This is something I wrote sometime last year, much has changed since then. Like a lot. But the vast majority of this is still relevant so I figured why not post it?
[Trigger Warnings: Misgendering, Childhood Trauma, Ableism, Bullying, Homophobia, Internalised Transphobia, Self Harm, Suicide, Mental Health, Medications, Hospital, Emotions, Bad Parenting, Dissociation, everything?]
Insanely Long. Maybe grab a coffee or a snack or something? (also because it’s so godlessly long, I can’t be arse proof reading it, so errors are likely)
Once upon a time there was what everyone assumed to be a boy, just going through his life. Except, for him ‘just’ wasn’t as easy as ‘just’ sounds.
He was diagnosed with ADD at a really young age, 5, and never knew what being ‘normal’ felt like. He was always different from the other children at school, this was made quite clear by the medication, Ritalin, he had to take at the nurse’s office, and the Communication Diary his teachers and parents kept to monitor his behaviour. He was aware of all this, even at a young age. He knew the other kids didn’t have to take medication, or have Communication Diaries, or that they behaviour needed monitoring. He knew, intrinsically that there was something inherently wrong with him.
By the age of 8 he already knew. By the age of 9 he attempted suicide, by manual strangulation. He self harmed regularly when he felt like he failed, or didn’t live up to everyone’s standards, by banging his head on his metal bed frame.
And then came the bullying. It was there before, but it was minor, innocent teasing, easily ignored. But this was more vicious, targeted, and friends betrayed him. Peers he felt safe around, that he looked up to would suddenly, and seemingly without warning turn on him and participate in the bullying, leaving him without any safe group to retreat to. All alone. But the next day they’d be back to being his friend, seemingly unaware the psychological torment they caused him the day before. Frequently he would run away from the torment of bullies, or just the other kids in class laughing at his awkwardness, either into the playground, or away from the school entirely. Frustrating his teachers and parents, he didn’t seem to understand.
A more serious incident happened on a primary school camp one year. Having been assigned dorm bunks with some other kids he didn’t like, he was soothed that there would also be one kid he looked up to as a sort of mentor, someone he really admired and heal dear. But when they all, even the mentor kid, turned on him, bullied him and tampered with his belongings he couldn’t cope. He fled the dorms, out into the camp grounds, to a nearby BBQ enclosure. There he found a small nook and squeezed himself into it to hide. Making himself as small as he could. He hid, hunched over himself, for hours, long past dinner time. The teachers and camp staff obviously had done a head count and came up short. So realising the boy was missing the teachers began a search. He heard all this, but made no moves to do anything, he was so removed from himself. He merely lay there, in the nook, hunched over himself until one of the teachers did finally find him, pick him and rouse him back into himself.
And what happened as a result of this? He was sent home from the camp early. His bullies got to stay and enjoy themselves. A lesson he learned repeatedly as he moved into high school.
He was diagnosed with Aspergers (later Autism Spectrum Disorder), further adding to his feeling of detachment from everyone else. He was now even less normal than before. Fancy doctors called ‘psychologists’ said so.
His mother, with the best of intentions surely, started to try and modify his behaviour, especially while in public. “That’s inappropriate behaviour” she would say, encouraging him to try and act like everyone else, to ignore his inner feelings, to ignore his inner sensations. He learned to bury his emotions, to silence his mind.
His mother also seemed to have some sort of hangups about her own childhood, operating on some sort of belief that she needed to be a better mother than her own. It seemed though, to the boy, that she would only do this on a merely superficial level, that as long as she appeared to be a good mother it was fine. So her children had to act a certain way, behave themselves, not speak out of turn, when out in public, or, especially, when with other members of her own family. This also led to her being a bit of a perfectionist around the house, everything had to appear clean and tidy, everything had to be in it’s place. Think Mrs Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances the BBC comedy. It wasn’t much of a comedy to the boy, it seemed more like a heightened, more dramatic example of his own family. But with his “awkward autistim”, he often could not follow her instructions EXACTLY as she laid them out. She would, probably politely and calmly, tell him how he should do the task or chore, again, and again. Eventually he got the message that he couldn’t do anything right, and trying would just get him into trouble. Because that’s how he felt, like he was in trouble for not doing it right.
