Here In My Head (Part Two)

There is so much more to lay out on the table, I have decided to break it up into multiple posts. Today I have been meditating a lot on my emotional state and my spirituality.

The Bi-Polar has not only been a catalyst that has cut me off from those around me, it has cut me off from myself. I have pulled so far back, I often can't find the proper words to describe the emotional states that I experience during my episodes. Spiritually, I feel as though I have fallen so far off the path that I am looking for the beginning again.

Recently I have come to realize the the work required for me to repair my disconnected emotional state and my lost spiritual feeling are very connected. I am Wiccan, and the pleasures and energies I can feel from the simplest things in nature can carry me on an emotional high for days, when I am in tune with my spirituality. Having disconnected from so many of my emotions during the duration of my illness, I have lost that ability, and it brings me great sadness.

I can spend many days inside my home, a small basement apartment without a lot of natural light, and not even realize the passage of time. Events occur around me, things that I should be excited about or anticipating, sometimes with hardly a recognition. When I feel an episode coming on, what I'm experiencing feels so familiar, and the name of it all seems to be on the tip of my tongue but I just can't get it out.

I have begun meditation again. Nothing fancy, just contemplation, opening my mind again. I have pulled out my books and am re-reading many of the books that taught me the knowledge of my Spiritual path that I once knew so well.

It is too early to say if any of these efforts are bearing fruit. Yet, I do feel a new spark in me, a small but strong fire. Perhaps it is my will resurfacing from where ever I have kept in locked away these past few years, grabbing control again instead of succumbing to every mood swing and whim of my illness.

Here In My Head (Part One)

I've given myself a few days to reflect over everything I wrote in my last entry. It was very difficult and emotional. At certain moments I thought I might just delete the whole thing. In the end, I'm glad it is here, glad it is out, and I feel better for it.

The events of that night and all that ensued in the following days is no longer the largest obstacle in my road forward. It has only been a few days, but I have already begun to feel myself letting it go. The relief of that idea, of moving on, is allowing me to focus more on the other major obstacles that face me now, mainly my health.

I suffer from long term mental illness, along with chronic physical issues. It has been about two and a half years since I was officially diagnosed and have been receiving treatment. However, therapy has traced symptoms and signs of my illness back through my years in high school, possibly back to the time I was molested.

One of the things that makes my illness so frustrating for me is that I don't actually "fit" into a specific "classification" of diagnosis. I suffer from traits of Bi-Polar Disorder mainly. However there are a number of classifications of Bi-Polar depending on the circumstances of symptoms. In my case, I don't fit in any of them, or you could say I fit in all of them. So my first diagnosis was Bi-Polar Spectrum Disorder ... leaving that open for much interpretation by any doctor that I ever saw. What came next was the discovery that I suffer from an extreme form of Rapid-Cycling, which is actually a classification of Bi-Polar, however, in my case, my symptoms were so extreme, it became a whole new diagnosis. So now, I have Rapid-Cycling Bi-Polar Spectrum Disorder.

Just a little background to bring everyone up to speed:
Bi-Polar disorder is caused by a neurological malfunction of the synapses of the brain. Basically, the synapses either stop sending or stop receiving the chemicals that your brain requires to function properly. Depending on the chemicals in question, as there are a number that can be affected this way, you can suffer from a number of levels of Depression or worse. Unfortunately there is no way to tell which chemicals are affected in any particular person, so treatment is always a shot in the dark.

Bi-Polar is a mental illness that swings between periods of Depression and Mania (hyper activity). The majority of Bi-Polar patients are classified as Bi-Polar 1, meaning that they will experience quite long periods of either Depression or Mania before swinging to the other, sometimes many years.

In my case, I experience a higher number of depressive periods than manic ones. The added Rapid-Cycling diagnosis is due to the extreme frequency that I swing between periods. The average Rapid-Cycling diagnosis is for someone who's swing periods are every few months or so. In my case it can be a matter of minutes and I've done a 180. Better yet, most of the time, I experience the depressive and the manic period at the same time ... which is not a pretty site. It can be brutal. I have been violent, I have broken things, and other times I've just done some crazy things.

