Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, so this is going to be a difficult couple of posts to do. I am crossing my paws I manage to do it all accurately and with as little observer bias as possible and in a way that doesn’t cost me any more friendships.

Whoever you are, you might want to start with Assume Good Faith. I don’t want to add any more pain and fear into a system (Earth) I already clearly see as having too much.

However, let’s talk about the deep dark past first, when my intentions might not have been so well formed. I feel the need to bring up the past because one of the reasons for one of the things I wish was different in the present *is* the past.

In particular, I’d like to start out by talking about my sister, who I think is probably the victim of a mental illness at least the size of mine. Now, at this point I have forgiven her for everything she has ever done. But, in my young-Sheer adventure, she was weirdly and scarily violent. I later discovered there was a lunar cycle thing going on there, but at the time it just seemed like sometimes, I got my hair pulled, I got punched, I got kicked in the stomach, often for apparently no provocation at all. And she had.. well, still has, last I checked.. this way of talking to me that made me feel about three inches tall. She was a master of word choice and tone of voice and all the things you need to make someone feel tiny and she used them.

Now, at some point in our cohabitation, I did something which I still (Sort of) regret and which is still (apparently) quite in her memory.. she was pregnant, and she had been attacking me pretty much whenever she wanted, and I threatened to kick her in the stomach. I don’t think I would have actually ever done it – my parents check my memory (or at least claim to) that I wasn’t violent towards *her* generally. But I had reached that mental and emotional place that I think is often referred to as “Enough”.

It had a dramatic effect on her. At the time I was quite pleased. she moved out! I think she didn’t trust her ability to not attack me (not something she had a lot of practice with) and she wasn’t sure she could still get away with attacking me whenever she wanted.

Anyway, I’ve never been proud of that particular moment.. as I said, I don’t want to add more pain and fear into a system that has too much..

Somewhat recently.. about five years ago I think.. my sister decided that she’s terrified of me and wants me to stay as far away as possible. As far as I can tell she thinks that at some point I’m going to end up raping her. This is difficult for me to credit insofar as A: I’m really militant about this whole nonviolent thing, B: I wouldn’t want to have the memory of having done it and C: This is so far out of my core personality that people who know me often laugh at the idea. But I guess if you’re 3000 miles away and learning about all my exploits via the internet it sounds credible, and I think there’s a little group of people in that position that have started passing the idea that they should be afraid of me around like a joint. And my sister is definitely a big part of that. Okay, for me this has been mildly annoying, insofar as she can’t be present at any family gatherings that I’m present at.. at some point I started realizing that it is yet another way for my sister to bully me, which resulted in me rolling my eyes a bit and sighing and wondering if she’s ever going to get over her Issues.

But lets move to nearer times for a minute. As most of you know, I have this repeating issue I’ve been having where every six months or so I go manic, black out, and end up in jail or a mental hospital after sending a bunch of emails to one person who wishes at this point I would go away.

Now, let’s get a few things out on record. If I had one wish without wishing for more, at this point, it would be to have my friendship with this person back. And I undoubtedly in these emails say a few things which are inappropriate insofar as a lot of my internal censors are not working correctly. They’re never threatening (because that’s not the person I am) or graphic, but clearly they make her unhappy and my inability to just stop has been upsetting everyone, myself included. Now, it’s possible if my sister wasn’t ostensibly afraid of me, this person would be willing to just talk to me and everything could come down from defcon 1, but that is not to be.

Obviously something inside me is not working right. For a long time, I went through the motions of going to shrinks and doctors and taking pills and surely this will fix me. Of very late (the last few days) I’ve started to ponder whether I need to take a somewhat more self-directed and aggressive approach insofar as I do have this sinking feeling that nothing is getting any better and it has been not just years at this point but a solid decade.

Anyway, so, it’s gotten to where friends can tell when one of these events is about to strike me.. I recently came from SoCal wound tighter than a clock spring and decided, if such a word really describes how things happen in this state (I think maybe the words “it eventiated” ) that I was going to go, not for the first time, to Virginia.

