Scattered pieces

On Monday we had our usual weekly appointment with Liz.  Because we’ve been having such a rough week, we were expecting it to be a chaotic session.  In many ways it was with first Aimee, Sophie and then M talking to Liz.  But it also brought a sense of calmness for the first time.  On Monday Liz said that she didn’t have all the answers and that she was very aware of the possibility that she could do further damage by saying the wrong thing to us.  Not in the sense of we had her walking on egg-shells, but more that she was aware of the possibility.  In some perverse way, this actually was comforting to hear.  She was admitting to not having all the answers – thereby denting her status as an authority.  I’d rather have someone helping me who is aware of their shortcomings and willing to work on them, than someone who is incompetent and unaware of that fact.

Then on Tuesday we went to the woman’s program to see Jo – they do one-on-one work at the program.  Again we were all over the place and finding it very hard to stay present.  It got to the point where Jo suggested we try drawing.  As always when it comes to drawing, we totally drew a blank as to what we want or need to draw.  M started off with a black swirling circle – something she regularly doodles.  Then we switched and  I’m not sure who came forward.  But what followed was about half an hour of drawing and talking with Jo.  M came back to find that the piece of paper now had a child’s drawing of a house and a rather interesting pattern of circles in different colours radiating out from a green base.  To put this into context, we’ve not disclosed our diagnoses with Jo.  M was stunned.  Always the questions – what have we done… what have we said… were we rude… did we speak at all… HOW MUCH TROUBLE ARE WE IN???

The confusion was so obvious that M admitted to having DID.  Jo was really good about it.  She tried to comfort us by saying that nothing bad had happened and that she’d been speaking to someone about keeping secrets.  Apparently whomever came forward had a rather impressive concept of the hierarchy of secrets – none of which could be trusted to the little girl that bears the name given at birth.  Her own name was also a secret, so Jo couldn’t tell us who she’d been talking to.  Jo wasn’t even sure if whomever was present, was aware of Jo being there at all – it sounded very much like they weren’t aware of the difference between the internal and external world.

So all in all, a great way to feel like a crazy arsed, fruit loop, spinner chick.

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Now playing: Anika Moa – Dreams In My Head
via FoxyTunes

In our post on Saturday, we mentioned that we were self-injuring daily.  To us this was no big deal, and we listed it as number 4 in the reasons why last week was bad.  Yet, this is what almost everyone picked up on within the comments.  This surprised us – we couldn’t see what the issue was.  Self-injury in some form, has been part of our life for as long as I can remember.  In some ways it has become a normal part of life.

A definition of self-injury or self-harm is interesting to arrive at.  I’m going to break one of M’s rules and use Wikipedia for the definition – not because it’s particularly good, but rather like all things Wikipedia, it’s a good starting point.  So according to Wikipedia:

Self-injury (SI), also referred to as self-harm (SH), self-inflicted violence (SIV) or self-injurious behaviour (SIB), refers to a spectrum of behaviours where demonstrable injury is self-inflicted. The term self-mutilation is also sometimes used, although this phrase evokes connotations that some find worrisome, inaccurate, or offensive.

(Wikipedia: Self-injury, 2009)

So how do you determine what a demonstrable injury is?  Some of my self-injury is psychological in basis, which is notoriously difficult to identify as having a demonstrable injury.  Does the injury have to be immediate?  I consider eating disorders to be a form of self-injury, but the effects are not always noticeable immediately.  So in short, self-injury is like defining the length of a piece of string.  To me, what defines self-injury is the intent of the action or non-action.  Why did you pick that sore?  Why didn’t you eat that piece of cake?  It’s definitely not about how much you bleed or how big the bruise is, it’s about why it happened and how it made you feel afterwards.

In many ways I feel like a fraud talking about self-injury.  I mean I’m “high-functioning” and “we” don’t self-injure.  Then I look at the scars on my skin, the signs of malnutrition evident in my toenails, the sores that never heal because they’re picked at, the bruises on my leg etc.  None of these are an attempt to get attention – the scars etc are on parts of the body where they won’t be easily found or recognised as self-injury.  They’re also not an attempt at suicide – the plans around suicide are very separate from our self-injury.  But the over-riding feeling for considering myself a fraud when talking about self-injury is the shame.  It is considered by society as a weakness, a character flaw, disgusting, self-centred…  My opinion of self-injury is affected by this societal view.  If someone I don’t know says that they attempted suicide or self-injured, I tend to dismiss them as attention seeking – I buy into the societal whitewash.  But I also know many people who self-injure on a personal level and at no time do I consider them to be attention seeking.  The big difference between these scenarios is that those who really suffer with self-injury rarely talk about it and I know the pain of my friends.  I know they’re not faking.  I know that they sometimes struggle to get out of bed and even pretend to keep going.  Their pain is real to me.  But I also feel that sense of helplessness that comes from not being able to “fix it” for them.

