15 december 2021
Well, finals are over and we're on break now. I don't know if we wrote about the whole AWS fiasco, but our college site for classes was down for seven hours because Amazon Web Services servers on the other side of the country decided to crap themselves on finals day, so it was kind of a frenzied rush to get everything done on time. Good grades though, so at least it worked out well. And now that's all done for the month.
So we're on break. Haven't been doing too much, mostly working on making gifts for friends. We do most gifts by hand, so there's a whole process of getting them done on time. Most of them are ready now, just one or two more to put together. Lots of hand-bound journals this year, some needle-felting, one plushie, and going to make some kandi for a few people. The elaborate kind of kandi. It'll be a day's project each for sure. Thinking cat ears and a mask at the moment. Maybe a mask with cat ears? I think we could pattern that.
Otherwise, it's been trying to keep ourselves mentally afloat. When we have a break, it tends to go one of two ways: either we wind up very happy and relaxed, or our brain sees that we're free and decides to hit us with a few mental buses. This time's definitely the latter. We probably need more distractions to make sure we stay sane enough to function when break lets up, but in the meantime we're trying to process and work through things. It's messy and it honestly hurts, but it helps a lot when we manage to get past an issue, and it's not like the brain's letting us do anything else anyway. Annoyingly, the insomnia's acting up and getting involved too. Awkward combo of being up at 4:30 AM trying to beat down panic with a stick for no apparent reason. We're hanging in okay though, just really wish we could get more sleep. We're tired.
Semi-vent ahead about identity, integration, and a whole lot of emotional issues. No obligation to read, but it does explain a lot about how we're doing and was written with a reader in mind rather than for ourselves. But don't read if you're not up to it, okay? Put yourself first. You matter.
Big things right now are ongoing identity issues and home stress. Identity issues are because there's been an ongoing process of integration and, if we're honest, fusion over the last few years. We properly confronted that pattern recently (we hadn't chosen any of it, so it was jarring to notice it was happening all this time) and it's been messing with us because recognizing it was like giving it permission. We were at probably... four, five, maybe six people that weren't quite people. Recognizing it and coming to terms with it has brought us down to two people, one of which is part soup that's not quite a person, and the other of which is a group of a few parts who have been clear this whole time that they'd prefer to stay separate (and we intend to respect their wishes). The part soupiness is what's messing with us because it's as though suddenly what identity there was just dissolved and now there are just a bunch of parts sharing something that is and isn't personhood. All parts of the mind, but no real shared self beyond "we're in the same mind." It's incredibly messy and confusing and a little distressing if we're honest. And we haven't even poked into what's going on with the parts that were most connected to our subconscious, where they went, or what memory issues are like at the moment, or quite a lot of things. We're just trying to relearn how to interact with ourselves when many of our parts no longer want to be treated as true individuals. Do you know how hard it is to consistently work with someone that doesn't want a name but insists you work with them? You can't get their attention with a name or anything. It's rough. We're trying to reconstruct a sense of self out of the part soup and it's difficult. Maybe we should ask Kaz (other remaining person) how they managed it. They're the result of two people merging a year back and it took them a while to reconstruct a self too, so maybe they have some advice for us.
It's both overwhelming and comforting, though. There's comfort in the closeness that comes with it. We're all still here, but much more closely integrated and connected. And we've always sort of seen ourselves in a yin-yang relationship with Kaz, so having there be two person-entities like this is... strangely soothing? We know they'll be there for us, and we're trying to learn to better be there for them. It's a lot more manageable and workable than it was when there were many more people here. Most of the overwhelm comes from in ourself (part soup) because we're still trying to figure out who the hell we are now. It's like trying to construct a house out of LEGOs, but all you have are the little 1x2 bricks in random colors, and there's no manual or guide or reference photos. But that house has to be up to earthquake code and livable and good enough to survive in, and no one tells you how to make a house at all. It's just assumed everyone already has a house and therefore no one needs to build one from scratch out of all the little pieces. And then there's also the issue of the "pieces" fighting with each other now that they're close enough to really come into conflict. There's been a lot of infighting in here, and a lot of struggling to make sure all of our parts feel heard and respected, even the ones that aren't as well-liked. They're important too and they have a significant role. There's a lot of fear and anger going on that we're trying to process because we have access to it now.
I think that's one of the big challenges, actually, is that our emotions are less segmented. Most of us never had to deal with anger, or deep grief, or shame, or fear/panic. Some of us are still stuck living mentally in the past, or in crisis mode, and now it's everyone's problem instead of just theirs. It's like being beaten by a rainbow. Different parts have different fears and experiences they'd rather not repeat, and with the big dissociative barriers between them coming down, suddenly those fears are all exposed to each other and often come into conflict. How do you reconcile a part that protected you by hiding and avoiding people with a part that protected you by being hyper-social and forcefully optimistic all the time, both of them protecting you from the exact same person and believing the other one is in the wrong? And then reconcile those two with the part that protected you by being angry and standing up to that person when it was impossible to take any more from them, and the part who feels deeply ashamed that they feel hurt by that person, and all the other emotions and responses that come from a family relationship where no one meant to hurt anyone else but did deep harm anyway thanks to generational trauma and mental health issues and all kinds of factors out of their control, so you can't blame them but they still hurt you badly enough that you know instantly walking in the door when you come home that they're angry, and that's all it takes to make you feel small and helpless again? Ugh. Sometimes I think being more integrated at this point is almost more difficult than when dissociative barriers were higher. It's so much to try to process and reconcile, and parts work is both easier and harder because of it. We can actually get at those issues now, but we're completely on our own in dealing with it, and these issues are deeper rooted and more painful than the ones we could get to when there were major barriers blocking us off from each other. It's hard to make sense of all these conflicting parts as being part of me, as there being a me at all now. But there definitely is a me, and they're all me. And that hurts a lot to recognize. It's painful. It means seeing what happened and that I'm hurt. I can't deny it now. It's my problem and I'm not blissfully unaware of it like some of us were, and we're struggling with a lot of shame for being hurt when no one meant to do any harm at all. They tried their best to be good parents. They love us, genuinely. It's just that their own parents were shitty, and their grandparents were REALLY shitty, and so they never really learned good parenting and are coming from a perspective of trying not to do what their parents did to them (or trying to emulate it partially) and struggling with mental health issues on top of it. I can't blame them for any of it. They did their best. It's just that their best left us afraid of them. I know that Kaz knows all this and they're just sort of resigned to it, bitter, but for me it's not something all parts of me have ever had to confront. There are whole parts of me that exist solely because recognizing that someone was hurting us when around them would have led to more pain, so they couldn't ever know about it. It hurts for all of me to see it. I think that's the real reason we're struggling to adapt to this. There's so much pain we weren't aware of that we're finding now, and have to deal with. And we're on our own. We don't have a therapist, and there are no open ones in our area (we know because we tried to help a friend find someone recently, no luck) or with telemedicine. As usual, we have to figure out how to cope on our own. We do research and find what we can but it's still a lot to have to work through solo.
And then there's the identity muck. I'm a we. I have parts of me that are as important as me. I can't ignore them most of the time like most people seem to, because they're all hurting and in conflict and very conversational without being their own people. It's weirdly difficult to wrap our head around that. Some of us really hate it when things can't be categorized and those parts have been in a frenzy trying to make sense of it all.
So, yeah. It's a lot. Probably going to spend most of break trying to relearn how to have a self and be functional within ourself, and trying to cope with emotions and everything. It's tiring but important. And it is healing for us, if painful to get through. It comes out better on the other side.
Going to go write out feelings now. This brought up a lot of unexpected emotions.