Now, there were some signs from the beginning that this trip was going to be different. Normally, I don’t actually get there, and I think that my mom has a good time calling the person who lives in Virginia and gossiping / winding her up about how afraid she should be of me. (If it sounds like I don’t have a lot of trust in my family, well A: I’m paranoid, we know that B: I don’t C: I have DID. That doesn’t happen because you come from a great family situation). However, first of all, the ‘Blackout’ phase of this trip was a good deal longer than usual.. over a day is completely missing, and the resulting jump looks to me like a teleport from the west coast to the east coast.. second of all, I spent so much time with crosstalk among alters that I ended up with a blister on my tongue.. I was present for some of that, and it was delightfully weird, as crosstalk among alters generally is. Third of all, none of the usual thing stopped me. I got a ticket in Minnesota, that didn’t stop me. I got stuck in St Louis because of the usual confusion of why we bother to do resource allocation tracking for food. That didn’t stop me although it did get me a three day hold. I finally got to $CITY and carefully did *not* go to person’s house (I was really hoping person would come out and talk to me on neutral ground, and either give me a Last Goodbye or, there was a bit of me still holding out hope, return to being my face to face friend)

What I did do was go to a bar and sing “Little Pink Houses” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” – I actually got invited up on stage with the singer, which fit my energy just fine. I talked to some old timers about being patriotic. I went to a church.. twice.. and both times had some pretty authentic (not to mention awesome) spiritual experiences that I have yet to fully grok but make me think I should go back to some churches. The church service was in Spanish. I think that helped *a lot* because the words didn’t make me mad.. and recently at a class I learned that only 7% of human communication is the words.. so I was a lot more aware of the tone of the experience etc. The second time I went to the church (a day later) they had live music and I think they were expecting me and ultimately I cried my eyes out about the whole situation, which has probably been something that has been needing to happen for several years now.

And I sat in my car and I waited. When it became clear person was not wiling to come to me, I decided.. partially as a matter of a way to make myself even less threatening and partially because I had reached the point where I did not trust myself at all to be myself after trying to operate a car while peaking on seroquel.. to check myself into a hospital and see if *that* would get me some kind of something.

Well, it did. Last Goodbye was apparently the answer, but instead of showing up to deliver it in person, I got a court summons and a protective order. This was both good and bad, and I still feel like I should have done things a bit differently here. It gave me a chance to hear person talk (and I *love* hearing person talk.. the way she uses her voice and her hands when talking just pets my brain somehow) and it also gave me something I had been really badly needing, a 3d memory that wasn’t text of rejection. See, the last time I saw her face to face she was behaving as a friend to me. And knowing as much as I do about information theory.. not to mention having *had the experience* – I know it is trivially easy to hallucinate text.

And I will say, she wasn’t actively mean about it. If my sister were ever to take out a protective order, she’d take advantage of the time to also make me actively wish that suicide is something that woudl work. (Repeated testing has told me, at least in my case, there’s a hypervisor, suicide doesn’t work. Not that there aren’t times lately where I wish it would). I can actually sort of imagine my sister describing how sick, perverted, useless, stupid, ugly, weak, and other undesirable behaviors I am.. I guess I have a alter who is a software model of my sister. Now there’s something I could use to lose.

Anyway, protective order… initially my response was “Well, if that’s what she wants, she shoudl have it” since I’ve never been of the position that if person wants distance from me she should have anything *but* that.. it’s just the alters that come up during a mania that, I honestly forget, have no memory of the times between. But, it occurs to me, this is giving said alters a tool to hurt me a lot a lot since person can now have me thrown in jail for sending her a email. I wonder if person has ever worn handcuffs the way cops put them on, which always hurts you paws, or been in a cold room of cinderblocks designed by idiot humans who think punishing is a good idea to send the message “You’re a bad person. You deserve to hurt.”. I also wonder if person really does think I deserve to hurt because there’s something wrong with my mind. I doubt it a lot.

Anyway, I already do hurt because something’s wrong with my mind.

I’ve begged God for a early death.. like, now would be good.. bu that’s not the sort of wish apparently that we get. So I’m stuck here, wishing I wasn’t. Maybe if I had a better attitude you’d still want to be friends. I do have a lot of friends, and I’m grateful for them, and I’m loved, and I’m grateful for that, and sometimes it gets all the way into my core and that’s very nice, and sometimes it can’t and that’s not so nice.

