Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I wanted to talk some about what this is like for me. Most of the time.. I’d say 99% of the time.. I just experience being me. I make choices, I see the results of those choices, I appear to have normal free will and it appears to operate normally. During a period of my life that ended in 2009, I appeared from my perspective to have almost no free will at all.. I actively wanted to be doing one set of things, or would even try to do those things, and my experience would be of doing other things. This was extra difficult for me because I wanted to get as far away from a romantic entanglement I was in as possible, starting (let’s be honest) a few weeks after the entanglement started, but I couldn’t. So, that’s one form that whatever’s wrong with my head manifests as.

I don’t do scary things to other people.. I mean, I don’t have memories of my doing violent things or forcing people to do things or knocking over banks or anything. I guess that’s one thing to be grateful for as that would be a bit more nightmarish than what I do experience. I do experience blackouts.. about every six months, suddenly I feel amazingly good and then.. from my perspective.. its just a blackout, and suddenly I’m thousands of miles away from where I started. Recently I got to sit in court while someone talked about how I’m not doing a good job managing my mental illness.. I don’t think this person realizes that I take the medication I’m assigned, I talk to the people in my mental health teams, and nothing gets fixed because, to be honest, this particular problem is probably a bit beyond what we understand so far about how the human mind operates. It’s a intermittent fault, which means that there’s no way anyone can know whether the drugs I’m on and the things I’m doing are working until the fault conditions are met and we find out, no, they’re not. Intermittent faults are hell to debug even when you’re not trying to debug them from *inside the running system that’s got the fault*. I won’t even start on my impressions of the medical system that the U.S. has to offer the average citizen, which appears to be way, way, way more concerned with privacy, not to mention who pays for what, than fixing *anything*.

Okay. This wasn’t supposed to be a whinefest and certainly I shouldn’t be whining at the person who’s life I’m degrading by constantly wanting to talk to her every time this intermittent fault activates because she certainly deserves it even less than I do. I was explaining what it’s like for me. (There is a part of me who thinks, *very strongly*, that this person should really talk to me *while I’m sane* because it could simplify everyone’s life a little bit, but this might just be because as everyone knows I want my friendship with this person back – although at this point that seems improbable – or even because even when she’s in court describing me as a potential rapist hearing her talk in her unique way of talking was making parts of me feel happy as other parts of me were feeling, wow, you really think THAT’S me? )

There are periods where I feel like I’m not the only one driving the bus. Like, I’m getting to add my *influence* but I’m not the only person around. That’s easier to deal with than total blackouts. I’ve been assured by various people who talked to me in (to me) total blackouts that during total blackouts numerous personalities are present. I keep hoping some of these people will guest on my blog to talk about what that’s like for them because I, for one, am interested. Sometimes I feel like my influence is very limited, like in the start of manic periods, and other times I feel like I have a fair amount but not enough, like in the periods where I didn’t want to be getting hooked up with a particular young lady but wasn’t able to say no in force of her very aggressive personality. I don’t, by the way, think that was in any way her fault. I think it was mine, in that I was somewhere to the left of submissive. See earlier posts.

I assume, after reading various things, that something hit my mind like a hammer back when I was a few months old. I have all sorts of guesses as to what that might have been, my most popular one being that my parents perhaps had a fight they don’t even remember having while they were moving from germany to the U.S..

It’s interesting to me, given the blackouts I have and the out of character behavior that occurs during said blackouts, that it’s taken me this long to acknowledge I have DID. All I have to say is, it’s scary. I remember many times thinking “There’s more than one person in my body..” but .. I don’t know. For the longest time I was deeply afraid of what people would say, or think, or do, if they knew.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2015 at 8:18 pm and is filed under mental illness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.