where I fly
In the dreams of tomorrow.
We are twins
And I love you
Don’t ever let me
Fly away from you.
For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.
A couple of months ago I signed up to a phone plan with a gorgeous new phone free of charge. It’s the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and I absolutely adore it. It’s a lot bigger than my old Ideos, a big awkward for fitting into your jeans pocket, and the larger screen drains the battery super fast. However, it’s so fast! So much easier to read email or write blog posts on, and can run all the apps my other phone choked on.
I now run four separate Google tasks widgets on my main screen, moving tasks between the lists as I wish. I am notified whenever library books are due etc. I also have a calendar widget as I use the Google calendar for my diary. I write poems on evernote when they come to me,
Early in the cold
I drag my bag of chittering, vexous, aching bones
Down to the sculpture studio
Like a leper to a sanctuary.
… write blog posts on the bus or in bed. I’ve just downloaded a few grocery shopping apps to test because I’m often ducking into the shops on the way home from work and I never have my list on me. Plus I’m an anxious shopper – I buy food for a three month siege when I’m feeling stressed, so being able to add the talley of my cart will be helpful in prevent those nasty surprises at the checkout.
The navigation app gets an extensive workout, as does Google maps. I can use public transport now I don’t have to read the timetables!
I have a very strong memory of my first night in a women’s shelter. I’m alone in the dark, locked in a strange room, lying on a plastic wrapped mattress, and I am terrified. I curl up on my side and talk to myself soothingly, clutching my mobile phone in both hands. It was my only lifeline back out to the rest of the world. Being in an environment like that: bars on my window, no escape route, no control, was a nightmare for someone with PTSD. I slept all night holding my phone.
My phone still means a lot to me. It is my access point to information, my voice to cry for help, my way to stay connected with far flung friends. It is a string I hold as I walk into the labyrinth, with it I risk things I would not otherwise have courage for. I take buses, walk at night, try new routes. It is my memory, reminding me I need cat food or the car oil needs checking. It is my way of recording so many special moments, documenting the mundane but incredibly precious moments of my life, Zoe chasing her toy, the blossoming trees in the street, a meal I’m proud to have cooked. It’s spoken as a given truth that technology divides us, distracts us, disconnects us. I love technology like my phone because for me it does the opposite. It frees me, connects me, empowers me. I remember the days of driving at night before mobiles, afraid of breaking down. I remember how hard you once had to work to find information. I remember what living with severe memory dissociation felt like before email reminders and phone ‘to do’ lists. I am very old fashioned in some ways, but tech like this I just adore.
in the hot afternoons,
intertwined
we make our bodies
into a press:
squeezing salty wines
from our skin.
Things have been going so well lately. Not perfect, (not manic), not without some confusion and struggle, but still; flying. Being ‘out’, especially as bi, is finally not just traumatic. It is liberating. I’m having positive dreams! Beautiful dreams, sad dreams, dreams of how things might have been for me growing up, if it had been safe to fall in love with women. Dreams that make my heart ache, make me cry when I wake up, curl back the curtain and cry in the golden light that spills onto my bed. Dreams of spring, blossoms on tree branches, light falling through orchards and curtains rippling in the cool air. Dreams that heal.
I’ve written before here about having ‘ugly days’, where my self perception is so destroyed I hate and loathe myself with an unbearable intensity.
I’ve been having ‘beautiful days’. Days I love what I see in the mirror, days where I dance, where my heart soars.
I feel like a little battery hen that has come at last to a world of green grass and blue sky and endless horizons.
It’s been a week since the psychosis workshop with Rufus May and my voice has been so quiet, but I can feel her, there’s no sense of absence or loss, I can feel her like a warmth in my chest, like a cat curled up tight around my heart. I am ecstatic.
I’m under no illusions, the work with this voice may not be done, there will be backsteps and bad days and times again of confusion and distress.
But, to make such a giant leap forward, after so many years of struggle… empowered really isn’t a strong enough word for how I feel. Perhaps hope is.
There’s been a lot of work happening over the past few weeks, so much thinking and remembering and making connections. Unpicking locks and following string into labyrinths. Coming to understand the things that trap me, the monsters that savage me, the ties that bind. Moving further into freedom and health. Feeling the sun on my face and the rain on my skin and being able to smell the cut grass in my yard. Washing off layers of secrets and shame like oil slicks. Feeling my system come alive, like a carousel turning with music and lights, that deep dreaming start up again, the wells flow with poems.
