Out of Despair 6 - Dreams and Tragedy

Part 5 here

We have dreamed large and been shattered when the dreams died. I have learned things I cannot unlearn, like searing coals that have left deep scars. Love is not enough. Life is cruel. People do not get as they deserve. Sometimes the violent prosper and the kind suffer. Sometimes you take big risks and lose it all. Death crushes dreams, sickness brings a grief that isolates utterly. We are vulnerable little bags of blood and bones and our dreams are soap bubbles and glass. Life turns on a dime.

But without dreams, there is no life, no hope, no abundance, no meaning, no joy. Without risk, we have nothing.

"Nothing's safe, except what we put at risk" - Le Guin

I understand this well, it's how I've stayed alive when I've lost so much faith in the world. But this year, it was not enough. Suddenly we're dreaming big dreams, like having a child. The kind where I can't imagine surviving tragedy. Death, illness, loss, all paralyzing me with terror. In the face of these nightmares, a dead child, a dead partner, court taking child from 'mentally ill' mother, homophobia, violence, homelessness, loss... I am like a rat in a cage, running frantically but there's no way out. There's no way to survive these things.

And that's the key, there's no way for your world to continue. It ends. What I'm doing now - this retreat, this bizarre breakdown - the letting go, it's the letting go of a world that has ended. And you wait, you listen, you follow the small voices, the needs of the soul. And you find another path entirely, one that works for you, with what you have. So if Rose and I lose a child and it tears us apart... we sit and we cry and we say - love, love, this pain is too great, our grief is too different. Let us be free to grieve apart. If she dies and all the world we'd created together is suddenly hollow without her, I retreat, I listen, and I find a new path. Perhaps I leave the home we'd made, I buy a caravan, the child and I go travelling with the market folk, at night we watch the moon.

We are not on the railway tracks. We are free to grieve the death of dreams and make room to have new dreams. So tragedy can be faced, the inevitability of loss can be borne.

 The world of structure is important. It is not wrong. It is necessary. It supports my life. Too much of it kills me. Too much of it would have me living a 'successful' life, the 'recovered' patient, doing things that have long lost meaning for me, empty and lost in my heart. This other wild way is capricious and impulsive and need driven and full of hidden mystery and meaning. People make a lot of sacrifices in their lives hoping that success will make them feel the way I feel when I'm up a tree in the moonlight full of the wonder of my world. These two things should not be divided as they are in my life and my head. They are a whole. The one supports the other. Structure follows dreaming, sustains it, makes sure there is food in the cupboard and a safe place to sleep.

Letting go frees me to dream of different things to what I have known. I have fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that flares and settles and flares again. I can expect that there will be days that I do not get out of bed - as there are now. If I wait until I'm well to be a mother, I will not get the chance. But the despair in my heart when I've realised that there will be days Mum doesn't get out of bed had overwhelmed me. My mother got out of bed even if she was just out of hospital. She's my whole world of what it is to be a mother. I will fall short. I will be one of those mothers.

So I grieve that vision of motherhood, and let it go. I will reach out to mother's who have disabilities and illnesses. I will find a new vision, where who and how I am, is enough. Where what I am able to offer is worthwhile. I will have a different family, a different life, a different experience of being a mother. This is sad, and it is also freeing. Let go of what does not work, and find something that speaks to me. Enough suffering. Enough diligence. Enough failure.

Instead, the most barely understood glimpse of a life where we live in harmony, where passion and diligence meet, space for dark and light, the strongest and the most vulnerable. Room for madness, permission not to fit in or hide, connection to soul.

It's a rich life I've led. So many experiences, so much I've learned. I've walked many different worlds, seen so much (attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion). It's an amazing thing to be alive. 

Out of Despair 5 - The Cave Dwellers and the Golden Light

Part 4 here

Let me tell you another story. There is a grey world, without colour, without trees or living things. Wounded people live in caves, scratching out life from a bare and inhospitable world. Beneath the crust of this world, is a golden light, powerful and full of urgent energy. The cave dwellers can hear it and feel it rising. They fear it greatly, it haunts them. They forsee it bursting through the surface of their world, tearing apart homes and safe burrows, destroying the world they have known. They do everything they can to keep it at bay. The light is the raw stuff of dreams, of hope, of life force. It seeks the surface with the determination of a plant, with the ferocity of a volcano.

There is so much fear here, so much loss. What if it doesn't have to stay this way? What if the golden light is exactly what the grey world needs to come back to life, to be abundant and vibrant and nourishing? What if the cave dwellers, instead of living in fear of it, can be the stewards of it? Instead of being haunted by it, they can live in the promise of it's song. What if they are the ones who mine into the rock for it? Who guide it into safe passages where it does not destroy? Who direct it so that the changes are good, thoughtful, wise ones? What is there is harmony instead of threat?

Narrative therapy and focusing techniques are something I've been exploring, making space to ask questions of myself and find new ways to think about my world, new ways to frame my stories. This is powerful for me.

With this shift comes also the power to face the certainty of loss. I have been terrified of my dreamers, those who fly, who take risks, who rock boats.

Part 6 here

Out of Despair 4 - The Railway Tracks

Part 3 here

Let me tell you about something I call the railway tracks. It is something I have struggled with for many, many years. I get stuck. I plan my life, and those plans are like tracks laid out before me. In good times, they are a guide. I stick to them, but I can also get off them, make detours, follow impulses, go where the moon calls me. In bad times, I am trapped by them, no deviation, no way out. Rewind 5 years. I've driven into the city to go to a church service that evening. I'm trying to make new friends. I know I'm multiple but I've told almost no one. I'm exploring an idea that if we don't switch, if we take the same part to church each time, we might have a better chance at making friends. It's sort of working but also not. Driving home late at night, there's a sudden yearning inside to go home via the beach instead. The night is cold and clear and the moon is bright silver and I'm terribly lonely and lost. I want to do this so badly, but I can't. The plan was to go to church and come home. The beach isn't in the diary, isn't on the schedule. I fight very hard but I cannot make myself drive there. I go home instead. This is the railway tracks.

At the time I dig into it enough to realise that I suffered from it because it supported my functioning in another way. I didn't exemplify the chaos that is common in someone who has parts, because we all stuck to an agreed schedule. The downside was this lack of freedom to be spontaneous. That was upsetting but an acceptable trade off. Over time, the schedule - and this whole approach, the group being bound to decisions made previously, a rigid adherence to agreements, inflexibility, feeling trapped and locked in, has degenerated into severe depression. Hence, the letting of it all, the following of small voices, listening to immediate needs and wants. The tracks are suddenly gone. The sense of living my life by constantly bullying myself into doing things I desperately did not want to do, being so far outside of my comfort zone I couldn't remember the last time I had seen it, of holding myself down, holding my hand in the fire, holding the feelings at bay, that has gone. The boulders on my heart have lifted. The despair is still there, the screaming pain, the loneliness, the scars, the terror, the years of torment and loss. But the crushing destruction of motivation, initiative, emotion, that has gone, for now at least. The tracks are gone. I can do what I wish, make impulse decisions. Turn right instead of left. Stand at the edge of the world and watch the ships.

