Journey to insanity

My journey to Insanity


It wasn’t that long ago, only 3 years or so, I was strong, energetic, and goal minded. I could do it all and if I couldn’t, well I would find a way. Who knew I would soon be on the strangest wildest journey of my life.
Being a nurse had been a distant dream for most of my life, and now that my son was out of the house, married with children, that goal was now at my fingertips. I had a very nice life; my husband and I lived in a new house, on a sort of quiet cul-de-sac. We were a happy typical suburban couple with two incomes and no children. My husband and I had devised a way for me to achieve my goal; between student loans and some ingenious financial wrangling I was at the age of 40 a student on the path to my nursing career. I was in heaven!
I had to start from scratch, which included taking all the courses I needed just to get to college level classes. I had dropped out of school in my senior year but received my GED 8 years later; my high school years had been spent at the beach in Hawaii where I grew up. Surfing, getting stoned, running around with bikers, and drinking were far more important than school, needless to say, my basic education skills were at a minimum, I was the youngest of five children being raised by just my mother who worked very hard taking on 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet, My father had left when I was 2 and my sisters and I pretty much raised ourselves. College was not even an option for a poor family with limited means so school was not on the top of our list as a priority. But now it was important and I managed to work full time, go to school full time and still carry honor roll status for the next 3 years. It wasn’t easy being 40 years old and enrolled in a community college amongst thousands of bright energetic much younger students. I looked at them as I would my own child who was older than most of them. I was a grandmother, what was I thinking? But school was an intellectual challenge and I liked it, I studied hard and the other student just accepted me as a sort of matriarch of the class.
I was the happiest person in the world that hot July day when the nursing instructor called me and informed me I had been accepted into the program. I knew it would be tough, competing with students much younger than me and certainly with more memory capacity, but I had experience and determination on my side. I knew I could do it. ( yeah, right)
I had worked in a hospital for 15 years as a nurses aid and a unit secretary, if nothing else, I had a good idea of life as a nurse and all kinds of resources at my fingertips. So I began my preparation, ordering books, backpacks, transportation and work scheduling to get me through the next 2 years of grueling study and hard work. As September rolled around I was truly ready to get started on my career path. I was extremely pleased to find out I was not the only grandmother attending the program, there were a few others in the program, and we formed our own little group. It was nice to have people who could relate to things like menopause and gray hair.
There were a few set backs at that time…. The school had cancelled my student loans because it had taken me so long to finish my prerequisites, so my adventure was now going to cost a lot of money and my husband and I would have to tighten our belts a little more and I would have to work for as long as I could, but that didn’t deter me a bit. Then my grandmother died, (I adored my grandmother, she had taught me so much about life and I would miss her terribly) it was a very sad time for me, but I didn’t have time to grieve for her, my career plans were in full swing and I couldn’t allow my feelings to interfere with my school work, so I swallowed my pain and continued down the path. Within weeks my mother’s boyfriend Ray (who I had adopted as a father figure,) also died and my world came crashing down, but I couldn’t stop now, the nursing program was underway and I once again swallowed my pain and continued.
I began at that time to notice small things that didn’t quite fit into my orderly chaos of school, home and work. I wasn’t handling things as well as I had for all of my life, little things were beginning to upset me more than I thought they should, I kept running out of the time I had set aside for specific tasks and my grades were starting to fall slightly, I chalked it up to too much study and not enough sleep and proper diet and I continued on and brushed the minute absences of time to the side.
My son, his wife and my grandson were frequent visitors to our house and I enjoyed their company, but trying to study for tests was getting very hard with constant interruptions from a two year old and his mother, Mostly because I wanted to be with them instead of studying but I needed to finish so I began spending more and more time with study groups at the library, instead of trying to study in the comfort of my own home. This put a stress on the relationship that I had with my daughter-in-law who was now pregnant with their second child. I love her as my own but she was demanding more attention, than I was able to give and that spring she had my son call me and sever the relationship between their family and ours. My son and I had done everything together and were always very close, and now I was having him ripped out of my life and my heart was broken into pieces, Again I swallowed my pain and went on, this is how I dealt with things…. worry about it tomorrow.
