by Band Back Together | Apr 27, 2016 | Child Abuse, Coping With Domestic Abuse, Domestic Abuse, Murder, Pet Loss, Sadness |
I came home once to find one of my daughter’s most loved fish in the toilet. I was sad for her, and very worried the little fishy might accidentally come back up. I didn’t want that to be traumatic for the kids, so I flushed it again. The fishy wriggled ALIVE and went down with the water. I was horrified!
Abusive Husband was very angry, and demanded to know what the EFF my dumb ass was thinking. I asked, “But why was it in the toilet?” He said it looked like it was going to die, but the cold water must have revived it. He made big deal to my daughter about it, saying that I was careless and killed her pet.
I was so sad I just wanted to slip through the floorboards. I was so confused. I was always messing stuff up. I would never have hurt her.
Thankfully, my daughter doesn’t remember it at all, even though it was just a few years ago. It must have been so awful for her, that she has blocked the memory.
The other kids remember Abusive Husband putting beloved fish in the toilet as a threat to force them to do things, “or else”. Or, he would do it just to terrorize them into a panic, when he was bored while I was at work. I asked them, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have gone toe to toe with him over one tiny mean comment to any of you kids!!”
“Exactly Mom, he was going to kill you if we told.”
by Band Back Together | Apr 22, 2016 | Borderline Personality Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Self Injury, Suicide |
Mental Illnesses are prevalent in our world. They greatly affect not only the individual involved, but the people around them. In the month of April, we focus our spotlight on Mental Health, in order to heal together and break down stigmas.
We want your stories. How has your own, or someone else’s mental illness affected your life? How are you rising above stigmas?
Please share your stories with us during the month of April.
As it stands, my story isn’t on this website. That’s because I’m not quite ready to go into it. What is relevant right now is that I’m the newest host in my body’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) system. I’ve been here for almost a year.
All I’ve really succeeded in was coming to terms with all of the mental stuff we didn’t want to admit to before. Like DID, Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the fact that the shadow people are actually hallucinations (among with other fun psychosis things). That’s a lot to tackle, and the fact that we’re still here makes me feel proud.
I’m both 21 years old and 11 months old. I was thrown into a breakdown where the former host isolated themselves from all but one of their trusted friends. I’ve gotten into a relationship with said friend, and he is the kindest soul I’ve ever (virtually) met. He supports me and makes me feel like I am not completely drowning.
I’m working on freelancing to save up to go back to school (they flunked out of college and now I’m here, aware of most of my limitations and certain to make sure that we succeed this time).
It’s almost been a year, a year of preparation for our lives. A year of learning about myself and my headmates. It’s been a fucking miserable mess of a year, one with lots of breakdowns, self harm, and suicidal thoughts 24/7. But I think I’m going to make it.
I want us to make it.
by Band Back Together | Apr 18, 2016 | Alcohol Addiction, Coping With Depression, Depression |
Mental Illnesses are prevalent in our world. They greatly affect not only the individual involved, but the people around them. In the month of April, we focus our spotlight on Mental Health, in order to heal together and break down stigmas.
We want your stories. How has your own, or someone else’s mental illness affected your life? How are you rising above stigmas?
Please share your stories with us during the month of April.
I lost my adult son to depression and alcohol and feel very guilty that I didn’t see his struggle. The days before his death I could have caught him, helped him, saved him. One email, one text. 2 years on, every day I wake and think of him and think of how I failed him. I lost not only my son but my self. When I got the call I fell to my knees and I have never really got up again. My wife left me because she did not want to help me grieve, and I cannot blame her. Will I recover? One day, one day far away I hope I will.
The purpose of this note is however not about me. I’m just like any of a million other parents this year, and next year, and the year after. Its about the other survivors like you. You need to know that you should support every charity, every effort, to work out why this this life toll, that outweighs road deaths by 2-1, happens in this modern day.
You should look at that drink in your hand, or that of your friend, who drinks too much. My son died of extreme alcohol withdrawal and I would wish that on no-one. At the last he must have been terrified. You might be one step away from someone who needs help. Help them.