Suddenly I'm walking Zoe because I want to, because I love her, because I love going out in the night and the cold where I have the world to myself, not because I have to, not out of guilt or obligation.

Suddenly I'm realising that this freedom is the key to attachment, to connection, to love. That this isn't just how I want to look after my dog, it's the kind of parent I want to be. Connected. Let off the hook for not being perfect. Working with what I have. It's the kind of partner, friend, person, I want to be.

Stronger member of my system have allowed themselves to be bound by the needs and fears of more vulnerable members. It's been critical for cohesion. We've been very good at presenting only one face to the world. We're united by a set of values, and the primary need to survive. This leashing also strips us of much of our strength, passion, fire, and zest for life. You cannot dream when your dreamers are locked in stone. There's a cold war between those who hope and those who despair. We are changing this. We are loosening leashes. I don't know what will happen. That's precisely the frightening and wonderful thing. I don't know what my future holds.

Part 5 here

Out of Despair 3 - The Tribe

Part 2 here

This change of approach is everywhere in my life at the moment. I have an analogy. Picture a tribe of people, living together. Now bomb the region. Nuclear! Wasteland, devastation, loss. The tribe are alive but wounded. Some are sick, some are weak, some are young. They band together to get out of the wasteland. The journey is very, very long. They don't know how long it will take. Somewhere it must end, somewhere there must be clean water and trees. It's an act of faith to go on, to keep believing that all the world is not like this. As they journey, some members cannot go on. They become exhausted, or too wounded, or they die. The tribe buries them, or leaves them in caves or burrows. They promise that when they find a good place, they will return. They keep on. Sometimes one member leads, sometimes another. Sometimes they fight. They learn a lot about living together and looking after each other. They leave a trail behind them, footsteps in blood, bodies under hummocks of sand and ash.

The tribe is smaller now, leaner, wiser, older. They find the edge of the wastes, there is grass again, water, food. They can make a home. They can make a life. They can sleep indoors.

The whole world of mental health now says to me - set up home. Focus on the present moment. Be happy. Be well.

My wastes are full of wailing, angry ghosts. I'm haunted by who I used to be. I owe debts. I've made promises.

So I look sick instead of successful, as I go back to the burrows and rouse them, the lonely, wounded, angry ones, and promise them the world now has trees in it. As I go and wake my dead, gather the bones and bring life back into them. It looks like depression. It looks like crashing, like getting sick. I don't look like a successful, recovered patient.

But there's life again! There's many voices. There's feeling in my skin. Where my routines and plans had become empty, there's passion. Where I've closed my ears to the cries and done what needed to be done, now is a time to open my ears, to sit and listen, to make a fire, to share bread, to tell the stories, to bring back together what has been divided. Dark and light, old and young, bold and timid, hope and despair, conventional and misfit, to be a tribe again, to each have a voice. We all need to have a voice to dream of a new future for us all.

And here comes the next part - the dreaming. It cannot be something that suits one, or a few. Parenthood must not be something only one or two desire. A home is not a home unless we all belong there, strange as we are. If the dark wild ones need trees to climb there must be trees. We need all of us to dream, to yearn, to share in a future together.

Without all the voices we have no balance. We are divided, unstable, without constraint. The human spirit is made to be pulled in different directions, this is our pain and our beauty, we find balance between conflicting needs. I am divided, we must work together for there to be balance, wholeness, real hope. There has been rising hope and despair, in conflict, this year. To undo the conflict and find harmony, we must undo the framework.

Part 4 here

Out of Despair 2 - Frameworks free and bind

Part 1 here

I've been doing a big shift in frameworks lately. I was conceiving of my severe bouts of depression and the fibro flare this year as an indication I was doing something wrong. I couldn't work out what it was, what I needed, where I'd stuffed up. Framing the problem like this was immobilizing me.

The mental health framework was offering me another idea, that of 'depression'. It was presented as a mysterious, incomprehensible illness, striking randomly without warning, disabling and destroying. One you cannot fight, cannot understand. There are meds, there is waiting it out. That is all. This bogeyman was preying on my mind. It loomed larger and larger in my thoughts, bringing with it an incapacitating terror. What if nothing I try works? What if this is part of my life now? What if I never feel better?

These are the frameworks we give to people with psychosis; that it is insanity, incomprehensible, impossible to interact with. Pointless to attempt to understand. Endure. Take your meds. Endure. Hope. Lower your expectations. Don't listen to the voices.

(I'm not anti meds. You do what works. I work a lot with people they don't work for. There needs to be more than one approach.)

The framing of the problem was killing me. I tried turning it all around. What if getting sick and being depressed doesn't mean I've done anything wrong? What if I've made excellent choices in difficult circumstances? What if my circumstances have changed now and the approach I've been using isn't working anymore? What if I stop everything, let go of all of it, and go back to listening to myself. This letting go has been the most miraculous thing. My heart is singing again. I feel alive, my emotional connections have returned. There's certainty and focus and hope, where there was terror, confusion, and despair. Language has power. You cannot find the answer when you're asking a question that don't permit that answer.

I'm ignoring the bogeyman of 'Depression'. I'm embracing the idea of letting go, of a retreat, of a cocoon, to build something new. To reconnect with the heart of me.

Take friends. I've been a desperately lonely child and young person. I craved human connection and contact, dreamed about having friends I could hug, talk to about things that scared me, people who would support me when I was hurting, remember my birthday, be happy to see me, miss me when I was away. I've carefully worked on friendship networks over years and had something catastrophic - like PTSD - suddenly open a Gap I can't bridge and take them all away. My multiplicity has deeply and strangely affected my relationships. I have trouble building relationships with parts of other, so called normal people, they usually keep buried. I also tended to push relationships hard. There was a big hole at the middle of my life, where very close relationships were meant to be. I took wonderful friendships and destroyed them by trying to make them closer than they were ever going to be. It's like there was a black hole in the middle of me, and I couldn't stop it drawing people inwards to something more personal, vulnerable, and intense, than they wanted. So I had nothing instead.

Several years I realised that this loneliness, this yearning need, was killing my friendships. So I disconnected from it. I changed focus and deliberately started seeking out acquaintances. From those, I started to make some slightly more close friends, and so on. I've reached a place now where I have a whole network full of really awesome people, more than I can keep up with. For a weird, lonely, mentally ill freak, I've been astonishingly successful at rebuilding social support. And I've hit a wall, where I can't let anyone closer.

Because this approach is goal-oriented, top-down, intellectual, disconnected from that lonely, yearning, intense heart of me. Shielding people from it has been effective, it's helped me build good caring relationships where I don't bleed all over them, where I'm not raw, prickly, angry, scary, or in their face, most of the time. It's helped me put my best foot forwards. But it also keeps at bay those I have come to love, walls them off from my vulnerability, cuts me off from my own yearning. So the time has come to let go of one approach, and grasp another.