It is a little more than three years ago when my symptoms started to get completely out of control. This illness has taken more than just a tole on my health, it has taken a tole on my life. When the symptoms got really bad I started to shut down and cut myself off. I pulled back from the world and the people around me. I took me months to gain the courage to tell my parents, then again, after I did it took me months to convince them that I was legitimately ill. I lost complete contact with a lot of good people. I've done just enough to keep in touch with quite a few, but in all honesty, I was terrified. At planned gatherings, I often would pull out at the last minute, out of fear of having an "episode" in front of everyone, fear of how they might react. My emails mostly go unanswered, and rarely have I ever initiated my own contact to someone.

I realize now that over these three years I've been hiding in a corner, building up walls around me, convincing myself it was for my own protection. Every now and then I'd let someone peer through a certain hole in one wall or another, but never all the way through, and never did anyone ever see the same thing. Outside of a small handful of people who have been helping me through this, no one has really ever seen me. I still haven't seen me.

The walls go back further than these last three years. The walls began the moment "he" forced me to "admit" that nothing happened. There is a lot to dig through, but I have support. I am no longer alone in the darkness.

It Is My Time

Secrets and obstacles. It's funny how sometimes they can blend so closely together that they become the same thing. I'm trying to move forward in my life, but there is so many strings from the past, and problems in the present that are holding me back. Cutting the strings aren't that easy. Even admitting that they are there is a challenge.

The biggest string is a secret that I have carried for many years, a secret that even I wasn't aware of until fairly recently. My mind blocked the memories out, hid them away, and I completely forgot about it all until last year. I was molested when I was 11 or 12 years old. It all came back to me one morning like a movie playing in slow motion in my mind, every detail, every feeling, every bit of confusion and shame. I was in a state of shock for a few days following that revelation, but I'm glad I know.

I was in bed, I had my own room, which was a pretty privileged thing in our house as there were only 3 bedrooms and 4 kids. My parents had been having a small party downstairs, a few of their friends and the next door neighbors were over. Many of them were drinking, and I clearly remember listening to my father play his guitar and singing as I fell asleep that night. At some point later, I woke up to find our neighbors son sitting beside my bed. I don't know how long he had been there but he was leaning over me slightly and he had been watching me sleep, and for some strange reason he had his dog in the room with him. He was only a few years older than me, but he had been drinking, he had a beer in his hand. His parents allowed him to drink as long as they were around, lucky me. After I woke up, he started to talk to me, I don't remember what was said, only that he got into my bed with me. It was a double bed, so I was able to move away from him some, but I was pinned between him and the wall, with no way out. The frame of the bed was an antique and the footboard was about 4 feet tall, not much shorter than me at the time. Besides, I was terrified, I didn't know what he was thinking, or what he was going to do. At first he just laid there and made comments about my bedroom, things about how he could live with that bedroom, he'd just have to change a few things. For some reason I remember him making fun of me at that point for the poster I had of Gowan on the wall.

I know I moved further away from him sometime after this point, because that's when it started. At first it was like he was taunting me, saying things like, are you afraid of me? think I'm going to touch you? And then he did. Part of me says I got off lucky, because there was no penetration, but part of me is still so angry, so confused, and so ashamed. Every now and then, I can feel where he touched me, like a phantom sensation.

I still believe that the only reason it didn't go further than it did was because of my father. He came upstairs to use the washroom, and saw my bedroom door open. My bedroom door is never open when I'm sleeping, so he came in and he saw him in my bed. Dad was furious and ordered him out of my room. However, Dad was also very drunk. Even though he most likely saved me from some much more serious traumas, he had no memory of it in the morning. He still doesn't to this day, and I just don't have the heart to tell him. It would break his heart, literally crush him, and he would blame himself.

