“I come not to bring peace but a sword”: Rage and Retribution

[Kintsugi]

I have spent so many years absolving my father so that he was charged only with the crime of absence and ignorance.

“No, no, no more, son of a bitch... No more happy face.”

He f*cking saw it happening.

He saw it.

All those years of abuse?

All those abusers.

The years when my mother interrogated me, for hours, trapped, asking who touched me?

He f*cking knew.

My mother did, too. I remember telling her one night in the bath. I couldn’t have been older than three or four, maybe.

But he has remained in the bubble I afforded him, accused of no more than ignorance borne of absence.

I started having nightmares about my father for the first time recently. I thought it was because I felt guilty. My mother begged me to speak to him after I leveled with him. Said he was depressed for months. Thought I was mad.

Well. Now I am f*cking mad. I am livid. I want to make him choke on his failures and cowardice. I want to burn him alive.

I want to ensure that when he dies, he remembers the choices he made, and he will fear his maker. Trembling. Afraid. Exposed as the coward he really is.

I hope this is what you wanted. Hope this is what you had in mind. Cause this is what you’re getting.

I hope you choke on this.

I hope you choke.

 

[Kintsugi]

My father no longer lives bound by the restrictions of Orthodoxy, but he is still a devout man. God-fearing.

The Judaic God is not known for His mercy. Absolution doesn’t exist in Judaism. There is no magic moment that can make you clean. Jews believe in atonement through action.

Christians often seem confused by Judaism’s lack of a central figure and, finding no better parallel to their Savior, they choose Moses.

Moses was an adoptee. His name means “from the water,” named by the Egyptian princess, “for from the water I found him.” When, as an adopted member of the royal family, he sees a slave driver beating an old man to death, he suddenly knows God’s true name, known to no one else in history, and speaks it aloud, the slave driver is instantly smote, he flees.

Moses becomes a husband, father, and shepherd. He lives a good life. It is then that God calls on him to return to “his people,” whom he has never known as such, to free them. He doesn’t want to. He is forced by God into this role.

Later, he will drown the brother he grew up loving to walk through the desert with strangers for whom he was forced to abandon everything he loved.

Still later he is called to climb Mount Sinai alone, where he spends forty days and forty nights writing the word of God.

When he climbs down the mountain with the stone tablets carved with the Ten Commandments. The people at the bottom have lost faith in God. They have melted their gold and fashioned an idol: the golden calf.

Moses, in a rage, throws the tablets, and they break.

God forgives the idolators. But not Moses. He punishes Moses for his moment of anger.

The Holy Land for which Moses has sacrificed everything? To which he leads this strange people he never knew? He will lead them there, but he is forever barred from entering, for he displeased God.

No. The Judaic God is not known for mercy. He is all rage and retribution. There is no “devil” in Judaism because they do not need a devil. Satan is an angel—The Adversary and Lightbringer. But God is who the Jews fear.

I would like to know what my father thinks he will face, charged by his beloved God with his heinous inaction.

I never understood why anyone would say, “May God have mercy on your soul” until now. Some people are so damned by their choices that you can actually shudder to think what their God will do to them when it is time for their crimes to be seen in full.

I don’t believe in this God of his, but I do believe that belief itself is the power of it all. In the first DMT studies, the beliefs of the participants and, of course, the headspace they occupied in their own minds regarding how they felt about themselves determined what it was they would see.

The night of my wedding, we only had a few close family members who stayed for the after party. We warned them. We tried. We told them This is some strong shit. Some of the best in the country. We tried to let them know before they embarked.

One of them had the experience we had thought they were all prepared for. Another completely lost it, but he did not shift afterward. The third, the one who married us, our dearest confidant, quietly lost his mind, threw us out, and didn’t speak to us for almost nine months.

We just went to see him, after he finally said he was sorry, he loved us, come back, please.

He has completely changed his life around. We’ve never seen him so healthy.

We know this practice will kick our ass if we’re not right with ourselves. It makes us alert, aware, always taking our temperature in the interims. We know opening the door into our Selves can be filled with endless wonder or terror, depending on where we are, who we are, how we sit with ourselves when faced with the Truest Mirror.

My father would never survive the experience. That is why I will be happy to say it: May your God have mercy on your soul. I know what we all must eventually meet, and what I believe we meet in death, is our Self. And I don’t think he is going to like what he sees.

 

[new gamma rays]

I am sorry you are going through what you are going through right now. I face a similar fate right now, realizing inside for the first time how an inner child feels neglected and forced by other people's anger into an involuntary psych unit. That's not the only time my parents betrayed me. It might help to imagine a punishment suitable for their crimes. I think of Dante and the lowest circle saved for those who betrayed others. But really we are just stuck with our pain. I think it helps to be compassionate to ourselves in these moments and imagine someone who would care or find some coping strategy that doesn't feed back on the anger that is our response to pain. I really don't know what to say, because i am stuck in the same place. Just wishing for both of us we can reach out to someone who cares - someone to replace what our goddamn parents were supposed to do.

 

[Kintsugi]

It might help to imagine a punishment suitable for their crimes.

