For years I've been suffering from a lot of disabilities at once. I have PTSD, ADHD, a still undiagnosed heart condition, had osteomyelitis, and turns out I may have even, my whole life, had Ehlors Danlos. It's hard to get answers in the time when I need the most help, so I've just slowly been eeking along with diagnosies and revelations.
I've also been suffering from a TREMENDOUS identity crisis that started young and just got worse and worse. I have undiagnosed but
undeniable dissociative identity disorder. At any one time I am thirty, fifty, and even up to 180 people at one time. As irritating as it SOUNDS to experience, the irritation is nothing compared to the physical pain it causes in one's brain to be running so many programs simultaneously. Imagine the burn out of fifty people on one squishy mass of electrocuted fat.
Wonder why I don't stay in touch enough? DID. Wonder why I don't go to events anymore or show up to important things? DID. Wonder why I don't have relationships with pretty much ANYONE anymore? DID. You know what makes DID tremendously worse? OCD. Not the "I'm so organized!" BS, but the real thing. I have to put these alters on a random spin wheel every day because it's almost the only way that they will cooperate: is if they each have an equal or near equal shot of coming out.
But I have to build up the number I put on the wheel, or we'll split too fast and end up in pain and chaos. So I have to start with the same five-to-seven alters as the first batch on the wheel every day, and throughout the day I have to build up the list based on the order in which they first emerged from my consciousness.
THAT is real OCD: when you compulsively have to do a routine that might not even make sense or benefit your life or your day, but you HAVE to do it to relieve the anxiety, because if you try to do without it or alter it, your entire concept of functioning collapses like jenga, and you're left either frozen or shut down for the rest of the day or you have to try and start all over and do it the way you know you were supposed to do it to get through it in the first place.
Oh, yeah, and I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I'm prone to meltdowns when overstimulated or in too much emotional or sensory turmoil.
Safe to say, some disabilities are invisible, but just as debilitating as some of the most extreme physical ones. Despite my ability to mask at times and look and sound relatively normal in one or two social situations a month, I'm actually one of the most disabled people I know, including among some I take care of, and among my friends who are all also disabled in some way, and this has been the case for most of my life. I had to stop gaslighting myself out of accepting that reality. Often times the people around me would gaslight me out of that reality, out of the reality of the severity of my experiences and their repercussions, because it benefited them to think I was abled enough to take care of them, or because they thought of the determent it was to them if I couldn't pull my weight.
The truth is, I've been chronically exploited by my family for resources and labor since I was about seven years old, and avoided or manipulated or lied to and either loudly or quietly disowned by the rest. I've needed an adult my whole life and have NEVER had one. NEVER. Never one I could truly count on to be the adult. I've had a couple of who loved me, but that didn't make them good for me all the time.
I think part of the reason I developed so many alters is so I would have a community.
I know I've burnt out a lot of people by asking for so much help. I've burned through relationships just like my family burned through proper relationships with me because I was either too convenient or too inconvenient at the time.
Why am I saying all this? Because my baby brother's going through frightening health issues, because I could possibly lose the last storage space of the three that I had of mine in my family's belongings when it's auctioned off on the 7th of this month, because I still don't have a home but I'm still trying to save everyone, because I've lost friends and family who were dear to my soul who have passed away, because I'm wondering if I should just flee the country so I can experience healthcare and the help and social service support I need some day...
Maybe because I just need to relieve the pressure. I need to think that maybe one person in the world out there might understand the depth to which I am broken, have been broken since I was seven, have been completely disabled while still expected to take care of myself and my family, because people treat me like I don't have a job when I've carried a minimum of 3 to 5 my entire life since I was a teenager, and yes, that includes now, because no matter what job I take it doesn't seem to meet the full accumulative needs of a lifetime and beyond, a inter-generational pit of poverty and trauma and despair and untreated anxiety and depression.
Because I've burned through most of the relationships and some of the most important relationships with my constant needs that I've worked my whole life to overcome and/or balance, but haven't been able to because of the needs of others. Yes, I am learning boundaries, but it's hard to risk the idea of my brother's health, or the things more thieves will take from me in a couple of days, after everything I've already spent a lifetime losing.
I have so many dreams, have worked so hard, and I have no clue whatsoever of what to do. Or, more accurately, I have too many plans and too many people trying to enact them at once, and it's hard to make any progress that way.
Yes, I am aware I need medication for that. I've even found some that works: S.T.R.O.N.G. THC edibles put my brain back together into one person, and it takes the pain away, so much so that I often cry, ball my eyes out even when the relief starts. But with my family and belongings stretched all over the country, sometimes I have access to it and sometimes I do not.
Oh, yeah, and the fate of whether or not I have human rights to my body and autonomy and whether I need to somehow, on top of everything else, flee the country, is just another little shit cherry on the sundae.
People get to vote on my body and who controls it, yay! That just goes to show you that a lot of this trauma probably has to do with the fact that I was never considered in any way legally or rarely socially to be a human being in the first place!
That's it for now, I guess. I think I just had to rant and get it out there.
LOL, just kidding. I need real help, too.
The funny thing is, I still function better alone than if anyone tries to give advice on the shitstorm they don't understand. No offense to anyone. I validate anyone's mental health journey or struggles, it's just that I'm more comfortable with people who give advice when I ask for it, which I do, just not as much as people would like to give it to me. I'm still the ultimate authority in my life because most people around me have made way, way worse decisions, even with all my messed up. So then there's the problem of whom to open up to about this (LOL, just kidding, I'm an autistic writer: I tell everybody). There's still needing to try and trust in society enough to not think I'm going to be locked up for it just for sharing.
So much anxiety. I haven't lost teeth and cracked others because I don't take care of them, by the way. I've done all that from grinding them together, even when I'm wide awake. I'll wake myself up clacking them apart, though. I bite THROUGH mouth guards. I grind my teeth away: it's actually how they ended up sharp in the first place. When I was young grinding them together made points and curves and kind of made them look cool. I didn't realize *I* was doing that by a process that would destroy them as an adult.
So, yeah. That's my life. I'm working on my mind set to create a better reality for myself, but sometimes I also just have to speak on the now and what my story has been.
I'm a writer. It kind of works that way.
Thank you for reading, if you did. It's its own kind of caring in a way.
