We Freak Out

Sitting here staring at the screen, half the buttons on our laptop stopped working at precisely the same time we came down from the peak of a panic/anxiety attack that had collided with what we can only describe as feelings of helplessness, fear, anger and confusion.

We now sit, retyping hand written notes, notes written in a desperate attempt to purge our self. We had to plug in an external keyboard. We have no patience for re-installing the operating system of the laptop. Not tonight.

She recovered. We read it in her bio; it says she recovered. We eagerly clicked her blog link. We’ve never been able to find a blog close to ours; we’ve never met anyone or known anyone who is close to who we are, who might know how we feel.

We read the first entry the link took us to. At the top it says that she had written this, these stories, a long time ago, when she was working through recovery. She deleted the files four years ago; we can only assume it was done when she recovered.

We got through one and a half entries and the tears welled up. We were at work.

We cannot read this now, I tell Bitch. We skim the screen, our eyes darting over the entries; we see phrases like “No one will ever believe it is real.”; “I want to swerve and hit the tree”; and while we know her reasons for wanting to hit that tree are not our own, we know that feeling. Every day, we know that feeling.

Except what I tell us is, “If we’d just step in front of that bus. It would be so easy.” Then she reminds me to think of The Father, Angry Brother, and Baby Brother; and the guilt The Mother might feel, and Bitch says each time, “No, we will not give up.” Even though I am the stronger one, she is more level headed; childish, but level headed.

We see a tab “About Us”…Bitch breathlessly whispers “Click it!” – we do. We scan through the nearly thirteen personalities this woman had, eyes not committing to any single spot, scanning.

We get confused. I get angry and scared, which makes Bitch scared. We close the laptop. We go tell The Jeans to sit at our desk, and monitor the people we are there to monitor. We need air.

We walk out into the sunshine, thankful for the warm breeze, the freshness, the shift in the seasons. It’s come at the right time for us. We take deep breaths and slowly pace. Thinking.

We make our way back to the desk and sit down. We go to her Twitter account and look at her profile wall. Bitch is really interested in what she says, what she writes. I’d rather not see.

With one Tweet we are both shattered. She talks about going back through this again and talks about the possibility of needing them.

Wait. She had said she is recovered, why would they come back? Did she lie? Is she not recovered? Can you recover from DID/BPD/MPD*? We had had a brief hope with her 160 character bio; hope in just one word. Recovery.

We have questions. We are confused. We get upset. We panic. We go to The Jeans and tell him he is going to have to learn to do our job better, and soon; because there are days when we are going to need to leave, like today; and we can’t.

“We’re trapped here, and it sucks. We really need to get out of here!” we nearly yell at him, tears threatening once again. We are lucky he is patient most times, and lets us talk to him like we do. It’s comforting for us; but we don’t know how it feels for him – we wish he would tell us. In his typical measured words he comes to our desk and tells us to show him, explain the one procedure he has not cared enough to master.

Our head is pounding; we try to explain what he needs to know. Thoughts are ricocheting through our head. It’s a swirling mass again. We hate when this happens. This is worse.

Finally we can escape. We cover our eyes with big sunglasses, throw on our jacket and stomp out the door. Before the door closes behind us, the tears fall and more questions race through our head.

Why is she putting herself through this, again, if she thinks it will bring them back adn if she is already recovered? Why did she re-post this a week ago, having had it printed and then removed from existence many years ago? Why were we among her first people she followed on Twitter, certainly in her first 30. What is she trying to tell us? What is her motive in this, if it’s only going to cause her to un-recover? We are paranoid by this person and what this means, for us, for her, for things we cannot yet determine.

We are always paranoid. We can’t help but think the worst of people. Given our life experiences, we don’t think there is anything wrong with this inability to see the best in most people.

We rush home. It was a terrible day to wear heels. Had we wore our regular shoes we could have ran; we would have ran. We get most of the way home before we realize that our headphones are blaring music into our ears and we hadn’t been paying attention to the volume of our sobs, as we rushed, clickity-clack, down the sidewalk. We didn’t care what the people passing us thought. We really don’t care what anybody thinks. But we do.

We lay on the beige carpet of our apartment floor, in our skirt and tights, clutching a realistic looking life sized stuff rabbit; staring at empty canvases leaning against our entertainment center. They are just waiting, ready for us to pour our self onto them at any time.

