We woke up this morning and we ... let's just say we were less me (Melody) than we have been since last Thursday. I knew it waking up, I knew it looking in the mirror. Having everyone together, on the "main level" (co-consciousness) yesterday to work on reading Fuck Face's tells, to figure out if he was lying to us, was a mistake. I had done such a good job cauterizing the emotions of all the others. We did a excellent good job throughout the morning, all of us, nobody vied for control and we were in what I would consider a very non-mood, other than the fun we were having keeping Fuck Face on his toes, making him nervous.
When Fuck Face got into work he initially ignored us, but later we opened up the conversation with him by asking how his evening was, how he is doing. He says he basically had a shitty night, and nothing had changed, and that he was trying to manage it.
He asked what we had done the night before and we reminded him that it had been our massage night, a night when very little gets done, and told him we had cleaned up the kitchen a little, "In case we bring a guy home this weekend, you know, to make it look like we actually do our dishes" we say, and giggle nervously.
Fuck Face tells us we have a cute giggle when we are nervous and walks down the hall to work in another part of the building.
We actually got some work done today, though we don't currently remember what we accomplished, before we had to go to The Room.
They (the others) have written about The Room, I am sure of it, though they have been no help in assisting me in locating the entry. Usually the entries that are written about The Room are when Sam (an alter*) does a running blog entry of how he feels and the thoughts going through his head while he is in there; he hates Twitter so we require him to write something in the blog. We probably cannot locate the entries about the room because they do not end up in the archives that we offer to people as reading recommendations. His entries are usually very, very, angry and mean; ugly.
The Room in question is a large, fairly open, space, with windows along the top of one wall; walls which are painted the worst colours of salmon, or peach, or some colour like that from the 1970's. Most everyone at work thinks it is hideous; we think it is something different.
We used to be in The Room every Tuesday and Wednesday, but are only required to be in it on Wednesdays now. The colours of the wall triggers* Sam, our angriest alter*. Sometimes he stays in the sub-conscious* for longer periods while we are in The Room; if he wakes up with us in the morning he is harder to keep at bay. Something about that colour really makes him angry.
We've been trying to figure out why The Room has the effect that it does. At the end of every Wednesday we usually end up crying, something we are sometimes unable to control when in The Room. When we have triggered switches* and come out of it we end up feeling like a wrung out rag...limp...we have no energy. This happens whenever we have a sudden switch*; sometimes they are gradual or are requested.
We also have our staff meetings in The Room on Fridays, but Important Boss rolls out big sheets of paper for everyone to draw on and we are able to stay distracted for the duration of the meeting while we doodle and draw on the paper reminiscent of an autistic child; all the while listening to the topic points and pipping up when need be, until it is our turn to report. These are the days that we usually come up with sketches to do paintings...sketches that usually involve flames, chains, and images of pain.
I managed to keep Sam in the background for most of the day today, but then lost complete control, and it became mass hysteria in the head.
We started out great, for hours in The Room we were able to distract ourself. Fuck Face was being funny, walking past the door and giving us funny looks, pretending to force a big cheesy smile so he looked silly. He has a big disabled tool grabber instrument, used by handicapped people for grabbing small items, usually in high places. He opens and closes the device at us, being silly, making us laugh. For the most part we are big smiles all day; for the most part. One of the times he walked past the door we stop him.
"What is that look for?" we ask, smiling happily at him, giggling, referring to a look of amusement but confusion.
"I don't know who is going to be looking at me when I walk past this door...if it will be someone smiley and happy, or someone who looks at me like they want to hurt me" he says matter-of-fact.
He knows many of us, he's pretty much dealt with us all on various levels at this point; until now he had never met me before last Thursday, but today we are less me than before. We know he can tell this, it is why he is trying to assuage our potential anger and/or sadness; because if he makes the rest of them feel it will cause me to do something he may not like.