This was also the case socially at high school. Nearly everyone bullied him in some way for the way he spoke, the topics he like, the way he walked, and even just the way he looked. They would call him a weirdo, a freak, a spaz. Or sometimes, probably owing to the fact it was an all male private Catholic School with rampant homophobia, they would call him gay or a faggot or a poofta. He worried if they knew about his feelings. That he didn’t feel like a boy. That he wanted to be a girl. He hadn’t told anyone. He could never tell anyone. He MUST NEVER tell anyone. He was weird enough as it is.
But everyday the bullying would continue, words here, taunts there. Sometimes it would become physical. Eventually, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he would respond violently. He would lash out, aiming only to disable his attacker, to stop them from attacking him. He rarely connected, but his wild swings and kicks seemed scary enough from some bullies to back off. And paradoxically they would respect him afterward. He never understood that. Why would they belittle him, taunt him, treat him like a lesser being until he resorted to the basest of tactics: violence, and only then they would respect him? This made no sense to him.
All this bullying and perfectionism from his mother had an interesting side effect, he would withdraw into himself. Not only withdrawing in a physical sense, like into his bedroom away from everyone. But also in a mental sense, into his own mind. Everything in the real world seemed small, far away, insignificant. Unimportant. He didn’t need to worry about it his inner voice would seem to say without words. He eventually came to learn that this was called dissociating.
It had become his go to coping strategy without him even realising it. He had become detached from parts of his own mind. He didn’t know when he was feeling something until it was too late to stop it. His anger often got out of control, and it scared him. He tried to double his efforts on controlling his emotions, all of them. If he scored a goal in Hockey, he would viciously silence the happiness in his mind, remain stoic. His emotions MUST be controlled.
But he couldn’t control how he felt about his gender, it persisted in his mind. He kept it hidden as best he could. But sometimes he would explore a different gender expression by borrowing his sister’s clothes and makeup. He made himself appear to be me. And I looked awesome. It was so freeing, so exhilarating. And distressingly, arousing.
These explorations more often than not would go unnoticed by everyone, but on a rare occasion someone would notice. Eventually his mother sat him down and tried to get him to explain himself. But she was met with only silence. He would not say a word. Terrified he just there, partially withdrawn into himself, partially hyperaware of everything around him. His mother and father threw out explanations like ‘it’s a phase’ or it’s his autism’. The latter seemed plausible, it is what he was assuming anyway. It is why he is different, weird, and wrong, so feeling weird, different and wrong about his gender is surely his autism right?
His silence met with exasperation and he was let return to his room. Thankfully for him, the topic was never brought up again.
Eventually he stopped taking his ADD medication, at the behest of his mother. She had believed that his Aspergers/Autism diagnosis superseded and replaced his ADD diagnosis, so why should he continue to take an expensive medication that he may not have needed that may not be benefitting him? And so he stopped taking it.
This was as he entered Year 10 of his high schooling, the education style seemed to have changed from purely concrete learning (ie: absorb information, spew it out onto a test), to more abstract/interpretive learning (ie: taking information and interpreting it’s meaning). He struggled to cope with both this learning style change, and the cessation of his medication. His grades fells from As and Bs, to Cs and Ds. This was disheartening to him. Even though he was weird, and different, and couldn’t do household things right, and his behaviours weren’t right, at least he was academically smart. Not anymore. He lost heart in learning, something he has enjoyed. At the end of the next year he left school, prematurely.
He did go back to school after a year’s break, to a different school. A school that offered some technical qualifications in computing. He decided he would finish his final year of the high school certificate over two years, which this school allowed. He would space himself, give himself time to focus and learn at his own pace. And this approach worked. He didn’t necessarily get As and Bs, but he was pretty consistently a C which was ok for him.