So, I was talking about things I might have done right or wrong. I got a lawyer, which might or might not have been a good idea.. as I said, I didn’t really exacly want to win but I also was willing to admit that it would be a good idea for me not to lose. THe judge, not too suprisingly, sided with person – I can’t really conceive of the situation where the judge doesn’t, since person is there saying “I want this person not to talk to me”, which really is a reasonable request and something we should all be free to ask for. My position doesn’t look very reasonable at all, since it’s “If I forget and do talk to you, I want to not go to jail.. “. I keep hoping if I develop the habit of writing the things I would have put in the emails into blog posts instead, maybe the next time I go manic.. plus, of course, as I mentioned, I now have a very real, visceral, 3D memory of rejection. And the wish that I hadn’t dragged person through all the unhappiness in the spaces in between. Not to mention dragging me through all said unhappiness.

What I wish most is that none of the ‘be afraid of me’ club were convincing themselves of something that, as far as I can tell both from the way I’ve behaved my entire adult life and from the way my friends treat me, makes any sense at all. However, this is America, and fear is something we love to sell ourselves, so I guess I’m not surprised to find people convincing themselves that I’m a threat.

More later.

I don’t think there’s *anyone* inside me who’s a potential rapist. It is weird to even try to figure out, though, what the aspects of personalities you can’t get access to might be.. I think mostly the people inside me who aren’t me are mostly very afraid.. I have some really odd things going on inside my head.

I have a deep seated fear of being on the recieiving end of anal sex, which might say that my shattering is the result of sexual abuse, but that seems unlikely to me.. it seems more likely that it’s just the result of how all the various things overlay. I am really terrified of breaking glass. For some strange reason I feel like I could tell almost any secret to this one person.. and I’m really, really wrong because she doesn’t even want me to write her at all. However, at this point I’m inclined to just post my secrets to the world.. One Republic seems to have the right idea for me..

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.

I keep reading more and more about it, and it seems like it’s difficult to fix. I mean, I’ve been going to shrinks for years, taking whatever pills they tell me to take (despite rumors to the contrary), and while my life has gotten noticably better, it hasn’t gotten, you know, really good. But it’s still.. I don’t know.. it’s like you just finished changing a head gasket only to discover a thrown rod. It’s discouraging. It’s even more discouraging to realize that I don’t really have any way of knowing

A: How *many* people are in me
B: What exactly they are thinking
C: What triggers them to suddenly get control of the body

I know aside from manic periods that happen twice a year on six month centers it’s incredibly rare that I lose any time, which is encouraging but also a little disenheartening.. I don’t know of any way to trigger them to come out of their hiding places.

I know that a lot of positive things happened for a lot of people because of my latest bout of insanity. But I was ready to think the best about someone, and they were ready to think the worst about me, and that’s going to make me sad for a while.

I will, however, be posting the whole, as-I-saw-it-from-my-viewpoint story, complete with court cases, lawyers, protective orders, who’s-driving-the-bus-now, the whole nine yards. My friend Loren has been amazed at my honesty at times, and I am thinking this is going to be another post she’ll find suprising.

Someday, I’m going to have to tell the whole story of the last few weeks of my life from my perspective. It was really interesting getting a chance to see what paranoid thinking looks like from outside, as opposed from inside. It also brought me face to face with the reality that I have DID. There have been all sorts of hints of this.. from a few lost seconds an hour to police reports talking about multiple personalities being visible to hours where I wasn’t present. I was resisting the diagnosis, first because I thought it would make it impossible for me to continue my IT career (that remains to be seen), second because it’s supposed to be *incredibly rare* and I didn’t think that lightning would happen to choose to strike me.

But, someone talked to me on the phone during a blackout, and there was more than one me to talk to. That’s pretty definitive.

One of the realities that I’ve been facing a lot lately is that there probably is a wall between my conscious experience and whatever world I’m immersed in that is shaping my experience of that world, as well as a second virtual wall that is the result of my former beliefs. At this point I would say I’ve faced a couple of my biggest fears and not only survived them, but came out feeling better about myself (although a bit concerned about the sanity of a couple of my friends, at least in my CE)

That is interesting to be insofar as Pink Floyd has a whole album about the idea of such a wall (called, unsuprisingly, The Wall). I can’t help but find the lyrics of the last track hopeful:

All alone, or in twos,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.

I do feel like I have a good idea how to remove said wall. One piece I really need to hold onto, really tight, for everyone’s best interests (mine included) is that what I’m looking for is something in the future, not something in the past. And that expecting someone to already be what they will become makes no sense.