Co-consciousness is a term used to describe the experience of someone with multiplicity, where more than part is aware of what is going on. For someone with DID (formerly called multiple personality disorder), they have very high levels of dissociation both in identity and memory, which usually means that they are amnesiac whenever a different part is out. Amnesia can cause distressing experiences such as not being able to recall important personal information (name, date of birth, home address), years of your life, or daily struggles such as ‘coming to’ in an unfamiliar place and having no idea how you came to be there. Some people are really aware that they are losing time or memories like this, others are in a kind of confused fog where until someone asks them a question – where did you get those shoes? when’s the last time you ate? what did you get up to on Wednesday? – they’re actually unaware that they’re experiencing amnesia.
With classic DID, not only is the person experiencing amnesia, but they are confused by evidence left behind while other parts have been out. Obvious things may be clothes in the wardrobe that are unfamiliar and not to their taste, family members upset about arguments you don’t recall having, friends who think they know you by a different name etc.
Co-consciousness describes switching without this amnesia, so that if one part is out going about their day, another part is aware of what is happening. Multiples with high levels of co-consciousness don’t tend to ‘lose time’ or have blackouts, they’re still aware of what is going on. This is mostly how I function, although under stress my levels of amnesia increase. Multiples who have high levels of amnesia often find that to be one of the most challenging and frightening aspects of the condition, and for most, gaining some degree of co-consciousness is an important part of therapy and recovery work. This process usually starts by working on building self awareness and mapping your system.
There is a similar but slightly different called co-hosting or co-fronting, which you can read about here: What is co-fronting and blending?.
Co-consciousness can work practically in a few different ways. For some multiples, it’s like they are seeing and hearing everything that’s going on, even though they’re not the one moving the body. For others, it’s more like being told what happened, or watching a short video of memories. I used to be confused as a kid that so many of my own memories are in the third person rather than the first – that is, I see everything happening as if I’m up by the ceiling, looking down on everyone including me. I’ve since discovered that this is an easy way for me to tell when I’ve personally been out running the body and when I’ve just been watching – co-conscious. My own memories are in the first person, co-conscious memories are in the third. This is different for everyone though! I can really struggle sometimes with new friends or in new environments, especially if it wasn’t me who has met them before or been there before. People sometimes notice me pause as I’m asking inside for the information and if I’m lucky whichever part recognises the person or remembers the event will quickly fill me in, or switch out and take over.
Co-consciousness is incredibly useful, but there are downsides. One of them for me is the mammoth amount of energy it takes for us to track all the different information and memories and hand them back and forth. It’s like I have a whole house full of filing cabinets in each room, and on a busy day I’m mentally running back and forth between them trying to make sure we can keep up and still function as one. The experience of co-consciousness can often confuse multiples who have only been exposed to the ideas of psychosis or DID and don’t feel they fit either box. It can also be distressing to be aware of what is happening but not in control of yourself any more. As a kid I had a number of experiences that frightened me so badly I became convinced I was being possessed by the devil. I often felt at war with myself, trying to stay out and in control, and when I’d switch we would look in the mirror and I would be terrified at this face that was mine and yet somehow clearly not me. Co-consciousness can make you feel both crowded and painfully alone at the same time. These kinds of experiences are called Schneiderian first-rank symptoms and were once thought to be highly diagnostic of schizophrenia. Now we’re discovering they are actually very common for people with dissociation instead.
The technical stuff aside, what does it feel like to be co-conscious? Well, that’s different for different people. In fact, different parts of my system experience that in their own way. Whoever is out is often aware if they’re running everything by themselves or if other parts are ‘close to the surface’ and aware of what is going on. Sometimes those surfacing parts might comment or advise about what they’re observing, sometimes they might be struggling to switch or being triggered to switch. For example, I gave a talk at a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital a little while ago, and it was going well. We got there on time, with the notes and presentation gear, there was quite a group waiting, and we had the right part out who had written and delivered the talk before. There was a slight hitch in that a sad, lonely song was playing over the radio. Music can be a powerful trigger for me, and a sad lonely part was called to the surface by the song and immediately switched and came out. We were panicking a bit because this part could not deliver the presentation, and they knew that and desperately didn’t want to be there. We kept still and quiet and finally the MC turned off the radio to introduce us. Once the music was gone, that part dived back inside and the right part came back out to deliver the talk. Phew! Being a multiple can be very complicated.