As an unexpected bonus he made friends at this new school, friends of all genders not just one rigidly adhered to gender like his previous school. He didn’t know there were more than one gender at the time, and neither did his friends, probably, but it was a truth that would eventually be revealed to him years later.
His friendships became the more important part of this particular school experience, with them he participated in Student Council, helping organise student events. With them he explored his love of writing.
But his friends were only there for one year, not two like himself. So eventually they moved on, and he came back the following year. That year though, his cousin attended the school for the same reason he did, finish off the high school certificate. He and his cousin often spent time together playing video games and generally getting into trouble, much to his cousin’s wife’s amused annoyance.
But, then his family, seemingly out of nowhere decided to move 1800km interstate. His mother had family there, his father lost his job, and they wanted the new opportunities. But that would mean he’d lose his opportunity to finish one of his technical qualifications, a qualification he spent $2500 to get into. To say he was royally pissed off would be an understatement.
He spent a year there, in that new place. He decided for his 21st birthday he would go back and visit with friends. Mostly because, fuck his family, they took him from the only life he’d known to a place he didn’t want to be, why would he want to celebrate anything with them?
But once he was back in his home town, he didn’t want to go back to the shit new place. So he stayed, he arranged rent and his family graciously helped move his stuff back. His mother complained that he had bought a toaster though, because they had already bought him one. Did she expect him to not eat something? His family then went back to the shit place, and he stayed in his home town, 1800km away from them.
This was a new freedom. He didn’t know how to experience it. He could do whatever he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted with no one to call him out except himself. Except for that voice in his mind that called himself weird, different, a freak, worthless, useless, incapable. The voice that told him that he couldn’t do anything right, why was he even bothering? He tried to ignore this voice, it wasn’t too difficult to do, as this voice was pretty quiet, at the back of his mind.
With this freedom he started to explore who he was. He decided he wanted to learn more about gender issues. He learned about the word ‘transgender’. He explored autism, wondering if there was any correlation between autism and transgender. He found a community online. The more he explored the more it seemed like he was in fact transgender.
So he went to a GP, asked about seeing a psych in relation to this. His GP sent him to a psychiatrist specialising in “sexual dysfunctioning disorders”, who eventually, after a few sessions, told him that what he was feeling was only “learned behaviour”. He apparently learned it from his sisters, from his mother. Because he was autistic and didn’t know any better.
Clearly utter horse crap. But at the time he knew no different and took the psychiatrist at his word. He withdrew from the communities he found online, he closed his transgender explorations and accounts. But continued his with the autism community.
He joined, and eventually became a Moderator on, Wrong Planet, a large (now huge) autism forum. There he met a girl, they talked a lot. She came over, interstate, to visit him, and they hit it off. After she went back home, he eventually decided to move interstate to be with her. This was a monumental task. And required a lot of planning. So he had to make sure it was what he wanted.
His housing situation in his home town was becoming increasingly tenuous, most of his friends had all moved on to other things and couldn’t or didn’t want to catch up with him nearly as often as he would’ve liked. He had begun to feel like he had nothing left in his home town. And he didn’t want to go back to the shit place where his family lived, at least not permanently. So moving to be with the girl, Z, seemed like a good idea. They clearly really liked each other, their personalities clicked right away, and even though she was only in his home town for two weeks he missed her.
So it was decided.
He would move back to the shit place with his family, temporarily, so he could save the money needed to get himself and his stuff over to Z, 4500km away from the shit place. It took a year, but he did it. And he moved.
He and Z had a house, or rather a unit, together. It was good. Not happy, because that wasn’t something he really felt anymore. Not exactly anyway. But good. He could smile about it.
Eventually they got married, a surprising moment for his family. There had been an assumption, both said and unsaid that he wouldn’t move out or meet someone, let alone get married. His family had low expectations of his social life. He knew this, felt this. But it didn’t stop him from proving them wrong at every turn.