Part 3 here

Out of Despair 1 - Language is Powerful

I've undergone a massive change in my mental landscape in the past month. Against a background of a bad flare in my chronic pain condition, and severe bouts of my first experiences of depression, I've finally found a way through. It's difficult to communicate but I wanted to share. I've tried to put my thoughts in order and broken them up into 6 separate posts to make it easier to read and pick out only the bits you might useful. I hope it might be helpful to someone.



So many of my experiences in life have been so different, so alien and without words, I've struggled to even think about them in a coherent way, let alone communicate about them to other people. I've found lose frameworks and sketchy lexicons to at least be able to have a dialogue with my selves about my life. They've been useful but also limiting - as frameworks tend to be. So for example, as a young person, functioning in a way entirely differently from all my peers, I needed ways to describe and explain this to myself. One of the concepts I came up with is that I was a poet and they were not. This was, generally speaking, true. It also encompassed other ideas - that I was a highly creative person in a non-creative environment where sports was the focus. It spoke to a sensitive, observant nature. It had connotations far beyond that of a wordsmith - poet, and became instead Poet - a term that encompassed someone profoundly out of step with contemporaries, who spent much time up trees, on roofs, and in rivers. Who dressed primarily in velvet when given a choice, wore a knife on a belt when at home, cried most days, was desperately lonely, and carried around a journal like it was her own soul.

It was startling to meet other poets and discover that while most are misfits in some way, they are not necessarily misfits in the same way as I was. I was using the term to encompass ideas that did, and did not fit within it.

When I was first presented with the idea of dissociation it seemed primitive to me. I made no connection at all between the clinical terminology and my own experiences. I had become so accustomed to living a double life - the things we speak of and the things we do not, that starting to dig into my own fractured state in therapy deeply troubled me. I have come to accept that dissociation is the term for what I experience - a division of personality into separate parts, and at times a tenuous connection with 'reality'. But there's more to the story than this. Multiplicity is a big part of what makes me different. Being queer is another part. Odd developmental patterns is another - I was far ahead of my peers in some areas as a child/teen, and very behind in others. Being highly creative instantly put me at odds with systems, structures, routines, and traditions. Being highly traumatised changed how I felt, thought, and reacted. What made me feel different, and be identified by my peers as different, is far more complex than a mental illness. And to collapse some of my differences and challenges under the framework of mental illness does them a disservice.

Language is important. It shapes how we think. It provides frameworks, and frameworks are both useful and limiting. They can also be incomplete, unsophisticated, erronious. The first times as a teenager that I went along to poetry gatherings I was deeply disappointed. I had been hoping to find people like me. People full of yearning and loneliness, who were deeply moved by life and had made the great effort to find words for experiences that defied language. People who craved connection and intensity. I felt instead, lost, lonely, confused. My frameworks were insufficient. 'Poet' was part of the picture but not the whole picture.

Dissociation and multiplicity are part of the picture but not the whole picture. The language of social workers and psychologists reminds me of butterfly collectors, who kill what they revere. Who have board of lifeless wings with which they cannot possibly understand the glory of flight. When lost for words, I always return to poetry. There are things you cannot understand without experiencing them as they are. Science turns on the lights and drags up the strange creatures from the deeps. It's valuable. But it's also limited.

Some days the single most lethal idea we've ever come up with, is that we are normal people, leading ordinary lives. The world is not what we think it is. Our ideas about it are a structure, a framework we've laid over it, to make sense of it and understand it. They are not 'truth', and they are not 'reality'. Rejecting the ideas of your own culture does not mean you are rejecting reality. Being able to step outside of the roles you fill in your life can be a terrifying experience. It can also be a way of touching your soul.

Language is precious. I'm frustrated by people who say that language destroys what it seeks to describe, who believe that life cannot be communicated about. It is imperfect, which is why it should not be static. It is fluid, we change it, we add new words, we change the meanings of words, we shift it around. We lose words, we reclaim words - like queer, like mad, like freak.

I'm still partly a child. Literally and metaphorically. I'm hypersensitive, at times profoundly insecure, confused by the world. I lack filters. When I read a book or watch a movie, I live in it. I cry, I love, I feel deeply for the characters. They have been my friends when I didn't have any. I learn quickly, the way a child does, soaking up information, mimicking instructions. The other day, I switched to a part who's about 13. I was co conscious and could see and feel what she did. It was like peeling back so many years of my life and tossing them away for a night. Memories of those early years were as strong as a yesterday. The world shifted, shadows deepened, all the words meant something different to me. I was light as air, laughing, I was free in the night, full of mischief and uncertainty. When I'm near the beach, a poet often comes out, full of lonely yearning. She is much younger, she stands by the water at the edge of the world and watches the ships out at sea. I used to spend a lot of time in Salisbury. One of the shopping complexes has been build around an old graveyard. Between council buildings, the library, cinema, grocery store, there is a tiny plot of gravestones. Everyone walks around them as if they are not there. I used to stand among them, memorizing the names. Noticing the babies who lived only hours or days, the women who died after long, long lives. We walk around these things as if they are not there. We get stuck in our frameworks and cannot see beyond them or think beyond them. I love my little yearning girl who lives by the sea. To call her a part of my mental illness is to miss entirely who she is and what she means to me. It is to obscure and deny.

Language can kill you. After being homeless years ago, I moved into a borrowed caravan and a caravan park. It was a time of absolutely disarray in my life, every plan I'd ever made or hope I'd ever had was utterly disrupted. I was chronically physically unwell and in constant pain. My marriage had collapsed, my friendship networks were gone, my life had burned to the ground. I was living among some of the poorest members of our community.

I found myself  in the 'white trash' bracket of our culture. People were confused, uncomfortable, curious, weirdly sympathetic. I tried to get involved in life again but found that my address held me back. I offered to help raise a puppy for a local guide dog organisation. I asked at the information session if living in a caravan park - a pet friendly one that allowed small fenced areas around each van - would be an issue. They said of course not! I went through the training and the home inspection and failed. Someone higher up the hierarchy I'd never met had decided that a caravan was 'not an appropriate environment for our expensive puppies'. I wasn't really a person anymore.

That could have crushed me. I felt the impact of it, the weight of it, on my spirit. I finally turned it around by tapping into the gypsy culture in my mind. Finding a different way to see my situation, different words to use about it. Now that I'm living in a unit, I miss my van some nights. I like to sleep outdoors, to feel the rain and hear the wind and watch the moon rise. I found new words, ones that didn't cut into me.

If dissociation is the word we're using to describe what I feel when I'm walking through the frameworks of our culture and finding my own language instead, then it can't be only negative, can't be 'illness'. It's also freedom. There is a tremendous power in being able to define ourselves and our own lives in ways that are meaningful to us.

Part 2 here

Staying safe in a crisis

I'm still in crisis mode here, working on staying safe until I'm in a better head space. I haven't worked out what's triggered this mess - that can happen and it can take some time to put things together. The task at the moment is staying safe. I have at least one severely depressed part, which is new territory for us. Anxiety is also sky high, I'm struggling to eat (or keep food down), fighting off a cold and sinus infection, and feeling very unsafe about self harm.

