My insides started spilling out
It seems like, once I admitted to my therapist that I had a problem, that things began spilling out all over the place. Finally, someone knows. Finally, I can be myself. Finally, I can get this out.
I remember posting something on an online message board--- confessing my "secret"-- about voices, people in my head. I was so scared to tell.
You know what the response was?
"We know, Pilgrim! You told us this some time ago."
??? To say I was confused beyond belief was an understatement. How could I have told anyone anything yet, when I didn't even know what was going on?
And yet... parts of me had already been speaking. Without me knowing about it. (this still creeps me out a bit...sorry.)
That year is a jumble of memories--- I'm sure my therapist knows more about what went on than I do.
I remember odd things-- a child inside who called herself Mae, who cried for her mommy incessantly, and was the same child I had started hearing years earlier, now started using my mouth to speak when I was home alone. I found myself in the closet, far back inside my body, too far away from it to control what I did, watching this other child take control and rock back and forth, crying for her mommy for hours on end, yelling for people to "Go away."
This same child one night wandered the halls of an office building looking for her mommy, and knocked on my therapist's office door to say "I can't find my mom." I can't imagine what my therapist must have been thinking. Here she had this 30 year old woman standing in front of her. Looking for mommy. OH BOY.
Others began talking to my friends and my therapist as themselves. Missy, who had been the one who got my through junior high and through college. Carolineine, the perfect daughter, who named herself after the perfect mother on Little House on the Prairie. Nobody, the invisible one who didn't mind being forgotten and left behind. The 8 (8 and a half, he always tells me) year old boy who named himself Tuck, the one who got to play football with dad the one day in my life he spent time playing with me. And there were others, and others.
Once everyone found someone to listen, they all wanted to start telling their stories. They all wanted to talk. At once. Loudly. All the time.
At me. At my therapist. In my journals. In my drawing books. In therapy sessions.
Everyone had something to say. And wanted to say it RIGHT NOW.
(Even as I sit here to write these posts for my diaries, they are clamoring for control, anxious to get a word in edgewise, to tell you about themselves-- I keep baiting them with--- "maybe tomorrow, maybe later, you can write about yourself." :)(Some of the kids are being bribed with brownies to keep quiet.)
Somewhere along the line, Carolineine started doing research on DID. I dont know when or where or how. I know its been in the past few years. She could probably tell you more about it than I could. Somehow though, someone ended up telling my therapist "I think this is what we have."
Thus I'm at this point, being tested.
But it doesn't even matter anymore, what the tests show.
What other people think is irrelevant-- people can test for anything, and get anything to show up.
The DID is the only thing that makes everything else make sense. When I've told my therapist, or friends, or even my sister, its like a lightbulb has gone off in their heads. Some have even said "OH! So THAT'S why...." and start naming things that have happened that never made sense before, that all of a sudden DO. "So THATS why you don't remember..." "OH! Well that makes SENSE that you...." "OOOOOHHHHH!! Oh my gosh that makes EVERYTHING make sense now!"
Some people have even said, "I figured that's what it was for a long time."
However, just because "Carolineine", another part of me, decided that this is what we had, didn't mean I was ready to just accept it and move on. Nope. Absolutely not. I fought it for a long time. A couple years, in fact. And actually, I am still fighting it.
There's still a part of me that's hoping the tests from the psychologist will come up with something else, with something weirder that DID. Somedays I'd rather be "crazy", whatever that means. I'd rather just be a really good actress, or a good liar, or something...anything... than have DID.
Posted by pilgrim | Filed under:
You say so many things that resonate with me! "I'm a good actress", etc. The difference is that I had no idea anything was wrong with me growing up. So when my T dx'd me, I was stunned and didn't believe her. Yet when I told my grown daughter about the dx, her very first words were, "Well, that explains a lot!"
I so appreciate your honesty in your journey...