He and Z volunteered at an ADD (or ADHD as it’s now called) organisation in the city. He didn’t like this job though, a bit mind numbing. Apparently, according to Z, he once remarked that he was dissociating on the bus back home. No memory of this event remains however.
Though, he did learn that contrary to what his mother believed autism diagnosis does not supersede an ADHD diagnosis.
Things were good. For a year.
Then the gender feelings came back…Well they’d never really left, they were there. He’d told Z about them before they’d even met in person, so she was aware he had these feelings, but he had told her that they were behind him. That he’d moved on. He was very wrong.
He became legitimately depressed for the first time in a very long time. Feeling emotions he didn’t quite understand. He knew he had to get this sorted properly. He knew that the psychiatrist back in his home town was a giant tool and didn’t actually help him, but only served to make him repress his feelings further.
Eventually he got to see a psychologist, she helped him realise that ‘if the seed was there already’, then how could it be learned behaviour? If the gender explorations felt good, and the good feelings reinforced the explorations, that initial good feeling had to have come from within, not from some external behaviour that he learned.
A revelation.
This is where I come in. I am who the boy became. He transitioned. It damaged his relationship with Z, it confused his family. It was a painful time when he decided to actually transition. But eventually everyone came back to me. My family eventually accepted. Z still loves me, and I still love her, maybe not in the same as he and Z did, but love all the same.
My transition was another revelation unto itself. The wall that he had erected in my mind, behind which he held all the emotions he couldn’t cope with, all the emotions he couldn’t control, began to break. Like a crumbling dam wall, my mind was flooded with dozens of new emotions, my life suddenly became technicolor, high definition, 4K. It was AMAZING. Everything felt more real, I felt more alive than ever.
I attended a University entry course, which I found to be a little bit difficult, my ability to focus and maintain motivation was impaired. So in preparation of attending Uni proper I sought a psychiatrist who dealt in ADHD to get my ADHD treated again. I started taking Ritalin again.
Whether it was the stimulant, the socialisation, the latent excitement of being the right gender, or just being at Uni, whatever it was, my mood shifted. And it shifted hard. I became more excitable, more energetic, my thoughts started racing, to the point I couldn’t keep up. It wasn’t a bad experience, but I did feel like I was on the edge of something. And then I fell off that edge. I recognised these ‘symptoms’ as being similar to what I knew of bipolar. The boy had had a conversation with a friend who had been diagnosed with bipolar. So I, too, was aware of it. I began an exploration. Voracious Research. Obsessive thought spirals to match my racing thoughts. I looked up everything I could on Bipolar, looked back over my life and made erroneous conclusions to fit my now biased assumptions. I learned that the increased in my mood was called a ‘hypomanic’ episode. This kind of obsessiveness led me to anxiety, a kind I had not ever experienced before. My stomach muscles would tense and then release in short sharp bursts, like a spasm. I became severely depressed as well. My doctor, apparently, gave me lorazepam, presumably to help with the anxiety. I don’t actually recall taking lorazepam, I have only a journal entry I made back then to go on. That journal entry actually recalled me asking Z what would happen if I took all the lorazepam. She took me to hospital after that, where I was admitted to a psych ward.
That freaked me out a bit. (though probably not as much as it freaked out Z to hear me ask about suicide methods…)
In psych ward I told the psychs everything they needed to hear to diagnose me with Bipolar Type II. I biased myself with my faulty assumptions, and so also biased their conclusions. The mere fact a stimulant had been introduced before the ‘hypomanic’ episode started should’ve disqualified me from a bipolar diagnosis. Medication induced mania is not bipolar, unless it’s from an anti-depressant, and only if there are recurrent depressive episodes. I did not even have recurrent depressive episodes. I thought I did, I believed I did. I told the psychs I did. But even today Z can not recall a single depressive episode I had before I started transitioning.
This misdiagnosis led to me all sorts of new medications. Seroquel, Sodium Valproate, Lithium, Olanzapine.