If the mental health system was less toxic, I'd be in care. But because it's such a mix of good care and abuse, it's high risk. For someone like me with my diagnoses, it's likely that I'll struggle to get any care at all, and that's not a struggle I have energy for. On one occasion previously when homeless, on the run from domestic violence, exhausted at caring for another mentally ill family member, and seriously suicidal I turned up to ACIS and asked for help... I was told that I had a better change of surviving alone than I did with their assistance because they do not treat people with DID well.

So that leaves me with trying to manage using my own resources and networks, to create something as safe as I can in my own life. I shut down to the bath if the self harm impulse is overwhelming. I've borrowed two bags of books from the library. This gives me something else to focus on. Sometimes they're a useful escape. Sometimes I read things that help me in some way. There needs to be something to ease that dangerous, frantic despair, the kind that has you running into the night looking for anything that might make you feel differently. I also have movies to watch, preferably long involved ones I already know. The flavour of the week is Harry Potter movies.

Sleep and food are critical. If they are both interrupted I will degenerate into severe dissociation and borderline psychosis. I'm fortunate at the moment in that I'm sleeping. Keeping food happening is more challenging currently. When you're very anxious your digestion shuts down, the thought, smell, and taste of food becomes unappealing. If I force myself to eat I will vomit. So I have to find small, filling meals of things that tempt me, where the smell or texture don't turn my stomach. Sometimes this means I eat the same thing every meal - like a bowl of cereal. Sometimes this means I need a different flavour and texture for every meal for a while. This gets very difficult if you're not well enough to drive and stock the fridge. I need to drink enough fluid that I'm not dehydrating.

I need to keep enough admin going that my life doesn't crash. This one is hard. I've cancelled almost every appointment this week. I'm getting by at the moment. Yesterday I was up to cleaning all the rotten food out of the fridge. I'm keeping up with feeding the pets and sorting out the cat litter tray. I've paid my bills. I've actually contacted people to cancel appointments instead of just not turning up. I've taken the dog to the vet when she was ill. I've removed all the clothes and linen the cat has peed on to a big pile in the laundry. I try not to think about all the big things worrying me about my life plans for the next few months or years, or I become hysterical. The goal is just one day at a time. Today I'm hoping to buy milk, cordial, and maybe hang out with some friends this evening if I feel safe enough to drive and have a chance of passing for normal.

I try and stay in touch a little with other people. Facebook can be good for this, if you're comfortable with that and know how to use your privacy settings. It gets hard to communicate. I'm mixed up. I stood at my kitchen window yesterday and simultaneously felt rigid, bitter despair about my life, and simple childlike joy. That's hard to explain to other people. In between jags of the kind of distressed crying that we never see on tv because it involves a truly horrifying amount of snot, I look fine. Maybe a bit tired and jumpy. I spent 5 hours yesterday morning trying to work out how to reply to a text from Rose asking me how I was, while she got increasingly concerned. Don't do that. We've since decided that an empty text with an asterisk in it means 'I'm not about to kill myself, but I'm not very good and I can't think straight enough to write to you. But I am awake and alive.' In between thinking about dying, I'm okay, just very flat and tired. There's even been some confusing but welcome good hours where someone happy turns up. After the first few days I've stopped hoping that this means the whole mess is over and getting devastated when I go down again. I also have to be careful because when I don't feel like a complete mess, it's easy to over reach and take risks I actually can't afford to manage at the moment.

I'm short fused and low on tolerance. It's important to stay away from people and situations that stress me, whether that's unwelcome advice, overbearing cheerfulness, people who don't get that I'm touch sensitive when stressed, whatever. Kindness goes a hell of a long way, as does feeling like it's okay that at the moment, you're a useless friend and a mess.

I need to not listen to the internal chatter that says things like "You're just lazy and weak and pathetic and useless and looking for attention and could snap out of it if you really tried". It helps when I can share that with someone who doesn't believe it. There's a sting in being able to confess stuff like this with someone who can say 'well so what if it is true? I still love you' and bring you an icecream.

I need space to be honest. My journal, a shrink, friends, somewhere I can pour out all of how messed up I really am feeling, instead of sticking to how I am being told I *should* feel in the hope that will help. Even if that means pouring out pages of reasons I'm a failure or why I hate myself. I need to be damn careful not to drown any one person in this stuff, especially not anyone who's already vulnerable themselves - or anyone's who's inclined to argue about it instead of just being kind, because I might throw things at them.

I need to make sure if I can that at least one other person know's what's really going on so that if it turns out that my assessment of where I'm up to is really off, someone else will step in.

I need a backup plan and other options in case this doesn't work. In my case at the moment if next week is still bad I'll be talking to my shrink. I also run a scale of stress-reduction behaviour according to degree of harm. So for example at the moment I'm struggling with a strong drive to self harm. I'm managing this using distraction, writing, wrist poems, hanging with other people when I don't feel safe to be alone, and long baths. If I become seriously suicidal and can't get help, I'll change focus and let myself self harm if that reduces enough stress and generates enough dissociation to reduce the risk of a suicide attempt. I keep shifting the goals as I need to. If I'm having a good day I try to connect to my networks, get urgent admin done, and go somewhere nice. If I've fallen apart I consider that if I'm still breathing at the end of the day that's a success. In the middle there is an attempt to self care and reduce stress with as little damage to myself, my relationships, and my life as possible.

On that note I'm going to fill a water bottle and watch the Order of the Phoenix.

Looking for self compassion

A few hours ago, I was sitting on the floor of my psychologist's office, choking on tears as I talked about what it felt to like to want to hurt myself. Something that started at 10 as a way of escaping the unrelenting misery of my experiences at school has stayed with me throughout life. My longest stretch without cutting or burning myself is 8 years. I was devastated when I fell off that wagon, and even more so to realise that for me, denying the impulse does not stop me wanting it. A desire that divides people immediately - those who simply cannot grasp the sense of need, the intensity of the urge, and those who have felt it too. It's difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't been there.

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.

Dissociation and tricks of the brain

Something happens when I rearrange the furniture. It's like part of my brain that was sleeping, wakes up and realises that I'm living in my own home where I can do that now. For a few weeks I look at everything with fresh eyes and find myself stirring out of the numb dissociation and actually paying attention to the miracle that is stable housing. It doesn't take a lot. I've recently moved my bed about 30cm away from the window, and stuck a cardboard box down the gap to act as a second side table. Suddenly my room is fresh and exciting. Today I secreted a few indoors friendly plants in small pots out of my garden and put them on the window sill. My inner house-people, the younger ones who love baking and having a beautiful home, prick up their ears. My goth starts dreaming of painting poems on the doorframes, of wall chandeliers full of candles. I start dreaming of peaceful sleep.