I think this is a huge reason why society view self-injury as it does – there is a sense of helplessness about what to do.  Will sympathy make the person feel worse?  If we talk about it will it give them ideas?  But it’s mainly I DON’T UNDERSTAND…  Often the lack of understanding comes from all sides – the self-injurer often doesn’t know why they need to injure, family and friends don’t understand where they went wrong, and the doctors treat you as another “one of those patients” where you don’t want to get too close because it’s a long journey out of self-injury.  Yes, it often becomes about the people around the self-injurer rather than the injurer themselves.  It is rare to find a person who will sit with you during that pain in an unconditional way.  But when you do, it’s incredible.  I’m not sure I would have the strength to do it, I’ve talked to one person who needed that unconditional support and I’m not sure how effective I was.

Sorry, this is very rambling.  But my thoughts about self-injury are so confused.  I know I do it.  I know I shouldn’t, but every day it happens.  I’m worried what will happen if I accept this as my reality – will it mean that I’ll also be accepting the self-injury and not want to stop?  Or, will it mean that I can look at the stampeding elephant coming towards me and make it change it course?  In the words of Frank – fucked if I know.

I hope that the more we talk about it, the less of a grip it will have over me and others who suffer.  Not looking at the elephant in the room doesn’t make it disappear, it just makes the shame more intense.

References
Wikipedia: Self-injury. (2009, July 9).  Retrieved 13 July, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-injury

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Now playing: Sia – Breathe Me
via FoxyTunes

We did this clip over a year ago, but heard the song on the radio earlier and it reminded us about this clip.  Just trying to keep occupied…

Note: It contains images which are only suitable for adults and might trigger.

I could do without triggers and a job at the moment.  Life would be much simpler without them!  So far this week:

1)  30 sq.m. of office space was taken from the office at work.  This meant that the two people we get on with, have moved out of the office.  This is good for them, in that they are further away from the drama and poisonous environment that exists in the library.  But it’s really bad for us.  We’re not going to talk to people unless we’re doing a desk shift now, so our grip on reality is going to lessen.

The new wall is partially up – along with the associated noise, disruption etc.  This has caused the library staff, who were already stressed, to basically turn on each other.  Several of the woman we work with have a tendency to speak before they think.  One in particular will get upset and fly off the handle with very little provocation.  She needs to have tight control over everything and if that control is threatened, then there will be fireworks.  The problem is, that she often moans about it all to our cynical friend, who just doesn’t have the emotional reserves to cope with anything else.

2)  We carried out a major system upgrade this week.  So all week we’ve been testing different aspects of the system and how the new library catalogue will appear.  It was all going OK, until it did a false “live” status on Thursday morning.  That meant that our cynical friend got caught off-guard with an off-line upload which she knew wasn’t meant to happen, but couldn’t stop.  Then today, when we finally went live.  Suddenly it was doing weird things with the images and giving temporary location statuses which were unnecessary.  Everyone came and complained to us individually about it – like we were meant to magically fix the stupid thing.

3)  Because of factors 1 and 2 as well as her husband being told his cancer is now stage IV, our cynical friend has had several melt-downs at work – bursting into tears, having to go for a walk to calm down etc.  She wrote her resignation letter on Thursday morning while still crying her eyes out.  I managed to tell her to wait until next week to hand it in, to give herself the chance to calm down.

4)  Because of factors 1-3, we’ve been self-injuring daily.  When we talked to Liz on Monday, we had to rate the severity and regularity of our self-injury.  We rarely cut, but our self-injury ranges from the subtle to the severe and occurs daily.  That was a scary realisation.  That realisation led to another round of self-injury.  M has stated that one of our goals with Liz is to try and work on hating this body a little less – she’s thinking big picture, as she knows it won’t happen overnight.  Liz gave us a time-frame of 18 months to being better, I hope she’s right.

5)  A friend shared something positive with us, but it caused so much confusion and hurt.  Nothing they did, purely our screwed up responses to a normal situation.  The image they provided of innocence, got so caught up in our past that we couldn’t cope with it.  I got overwhelmed by the young ones screaming that the girl would be hurt.  Sometimes its really easy to believe that we’re making up events from the past, then something like that happens and it stops you in your tracks.  Why would we react that way if we were making it all up?

6)  Matthew (our American friend) has returned to prostitution.  We’re all so worried about him.  It’s his choice, but he’s hurting, is going to get hurt further and there’s nothing we can do about it.

7)  Mother is moving in with us for the month of August.  Yup, the whole month.