We can sense some switching* within the system*, and a short while later Girl Crush comes to assist with our Wednesday activities; she is in a extremely chipper mood. We intecept The Employee****, the one that Fuck Face and us manage, along with Girl Crush coming from the opposite direction and we say, to both of them "She's is such a chipper mood I think I may slit her throat" and we walk off to the bathroom.
Thankfully Girl Crush knows we are mostly kidding, she is not scared of any of the hideous things she has heard come out of our mouth, things that people of Twitter have read, the types of things people think, but never say out loud. We say those things out loud a lot of the time. She spends several hours a week in our company and we have gotten to know her pretty well.
Fuck Face comes into the room and stands at the other side of our desk and we are a little pissed off, Sam is starting to front*. We look him at Fuck Face and say "I don't want to look at you right now." We are sure this confuses Girl Crush a little, and a bit later we step over to his office door and apologize for saying that to him. He had taken it lightly and said not to worry about it.
We have lots of fun with Girl Crush, we are giddy, we chat about going for drinks, about men, about society, and about life in general. She thinks we are hilarious with our facial expressions and the things we say. We talk to her a lot about how we don't have people in our life anymore; she is in a similar situation. Every week we discuss with her the people from our past but not specifically what has happened, but she does not know about us, about the We.
Discussions usually turn to drinking when we talk to her. She thinks it funny that we walk around in public drinking, that we go to the local video store, where we do not rent videos but wander around looking at them, drinking from travel mug. Same with the local grocery store; though we do not do that everyday.
She wants to go drinking with us, so we tell her if we go out drinking we will explain the obscurity of the things we say to her. She will be the first person we have told face to face about Us. We are nervous. We will need alcohol to do it.
Fuck Face and Fabulous People, and those at work had either been present for so much of the last couple of months difficulties that they knew and accepted us. They also have access to our blog and so they have been able to keep up with what we have been going through without us having to speak the words. We are nervous about what she will say, that the look we will receive from Girl Crush is going to freak Catherine (an alter) out, once we tell her that we have multiple personality disorder. We are scared of the rejection.
It seems like there is going to have to be way to much to explain.
We have dropped plenty of hints to her to indicate that we have some issues. She knows we have food issues because she says when she walks in each week, each day she is there, she can tell if we have eaten by the colour of our skin. We also talk to her a lot about food, and she knows we do not eat much, or enough.
At one point in our conversation we made a comment that drives her to joke about the voice in our head. We "joke" back about there being more than one. At least we are planting the seeds of understanding, even if she thinks it a joke.
We talked to her about our paintings today and showed her pictures of some of them on our BlackBerry. She stares at them for awhile and asks us about the stretched our shapes that she observes as part of a theme in some of our paintings. We say we are not sure why they are there and then she asks, at the final painting, the newest one we are only partially done with.
"Do you black out when you paint?"
We find this an odd question. We say we don't really recall each painting fully, but we are aware we are painting.
Girl Crush goes out for a smoke
We step into the hall and Fuck Face is there, he talks about smoking his pipe and finding a large amount of gin to drink on a patio somewhere, because it is another beautiful day.
We want to say we want to go with him. But we don't.
"What are you doing later?" he asks.
We tell him we plan to do the same thing, to go for a drink somewhere.
"Where are you going? So I can make sure we don't go to the same place." He says to us.
Slow blink.
He sees the slow blink, followed by the pain in our eyes.
"You know what, we're just going to go home. Don't worry about running into me." we say flattly. The tears sting behind our eyeballs. We have not cried in almost a week. I know I have lost myself over to them, to the other alters, if only for a bit; they love him too much.
We sit down at our desk in The Room and he stands in the doorway.
He repeats our name over and over, looking at us. We stare at the computer screen for the longest time, turn our eyes to him. He sees someone different, he sees the anger this time. We tell him to leave.
Girl Crush, after she returned from her smoke, mentions that we should not ever play poker; she has seen a look cross our face when Fuck Face came into the room.
"I used to be great at poker" we say, but actually The Other Girl used to be great at it, we have never played, "just because you see an expression on my face doesn't mean you know what's going on in my head." We give her a slightly crazy grin and she laughs.