That’s when things got really weird. I was driving to school one morning and I heard a voice…a mans booming voice, and it said…”you will never make it through school, why do you even bother, you are not smart enough or ambitious enough to get through this, you are worthless and your children cannot stand you. I can make it all go away, all the pain you feel will be gone, just do as I say and you will have no more pain… speed up…a little more… a little more ok now turn the wheel hard!!!” As I turned the wheel, I realized what was happening, I was headed straight for a concrete wall down the side of the freeway; once I realized what was happening I quickly turned and swerved back into traffic. I was terrified,” what the hell was that all about” I thought to myself, as I pulled over to the side of the road to gather up my wits I then very carefully drove into the school. I sat in my car and cried for I don’t know how long; I finally gathered myself up and went into class. I was early as usual and very shaken up, so many thoughts raced through my mind… Was I suddenly schizophrenic? No I was too old, was I loosing my mind? How could this be happening to me? Dazed and confused, I decided to go to the cafeteria for coffee. The next thing I remember, I was on the second floor railing and woke up to the voice telling me to jump. I looked down to see the ground below me swirling as my heart pounded out of my chest, I was afraid to breath for fear it would throw me off balance, somehow I managed to pull myself off the railing. I ran back to class and ran into a friend who asked me how I was and all I could do was cry, Then time passed again and I was in my instructor’s office crying my eyes out and I couldn’t stop, I don’t know how long I had been there or what I had told her but she was on the phone calling my husband.
My husband took me to a psychiatrist who diagnosed me with severe clinical depression and gave me a prescription for Prozac. I spent the next 3 weeks on the couch in excruciating internal pain and blackness (this I call the “PIT”) all I wanted to do was end the pain I planned out so many ways to kill myself, and they ranged from borrowing a gun from my friend, to hanging myself by tying a rope to the toilet and jumping out the bathroom window. I even went so far as to go to my mothers and search through her medicine cabinet for sleeping pills. I truly believed that death was the only cure for the pain and my broken heart.
We finally got an antidepressant that worked for me and I went back to school, I had missed so much time in school that I should have failed but I was lucky, my instructor took pity on me and allowed me to make up my time missed by doing double clinical work and when August came along, I graduated with the class.
But during this time, my second grandchild was born prematurely but we were not allowed to see her, we kept asking but were constantly denied. That was my first trip to the hospital. Which I think made everything worse because I was locked on a floor at the same hospital where my new granddaughter was and couldn’t see her. This seemed to cause more strange things to happen, I would suddenly find myself going into the “PIT” more and more time seemed to slip by without me being aware of where it went. The voices continued, but were now changing, at times they sounded just like my son saying he hated me and giving me instructions of how to kill myself and sometimes it would be a female voice, who would remind me of what a horrible person I was and how I had ruined my only child’s life. It was becoming increasingly harder to concentrate on any one task. I felt like a small child afraid to do any of the things I had loved to do, every time I would get a little confidence, the voices would return and toss me back into the pit.
I finally gathered it up enough to go back to work in October but now I was a nurse!!! Orientation was tough with my lack of concentration and my deteriorating memory. I had always been a quick learner and now what would have taken me a day to learn was now taking me a week. But somehow I pulled it off and learned all the new skills that came with becoming a nurse.
I was seeing a psychiatrist on a monthly basis for my depression, and I began to tell her of my missing time periods, which were becoming more frequent and longer lasting, what used to be minutes had now turned into hours on end. And there were the cuts on my wrists that I would find when I came out of the “PIT” and headaches became just a part of life. She had mentioned that she thought maybe I could be suffering from DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) formerly known as Multiple personality Disorder. You’ve got to be kidding! Me? Organized, tough, ten foot tall and bullet proof me? No way!!! She explained how she was going to discuss this idea with her colleagues and she would give me a test on the next visit. All I needed was a test. One I couldn’t even study for.