Tears are streaming down our face, our body alternating between lethargy and sobbing convulsions; screaming, yelling, and moaning.

We do the only thing we know that makes us feel better. We grip our BlackBerry in our hand, and try to empty words from our head. They don’t come easily this time. I am embarrassed to be doing this, to be sending Tweets that reveal what is in our head right now; we do it anyway.

• - All alone. All alone. Just us all alone. Fabulous People have to work. All alone...nobody...
• - ......Drowning with no liquid anywhere in sight/ looking beautiful and "normal" is our endless plight. Words are all we have to save us.
• - Trapped
• - Broken

We think about the fact that we have to deal with this on our own. From what we scanned in the entry of this woman’s archive of recovery, she had already been married before she came to terms with this. The book The Father was reading on the subject was by the husband of a woman who had been through some of the same experiences, similar trauma. Both women had someone there for them, to help them deal with what they had gone through. It must have been hard for the husbands. It must have been easier for them. They probably had family that was somewhat supportive, living nearby. We have no family nearby.

We are jealous of all her personalities. Why she got so many to help her, and we only have us. Are we normal? The notion that we fear we are less normal than another person with DID makes Bitch [no understood as only one of us] pause me, and giggle at me. Is it normal that there were only three of us, and now there are two? Do we have more? Do we just not know how to separate them? If we went to a doctor about this now, would that make any difference? We don’t want to lose each other; we’ve written about that. Is it good enough that we figured out how to get rid of The Other Girl on our own? She was the biggest problem. Is any of this important?

We have never researched DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder); we’ve only been told that this is what it sounds like we have, from what we write and based on the constant trauma in our life. We’ve been diagnosed with so many other things.

We’ve never been able to verbalize it, and even now, it’s hard. Fabulous People are the only ones we have been able to talk to about it, about each other, without feeling like we were being judged. Somehow they understood and accepted it from the very beginning. Will anybody else understand, even a bit; will anybody accept us? Will we really be alone for the rest of our life? Will we okay with that, honestly? We don’t know.

We think we are stupid for being confused and jealous.

We take that back. I am confused and jealous, and I think I am being stupid. I would have liked more help. Bitch [Bethany] is handy, but she’s no real help. She is only good at balancing us out and working on distractions. She talked about that once when I let her write about herself.

We lay on the floor, sobbing; now we are starring at a cat toy, a small yellow stuffed duck with physical disabilities. Its wings have been sewn on crooked. Through our tears Bitch [Likely it was Ivy] tells me we should take a picture of it from this view, it’s an interesting angle. She is trying to distract me from my anger and sadness and confusion. She says we need to breath.

We grab our phone again. We find a message of hope for a distraction. FNA has caught wind of the situation, and sent us a message, feigning concern. He asks if he can stop by. We think he is only trying to fulfill a need of his own. We respond by texting him:

“What!?! We are sobbing on the fucking floor, trying not to lose what’s left of the mind we have to share.

Do we not give you enough?”

He says he wants to make sure we are okay. We think he only wants to stop by because he had heard we were dressed up and looking great today, despite the rip in our stalking; it put thoughts in his head.

While he stands in front of us, touching us, asking what we’d like, we think: Is he really concerned? Did he really only want to stop by to make sure we are okay? Is this the only real way he knows how to distract us? Is that what he is trying to do? We only have eleven days left with him (our decision). Why is he pretending anymore? What do we want from him right now? We know we want him; we just want him forever. Could we really tell him all we want is to be held right now? Why doesn’t he like to show us that kind of affection? Would he be disappointed? We don’t want him to go. We want to be close to him. But we don’t. Again, were conflicted. We make a compromise on what we really want.

The Jeans does a better job of distracting us, even though he frustrates us because he will not yield to our advances. The way he distracts us is better, he does not make us feel like we are being used.

We sit down at the table after we part ways with FNA, to start writing. We have to, we wanted to from the minute we could pull our self off of the floor for more than 5 minutes, right before he had showed up.

We start the first sentence, fingers poised over the ‘w’…we press down…it does not work. We try the ‘e’. It also does not work. We are upset once again; tears of frustration sting our eyes as we think to our self: ‘We’ isn’t working again.

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*DID = Dissociative Identity Disorder /BPD = Borderline Personality Disorder /MPD = Muliple Personality Disorder