Ruined December 31, 2012

This is what’s wrong with me.

Cookies.

That’s what they were supposed to be, anyway. But I can’t even do that right. Can’t even make goddamn cookies come out right.

I want to kill myself. Over cookies how fucking stupid is that?

But it’s just so emblematic of my whole life. I fuck up the most basic things if someone isn’t there to do all the hard parts. I don’t even know what I did wrong, with my life or the cookies. I just know everything’s mess and it didn’t come out like it was supposed to and it’s irreparably ruined. I don’t have any more ingredients or any money to buy new ingredients, and it’s too late anyway because the party’s in an hour.

Just like my life: fucked up beyond repair, out of resources for starting over, and too damn late anyway.

I don’t know if I’m going to make it through this.

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Terror, Compounded December 30, 2012

I can’t stop freaking out. I know I need more than Windhorse can give me, but I’m terrified of being hospitalized. I’m not talking about a little bit of anxiety–I’m talking about can’t quit crying, nose keeps running, shaking, hyperventilating panic. For days.

I try to keep busy. I’ve been playing with Winston and knitting madly. It doesn’t really help, though. Distractions don’t really work.

I haven’t told anyone at Windhorse what happened at the hospital in Iowa. They know I’ve had bad, retraumatizing experiences with hospitals, and they know how bad Menninger was. But that’s nowhere near the whole story.

Locked up, dehumanized, ignored, mistreated. Physically assaulted. Denied medical care and told to let it go. Repeatedly sexually assaulted. Silenced because no one would care anyway.

Different scenario now. Supposedly. Could be exactly the same, though. Stuck. Alone. 1500 miles from anyone who cares. Locked in. Controlled. Hated.

Can’t do it. Can’t. Not again. Can’t.

But I need this, I know. I’m too messed up to be outpatient right now. I just want somewhere that’s not locked and isn’t totally controlling. I want to be allowed to keep my shoelaces, my self-sufficiency, my dignity. But Medicare doesn’t cover that.

Why can’t I get what I need? How fucked up is it that, to get the help I need around the trauma, I have to go back into the same situation that caused a big chunk of the trauma?

I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how much more terror I can survive. Will the terror of being in the hospital fix the terror of the trauma, or will it just make the terror worse?

Terror December 29, 2012

Please, someone tell me that it’s going to be okay.

I’m having a very hard time not killing myself tonight.

I can’t find a program that fits my needs and takes my insurance. I’m terrified of ending up locked in where people will hurt me again—I was abused in a psych hospital.

I’m do scared I can’t stop crying.

There has to be an answer, right? There must be something. I just don’t know where else to look.

Tell me it’s going to be okay.

Options December 28, 2012

So. Today was a day.

Still in complete suicidal breakdown mode, so Team Leader convinced me to go be assessed for respite care. The woman doing the assessment was about 12 years old and kept talking to me like I was a stupid child and threatening to hospitalize me. Cue total dissociative shutdown. When Team Leader finally got me grounded again, somebody in the system was sobbing and telling her it wasn’t safe and swearing we’d be okay if she let me go home.

I don’t think she quite believed me, but she took me to Windhorse to talk to Fake Therapist. I must’ve still been switchy because I only remember the meeting through a dense fog. The conclusion is we’re going to find a residential trauma program I can go to.

It’s probably going to be either Sheppard Pratt or River Oaks. I’m not thrilled with either of them, mainly because they’re locked, but I guess I’m never going to find exactly what I want. Sometimes you have to take the next best option. There are trauma programs that are unlocked and do more integrative, holistic stuff–but, predictably, they don’t take Medicare.

I’ve been to River Oaks before, years ago–2005, during Mardi Gras, a few months before Katrina. I barely remember it, but I know it wasn’t traumatic like so many other hospitals, and I think it helped.

I just don’t want to be locked up again. I have so much trauma around the state hospital in Iowa, and I’m also terrified of ending up in another Menninger scenario. But this time I have a home to come back to, and my Windhorse team wouldn’t let me be held hostage in a place that was retraumatizing me. It’s still terrifying, though.

I’m so exhausted. My head is killing me, and Vicodin isn’t helping.

Somebody tell me it’s going to be okay?

Next verse, same as the first… December 27, 2012

…but a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

*

I called Fake Therapist. Told her I needed help. Told her I need out of my life for a while, need to be taken care of, because I can’t hold it together anymore. But not a psych unit. I need a holding environment PLUS real treatment (read: intensive therapy). I’ve never gotten real treatment on a psych unit. If I could get Riggs to take Medicare, that would be perfect, but snowball’s chance of that.

For the moment I’m at Counselor’s house so I don’t do anything self-destructive. Not a long-term solution, though.

I don’t know what the answer is. A residential trauma program for a month or two? Doesn’t seem ideal, but what’s ever perfect? Besides, I don’t have any other ideas. Maybe my Windhorse team can come up with some better alternatives because my brain isn’t working too well at the moment.

I feel so guilty that Windhorse isn’t enough. They’ve given so much of themselves, and I know they really care about me. But I’m the black hole, and I don’t want to use them up. They’re worth far more than that.

And what if I go to a residential program and it doesn’t help? Or it does help but I feel just as bad when I get back to the real world? Then I think I really would kill myself, no matter how many people it would hurt. I know I shouldn’t worry about that right now, but don’t think about pink elephants.

I’m so scared. I really feel like this is it: I’ll either find something that helps or I’ll kill myself.

One with the mud December 26, 2012

Have you ever exercised to the point of absolute collapse? You’re so tired your muscles shake uncontrollably, and you know if you don’t sit down and rest right now, you’re going to collapse.

I’m living the emotional equivalent of that.

Only I can’t stop and rest, or else my suicidal subsystem will do something destructive. Then I’ll have to repair all the damage.

I have perhaps dozens of people in my head. Is it so much to ask that one of them could take care of me for a while? Be kind to me?

But when I ask for this in my journal, the answers I get are “You’re the adult” and “There isn’t anyone.” Right, thanks, lovely.

I don’t want this responsibility anymore. I’m too tired to take care of the broken kids and keep several teenagers from slitting their/our wrists. It’s too much for one person to do.

I just want a few kind words now and then. Some recognition of everything I’m doing for them/us. The ability to take a break without worrying I’ll end up with my arms shredded. Just a little kindness.

But maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe I ask too much when I should be giving more. I don’t know.

What did I do to make the people in my head hate me so much.

No, wait. I don’t think I want an answer to that.

Unloved December 25, 2012

Apparently there are no kind, caretaking adults in my system. At least according to whoever was talking to me through my journal.

I guess that means there’s just the damaged kids and the angry or detached teenagers and adults.

I thought DID was supposed to be a self-protective development, so why the hell would I not have developed at least one nurturer? Every other DID system I know of has them. Once again, I’m the freak who does everything wrong.

I try to be kind to the kids, and I guess I do a halfway decent job at least some of the time. But what about when I need someone to be kind to me and take care of me? No one in here is at all interested in the job, and I fail majorly at doing it for myself.

Maybe the reason I feel so alone and unloved in the outside world is that I’m alone and unloved inside.