On my next visit my shrink had me answer a questionnaire, with a hundred or so questions. After reviewing my answers, she pondered for a while and ran off to show it to her colleagues, I sat nervously in her office until she returned, I felt as though I was waiting for a jury verdict. When she returned, she sat down with me as though she were going to inform me of some dreadful disease. “I think you have DID,” she said quietly” but I want to send you to a specialist just to be sure. Give me a week and I will refer you to another colleague across town.” I went home and tried to explain it all to my husband who was in as much shock as I, and we started to research DID on line. “She’s got to be kidding” I exclaimed again…this can’t be happening to me, this is way too science fiction to be true! The next week my husband and I were sent to a so-called specialist in DID, (I cant understand how anyone can be a specialist in this if only 1% of the population has this illness.) There we were sitting in a dimly lit staunch office with oversized furniture waiting for the specialist to arrive. I kept hoping that my shrink was wrong about what she thought, but now it was too late and the specialist would decide that I was perfectly normal and only suffered from depression. WRONG!!! After talking with him and answering another hundred questions or so, he pondered over the answers for a while and then informed us that the diagnosis of DID was correct and decided that I was too dangerous and not stable enough to start treatment such as EMDR and hypnosis or for short term outpatient treatment through their facilities. He sent me back my regular shrink who in turn gave me a list of outside psychiatrists who specialized in DID (there’s that specialists thing again.)
So many thoughts raced through my mind… I should have lied on the test, now im going to be labeled with a mental illness, what will this do to my job, will I be able to work in the profession I had always dreamed of? Are they going to put me in some kind of home for the mentally insane? Throughout our 28 years of marriage, my husband had always joked about him keeping a journal of my bizarre little escapades and he would some day have enough to have me committed, well was he getting his wish? It was only a joke…wasn’t it?
During this time I researched as much as I could, I looked on line and read a few books, even watched ‘Sybil’ and ‘Three faces of Eve’ but it still seemed so science fiction to me. I was sure the diagnosis was wrong (denial). This really can’t be true! I was still missing time, still having headaches, and still waking up from naps with my arms and wrists bleeding from large cuts that I didn’t put there. I was spending more and more time on the verge of the “PIT”. That awful place of internal pain and helplessness. The voices became louder and I could hear the crying of a small child constantly. Now I’m sure im losing my mind but it really struck home when I began to find clothes, new clothes, with tags still on them, in colors I didn’t wear, styles I didn’t like, from stores I don’t remember going to. One night, in the middle of the night, I, talking in a 4 year olds voice and language, woke my husband telling him that the boy (meaning my son) couldn’t see his mommy anymore because he must have told his secrets. The voice said her name was Muffin and she fell asleep with her thumb in her mouth. When I was 4, my sister called me Muffin. That was just too bizarre for words! I truly believed that my husband was lying when he told me the story; it took me a while to come to terms with the whole thing.
We also discovered Emma, who is 12 and very mature for her age, she is very organized, and loves to clean. When I was 12 my middle sister who was 15 got pregnant, and instead of giving the baby up she gave him to my mother to adopt, I was the only child left at home so I took care of him like I would my own child. We assume this is why Emma was created. Little by little we discovered different people living in my body, all with different likes and dislikes, one of them Elizabeth,( the one who cuts) is left-handed and lives with great anger all of the time. She hates all men and me; one time she even went after my husband with a butcher knife, luckily she is not very sneaky. I have to admit my life is never boring. My poor sweet husband gets the brunt of it all, most of the time I just loose time and all these other people interact with him so he needs to fill me in on what I have been doing. And that’s really weird. We don’t know yet how many other personalities or altars I may have because we are still coming to terms with all of this.