I was on Seroquel from psych ward, and my psychiatrist (that I had seen for transitioning, not ADHD) added in Valproate, it worked for a couple of weeks, my mood was in a reasonable range, mostly lowish, but generally ok. But then, for seemingly no reason I’d started to get irritable, and then anxious followed by a depression. So lithium was tried, it had minimal effect on it’s own, so Valproate was added back to it, and that worked for a little while with Seroquel squashing everything else.
I felt my mood was stifled. I was stifled. Everything felt flat, lifeless, boring and ultimately pointless. And then it stopped working too.
My memory of events after this point seem to be confused, out of sequence with the reports and journal entries I have. I try to piece it together.
Apparently Seroquel was eventually removed and Sertraline, an antidepressant was added.
I’d once again been doing some obsessive internet mental illness research. My experience with medication difficulties and my moods not having any sort of discernible cycle had led me to question the Bipolar diagnosis, I’d zeroed in on the notion I had Borderline Personality Disorder instead. It seemed to fit everything I was dealing with, emotional dysregulation key among them. I, again, faulty assumptions, and came to an erroneous conclusion.
I was frustrated, depressed and generally just annoyed. I became suicidal, what was the point of even bothering, that voice in my head had gotten stronger over the years. It was now far more effective at telling me how worthless and useless I was, and making me believe it. I didn’t see much point in going on. And so, I tried to commit suicide. But Z stopped me. And off to psych ward I went once more.
When I told the psychiatrist in psych ward all my symptoms, of course framed as BPD without actually saying BPD, he just seemed confused. This went on for 5 sessions, or about 4 weeks in psych ward. Eventually, in the 5th session, I just told him that I thought I had BPD, and that I had wanted him to figure that out on his own, but he didn’t seem to have a clue. The very next session he basically said, “Yup, you have BPD, let’s organise some outpatient therapy” and once that was done, I was discharged. At the time I was relieved to not only have a diagnosis that seemed to fit better, but also a treatment plan that was tailored specifically to that diagnosis: Dialectical Behavioural Therapy. In hindsight though, it seems like the psychiatrist was baffled by what I was telling him, seemingly not matching up with either his own assumptions, or my behaviour in the ward. But once I told him ‘BPD!’ it was like he was given an easy out. Bing bang boom, diagnosis, therapy organised and out the door in short order.
DBT seemed helpful at the time. It was divided into two session, a group session going through the DBT course, and individual sessions with a psychologist. My psychologist decided to do Schema Therapy with me as well, which I find extremely useful, but it didn’t last long as he had to leave the service for personal reasons, and my next psychologist was nice, but useless.
Eventually I finished the DBT course, I assumed it had helped me. It was hard to tell, I didn’t really feel better, and I seem to have similar experiences to the others there. But I tried to assume I was getting better.
I got frustrated with having to take all the medications I was on. I figured ‘fuck this’ and just stopped taking everything, cold turkey.
They say the withdrawals of stopping cold turkey are horrendous but I only got some mild dizzy spells and very rare head zaps for about a week. And then I was fine. I also stopped seeing the psychiatrist because he wouldn’t listen to my pleas for an antidepressant medication. Everything I’d taken was for managing mania, which I did not have. Even under the assumption I had Bipolar 2, I knew that my hypomania were mostly harmless and it was the depression that was the worst and most pressing concern. But now I assumed I had BPD and that replaced Bipolar 2. So why was I even taking mood stabilisers?
I also stopped seeing my psychiatrist, I was frustrated with seeing him, having to travel into the city, the cost, and his general rigidity when it came to medications. So, ‘fuck him too’.
Following this, I was mostly okay, had a couple depressive moods though and I felt it necessary to try an antidepressant. My GP decided on amitriptyline. Unfortunately I can’t recall it doing anything. At all. No effects, no side effects. So Sertraline was tried, again, it didn’t really work either, mostly just made me hungry and thirsty.
I recognised I needed to treat my ADHD again, and I decided to try the antidepressant Edronax instead. It seemed to have some effect in regards to my ADHD symptoms, but extremely weak. So my GP referred me to a psychiatrist who dealt with ADHD.