I didn't forget it all immediately, but I didn't understand what had happened. I told a friend, which turned out to be the biggest mistake I made. We were in middle school, she didn't understand it any more than I did, she thought I was making stories up about "making out" with him to try and be "cool". Rumour mills are not nice things, the fact that I spoke about it got back to him, I don't know how distorted it was by this time, but he was pissed off.

He showed up at my back door late one night, when he knew that my parents were away. It was just me and my baby brother. We had both been playing games upstairs so most of the lights were off downstairs. When I heard the doorbell, I came down, but by the time I got anywhere near the back door, it had turned it to multiple rings on the bell and loud banging on the door. I knew who it was without having to look. There was an small enclosed porch between the door he was at and the door I was behind. I could peek through the curtain without him seeing me to confirm it was him, and then I tried to ignore him. I was frightened out of my skull. My baby brother was very confused. I told him who was at the door, but that we couldn't let him in, and my brother just didn't understand why, but he went along with it. But he never let up at the door, it felt like hours, but I was watching the clock. He banged and pushed on that bell for 20 minutes straight, even began yelling at me to open up because he knew I was in there. My brother was now getting upset, very upset, and it was only for his sake that I opened that door.

He came in like the speed of light, and he wasn't alone. He had a friend, who happened to be the older brother of one of my friends ... that's how it all got back to him. I backed up into a corner of the kitchen, I had an open door on either side of me, but there was no where I could run. My brother was right there with me, cowering behind my legs. He stood by the back door, never coming closer that 10 feet to me and chewed me out for spreading lies about him, trying to ruin his reputation, insisting that nothing happened. And he refused to leave until I agreed with him, that nothing had happened, he made me "admit" that I had lied, all for the benefit of his friend and ego I'm sure, but to the complete obliteration of me.

He finally left and I locked all the doors, ran upstairs and cried. I don't know how long I cried for, but my brother eventually came into my room and very quietly and so gently came up to me and told me not to cry. He then asked me why "He" was yelling and being so mean. My brother was so young, but he was so sweet and caring in that moment that it still brings tears to my eyes today. It was my brother that got me through that night, he gave me huge hugs and even brought me his favourite stuffed animal. I set it all aside, and my brother and I got back to what we were doing before the ordeal at the back door. After that, I don't remember anything.

I don't know how long it was before the memory was buried in my mind. The emotions that came with the experience never went away, just the memory. And I think that made everything a little bit harder to deal with. I was going through the trauma, but I didn't understand why. My behavior got out of control, I never really crossed the line and did anything illegal, but I was a brat. There was a full year where my mother and I didn't speak to each other unless it was necessary. I became very sexually promiscuous, and I went through relationships like water. Maybe this was all a result of what happened to me that night, but we can only speculate.

I was 14 when my cry for help came. I was in grade 9, and I was not adjusting to anything at all. At times I would walk out of class, throw books ... there was just huge amounts of anger surging through me and it was bursting at the seems to get out, but I didn't know why or where it was coming from. Eventually, my math teacher took me out of class one day and asked me to go see the principal. When I was in his office, he basically asked me why I was acting out like this, and before I could think, before I even knew what I was saying, I had told him I had been raped.

The police got involved, my parents were devastated, there were councilors. All the while I'm panicking in my head, trying to go with the story, and not get caught. Then the guilt set in, I harboured it for years. How could I make up such a claim, when there truly are women out there experiencing the trauma and violence of rape everyday? What kind of person was I that I could lie about something like that?

All that time, I didn't know what had truly happened to me. When the memories came back, it made more sense. I was trying to deal with the trauma of my experience, but without the memory of it, I was left blowing in the wind. I guess part of me knew something had happened, why else would rape have been what I made my distress call with. It's true that I never was raped, and there are many, many women who experienced far worse trauma and violence than I did, but a friend pointed something out to me. It's not a competition. What I went through isn't any less valid because there was no penetration. I still experienced the horrors of sexual assault and the aftermath of it all.