I now have a new psychiatrist who seems to know a little more about this illness and I am currently in weekly sessions with her. She explained how a small child can separate herself and creates other personalities to hold the pain of abuse and keep the host (that’s me) safe from it. The mind is an amazing thing. We are working on trying to find out why I created these alters and how we are going in integrate them into a whole me. I have very few memories of my child hood, I know that we grew up in Hawaii and were pretty much on our own, my siblings and I had an unspoken pact that we would keep any problems between us and we would handle it without having to upset our mother. She had enough to worry about, keeping all of us fed and clothed. I suppose if my father were going to dump us then it was a good thing he dumped us in a place that was warm so we didn’t have the expense of shoes and coats. My mother had a boyfriend named George who lived with us off and on and I know from the stories my sisters told me that there was a lot of inappropriate fondling that went on, but I only remember one occasion when I was 17 and woke up with him in his underwear stinking of booze on my bed running his hands up and down my naked body… I screamed and yelled at him to get out, about that time my mother came home from work and he left. When I complained, my mother said he was just giving me a backrub and shouldn’t take it so seriously; She also called me a slut and said I asked for it, and how could I accuse him of something like that when he has helped us out for so many years.
Recovery could take many years, because of the scattered memories of my past and I will need to unlock all the secrets my altars have hidden from me all these years. In the mean time, I live day-by-day learning to live with this bizarre mental illness. Life, which seemed so easy before has gotten very difficult, I don’t know who the real me is, I don’t know from moment to moment where im going to be or who im going to be, I don’t go far from home except to work (they don’t bother me there). I must carry a notebook to keep track of what I need to do next and I always wear a watch to keep track of my missing time.
I have discovered that the psychiatric world is made up of those who believe this illness exists, those who don’t, and those who have never heard of it or maybe they have, and choose to ignore it. This makes it very hard for those of us suffering from this illness to get help. I was having a bit of depression this past November, I remember having a stash of painkillers (I kept around for some subconscious reason,) and holding them in my hand. I remember thinking of taking them the next thing I remember is being admitted to a psych unit, where I stayed for a week, during that time we had different group meetings that went on throughout the day. Most people were there for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and so on, and during these meetings the counselors would hand out information with support groups listings, self help books and so on for each specific mental illness. None of them could come up with anything on DID! I felt like a circus freak! I felt lost and alone in a place where you go to feel safe. The most they could offer me was yet another medication that would keep me from hearing voices, but whom are they drugging? Me: (the host), or the others? And if you drug the host, are you also medicating the altars? Hmmmm… a thought to ponder.
I cant say it was all bad, there were some positive aspects to spending a week in a mental health facility, they feed you 3 well balance meals a day, and there are a lot of very interesting people to encounter, and with my many personalities, I was able to fit in with everyone, from the adolescence to the elderly. I felt safe there, for the first time in over a year, I was not afraid. I knew that someone was there to help me no matter what I did or whom I turned in to. All implements of self-injury are taken from you when you are admitted, no belts, hairdryers, cell phone adapters in which to hang yourself, no lighters, so you cant burn yourself, or anyone else, And twice daily room checks so visitors cant smuggle you in a gun or drugs or other implements of self destruction. And then there was the bottled water thing, apparently bottle water is not given out without a doctors order, im not sure why, I assumed it was because a plastic water bottle could be used as some sort weapon or maybe they didn’t want you to drown by inhaling the water. The switching (going from personality to personality like changing the stations on a radio) was down to a minimum and there was always medication to take care of the headaches that go along with it.
In our hourly group sessions, we discussed our personal safety plan. (You know what to do when the “PIT” starts swallowing us up, and death is as close as a razor blade in the bathroom, or the surgical blade I smuggled home from work.) Safety plans were very hard for me, because when the “pit” is near I loose time so which one of me is going to follow the plan? But I went ahead and made a plan to pacify them, well it was either that or stay there until I made one and I was looking forward to my comfy bed and endless amounts of coffee. Coffee is not allowed in the psych unit for fear it may make the crazy people hyper. We were allowed 1 cup of coffee in the morning and that was it, But there was always a way to end up with an extra cup, I would trade my cigarettes, some candy (more caffeine) or the use of my lighter I had hidden in my robe pocket, they never searched my clothes as long a I was wearing them. I wore my robe most of the time, but they did take away the belt. If you were really good and did everything they said you were allowed privileges ranging from being able to leave the unit with a staff member, to being able to leave the unit by yourself for 30 minutes. On the last day I had made it to level 4 and was able to go to Starbucks and buy myself some real coffee I was on cloud nine.