This psychiatrist believed I didn’t have Borderline, and initially doubted I even had autism. He put me on long acting ritalin, and that was a very bad bad idea. Whether it was the edronax or the ritalin or some unholy combination of them both, my already consistently low mood tanked hard. I don’t think I’ve ever had such an unstable and severe depression in my life, not even when I was hospitalised. I often had that nasty inner voice telling me I’m useless, no one wants me around, I can’t do anything right. I spent over a week in bed with that voice before I could see the psychiatrist again.
Thankfully I had begun seeing a psychologist during that time, and she was doing bits and pieces of schema therapy with me. A lot of my functioning seemed to be based on differing modes that would ‘come out’ in response to certain events, emotions, or other triggers, so schema seemed the perfect fit, helping put names and reasons to the different modes. We put names to two defensive modes I often exhibited, ‘shield’ and ‘spiky shield’. They often came out during my depression, as a response to my vulnerability. Whenever someone pried too much, got too close, or just said the wrong thing I would withdraw, or snap at them. I tried hard to fight those urges. That’s not the kind of person I want to be. I also started to dissociate during the sessions, the same visual distortions and withdrawing into myself mentally that the boy had done.
I had mentioned it, and the boy’s history, to my psychologist, his “difficulties” that he faced from a mother struggling to connect with an autistic son, often telling him what to do with his behaviour, telling him everything he did was wrong or inappropriate. I felt like I could never live up to her standards. And all the bullying and betrayals he experienced during his schooling. How I couldn’t really recall any specific details, just the vague events, and the general sense of what happened. That it was the origins of the nasty voice I often hear, loudest during depression, but it always being there. She nodded along. We were under the assumption it all fit with the Borderline diagnosis. She tried to do some sort of trauma memory thing? Where I recalled a memory and then went into to tell my younger self, the boy, that he was safe or something… I really really didn’t like that. And found it extremely difficult. We only did that once. And we didn’t get to see each other very long; she left the free service to join a private clinic further north than I could reasonably travel.
The psychiatrist believed that my diagnosis of Bipolar Type II was valid and was the reason for my mood instability reaction. He put me on Lamotrigine around mid August of this year. By mid October my mood was flattened. Stable I guess. It was a lot like being on the Valproate/Lithium/Seroquel combo, kinda suppressed. But this felt a little gentler.
But it only lasted until the introduction of 2x 5mg dexamphetamine at the end of October at which point my mood went HAYWIRE. It started small. A little bit down, then the next day a little bit up. Over the next two weeks it continued like that, down a bit more, up a bit more, down a lot, up a lot. Down to rock bottom depression, up to high hypomanic. All the way I was experiencing the worst anxiety, included an unexpected attack panic accompanied by dissociation.
I found it difficult to keep myself present in the moment, often zoning out, staring off into space, fully conscious of what I was doing, but finding it difficult to stop doing it. I started thinking about the boy more. His childhood. His schooling. I hadn’t spontaneously (not specifically prompted by someone) thought about the boy’s school years in ages.
I emailed my psychiatrist about all this new mood instability, and he made an earlier appointment for me. I began to actually suspect that Bipolar Type II was also a misdiagnosis, my only two “hypomanic” episodes of note seemed to be have been triggered by the introduction of ADHD medication. (Ritalin, way back at Uni, and Dex now)
But during the wait time I began to look up information about all what I was experiencing. A mistake, to be sure, given how prone I am to obsessive thinking. My research was initially fueled by a podcast I’d listened to wherein someone was talking about their own childhood traumas and how it led them to a diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was curious, so looked it up the symptoms of CPTSD, and they were startlingly similar. Disturbingly similar. I now began to wonder if maybe my psychiatrist was right and I didn’t even have Borderline. I rechecked my assumptions and the criteria/symptoms of Borderline. I don’t actually fit enough of the BPD criteria. While I do have a strong fear of betrayal and rejection, I don’t make frantic efforts to avoid them, or abandonment. I tend to be more of a “welp, that’s my lot” kind of person. I don’t alternate between extremes of idealisation or devaluation in my relationships, I tend to have steady opinions of those around and close to me (perhaps to a fault?). I’m not impulsive, even when I think I’m being impulsive those around me think I’m acting within expected norms. I don’t think I have feelings of emptiness, despite my life currently being empty. And I don’t have inappropriate, difficult to control anger, at least not since I was the boy. Not to mention many people, both trained and untrained have all disagreed with the diagnosis over the years. And looking back at DBT with other BPD people, I never fit in with them at all, I just assumed it was because I was autistic as well, but maybe it’s actually because I’m not Borderline.