I know that Zombie by The Cranberries is a protest song about Northern Ireland, but many of the lyrics also are relevant to what goes on in this head – the bombs and guns are like the triggers which cause the violence, silence and crying…

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Now playing: The Cranberries – Zombie
via FoxyTunes

Raindrops

The ripple from each drop is similar to how each part of the system can impact on another, or be totally out of touch and isolated…

It’s been a rough week.  There’s so much happening at work that it’s just chaos.  Work is usually our anchor – it forces us to get out of the house and interact with people.  But there have been so many changes that the anchor sort of got cut free for a few days.  We walked out on a meeting on Thursday – something we’ve NEVER done before (no matter how much we’ve wanted to).  Part of the changes, are a renovation to the office space, which will mean the area being reduced by 30m sq.  The flow on effect is that three people in our office are having to be relocated elsewhere in the organisation and another three people are going to have to be shifted from where they currently sit.  Ordinarily, we would have jumped at the chance to go to another office area, but the new office space is open plan with no walls behind the work station.  We HAVE to have our back to a wall, doesn’t matter where we are, we just do.  But everyone else in the office is suggesting that we move.  Our team leader and the manager know that we have to have a wall behind us, but the manager made a point out of talking about us during the meeting and using us as an example as to why some people can’t work in every office space.  That was the last straw, we had to get up and leave.  She’s a really nice person, but she’s not a good manager.

As a further blow, our cynical friend is one of the people moving out of the office.  She needs to do this in order to stay calm while her husband deteriorates from the cancer.  So the only person we talk to and laugh with is leaving the office.

All of this lead up to a fairly intense bout of suicidal intent.  We contacted (via email) the woman’s programme we go to and Liz detailing what was happening.  The interaction with Liz was interesting, it got to the point where we knew that if we didn’t head her off, we’d be sent up the the hospital for a risk assessment…

To Liz:
… shouldn’t have contacted you or anyone, it’s just attention seeking.  It will be fine, at work now and then go home and forget everything for awhile.

Liz’s response:
I have found that talking about things, hard stuff, etc does help.  If it had not done so, I don’t know where I would be today.

Are you attention seeking?  Doesn’t sound like attention seeking from where I sit.  Although saying it is, will be another way that you avoid talking / dealing with it, aye?  Of course talking about hard stuff can seem to make things worse. Do they get worse before they get better?  Sometimes it works that way.  Sometimes there can be immediate clarity and balance.  I would like you to know that I am available to talk about this situation when you are ready to.
Regards
Liz

She saw through our rubbish, avoidance etc.  Will be an interesting session tomorrow…

As for our photos… we’ve realised by taking photos that our focus of the world is very narrow.  We’re not comfortable with the expanse of a landscape and the idea of taking photos of people is absolutely terrifying.  We tried taking photos of the mother while she was here, but immediately dissociated.  Yesterday we went for a walk and tried to take some photos of the surrounding landscape (managed a couple – try 1 & try 2), but we much prefer the narrow focus (e.g. dew drop).  I wonder if this is about our style of photography, or being caught up in PTSD and dissociative issues?

Today has been one of those last straw days.  It started out fairly normally, the traffic on the way to work was light because the university students are in the middle of exams.  Our cynical friend at work was in a good mood and it was all looking positive.  Then…

Blow 1:  Our cynical friend didn’t come out to morning tea with us all – which is unusual.  When we were walking back to our desk we saw the graphic surgical procedure pictures she was looking at.  They had found a cyst which they are going to operate on.  As if she hasn’t got enough on her plate.

Blow 2:  We’ve been nominated as the union representative for the workplace.  Considering how we don’t like arguments or confrontation, I’ve no idea why they elected us – especially as we refused to volunteer.

Blow 3:  Each website we visited today that had an Ad banner, was advertising the “Death Quiz”.  It invited you to fill in the quiz to find out when you would die.  Considering how suicidal we are at the moment, those subtle messages are not helpful.

Blow 4:  One of the most vivid abuse memories we have is an event that occurred on the grounds of the local kindergarten.  Today in the newspaper feeds, a headline jumped out – that kindergarten had been set on fire.  It started on the couch they kept on the porch.  How the kindergarten is used on the weekend at night as a gathering place for teens was mentioned.  SO and W are triggered so badly.  We were already unsteady, but this has pushed us over.

Blow 5:  We were 3 minutes late for our desk shift because we got caught up in a conversation about a major system upgrade that is happening next week.  Another team leader came up and yelled at us for being late in front of other team members.

It’s now 1am and we’re terrified of trying to sleep.  We know the nightmares will be there.  It’s just one bad day right?  We can do this……….

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Now playing: Christina Aguilera – The Voice
via FoxyTunes