Is my overwhelm just an excuse for laziness?


















Other than that, who am I?

The unloved child




















Lost on Planet Earth

Some days I can lay in my bed all day and have little recollection as to what I did while in bed that day. I don't usually sleep. Sometimes I write on this blog or somewhere else. Other times I stare into a wall or window without really seeing anything for many hours at a time.

Time is a mystery to me. Has been my entire life. A sign of someone who has a Dissociative disorder is that they have a very distorted sense of time. For me, most of the time speeds up, and I don't know what happened to it. I might feel as though ten minutes have gone by, and really 4 hours have passed. This can frustrate those around me, and it often makes me late to my appointments.

I have learned recently in my haze of being disconnected from reality on this planet that although my body may be floating around on it, and even showing up to events in my life, I am often not really present. I am really somewhere else, which has always been a mystery to me.

The therapist-types always ask me where I go when I go away, but I never have any answer other than I have no idea. I suppose they think I have some elaborate fantasy place I go to, but I don't. Just more nothingness.

I have realized as of late that I am more absent than present. This is disturbing to me, especially because I realized I prefer to be absent from life. Life has been cruel to me, so can you blame me from trying to skip out on it?

Yet, if I don't change my mind and decide that I want to exist in this world, I won't get better. It is so hard when a fantasy of nothingness is better than a potentially rich life of reality.

Oh reality. For the past 3 years real life has beat the shit out of me. Betrayal and deep wounds have been delivered to my soul time after time so much that I have lost faith in the loving God that I once knew.

It is impossible to make sense of what I have experienced other than to believe that God has wanted to punish me.

So, I drag my body through life so as to not hurt the ones I love by leaving this planet, but my compromise has been to not really be present. People don't really notice because they tend to be so focused on themselves.

I don't really hear the words spoken to me, or notice the beauty or ugliness around me. It is kind of like the walking dead. But sometimes I decide to connect, usually with my kids, and it feels good, but not good enough to give up my addiction to merely floating on planet earth.

My escape to nothingness beats the suffering I endure when I show up for life.

And that I don't know how to change.

Searching for life

Many days I find myself wandering, and wondering what I am doing and whether there is any real purpose to it.

Sometimes these journeys searching for my life take me far from home. Many of the times they have been clearly for nothing, and have just left me with the feeling of being further lost than when I started.

I keep searching for my life, and just can't let go of the idea that one day I will find me, and get to live that life that has been missing.

I read and study and talk and write about my search for my life. So often it seems pointless for me, but I stay inspired because I know I am slowly putting enough pieces together that I can help other damaged people suffering from severe trauma find their way back into the lives they were meant to have.

Being lost is lonely and pointless. Today I walked 7 miles along the beach and busy touristy streets, and did not really have a connection to it all. In fact, I had no idea I was even going to do it until I had done it. I still don't know why I did it.

My whole life I have been lost, and never meant to find my way. Living in confusion land protects me from feeling my pain, and the herds of people who abused me.

There are moments, though few and far between, in which I can reach through the depression and despair and believe I will find answers for myself and the others who come behind me.

We all deserve hope, but I realize sometimes it is just not there.

Each day I choose to wake, I know I still have a little hope. This little bit of hope keeps me searching for the answers for those of us who are lost and need to be found.

I am closer to the answer. Hang in there with me, and together we will find our missing lives.

The pieces to the puzzle are coming together. Have hope because I am going to put them together for us.

Then we will have life.

Knifes in your soul

I have come to realize this past year that even though I was for an extended time extremely high functioning and stable, that I am actually among the most severely injured from a childhood filled with abuse and other horrific things.

It is not cool to be in this club of the severely injured because with these injuries comes damage, lots of it. And I have found that the mental health system doesn't like messy, severely damaged people.