In the early hours of this morning, while it was cool and I could move about without feeling ill, I begun the task of rearranging my studio. This time the entire room is being moved around a single, critical need: that I have only one form of refrigerated air conditioning in my unit, and it is the freestanding kind that needs to be vented out a window. Previously one of my art desks blocked the window entirely. I have also had a lot of trouble with the curtains. The hooks that hold up the curtains constantly snag on the netting behind them when I try to open or close them. If I pull too vigorously, the curtain rod falls down. The netting is too long for the window so it gets caught under anything I put under the desk, and the dog and cat get tangled in it when they try to look out the window, also pulling the curtain down. With the wide desk in front of the window I simply can't easily open or close them, so they either live open and I vacate the studio once it's dark and keep the door shut, or they live closed and I vacate the studio during the day. I once lived in a horrible bachelor pad where the house stank of mould from the bathroom, off food in the fridge or from various half finished meals left in bowls around the house, the blinds were rarely opened and the floor stuck to your feet. I was desperately unhappy and constantly trying to clean it up but when your flatmates are trashing it daily it's not a happy place to be. I now particularly hate having the curtains drawn during the day. I tolerate it during extremely hot weather, but the rest of the time, if I'm out of bed, the curtains are opened. I crave and love the light when it's there, and open windows letting in fresh air and the sound of birds and traffic and the far off trains.

So I've changed things around, freeing up the entire window, removed the netting, and changed one of the curtains. I was going to change both because the original blue were also only just wide enough to cover the window which also made life tricky, but I love the effect of one of each. In theory, once I've cleared away the rest of the mess, I should be able to wheel my air conditioner in there, shut the door, and make art in the cool.

It's not perfect, both tables/desks are awkward sizes, one very long and one very wide, but I think for now it will work. Hopefully it will help me get back in there and get my fingers dirty, seeing the space with fresh eyes and reclaiming my constantly dimming sense of ownership over it can only be a good thing. Either way, it still feels good to have done something.

Recovery from Trauma - Touch

This has been a huge area for me, one I've had to re-negotiate throughout my life so far to try and find something that works for me. A lot of us who come through interpersonal trauma - where other people hurt us, are left with major struggles about touch. For me, I found that I've suffered when I'm touched, and I've suffered from being touch-starved. If you imagine for a moment that in your mind and body, there are three basic types of touch that you register and react to. One is touch that makes you feel good - a little baby holding on to your finger or a kiss from your lover or a hug from a friend. The next is touch that makes you feel bad, such as being hurt or invaded. The last is neutral touch, that doesn't make you feel good or bad, inconsequential things like sitting against someone on the bus or brushing hands with a checkout operator handing you your bags.

I found this last category of touch collapsed completely for me and has been by far the hardest to get back. When I'm really struggling good touch goes too, but a lot of days when I can still enjoy good touch I can't cope with neutral touch. I'm very sensitive to touch and it's like my brain can't work out how to handle neutral touch and does a very basic 'what kind of touch is this?' assessment that goes

1. 'does this feel good?' 
2. 'no' 
3. right then - 'BAD TOUCH'

I've had to talk myself through re building a sense of neutral touch. It rests on feeling reasonably safe and calm, and for me at least, part of a community. Strangers don't bother me if I am feeling content and like we're all just people. Being able to cope with neutral touch is an important key for me to cope with medical and dental appointments, travelling on public transport and in lifts, accessing crowded places, using supermarkets - basic functioning in life.

Touch is actually a crucially important aspect of being human. Newborns need touch after being born. Untouched, they will simply die. Touch changes us on a physiological level, massages support immune function and health for example. Touch is crucial in attachment, in bonding, and in social connection. Touch communicates affection, loathing, power, or love.

As a child and teenager I was ostracised and bullied at school. Touch became a key issue. I struggled to define moral responses to abuse and contempt. I developed a basic set of parameters - that until another person touched me, I would manage the situation verbally. If they initiated contact physically, then I would defend myself physically. It became generally known in the school that I was not to be touched. This decision was to some extent effective in that it relieved me of the chronic anxiety and distress around how I was to respond to relentless bullying. However the unintended downside of this was that I struggled alone, untouched and without comfort. Following a major trauma I was diagnosed with PTSD and in that space - traumatised, alienated, chronically suicidal, and devoured by nightmares, my world without touch became surreal and terrifying. I craved touch, longed to be hugged, my self-made wall designed for protection left me free-falling, alone and outcast. I no longer felt part of the world or of humanity, without touch to connect me. With no anchors, I floated into surreal dissociative states, feeling unreal and chronically numb, punctuated by intense fury, distress, and self loathing.

A few years ago, I turned up to the Mental Illness Fellowship SA activity centre. My life had burned down and I was extremely isolated at the time. I sat on a couch, nervous in a room full of strangers. Someone sat down next to me and I concentrated on not flinching. As I sat there stiffly and awkward and silent, the whole side of my body next to the stranger began to warm. This yearning for contact came unbidden from deep inside me and I realised how solitary my world had become. The loneliness was profound.

Touch is powerful, and for some of us, touch has been withheld and we have starved without it, or touch has been used to wound us and now we struggle to define our relationship with it. Touch often defines power in our relationships - I've felt trapped at times with people who refuse me the right to withdraw from touch I do not want. I've become more assertive these days as I've discovered that if I protect my right to control touch, then my relationship with touch becomes less ambivalent and stressed. My good friends know to check before hugs, and not to take it personally if I don't want to be hugged that day. Likewise, I do this for them. Because of this, touch has more and more of a place in my life now, which delights me.

People who don't get this and fight my right to choose who and when and how I am touched are usually excluded from my networks. Some of them are simply bullies. Some are too naturally dominating to consider someone else's needs. Some are under the illusion that if they impose touch upon me, I will 'realise' that it is safe and my boundaries are silly and unnecessary. Some take a preference not to be touched as a personal insult to them. The occasional few are sadists who enjoy touching someone who clearly is uncomfortable with it but lacks the social power to tell them to stop. I have a strong commitment in my life now; that loneliness is better than torture. People who don't respect me, don't get close to me.

Developing that power and honouring that need to protect myself has given me a lot more freedom. If I trust myself to protect myself (and my system trusts me to protect them - no accepting hugs if they're screaming inside me) then suddenly neutral touch isn't such a big deal. I'm not small and powerless any more, I'm a member of the community. I have a voice and I can take care of myself, which means I can engage. I don't have to hide, or run, or fight. I can be part of the world when I want to. I talk about the mental flip from seeing other people as inherently dangerous to just regular people in my article Using Public Transport. Here's an example:

"I was on the bus the other day and a man was standing in the aisle next to me when I noticed that he had a big mop of long fluffy white cat fur stuck to his nice dark pants! I suspect he has a lovely white persian cat at home that had been sleeping next to him on the couch. It suddenly flipped how I saw him - from being a threatening man standing too close to me, to just a regular guy with  a cat and not someone to be afraid of." 

I crave this freedom. When the PTSD is too bad for me to handle crowds, strangers, confined spaces, being a passenger in someone else's car, being out after dark, having other people in my home, being touched, new environments, loud environments, and so on, my world is very small, very painful, very lonely. I hate this place, it's like being in a coffin.

There's a thrill to being able to reclaim my place in the community. The more I protect myself and make myself feel safe, the more 'risks' I can take, like going to a concert I love. As I learn to reclaim touch it helps me manage experiences that typically are nightmares for me - like dental or medical appointments. It also frees me to have the ability to offer touch to someone else in need, to give a hug to a friend who is struggling or hold the hand of a psychiatric patient who is confused and distressed.