When I approached my mother and told her the truth after I remembered, she told me she knew I hadn't been raped. They all knew, the police, my parents, my councilors. But they also knew that something did happen to me, and I they would just have to wait until I was ready to share it on my own time.

It's taken 14 years, but it is my time.

This Mountain of a Mole Hill

I watched two documentaries tonight, one on the separatist movement and referendum in Quebec and the other on the exorcism of a boy in 1949 that inspired the book and movie The Exorcist. Somehow I've found a theme here between these shows and my thoughts. Then again, maybe I just think too much.

I did a lot of thinking today, about myself, my place in the world, where I am in my life, where I'm going and how I'm going to get there. Then came the inevitable thoughts of all the obstacles that I can already see in the road. It's been two and a half years since I was officially diagnosed with Rapid Cycling Bi-Polar Spectrum Disorder, but most days, I don't feel like I've made any head way in all that time. My life is literally split is so many ways that I think my brain has started to block some of them out so I won't have to deal with too much at once. The hyper mania/depressive behaviors of the illness is a given, the ones that get to me the most are who I was and who the illness has made me become, what I'm doing in life and what I should be doing if I wasn't sick, where I am in "the plan" for myself and where I wanted to be by now.

I feel like my life stopped three years ago, it started to slow down, gradually getting slower and slower until it came to a full stop. On the other hand, as my life was stopping, I was spinning out of control. Sure, things are better than they were, I know what is wrong with me, and I'm being treated but it is an endless uphill battle on a very slippery slope. I've spent the better part of the last three years waiting for the answers to come to me, waiting for the cure to find me, to wake up one morning and just be myself again. I have sat myself down in a comfortable corner, built up some walls, cut myself off from the world, keeping just enough contact to keep myself convinced that I was fine, and I have been attempting to wait my illness out.

When you realize that you have been deluding yourself, or convincing yourself of something that isn't true, it hits like an icy wave of water. You feel paralyzed for a while, trying to figure out why you did it in the first place or why it took you so long to see what was plainly in front of you, especially if others around you were pointing it out along the way. I have had a few of these revelations over the last several weeks. I've kept myself convinced that the problems I'm facing aren't so bad, they are a mole hill instead of the mountain I face in reality. In trying to cope with the revelations, I am here, sharing my thoughts, my secrets, my pain, my glories with whoever will read it.

I'm pulling the poison out of my system letter by letter, and it is not easy. I won't lie to you, I am having a very difficult time writing all of this, I had a very difficult time even just starting this blog. I had to take many deep breaths, much like I was plunging into another icy wave at each step. However, I now feel like I can't turn back, like it's easier to keep swimming forward than to turn around and head back to shore.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find the strength that I thought I had today, the strength to lay it all out on the line for all to see, those waves of revelations I mentioned, the obstacles that are standing in my path, and the secrets that have laid buried in my past for so long.

You Are Not Alone In Your Darkness

So I've found inspiration. Inspiration to finally speak out, to finally share what has been aching to be shared for so long. Tori was my inspiration, Haullie was my kick in the pants.

Tori Amos has been a long time influence in my life ... since Little Earthquakes was released, she's been finding ways to rescue me, whether I was aware of it or not.

Haullie found similar inspiration in Tori and her music, but Hauliie did what I could not. The words I could put on this page can not justify what Haullie has accomplished, I can only suggest you visit www.alltheseyears.net and witness it for yourself. Haullie is trully an amazing spirit.

The affect Tori has had on my life has always made me want to do something, to take action, to make a stand, to yell from the rooftops how wrong the world is, but I never found the guts. Haullie's accomplishments made me realize that what I trully needed to do for my ouw healing was a small grain in comparison to how far Haullie has gone for her healing. Haullie has started to heal others, just like Tori.

So this is where my healing begins. I am no longer alone in my darkness, though neither of them are aware, I have Tori and Haullie here with me, in spirit. I'll be damned if I'm ever going back again.