So, I think we managed to achieve some genuine personal growth this weekend.

Historically, at Lemons, my driving style has been to stay out of everyone’s way – this basically means yeilding the line (the most optimum path through a curve) – in fact just staying out of it at all times. This is not exactly a way to race, although it does make for a nice sunday drive in a racecar.

However, on Sunday, I came up behind the Snipe, and had one of those character defining moments.. I seem to recall my exact thoughts were ‘fuck it..’, and I dropped to third and passed.. and then (since I was up to mid-4th gear speed anyway), I rode out the course in top gear, holding the line about 50% of the time, tires protesting at every turn.. I probably took 20 seconds of my average lap time. I went from sunday driver to apprentice hoon.

(Also.. my team won the top prize at Lemons, the IOE!)

Morever, on the way back from the race a van tried to occupy the same spot on the road I was. Now, I’ve always had no problem doing evasives in this situation, but historically it introduced a emotional state similar to a panic attack. This time.. I was amused.

From my experiences running from the police, I know deep inside me is a genuine racecar driver – anyone who can drive a Honda Oddessy at 120 mph through US 101 without so much as scratching the paint clearly has what it takes to be a hoonatic in terms of driving skill – what I lack is the confidence and emotional/mental configuration to believe the line belongs to me as much as it does everyone else out there.

Numerous times in my childhood this was a major problem as well – I failed to assert myself or understand that my point of view and needs and wants were just as valid as my parents’.

Lemons pics at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/Lemons-Buttonwillow-2015/

When we purchase water, there’s sort of a unspoken compact that we’re part of a closed loop system. We’re not going to pollute this water grossly and then lock it up far outside the water table, we’re going to use it and return it via the sewer system to be, in essence, recycled. Earth is based on a closed water cycle, which I’m sure you all learned about in grade school. The people who are fracking are opening that water cycle up – rendering the water uncleanable by mixing it with extremely disturbing chemicals, then locking it up deep in the earth.

These people should be paying *enormously* more per gallon. Water is the most valuable liquid in the world and they are, in essence, reducing our total available fresh water. A $10/gallon tariff doesn’t sound outrageous under the circumstances.

So, I financed some of the upgrades to the house on aa 1 year same as cash plan, assuming that interest would accrue only on the unpaid balance after one year. Judging by the 6750 in interest I just got hit with, i would say that in fact interest has been accruing the whole time and possibly on the original purchase amount.

I really, really want out of this system. I understand that I can not win. I do not want to play any more, I am requesting a exit.

One of our long term goals, as a race, if we want to continue to exist, should be to whenever possible not *consume* resources that are not renewable, and to encourage the rewewing of resources. I’ve talked numerous times about how fracking renders clean water polluted beyond the ability to easily recover it – that in fact once water has been used for fracking it is no longer part of our usable water pool. Now, I would hope that common sense would tell everyone on the planet that water, being the #2 requirement for our type of life after air containing oxygen, is the most valuable liquid on the planet. However, as far as I can tell, that is not the common consensus despite it appearing to me to be a obvious truth.

We have learned.. the hard way, sadly, after much destruction of value.. that we shouldn’t cut down forests unless we plant and maintain new ones – this is the only way that our children’s children can still be loggers if they want to be, or indeed have anything made out of wood. We are slowly beginning to realize that we should not suck dry every oil and water resource on the planet – however, the question is, will we realize that we need to stop before our children’s children end up living in a bizarre dystopia where there are no resources aside from what they can mine from our trash?

Sadly, the current resource allocation system is at the root of all of this. Products are made, rather than to be durable, to be as cheap as possible. This is a decision that looks like it makes sense from a “money” viewpoint but actually makes no sense at all when you put on your “value” glasses. To the extent that we can, we should be building everything that involves resources that are even remotely scarce to last through so that our children’s children can be more wealthy than we are – rather than, as is currently the case, leaving the question open as to whether humanity will even exist 500 years down the road.

Now, if we’re all hypervised, this may not matter, because some diety or hypervisor operator may step in and set things right. However, at the moment we have no clear and obvious communications from anyone who might happen to be running the universe, and the majority world religion has a number of enormous gaping flaws that makes one question deeply whether it was written by a mind more enlightened than ours.