Touch is powerful. It can be my biggest trigger for anxiety and dissociation, such as when I get hugs following my talks at big conferences (see The Voices Vic Conference). It is also one of my strongest grounding techniques during anxiety attacks or major dissociative episodes. It's a powerful way of communicating between people - acceptance, or rejection, affection or loathing, mutuality or domination. If touch is an area that has been damaged for you too, you can change how touch works in your life. You have the right to use it as a tool, to protect yourself from it, to seek out good touch, to be aware of the messages you send and accept through touch. There are more, and better, options than being touch starved or having to put up with touch that you find distressing and disempowering.

So it turns out I am a bat

I've been experimenting with my sleep patterns since I started the new job with Aceda 6 weeks ago. It has been a continual thorn in my side over the past 6 years that my sleep gears towards nocturnal. It started suddenly after the devastating break up of a long term relationship, I immediately went from being a very morning, waking up with the dawn to have a walk kind of person, to keeping company with the owls and bats.

Many things fed into this over the years, for a couple there I was totally nocturnal, unable to sleep at all until the dawn came and people started to wake up and go about their lives. I kept vigil all the long, lonely nights, baked scones, watched bizarre documentaries on SBS, wrote poetry, wept myself hoarse, and went for long walks when it rained and I figured I'd be the only mad one out on the streets.

When I was very sick with the chronic fatigue and fibro etc getting less than 9 hours would leave me trembling, vomiting, and massively dissociated. Insomnia cycles with nightmares were devastating physically and tipped me into psychosis. The usual treatments for sleep issues didn't work at all, most sleeping meds do not work on me, the only one that does also leaves me dissociated and half out of my brain for days. Attempting to reset patterns by persistently getting out of bed in the morning and getting in the sun or taking melantonin only made me incredibly ill. I would crack long before any signs of sleep resetting would start.

So, I've been quite surprised to discover that I've been able to reset my patterns fairly easily over the past few weeks. I'm certainly physically far stronger than I have been, I can even handle one morning a week on a few hours sleep, and I've discovered recently there's one part who seems to exist in a permanent hypo-manic state and doesn't seem to notice even quite significant periods with little to no sleep. Slightly worrying but also incredibly useful when they're around...

There's been a downside I didn't expect. My mental health isn't coping with the change at all. Without my late night hours, there are a number of parts of my system who are not getting any time at all. We didn't realise this. So many new realisations lately.

We are able to get by so much better than we used to in so many ways. One of the big things that has made a difference is the ability to contain distressed parts until we're safe and alone. So often people say to me "I can't believe you wrote that post about hating yourself, or painted that image about self harm, you don't seem that way at all". And I say back to them - "You haven't met me at 3am". How true that is. It's such a constant surprise to me that people don't pick that the confident, gracious person who steps onto the stage to read poems about savage pain cannot possibly have written them. When I was younger, triggers would floor me. Vulnerable parts would fall apart in public, switch out and hide in back rooms writing poetry in the journal we carried everywhere. Skinless and devastatingly sensitive we had no capacity to fit in, to conceal our difference or our pain. We're still painfully raw at times, crying at work, missing the kinds of filters that adults seem to develop where you sit through movies untouched by the world within it. But we're so much further along than we used to be, and it turns out a huge aspect of this is having hours at night, alone and uninterrupted by the rest of the world, to let out all of those suppressed feelings and those hidden parts.

How much of this is the difference between a child and an adult? How much of this is the distinction we draw between the crazy and the sane? The 'sane' still have the capacity to choke it down in public? Something left with which to conceal themselves? No sobbing on the bus, no poetry in the doctors office, mustn't let them hear you scream...

I need my night hours to be mad. I crave my time in the sun, to be useful, to see friends, to study and work and live. But I need the night. It's where I do my screaming, where I bleed ink, brew art, it's the hours where the poems live and Narnia is close. It's a difficult life to pull off, there's too many mornings I can't avoid being sleep deprived and up early, there's the constant need for vigilence around things like driving and dissociation, cooking and dissociation - another nice burn on the inside of my arm from careless handling of a hot baking tray from a couple of days ago. There's the risks of sleep deprivation which are serious. It's a foot in two worlds kind of life, constantly frustrated by my inability to fit properly, to be entirely one thing or the other... It's also a productive, fulfilling kind of life, sublime and mundane in their proper places, full of art, full of love, light and shadows, the dark and the bright of the moon.

It's what I have to work with for now. So tonight, I'm a little tired, but I'm sitting up blogging again, past midnight where my thoughts suddenly become clear as snow melt and I feel at home. I belong here and I need this place. 

The Dissociation Inc Is Official!

We're registered as a legal entity now, all official and legit. The paperwork arrived in the post today, to much rejoicing!!

Next year some new plans and resources will start to be put into action with enthusiasm. In the meantime, we're all learning a lot and working hard. Our two face to face groups are going really well and continue to grow and develop every month, providing support for some amazing people struggling with some really tough issues. Our online groups are also going great, our open group now has over 100 members! We are supporting more people with trans and diverse gender needs which is wonderful as that is another under-resourced high stigma area. We're building bigger networks around Australia and some international too. Ticking along, ticking along. :-)

New Journals

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. 

Multiplicity - switching and relationships

'Cascade switching' is a term I coined after watching someone with multiplicity do an incredibly rapid series of switches over the course of a conversation. I've experienced it only a few times myself and I really hate it. Multiples are very different from each other when it comes to things like switching. Some switch frequently, some very infrequently. For some multiples switching a few times in a week would be highly unusual. For others switching a few times an hour is quite normal. I lean more towards the latter. It's quite normal (hah) for me to switch all through my day, even if one is mostly out over a week, others will tend to peek out here and there, even if it's just a young one noticing the jar of cookies in the cupboard or being distracted by little kids running around on tv.

Cascade switching is something else. It's switching so fast and so frequently that it feels and looks something like shuffling through a deck of cards face up, almost too quickly to register what's on each card. I've noticed that it seems to have been triggered in the cases I've seen by huge news that impacts everyone in the system (eg news of a death in the family), by encountering a situation that no one in the system can handle, so the switching just speeds up and becomes chaotic, or, as in my case, by the start of a new relationship. I've also done this when I've been under threat in dangerous therapeutic relationships.

It's deeply unsettling, I'm switching from one sentence to the next, or even part way through sentences. My ability to track information is overtaxed by the chaos, and breaks down. We can't tell who is out anymore, what we were doing, who we are with, even what year it is. The dissociation becomes overwhelming and I feel like I'm drowning blind and can't even tell what way to swim to get to air.

For some multiples this is a common occurance. Their systems are highly fluid, parts constantly changing, disappearing, new ones being formed. Their experience of life is so chaotic and dangerous that their system doesn't settle into a stable pattern but stays in a state of turbulence. Stability hasn't served them for survival so they gear towards flux instead. These people are often not diagnosed as multiples because the DSM concept of DID presumes stability.