I am complicated. The affects of my abuse have left behind a complicated and difficult set of symptoms. As a result, my soul has been repeatedly ripped out this year by people rejecting me or my symptoms or my diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

It seems no one who knows how to treat this disorder and my symptoms in a way that would be effective wants to help me.

Rejection. Rejection. Rejection.

Laughingly, I am not supposed to take it personally, or believe there is anything inherently wrong with me.

I am wished good luck in my future treatment and sent on my way knowing there is no future treatment to be had. I fear I have looked under every stone and have run out of options.

But don't give up. Stay alive. It doesn't matter how miserable your life is. This I am told over and over by those who reject me.

The injuries to my soul have been brutal. Especially since it is over and over. To be rejected your whole life, even by the so-called angels who are supposed to help those of us with these injuries.

It is hard for me not to believe that God is punishing me. I haven't had this kind of knife into my soul so much until this last year. I try to find hope, but then I get the knife in my soul again.

How many knifes to your soul can happen before it is completely dead?

But I am not supposed to give up. I am to keep fighting as if that has ever really gotten me anywhere. Big deal, I'm alive.

I would be better off dead, which is a hard sentiment to swallow knowing I have children I should live for.

It is a double bind. Live in torture or harm my children by leaving them.

Oh, but I am supposed to get better by some miracle that hasn't come for 50 years now……

A Decade Lost

I never had a true suicidal thought until I was 21. Sure, in my teens I did plenty of things that looked like they were unconscious, wreck less suicidal behaviors, butnit really wasn’t conscious.

I’ll never forget when I first started having true suicidal thoughts and feelings. My life up to then was always extremely busy, and I was not the type of person who stopped to smell the roses. Then one day, it was Spring of my Senior year in college and my life came to a screeching halt. 

I suddenly found myself sitting on the benches of my beautiful undergraduate college and just staring at the trees and watching all the happy people walk by.

I had no idea what was happening, but I turned into someone else overnight, and my first response was to hide it from my closest friends. None of them knew I was circling the drain moreso as each day went by.

I was so confused. I had everything going for me and I was overwhelmed with sadness, depression, anxiety, and a desire to die. Where was this coming from? What was happening?

I went to college prior to the internet, so I had nowhere to turn to to learn I was having a Major Depressive episode. 

Though I don’t remember how, I did manage to find help through a wonderful therapist and psychiatrist who provided me with great care and concern.

The irony was I was living next to a private psychiatric hospital, and used to watch the patienrs down the hill as I walked my dog on the path of my apartment complex. Maybe I knew I would be one of them one day.

I was thrust from never having a suicidal thought to having them everyday. It’s a big change in your brain to make that switch.

Fortunately for me, I found help, and this was pre-managed care, so the hospital kept me for about six months until I was kind of better.

True to my frequent Identity shifts, I left that hospital and went back to the major city I was supposed to live in post college, and moved into my condominium I had purchased just before things went South for me. Oddly, I walked right over to the private psychiatric hospital in town with the best reputation and got a job there much to everyone’s puzzlement. I already had a contract signed with a major corporation for a job I accepted pre-breakdown.

It turned out what I had learned for my myself in the hospital all that time turned me into a great mental health clinician, who could truly empathize with the patients I worked with.

I was good at that job, and loved working with the patients and co-workers. It felt like home to me. 

Unfortunately, as time went by and I continued in therapy, my life slowly started to unravel in the most curious way. I started realizing I lost time, couldn’t remember my childhood, had a fake relationship with my family, and had voices in my head frequently talking to me, and eventually taking control of my body.

I was privileged to be in the right place at the right time, so I didn’t have to wait the typical 7 years to get correctly diagnosed. I went to a reputable DID specialist who worked at the same hospital to find out what I suspected, I had DID.

The revelation of the DID seemed to cause my life to unravel even quicker. Sadly, I eventually became a patient at the dissociative disorder unit at the hospital I was working at. And from there, a decade of my life was lost to the mental health system. A decade I can never get back, and is mostly lost to dissociative amnesia.