Thank you for reading and listening.
by Band Back Together | Apr 8, 2016 | Alcohol Addiction, Codpendence, Self Loathing, Shame, Suicide |
I’m not sure I’ve ever written honestly about my mother’s drinking. No, perhaps what I’m trying to say is that I’ve never written neutrally about my mother’s drinking. No, that’s not right either.
I hate my mother.
There, that’s it.
My mother was my world. And in that world was wine. Bottles and bottles and goddamn bottles of wine. Wine bottles she would throw in the garbage so it didn’t seem like there were too many in the recycling outside. So the neighbors couldn’t see.
But I fished them out of the garbage and threw them in the recycling anyway.
Fuck you, mom. Feel your shame. So I don’t have to feel it for you.
My mother and I were inextricably linked through our personalities, the traits she said I possessed that she had too. Look how similar we are, right? It was so easy to become the same person. We were tightly bound into a cocoon that others couldn’t enter. Might as well have been made of fucking steel, that cocoon. And someone was covering my mouth in there, so I couldn’t scream.
I guess that someone was my mother? Or was it myself, my own hand?
All alcoholic relationships are codependent relationships, right? Or so I’ve been told. All I knew was that when she was up, I was up. And when she was down, I was disgusted with myself. Absolutely disgusted.
I hated myself more than I hated my mother. Or, rather, it was easier to hate myself than hate my mother.
So I did. It was all too fucking easy, hating myself. It’s so fucking easy that I still do.
Writing about this requires that I pull emotions from my chest that have lain dormant for years. After a while, it all starts to go a little flat, you know? The drinking thing gets old. You get used to it. You starve those emotions in your chest for air until they suffocate, but somehow they never actually die. They mutate into fucking zombies. And then some person, perhaps some random fucking person who doesn’t know anything about you, pokes at them and you think oh shit, there they are. Why the fuck do I need those.
That’s your mother, the roaring tiger inside you that you forgot even existed. The tiger clawing at your fucking insides, puncturing holes in your intestines. So you bleed out, become your own zombie.
You know the line of that poem, “I carry your heart (I’Il carry it in my heart)”?
I carry my alcoholic mother in my heart. Always.
And that alcoholic mother hates me. I’m a piece of shit. I’m critical. I’m too much like my father. Why can’t I be understanding, like my brother. I write these words and no emotions come out because I’ve heard these phrases too many times. How could I let myself feel sad every time I heard them? I would have died.
I would have killed myself.
But instead of killing myself, I suffocated my emotions so I was a shell empty of water and star stuff and all the other shit they say makes up your body.
I like to pretend I’m not angry about this.
But I am.
I hate you, mom.
You are not Mom. You are mom.
There, fuck you, you don’t even deserve a capital letter.
I can’t write honestly about this. I can’t remove the layer of disgusting slime that clings to my skin that I believe makes others hate me. Makes me an abhorrent person that nobody loves.
But the thing is, I know you do love me. mom.
And that’s the fucking awful part. I never knew which monster I was facing.
The emotional monster that dragged me kicking and screaming into its lair, into its cocoon of twin selves or the alcoholic monster that aimed their own kicking and screaming at me. I imagine my young self like a little hermit crab without its shell, this soft defenseless thing that people didn’t care about because it wasn’t a real pet anyway.
But goddamit, I was a fucking fighter. Every night I battled with my fucking mother. I wanted her to feel her shame the way I felt it for her. This should not be my job. I felt emotions for both of us so she didn’t have to feel them, didn’t have to face what she was doing. And I was sick and fucking tired of it. So, so tired.
I’m still so tired, and I don’t even live with the woman.
Yes, you’re not even mom. Or mother. You’re woman.
Not Woman.
I hate you.
There, in that sentence you don’t even deserve a name.
Only a statement that tears at your heart the way you tore at mine every.single.fucking.night.
I think you can handle it, right? Me telling you that I hate you.
Because it’s true.
Toughen the fuck up and move on.