I'm settling down finally which is great. It's been a few weeks of cascade switching with the occasional stable day or evening around my girlfriend, but that's settling more into my usual patterns of at least having someone out for an hour or so. Not to mention that's making it a bit easier for her to work out what's going on or have some capacity to predict how I'll react to her. I've been trying to unpick what's driving it for me and I've been able to pin down a few things. One is that most of my system are keen to meet her. Another is anxiety about forming a 'one-part bond'. Most of my friendships used to be this kind of bond, a few still are - where the connection is only to one part and no one else in my system thinks of that person as a friend, or even recognises them. (this makes life awkward when you run into people unexpectedly, that blank confusion that always makes me feel broken and ashamed) This is not what I want, because we are all parts rather than entirely separate people, we are all missing information about our life, and also missing skill sets. We are vulnerable to bad dynamics and painful relationships when only one part is involved and making decisions. We make much better decisions as a team. For a really important relationship like a romance, it's even more crucial that everyone in my system is aware, involved, and has a voice in what's happening. That doesn't mean that the kind of relationship is the same with all the parts, but that there is a relationship of some kind being developed. So I think anxiety about that has been pushing up the switching - whenever one part is out for a while and things are stable, the anxiety spikes and the switching amps up. The downside is that cascade switching is so stressful and confusing that it's very difficult to navigate a relationship with someone in the grip of it.

Pacing seems to be helping me get out of it. The obsessive focus you feel in a new relationship is delicious - you want not just to be with them all the time, but to climb under their skin, into their mind, investigate and submerge yourself... But the dating, the meet and part and meet again cycle is helping me settle back into my own cycles. Making the effort to keep the same part around for an hour or the whole night - then making the effort to have another part who wants to connect or communicate be present next time, we're slowing down and things are becoming clearer. Trying to find a middle ground between adapting to another person where switches are triggered by how they are and what they need, and the kind of switching we do alone where they are entirely generated by our own needs... that's a huge challenge! I can do one or the other, but trying to meld something between is a complex ask. A whole new kind of dance.

United States of Tara

I'm often asked what I think of this show, and it's not an easy question to answer. It's a highly divisive topic in the multiple community and I'm always mindful of very strong feelings for and against by a lot of people who feel pretty disempowered and marginalised already.

Personally, I've watched the whole show. As a television show, I think it works. It's interesting and funny and thought provoking. It's entertainment. I laugh through it. As a multiple and mental health activist passionate about multiplicity, I have mixed reactions. I love that everyone in Tara's family has 'issues'. She's not the wreck in a perfect family. I love using humour to talk about big important issues- although I also recognise that for some other people, this feels painful and humiliating. Personally, I've plenty of funny stories about the complications of life as a multiple and I'm glad I can navigate things with a sense of humour. I like that they consistently treat the multiplicity as 'real' and show the confusion and distress of not having it treated as real. I think it's good that there's a clear childhood trauma link established. Raising awareness of the experience of multiplicity is a good thing.

But there are also things that deeply frustrated me about the show. I find Tara's switching actually painful to watch. It's hard to communicate how deeply uncomfortable it makes me, the best analogy I've been able to come up with, is to try and imagine how it feels to watch a close relative stripping... just... ugh! This representation of switching isn't inaccurate, although it is misrepresentative. A smaller percentage of multiples switch like Tara, very obviously, to a small, stable set of highly recognisable parts. The majority of multiples switch covertly. The transitions are subtle and hidden from most people, or only occur when they're alone/in therapy/with their closest friends. Making me feel uncomfortable is not a criticism, but what really bothers me is that Tara's presentation of multiplicity is not put into a context. It wouldn't have been difficult to write in brief interactions with some other multiples who have different presentations, whether she met them in person, read about them in biographies, or talked with them online. Presenting Tara as a typical multiple is frustrating for someone like me. I have to contend with the sideways glances as people try to catch me switch. I have been asked by shrinks or support workers to switch on demand. I also have to manage the typical reactions of people who are permitted to observe an obvious switch, which is usually fear and fascinated voyeurism.

This brings me to my next major concern about Tara. The show brings up some of the greatest fears experienced by multiples or by the general community about multiples. 'Younger' parts making sexual advances to a young person. Parts being killed off or disappearing. Parts who embody an abuser. A multiple who cannot be trusted to care for an infant. I'm not saying these things never happen, but when the public understanding of multiplicity is based on Tara, Sybil, and numerous serial killer movies, this makes me angry. This is not representative of multiples! I have never ever put a child at risk, been sexually inappropriate with a child, and none of my system are abusers, violent, sociopathic, or sadistic. Multiples watched this series, saw some of our worst fears brought to life, and we're left without answers, without assurance, and for many of us, without any other resources or supports in our lives. I feel this is shortsighted at best and unethical at worst. So many of us are so alone, so afraid of ourselves, so stigmatised, labouring under books of rigid advice about how we should function, stuck with a medical model that construes multiplicity as a sickness, and treated by the wider community as serial killers and freaks. I think conversations and depictions of multiplicity need to be sensitive to this context, and to maintain hope, honesty, freedom, diversity, and respect. I think Tara starts this conversation but falls a long way short of the hopes I had for it as a resource and tool to advocate on behalf of multiples.

I'm dating :)

It's been a mammoth week here for me, and with 2 exhibition launches this week and a major sculpture project due on Monday... it's not going to ease up anytime soon. It's getting challenging to find time to write the blog! Over this last week I've had the wedding of two dear friends (to each other), a friends mental health crisis, vandalism happening around my home, and I've officially started dating a wonderful woman I first met in the online dating scene. We've been talking and catching up for almost 4 weeks now and we've just done the big status change on facebook. :)

Needless to say, I'm feeling slightly dazed! On top of the world, anxious, excited, exhausted, frustrated, happy... I think I've hit every emotional note and then some this week.

Dating as a multiple is complicated. My girlfriend knows of my situation and we're doing a lot of talking. I'm learning a lot and my system is adjusting to the new circumstances. I'm working on foreseeing and avoiding at least the obvious possible problems (such as leaving the other person feeling rejected when some parts need time to themselves), and discovering that being a multiple in a relationship doesn't all have to be trauma and downsides... in fact it can be fun, silly, enjoyable, slightly bizarre, and always interesting! There's a lot of role swapping and different kinds of bonds being formed as different parts turn up to say hello.

So, that's been my week. Off to The Knack tonight, hope your week is going well!

Nobody

is strong all the time.

There's out

...and then there's out to your neighbours... I've been having a rough time since I moved in, with one neighbour shouting at me and sending the occasional hostile letter. In the last few months I've woken up a couple of times to find some minor vandalism. Last week was a bit special, had one of my windows super-glued shut. :(

This morning I was busy painting shoes and I could hear this neighbour complaining about me to others in my block which was pretty unpleasant. I turned up the music and kept my head down.

This afternoon I discovered that the local Messenger was running the story about me. Hence the sudden interest. You can read the article here, on page 18.(the last time icwas interviewed by The Messenger, it didn't run the story in my local area)

My first reaction is to feel ill. Stressed, exposed, discredited, humiliated, targeted. Feels like being back at school.