The rest of the day, the next couple of hours, are more tense for Fuck Face as Sam shoots him evil looks of anger whenever he is near. He stops making faces to make us laugh. He knows what has happened. As much as he likes Sam (who we all refer to as "Stabby") he does not like it when Sam is angry at him.
He stands in the door of the room later, after the people we deal with on Wednesdays have all left, and inquires to Girl Crush and us what he should drink today; white wine or gin. She says gin. We stare dead at his face, the expression he sees on our face is probably unnerving to him.
Girl Crush gets ready to leave and she gets our number, in case she is in the city for the weekend because if she is we might go drinking with her. We think this is a fabulous idea. She makes a last comment about how she thinks our facial expressions are great, and not to stop doing "that". She tends to be as animated as we are.
As soon as our shift is over the tears begin to burn. We cannot hold it in any longer and they stream gently down our face.
We are exhausted. Fuck Face recognizes our exhaustion as he passes by the door. They are relocating him to a different part of the hallway, and have finally told us today that in fact we will not have to share a space with him, or any of the other employees. We are both relieved and upset. We know it is best that he be further down the hall from us, but it's breaking many of hearts; one we have to share.
More and more they feel the pain, now that I have less control over what they feel, of the loss of the man they love, and the friend who he is still trying to be.
I have never had them be this way; we have cut countless people, countless "loves", and friends, out of our life; family we hardly see, best friends whom we forget about for years. What is making this so much different for them, other than the combined love of them all, I do not understand. I feel sorry for them when I choose to leave, and I will have to leave because I do not like being here, like the rest of them do; and my inability to let them feel when they need to feel will destroy them, and then I will be no better than The Other Girl was.
They talk about painting The Room a different colour, something we had been trying to talk Important Boss into for a long time, something he resisted until he overheard us tell another employee that the room was a trigger* for us, and when he talked to us that day he said he recognized that the room was a problem for us, and that he would work on changing the colour, because now he understands it is more than not liking the it. We are thankful for that, considering in a few short weeks that room will become part of our new office space; they are giving us our own room, and making the other employees share - which doesn't really work for us because it is a public space where we will have even less privacy - and no private place to scream when we need to, which we have done at work. We hope that the issue we have had with this room is indeed the colour, and not the room itself - or we could be heading into a constant hell.
As we start to leave the building, teary eyed, The Employee*** stops to talk to us, to give us a hug. She knows Wednesdays are tough for The System*
We tell her about going for drinks with Girl Crush and she thinks that it is a funny idea. We tell her we'll probably end up destroying something with her, and The Employee laughs and makes a joke about us being arrested.
"Live Tweet it if you do!" she says, and makes a joke about whether or not Twitter has "sweeps" like on television. She is one of our followers and thinks it would be hilarious.
We walk home and continued to cry for a bit. We're mostly better for now. Control has been maintained...being at home is helpful. It is our fortress, our safe place.
~Melody
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***The Employee has also been referenced in previous entries as Fabulous People. Until recently we never mentioned we actually work with Fabulous People because it was a measure of protection for ours, and Fuck Faces, identity. Seeing as how his identity no longer needs to be as protected, neither does ours. Fabulous People generally come as a pair, they are a mother and daughter; they are Fabulous beyond reason. We owe them our lives <3.
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*DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER A.K.A MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER: TERMINOLOGY
Hey. I know I haven't been around much the past couple of days. I'm still fighting this horrendous cold and trying to get caught up on some stuff at the same time. But I wanted you to know I'm still here...I'm still reading...and I still love you. Stay strong.
ReplyDeleteGlad to know you work with one of the Fabulous People. There's some measure of support there.
ReplyDeleteTo this day, Pepto Bismol pink bothers the hell out of me. It was the color of the seclusion rooms in the hospital I was in repeatedly in my teens. I can at least function now but for a long time, being surrounded by that color was all it took to shut down entirely.