Latest Posts by dissociatedbi - Page 8

losing your skills and abilities to physical disability can be so scary. especially when you don't know where it's going to end. where the same day a year ago you could walk unaided and now you can't cook while standing. it's okay to be afraid, to mourn what you used to do and what you might have done. nobody is allowed to tell you that you have to be positive, be a "warrior" of your condition, or that you can't mourn.

Here's a thought: if a child begs to be allowed to see a counselor and the parent's response is to prevent them from accessing mental health care because you're afraid CPS will be involved? That's a red fucking flag.

If a kid carries around a window crank and a screwdriver in their bag, tells you it's secret from their parents, "just in case," because their windows have been screwed shut and the cranks removed? That's a red flag!

If a kid tells an adult they trust, "my parent is an asshole and I'm afraid of them," that's a red mother fucking flag.

If a kid wears shorts to school with bruises covering their legs and makes teary eye contact with their teacher through the entire class period? Red. Flag.

If a straight-A student fails an exam, looks like they haven't slept in two days, is holding their arm awkwardly to the side as if it is hurt, and stands in their guidance counselor's office, shaking and crying, convinced that that failed exam is the end of the world? guess what color the flag is. RED.

If a kid passes out after a hot day of outdoor activities and when their parent arrives to take them home they scream at the kid for making them look bad- the flag is red!

All of the fucking flags were red. Fuck.

This was my 4th Christmas without my mother. Every year, I am struck by how much of a fucking relief it is. I was told by so many people that I would regret my decision, that I would miss her, that "she's your mom and you only get one."

I don't miss her. My life has been objectively better without her.

I miss believing I had a mom who loved me, but that started a long time before I cut her out.

I don't miss the panic I felt seeing her name on my caller id. I don't miss her manipulation. I don't miss her parentifying me. I don't miss the burden of caring for her in her old age looming over my head like a fucking guillotine. I don't miss her guilt or her lies or her abuse.

I don't miss her. I don't miss her. I don't miss her. I feel free.

Your best is what you can do without harming your mental and physical health, not what you can accomplish when you disregard it.

"Disabled " is a neutral descriptor at worst. It just means we can't do some things the way other people can, or at all. It's not an insult, and it doesn't mean we're lesser.

Disabled culture is beautiful and wonderful. Disabled people are beautiful and wonderful. We and our worlds are not a misfortune or a consolation prize.

“And I don’t think anybody should feel bad if they get diagnosed with a mental illness, ’cause it’s just information about you that helps you to know how to take better care of yourself.

“Being bipolar, there’s nothing wrong with it. Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places. But they have arm floaties. And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.

“And I know some of you are like, ‘But Taylor, what if people judge me for taking arm floaties?’ Well, those people don’t care if you live or die, so maybe who cares? Maybe fuck those people a little. I don’t know.”

Taylor Tomlinson, Look At You (2022)

That trauma survivor feeling when you wake up from a nightmare that was a memory and it fucking clings to your bones like a maladaptive koala

listen, bad poetry is self care, this is the hill i die on

her

when the purple faded from her hair she said she liked the way it looked like the ocean the way her lover said her eyes looked in the sunlight; like the ocean the way she felt when her feet were pulled gently, strongly, underneath the sand; by the ocean the way the salt chapped her lips when she overstayed her welcome with the ocean when she said she liked the faded color, the grey green blue- the memories of purple chemicals breaking down the keratin of herself remade, brittle and neon and defiant- she meant because she was seaweed all along grey green blue floating dead in the ocean washed up, sticky in the foam on dry land honest in death smelling of the ocean

It's like:

Sometimes I want my nanny back even though I know she was selling coke on the side and probably endangered my life, all I remember is her hugs and teaching me to sew and making me snacks and not letting anyone hurt me.

And then I'm forced to reconcile how a literal drug dealer who harboured her fugitive adult son was a better mother to me than the woman who brought me into this world.

Just. For the record, for anyone worried after seeing that post; Traumadumping on the first day of therapy is like. A good therapist’s dream. Like they WANT you to spill out your problems so they can help you work through them. When you only have an hour with someone once a month it is a Godsend for them to be able to just. Say whats hurting them right off the bat. The biggest problem I had at therapy was I became so conditioned to not talk about my issues that nothing was able to get done. So please, ‘traumadump’ to your therapist. Its what they’re paid for. They are trained to decompress, you don’t have to worry about them.

Dude I have never felt older than I felt when I cried over the final Brooks & Capehart of 2022 because they hijacked the segment to tell Judy Woodruff that her journalism is a gift to the world, on her last night as anchor for the NewsHour.

My parents: what trauma?

Me: uh-

I can't believe I'm 31 and still putting pieces together.

Shortly after reporting my stepfather to the police for rape, his father, the man I had called grandpa for a fucking decade, started coming to the burger joint I worked at. I couldn't get a restraining order because he didn't do anything but order a burger and sit at a table directly across from the register and stare at me. He'd leave when he finished his food.

When I told people, their reaction was always "why would he do that? That's so weird." But knowing what I know now, knowing he'd been paying my mother thousands of dollars over the years to keep both of us quiet, knowing he had effectively been paying my mother to let his son use me-

It was just intimidation. Money wasn't keeping me quiet so he wanted to scare me into silence. Wanted me to know he had more power, more resources, more time.