In group we all got to share our story of how we ended up in this place, and the stories were very interesting, one guy was so down, he tied a pile of shirts together to try and hang himself, at that point he decided to call the police instead and they brought him for help, another person was admitted for post partum depression she was so depressed she considered killing her 2 week old baby, And then there was…we’ll call her Mary, who was in for post traumatic stress, she was a bus driver, and one day she completely flipped out, I don’t know what she was like before but she wandered the halls, shuffling her feet, crying and dusting all the railings with her snotty tissues, from time to time she would stop and lay on the floor and do sit-ups. She had come in on my 3rd day there and by the next day she was talking coherently, and joining in during group she did a complete turn around, it’s amazing what the right medications can do. All of the adults were allowed to go to the smoking porch between groups and I know that most of the healing happened out there. We compared life stories and talked out our problems, it was just comforting to know that everyone there was in crisis and it didn’t happen to just me.
From time to time someone would ask me why I was there, and when I told him or her I had DID they just looked at me with a puzzled look. I would have to explain that I had what used to be called multiple personality disorder. “Like Sybil?” is the usual response from those old enough to relate to the movie. And then wait for me to do something Hollywood like switch in front of their eyes into a completely different person. In the movie, you could tell the distinct personalities, but in real life the changes are usually subtle and if you don’t know what you are looking for you would never know a switch has happened. There are a couple of defined personalities, like Elizabeth who growls and muffin who is obviously a four year old but other than that if you didn’t know me very well you couldn’t really distinguish a switch.
My healing process is very slow because of the many set backs, In order to achieve unity, you need a very stable support system, and people around who understand at least a little of the illness. This is something I don’t have and probably never will. My husband has his own problems dealing with life, he is in a constant battle for sobriety, and my illness certainly doesn’t help. My mother is in complete denial that my illness even exists, even though she has spoken to my therapist. She claims that I had a perfectly normal happy childhood. But she has always lived life looking through rose-colored glasses. My sister Sue looks at me with pity like I have some kind of deadly disease. And my other siblings are just as screwed up as I am with their own psychosis. My son, the love of my life, the only person whom I believed would love me unconditionally; will have nothing to do with me. I can’t really blame him though who wants to deal with a mother who has an illness as bizarre as mine. He doesn’t want his children to be subjected to my switches and that in it’s self is my own demon to carry.
My therapist is working hard to build a trust within me, so I can at least call her when things aren’t right. But how do I trust someone when I don’t even trust myself? Trusting people is something that I used to be able to do, I blindly trusted every one and everything, and somehow that trust was always broken. Either by the adults who were supposed to protect me or by my own husband who claimed he loved me. The trust is just not there anymore. I don’t even trust my own instincts. I have become a fraction of who I used to be because I constantly live in fear. Not only of other people finding out about my illness but what happens if I switch at the wrong time and wrong place?
One of my biggest fears is not surviving this. I have an alter but I don’t know her name and when things are very stressful in my life she raises her ugly head. She is obsessed with suicide and wanting to die. I have had a few incidents with her, all of which landed me in the hospital. Her most recent escapade was to get into the car, turn on the engine and close the garage door. She is much stronger than I and very insistent. I begin to believe all the things she says in my head, she tells me how worthless I am and gives all the right reasons why I am that way. It’s hard not to believe her when I am told that she is me.
I wrote this story a year ago, and people keep telling me I am a survivor, but a survivor of what? I dont have the memories of abuse like others do, I cant actually say I was abused. I wonder sometimes if I am surviving or am I just muddling through. Therapy has gone nowhere although the episodes of switching have become fewer and farther between. I hide my illness now from everyone because they just dont understand, and certainly dont want to hear about it, so im alone in this with no one to turn to when things get bad. I have a good life, I have a good husband who is going through alcohol recovery, we have our own little ranch with 4 horses and chickens, I have a good job I really love, so why am I so miserable?