I know I did.
by Band Back Together | Apr 6, 2016 | Coping With Depression, Dissociative Identity Disorder, How To Cope With A Suicide, Inpatient Psychiatric Care, Major Depressive Disorder, Suicide |
I’m sitting in an ambulance. The blonde-haired paramedic gazes at me in the blue light, asking me if it is alright that the proper lights are off. I suppose something in my face alarms her enough to gasp: “Is it too dark?” I reassure her with a shake of my head that no, it isn’t too dark.
I feel childlike in my Adventure Time leggings and sweatshirt-tunic. I never noticed the white lines on ambulance windows were full of glitter. One of the littles hops up to front in a gush of joy. Glitter, of all things, glitter! I swallow a glomp of air and push her back in the garden with the rest. L peeks through the slit below the door of the Limbo Room somewhere deep inside.
Emergency Rooms, ambulances and psychiatric ward workers have always looked at us weirdly. The paramedic tap-taps on a Panasonic Toughbook. “Your care worker said you have these personalities?” she says, the question mark imminent in the air around her. Yes, I think to myself before even considering saying it out loud, my head moving in what could be called a nod. “I have Dissociative Identity Disorder,” I say out of habit. I should have used a plural pronoun.
It is the first time being admitted since this past February, when my dissociation had me walking into busy roads without looking. This time is different, though. This time it is even more confusing to the paramedics and the psychiatric nurses. The paramedic waits patiently as I try to remember which day of the week it is. L would know. L was here on Wednesday, that’s several days ago – Saturday, I blurt out slowly. What month, what year? Holy fricking shitballs. I find the right answer somewhere in L’s frontal lobe. November, 2015.
The waiting room is full, as per usual. Nosebleeds, broken ankles. Normal problems. The psychiatric nurse sees me after 45 minutes. A young fellow, agitated and, somehow, a bit amused. I try to tell everything, but it is difficult. “Do you remember [this]?” No, no I don’t remember doing that, that was another alter. “Why do you think L is gone for good this time?” I just have the feeling. I tell the guy that I’m the replacement. That I’m the one to take charge in case L is gone for good. His face is full of confusion.
In the waiting room again. The nurse called the doc. A foreigner, for a change. Not that I mind. I like the little lisp in their voice as they utter their sentences. The doc wants to hear the same story. I look at the nurse by the computer, apparently with enough agony on my face to make him state my dilemma instead. I add in a few details and listen to the doctor’s remarks, with a tight pull in my stomach each time he sounds less and less convinced. Finally we get to it: suicidality. I explain the monsters that are Dawn and Claudia, the cuts that have been made, the writing in blood in my journal, the knife brought to work with us. This peaks the doctor’s interest. “Oh yes, if that is the case, then we should take you in for a few days, as a crisis admission.”
The ward I know well. I’ve been here several times. I wouldn’t call it a second home, but I would call it safe grounds. We hand in our tweezers and nail clippers. Make sure nothing else sharp is left on us. Our psychiatric nurse at the ward is a young lady with a pretty braid in the front of her hair, dangling around as she speaks with a multitude of head gestures. She wants to hear the same story, but I tell her I’m too tired. After prying some things out of me, she retreats to the nurses’ station. It is only hours after that, we get our precious hospital bracelet, a Beck Depression Inventory and other forms to fill. What she doesn’t know is I would need ten BDIs, one for everyone. Maybe eight since the littles would just be confuzzled at the idea of a weird form to fill and even weirder questions to answer. I tick in some boxes that make me look severely depressed. Lydia must be close to front.
I unpack Bunny’s teddy bear and unicorn and feel her refreshing presence. The little five-year-old treats things with such openness and curiosity that I cannot help but smile and let her come closer and closer to front. I know she’ll be upset to be alone in a big three-person hospital room, but I am far too tired to take care of the body any longer. I step back in the garden and let her go forth, watching as she bundles herself up in pink hospital pajamas and her unicorn hoodie, giggling as she brushes her teeth with such vigor (need to kill all those germs). Finally, as she settles in bed, I let my guard down, retreating up the stairs inside the Clock and to my room.
By-theclocksystem