My friend Hope has a wonderful description of her take on co-consciousness over at her blog:
Imagine a Combi Van, grab a handful of people and put them in the van. One of those people will drive the van, one may sit next to them. The passenger may just watch where they are going of maybe give directions. They may even pull the steering wheel to try and get the driver to go where they want. The rest of the people are in the back of the van. depending on where they are sitting and if the can see out the windows they may or may not be aware of what is going on and where they are going. They may yell to the driver to go somewhere or slow down. Then right at the back of the van, you may have one or two fast asleep totally unaware of what is happening and where they are going… (click here to read her full article)
For me, my poetry often talks about wells inside, very deep, or an ocean where we are sometimes at the surface and sometimes in the deeps. Here’s a short extract of a poem that describes co-consciousness:
I feel her surfacing
like a scream rising
like a knot of tears
in my throat –
Fingernails into palms
I fight to stay
I can feel her so close.
I catch him
glancing at my eyes
perplexed
and I know he sees her
I know they’re her eyes now
but still my face, hands, body
still me if I can just drop my gaze.
In the car, on the drive home, alone
she steps into my skin
wears it a little differently
adjusts the mirror, tucks
hair behind her ear
weeps alone in the night
as I fall, like a star, and fade out.
For more information see articles listed on Multiplicity Links, scroll through posts in the category of Multiplicity, or explore my Network The Dissociative Initiative.
I’ve only a few pages left in my personal journal and need to choose a new one. I have more than 30 of them now. It’s always a challenge to choose one that’s suitable. I like flat spines but spiral bound journals can be flipped back which makes them easier to write in when you’re in bed or other awkward places. I love fancy journals but find they are usually too expensive for my budget. I don’t like them to have too many pages else it takes me more than a year to fill them up, which is a long time to be carrying it around and worrying about losing it. I love lined journals because they’re easier to write in, but I also love blank journals because they’re easier to draw in. I tend to alternate, or sometimes run a visual art journal at the same time as my written one. They can’t be too ‘pretty’ or too dark, all my parts have to feel comfortable writing in them. The paper has to be good enough to be able to write on with a fountain pen without feathering or bleeding through to the reverse side. I alternate sizes between A4, to letter, down to A5. I have occasionally gone smaller. I find my poems sometimes shrink or expand in length to fit the page size, there’s a reluctance in me to go over to a new page by only a line or two. I didn’t used to date every entry, now that I have a mobile phone and can easily check the date almost every entry has a date. I have a very visual memory and can usually remember what poem I’ve written in which journal by the cover.
I want to start decorating my own as the plan, cheap journals I often use all have the same cover which wrecks my memory system. It would also make life easier if I had the dates down the spines of all the journals for when I’m trying to find something. My very first proper journal was a blue ring folder with transparent plastic sleeves stuffed full of graph paper. To read one, I’d have to pull all the sheets out carefully, turn them over until I found what I was looking for, mark the place and put them all carefully back in the same order. Now I never use lose sheets because they are too easy to damage or misplace. Because I’m a multiple, my journals are full of different handwritings, which used to stress me. Now it doesn’t worry me, in fact I get a little concerned if the handwriting stays the same because it means only one of us is writing. Going quiet in the journal has always been a warning sign for me.
I write nearly every night in my journals, and re-read them when the mood takes me. I learn a lot about myself from them. They’re an important way I listen to myself and allow myself a place to tell an uncensored truth. If I stop writing, I start to crash. They are a place I turn and face myself, my pain, my deepest needs and fears, everything I might want to run from, everything that needs to be said.
I’m looking forward to making a new one. I’ve been wanting to decorate the journals for a long while. I spent a couple of hours today watching youtube videos about how other people decorate their art journals, and learning about the different products they use. Trying to paint on the glossy paper cover can be difficult. I am hoping that if I emery the paper gently then coat it with gesso my paint will bind well. I’ll find something that works.
Secondly, the Mental Health Coalition of SA are also hosting their annual Open Your Mind poetry competition! This is a fantastic event and the night of announcements is good fun. Check out their categories and themes, it might be that you already have a poem that will be suitable. 🙂
Thirdly, Mindshare have just launched a new online resource – interactive Forums! They have already set up a number of different topics such as Mental Health and the Law and the first posts have gone live. Why not go and share your opinions or ideas? They also have a theme every month and will be looking for artistic submissions in July on the topic of Bullying.
Sarah K Reece 