And they did win the court case. And he did scare the shit out of me. So much so that I nearly quit my job.

I was just faulty merchandise to him. God.

Just thinking about how, as an under-medicated, severely mentally ill 18 year old, living 800 miles from the only home I knew with no support system other than the fundamentalist cult I was wrapped up in-

I was supposed to sit in a court room and point a finger at the man who hurt me for over a decade, and know how to explain what he did to me, and remember events I was completely dissociated during, and understand that I wasn't lying, I just didn't have access to all of the parts of me that experienced all of the things that happened.

With an undiagnosed dissociative disorder, I was supposed to explain to a jury why my three witnesses knew different details of different events and why I'd only reported one instance.

As a minor, I was supposed to understand that if I told my mandated reporter therapist about one specific situation, I'd be expected to then disclose every instance of abuse, or pretend that it all only happened once.

As a child, I was expected to behave in a way that "makes sense" to the middle aged, rural, conservative jury of my abuser's peers.

Fuck. That.

Sometimes I have an impulse to just cry and yell and scream, over and over, until every mother fucker hears me when I say how fucking terrible she was to me

She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. She sold me. Shesoldmeshesoldmeshesoldmeshesoldme.

Sincerely, with emphasis: fuck.

Crazyheadcomics

People talk so often about wanting to go back to the "good old days" of childhood and I can't help but feel some kind of way about it. When I think about my childhood, in an overall general sense, all I feel is fear and dread and relief that it's over.

It's like reminiscing about the good old days is so unrelatable that my brain just turns off. I hate navigating those conversations.

the more time I spend with kids in my husband's side of the family, the more I love these kids, the more deeply horrified I get about my own childhood- about what my mother did to me. about what she let my stepfather do to me. about how many times I was crying out as hard as I could for help, and didn't get it.

how the fuck, what kind of mental fucking gymnastics did she perform to make her capable of this kind of behavior??? how do you look at a child, your fucking child, and think, "yes, i can facilitate the sexual abuse of this minor for the right price." what the fuck.

Obviously there are many things to dislike about adulthood but as someone who grew up in an abusive household for whom adulthood offered the only chance at an escape, it's incredibly important to me that i romanticize adulthood whenever possible because i know there are kids and teenagers like me out there who are seeing nothing but complaints about rent and taxes and the loneliness of living on your own and i know they're going to internalize all of that and assume it means that adulthood won't offer them the freedom and safety they've been dreaming of. So while i never want to minimize the difficulties of being an adult, i also want to highlight how incredibly nice it can be to finally have ownership of your life and your body and your time and money and food and everything else in a way that you never had before. You can choose when you wake up! You can choose what you have for breakfast! You can choose when to go to sleep or if you want to (inadvisably) stay up all night watching tv in the living room! In the living room! You can choose what to watch! These are little things, but they are worth taking pleasure in, and they are worth looking forward to.

After therapy today, I spent 5 hours writing fanfiction in which the main character gets the comfort I wish I had been given as a kid. I didn't do anything on my to-do list but I'm gonna count this as productive anyway.

This song is such a fucking gift

A Tweet by Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle (@DrDoyleSays):

"When we grow up emotionally neglected, we're vulnerable to a certain fantasy that IF ONLY we can 'make' someone understand where we're coming from, we MIGHT get the care & attention we need. Hence the anxious 'overexplaining' thing."

feeling trapped

i think one of the things i'm struggling with the most is the feeling of being trapped. it's what the majority of my nightmares focus on, either with memories of real events or invented trauma-based dream nonsense, but i haven't parsed out exactly why this is such an issue for me still.

for all intents and purposes, i'm not trapped anymore. i've been out of that environment since 2008. i've been no-contact with my abusers since 2018. i'm married, living in a different county, in my own house with my partner and two dogs. i am the least trapped i've ever been.

though i do feel trapped in my body- it's maddening sometimes, having to deal with my chronic illness and disability on top of this mental health baggage. it's frustrating. but i don't really think that's what the issue is, with this trapped feeling.

i know it somehow relates to my trauma, but i can't put my finger on why my brain feels the need to process this now. what even is there to process? i was trapped. often physically, always psychologically, but like why does my brain keep telling me there is something deeper about this that i'm not understanding? it's like having a word or phrase on the tip of my tongue. there is something but i don't know what.

one of the reasons my therapist suggested writing online, anonymously, is because my trapped feelings can be triggered when i want to talk about my trauma but get stuck in the potential consequences of doing so with my identity attached. my abusers have both, separately, threatened me with lawsuits should i ever attempt to report them again or go public with my story. defamation, libel, countersuits if charges are pressed again. as if i would even want to go through the trauma of legal proceedings, all over again, since all it ever did was make my life harder. that court experience was worse than some of the rapes i remember.

so i'm writing, to see if putting this out into the world helps this feeling. or maybe it will help something else inside of me. part of me wonders if i'm just using it as an excuse to lean into the trauma more, since feeling broken down is more comforting than feeling strong, even now. the pain of it feels safe.

here we go, i guess

my therapist suggested i make an anonymous blog to write about my experiences growing up in an abusive household, because i'm still trying to sort some shit out, and i keep feeling compelled to tell my story. but i can't publicly, because it wouldn't be safe for me. so here we are.

i feel old, the last time I had an active tumblr account was like 2012, lmao. this is weird.