My second reaction (thank god for parts, they always have a different view) is defiance. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to be embarrassed about. I'm a decent person and a respectful neighbour. People can think what they like, I'm holding my head up and I'm happy with my life. Out is where I wanted to be.

Adaptation and Control

The capacity to adapt is one my strengths, and it's a very common one for dissociative multiples. Chameleon like, we often switch to new parts to manage new environments or situations. People who are rigid and inflexible in the way they approach the world usually struggle during times of change or through experiences of trauma. Adaptation has tremendous power to help us navigate complex circumstances and draw upon different personal attributes in different situations.

However, too much adaptation can become destructive. This is something I have really struggled with. The metaphor I use is of having my feet welded to railway tracks. I am not a free agent who can go where they wish, rather I only travel the tracks laid out for me. What this means practically is that I can really struggle to run my own life when I'm stressed. I lose my capacity to initiate anything. I am adept at coping with adapting to what other people around me choose to do, but making choices of my own has been very challenging. I've worked very hard to manage these problems and feel more in control of my own life.

For me, I spent a great many years in various stressful situations where I could not escape, and I could not control what was happening. I did not have the power to make major decisions about my life. I could not choose where or with whom I lived, not to go to school, or to influence any of the decisions the adults in my life made. Because many of my experiences were traumatic, this basically trained me that life is something I adapt to, not something I control. I try to carve enough breathing room from the space that is left after everyone else has made their choices. I have been conditioned to be compliant (or passive aggressive) rather than free.

As an adult, this is a useless framework. It severely limits my freedoms, stops me taking charge of my own life, and has tended to play into abusive relationships. I have had to work hard to retrain myself to be the person in charge of my own life. Even now, when I'm very tired or run down, I feel those old train tracks under my feet, and that sense of being trapped by my choices and unable to make changes.

There are many things I've done to break this training. The first step for me has been recognising it. There is a particular grief that I feel when I'm trapped in it, a horrible, paralyzing depression that I have learned to recognise means I have lost control of my own choices. Many things can trigger that loss of control. Some common ones for me have been:

• being dependent on someone else for a basic resource like housing 
• feeling trapped by difficult circumstances such as caring for someone with severe mental illness 
• feeling trapped by choices made by other parts that are not what I would have chosen 
• being paralysed by fear or guilt in a relationship 
• not standing up for myself in a power struggle
• not saying what I really think or feel 
• feeling betrayed by a part in some way eg. sharing my journal entry without permission, talking in a derogatory way about me to someone, giving away my clothes or belongings

Once we'd started to tease out what sets off this experience, we've all started to work on each of the issues. Mandating system wide that no one is to be abusive or disrespectful to anyone else, or to throw out anyone's belongings was a fairly easy process for us. Learning to say what we really think or feel has been much slower and longer. Many parts have excellent skills in that area and are comfortable and confident. However many are crippled by social anxiety, a desire to please, a fear of abuse, and really struggle to clearly define themselves. We've taken a two pronged approach to this - firstly to support all parts to be able to learn these skills as they can, and secondly to switch to more confident parts if they are being overwhelmed and crashing. Both have taken time to develop, and a safe place to retreat back to, to process all the complex feelings associated with it. This process brought up a lot of intense feelings, fear that I was being mean, fear of being perceived as selfish, fear of arguments or hostility, struggling to learn how to disagree in a warm and friendly way, struggling to learn how to set boundaries before I'd become furious and resentful. (or switched to someone furious and resentful!) It was amazing the sense of freedom that came from being able to do very little things like say warmly 'That's not been my experience' in a situation where I felt dominated and everyone else in the room agreed with each other. Just a tiny little sentence like that would lift the sense of crushing weight, of being trapped and owned, and suddenly we were Sarah again, and could breathe.

Most of these issues for me/us have taken a lot of work and a long time, but even very small gains have been powerful. I'm not finished yet, some areas are very strong now and some are much more fragile and rocky, but enough work has been done that I am able to exercise a lot of control in my life now, to make big independent decisions about what I do with my time, who I spend time with, what degree to pursue, how to run my house. I am gradually learning the skills to be the leader in my life, practising through things like training a strong willed dog, forcing myself to make decisions without checking them out with anyone for their approval, learning how to be more adaptive to internal needs and conflicts instead of accidentally trapping a whole system of parts into choices only a few of us want. 

This issue of over-adapting and losing initiative is a very common one for those of us who have been traumatised, particularly through abusive relationships. Breaking the training that making independent decisions is profoundly dangerous can be tricky and take lots of time. But it certainly is possible. If this is a difficult area for you, perhaps a similar approach will be useful - notice what makes it worse and work on those issues. Some days you'll make progress and other's you'll crash and burn, but it's surprising how it does all add up over time. Everytime you look after yourself, speak up for yourself, make a decision in your own best interest, you exercise a little more power over your own life, you reclaim a little more freedom. And that experience is so thrilling, so liberating, so nourishing, that it all snowballs and becomes easier and easier. If you're at the start of that process, take heart. :)

The Exhibition Is Up!

I spent a frantic morning before Bridges yesterday putting up all the artwork for this exhibition. The previous evening I had titled and written a brief description of each work, I dashed off to the library first thing to print these. When I arrived at Fullarton Centre, I found a corridor with newly installed overhead rails from which to hang the art. These are simply awesome, I would love to install them all through my house. The downside was being given a milk crate of tangled line and hooks to hang the art with. :-) I was madly rushing up and down this corridor, wrestling with lengths of clear nylon line and trying not to fall over my own feet. I arranged all the work, strung it up, cut out the titles, blue tacked everything discretely, and jumped up and down with excitement before running off to group. It really did look good, something special. I can finally really envisage my first solo exhibition somewhere with loads of new work and a big wonderful launch... I'm not quite there yet but at last it feels within my grasp! I'm tremendously proud of the work, to have created so much under such difficult circumstances, and kept it safe, it's such a joy to me. There's so much more still to come, my brain bursts at the seams with new images and ideas!

The descriptions is very new for me, it opens each work up so much more to reveal my personal imagery and symbolism. It was alarming to write because of this exposure! But I also think it is very powerful. So much modern art locks the viewer out, it is incomprehensible and alienating. I want to do the opposite, to invite people in, to be open and share the keys to understanding my work, to communicate through art.

But wow, is it revealing!

Earlier this week a reporter and photographer from the Messenger came by to put a story in the paper about Mindshare and the whole Big Circle Arts Exhibition Trail. I did an interview for the Messenger last year, which was fantastic. At the time I only disclosed that I had 'a dissociative disorder'. This time I talked about DID, multiplicity, parts, the whole shebang. First time I've done that with the media. I felt pretty ill for the rest of the day. But, I'm also proud of myself. One more message that this stuff is real and 'normal', not freakish or scary. Nibbling away at the myths and stigma. I'm hoping the art exhibition will do that too. The stress and anxiety and exposure are pretty high, but so is the delight and pride and excitement. I hope I've made the right calls.