I had another voice in my head telling me to be careful however. This was exactly how I was with both Bipolar and Borderline. I had felt like I knew, ahead of my diagnoses, that I “had” those conditions.
So I knew I had a pattern I pre-self-diagnosing and I had to be careful. Honestly I should’ve stopped right there. But I read that dissociation is a symptom of CPTSD and I knew the boy had done that, I knew I’d been doing it recently. So I followed that down the rabbit hole, leading me to Depersonalisation/Derealisation.
That clicked with several experiences I’ve had over the years. I’ve struggled with a stable sense of identity, particularly post gender transition. Who am I as an adult woman? The boy was told who he was and just went along with it. I’m forging my own path with no one backing me up. So who am I? I know what my values and ethics are, what I believe to be right and just. But I don’t know what I want from life. I have ideas that seem to come and go, morph and change, or disappear entirely, always vague. I don’t feel a sense of recognition with my own reflection, never have as far as I can recall. And as I’ve mentioned, apparently my memory is full of gaps and sequences errors.
I was on a mental health forum for a little while between 2011 and 2012. I originally joined because of the Bipolar diagnosis my struggle with medications. I re-read my old posts recently and I don’t remember even half of them, that’s only 5-6 years ago. Much of what I said in those posts don’t match my current memories of those times, particularly the sequence of events that I believed to be true. The other day Z was talking about a book we’d bought together, for my birthday back in June. I couldn’t remember it at all, had no idea what she was talking about. I’d almost accidentally gaslighted her into disbelieving her own memory so completely did I not remember this book. At least until I saw it on the table at home, I was like “oh right that book!”. But then I could not remember where we got it from. I tried and tried to remember, until I was in tears from the sheer distress of it all. But then I asked Z the next day and she told me I was like “oh right!” all over again.
However, now that I know there are gaps, that there is something to look for, I have been noticing more gaps like that in my memory from throughout the years. Errors in recall, or sequencing, just forgetting random things here and there. Forgetting why I put an object (eg my wallet) in a certain place, when I always put it in this other place. Or even, reading my old journal and not remembering even half of the entries, even though it’s in my handwriting. If you can call that chaos handwriting.
My obsessive research also led me to Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I immediately dismissed that as any sort of possibility. I don’t have separate personality states. I mean sure, I might have voices in my head that don’t seem to originate from my own thoughts (at least one of which I can sometimes hold an actual conversation with). But they’re more like fragmentary emotional modes that influence my thoughts behaviour in ways I may not necessarily approve of later and might shamefully regret. Sounds like Schema, which means it’s just Borderl-oh….
If I don’t have Borderline or Bipolar then how do I explain all these other goings on in my head?
What are even my reactions?
Why do I have these sometimes rather vociferous voices, emotions and thoughts, in my head?
Why do I dissociate?
Was the boy’s years even that traumatic?
Am I just obsessing myself into oblivion?
That last one, probably?
I couldn’t shake the notion that everything I’d read about DID seemed to somewhat fit my experiences. But only partially. I don’t experience switching between alters, at least as far as I or anyone around me is aware, and I don’t seem to experience any gaps in memory related specifically to switching, again, as far as I was aware.
So much self doubt.
Then I found OSDD-1. Or Other Specified Dissociative Disorder 1. It has two sub types. 1a has less distinct states that may not switch, and 1b has the no amnesia/memory problems.
I seem to have both subtypes? Or am I just making it all up because I went WAY too far down the rabbit hole and now I can’t distinguish my objective reality from my subjective feelings?
A friend recently told me that my posts online seemed disconnected, like I would be yearning for connection and belonging in one breath, but in the next I would reject it all.
Well, whatever I felt, I went to see my psychiatrist, for that earlier appointment he made, in relation to my unstable mood spike, I mentioned several paragraphs ago. It was just last Thursday (7th) in fact. I told him all about my symptoms and experiences, my mood reactivity, my anxiety, my dissociating, my general sense of being very unstable, and eventually I even told him that I had inner voices seemingly distinct from my own self talk. I very specifically didn’t mention any diagnosis suspicions I had been obsessing on.
He had no specific answers and just wanted to focus on my ADHD and getting the medication right. (Though he did say the voices seemed to be ‘pseudo hallucinations’.) He agreed with my conclusion that I don’t have Bipolar and reaffirmed that I don’t have Borderline. But said it was probably a good idea to stay on Lamotrigine for now. And we raised my dexamphetamine to 3 times a day instead of just two. He suggested I see a psychologist for the rest, which was kind of frustrating, but not wholly unexpected.
So I did see a psychologist, Monday, in fact.
I told her all the same stuff I told my psychiatrist, and we seemed to end up focusing on the dissociating and childhood trauma. We didn’t talk about anything specific, just around the topic in general and what we might do moving forward.
Even that kind of general talk kind rattled me a little. Like the memory exercise my last psychologist did. I guess I still have some open wounds from the boy that are still extremely raw, and just dancing around them with a mind to actually poke at them sets me on edge. Possibly a contributor to the mood I felt on Tuesday and a Wednesday. I became more emotionally reactive.
A friend of mine is currently undergoing SRS/GRS/whatever you prefer to call it, and while I’m happy for her, and supportive of her. It FUCKING kills me that I’m not doing it too. It burrows deep inside and stabs at me in places I didn’t know I could hurt, emotionally speaking. I ended up having to distance myself from her, and her posts on social media. My emotions even more difficult to control, handle or cope with. And I fell into a short, but severe depressive mood.
I constantly fall back on old methods, withdrawing, dissociating, and self harm/suicidal ideation. They don’t work, the feelings are too powerful.
Honestly, I wish I could take a break, mentally, let one of the voices in my head pilot the body, live the life, for a while. But it doesn’t seem to work like that for me. Even though one of the voices seems to have a much better handle on shit than I do.
That’s assuming the voices are even real and not some imagined construct derived from my own self talk. It’s very difficult to tell to be honest. Are they just buckets of emotions and thoughts and sometimes get dumped onto my consciousness, or is there more to them? One of them, the one with his (yes, his) shit together seems to be more than just an emotional bucket…More of a guide, a protector. But how can I be sure that he’s not just a facet of my own self talk? That they’re all just facets of my self talk.
I was legit suicidal over the last two days and couldn’t get a handle on my emotional reactions to things.
I don’t know if it’s the medications, my mental illnesses, or something else.
Honestly it sometimes feels like no matter how hard I try I just can’t or am not allowed to get better, something always goes wrong, there’s always some sort of barrier. Maybe my biology is just completely fucked up and meds don’t work way they should with me. Or maybe there is a god and it hates me. Maybe I hate me. No wait, no maybe about that one. I do hate me. I hate all of this. It’s not fair. I’ve wasted YEARS trying to get better.
Was transitioning a mistake? It did unleash something I wasn’t equipped to cope with. But that was because of the boy’s years silencing his own mind.
Why do I refer to my past self as the boy, and my post-transition self as I? Well, two reasons. My past self, named Joshua, in some ways literally feels like a different person. And, a little more existentially disturbing, one of the voices in my head, the one with his shit together, the guide, the protector, his name is Josh.
So…Uh…Yeah that’s a thing.