I’m finally, after 15-16 years knowing I had the option and my wonderful recent therapist urging me to consider it further so she could help me do it, seriously looking into my legal options. I’ve always known I had a truly stupidly excellent case. But I believed in keeping it “in the family.” Trying to repair things. Amends.

But now. Well. I have some phone calls lined up including a lawyer as well as a Hail Mary to my father and a consultation with my only family ally, my cousin. But now.

I come not to bring peace but a sword.

I have so much rage.

An appetite for retribution.

F*cking restituion.

In Toni Morrison’s Sula, she writes, “He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four and that the fourth explained Sula.”

I won’t go into the thesis of my essay, “The Fourth Face,” but I will say this:

I am The Fourth Face.

It isn’t a pretty one.

 

[Kintsugi]

Oh goddamn it.

This shit just keeps getting worse.

So yeah. Revelations continue.

Turns out my little cousins—my father’s late brother’s two girls—think the reason my sister and I are never around my parents but my brother is is because my father sexually abused us.

So like. Because my parents chose to make sure what happened to me was swept under the rug

And chose my brother over me

And then again over my sister who eventually developed my rage on my behalf

(Which I did not know and which comforts me)

His brother probably died thinking he sexually abused his daughters.

Awesome. I don’t necessarily feel he deserves that truth (and he has no clue).

But I am not particularly sympathetic either.

I’m just so tired.

 

[Friday]

His brother probably died thinking he sexually abused his daughters.

Of course you’re tired.

Your father sowed the wind.

Powerful thing, wind. Only seen by what it affects. But felt??? For damn sure. The choices your father made in his life, the effects of those choices? Unseen. Unfelt. Seen. Felt. Coming at them, as you are now? Tacking in, across, from an entirely new direction than you’ve ever attempted in your life before? Not in the eye, not storm tossed, but at the helm??? Seen in all new ways. Felt in all new ways. Course still to be decided upon. That’s exhausting at every kind of level. Too right, though. Your right.

Hold fast.

 

[Kintsugi]

The choices your father made in his life, the effects of those choices? Unseen. Unfelt. Seen. Felt.

“I have to live with this for the rest of my f*cking life,” I cried to my cousin on the phone, full of burning pain and rage fueled by the whipping sting of helplessness. I had my head in my hands. I felt so alone. Cast out as always. They chose him, and I lived with that choice vividly and viscerally every day.

“Yeah,” she said. And she sounded quiet and sober and sad. Her energy had dropped to a whisper. “But I gotta tell you, if I had to live with it on your side or theirs, I would choose yours all day long.”

She isn’t like any of them. She has never downplayed. Doubted. Disbelieved. None of it. She’s the only one who always, always saw me. It’s not like she didn’t know exactly what she was saying. She knew what My Side was. She knows how utterly dense with suffering it has been. She knows I will carry it always and never be whoever I might have been without All of It.

So I heard her. I’m not sympathetic. I don’t pity them their choices. They hurt me, and it wasn’t something bygone they couldn’t change. And then they kept hurting me. They abandoned me. They put me through hell and blamed me for sweating. They punished me for refusing to go back. They made sure if I wouldn’t do what they wanted, be who they wanted, feel how they wanted, it would make my life exponentially harder. They squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until they finally realized I was never giving way. I would rather starve than eat at their table with him.

And then I started to f*cking succeed in spite of them.

And they couldn’t stand it, knowing they did everything to conspire against it. That they failed to force my hand. And I was becoming what they wanted without them earning so much as a f*cking blip in the credits reel.

So yes, I think my cousin is probably right.

I have shame, but it is foreign. It isn’t mine. It doesn’t belong to me. I didn’t earn it. I just carry it and tear at it and remind myself it’s just a bad dream of myself that isn’t based in reality.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to have earned the emotions they have earned, the dilapidated life they inhabit, the echoing void they tried so hard to fill with the family they said they were protecting from me. From my truth. Because my truth was supposed to be the rot. My story was the poison. I was the harbinger of broken ties. I was the cracks in the firmament they kept painting over with sunshine.

And now he’s the only one who doesn’t have a problem with them. Why would he? He has failed at everything and been handed whatever he wanted in exchange. He got what he wanted. Everything except a single clue how to survive a single day alone. How to work. How to live without. How to love. How to say thank you. How to say I’m sorry. How to understand accountability.

I kept asking last September, back when I first broke. First leveled with my father. Because he kept saying “I’m sorry.”

And I kept saying, “I don’t want you to apologize. I want you to tell me why. Why did you choose him? Why? Was it worth it?”

More apologies.

Yeah, I would rather live with my side of it, too.

I’m not sorry.

I don’t owe any of them a goddamn thing.

I didn’t do anything wrong at all. I just kept doing the right f*cking thing. Every time. Doing the work. Taking care of me. Doing whatever I had to do to that made me feel whole and sovereign and free.

I told my cousin I feel like everyone has just always told me I’m insane, but we’re the only sane ones in a madhouse.

“Why can’t they just tell the truth?” I asked her. “Why are we the only ones ever telling the truth?”

“Because they’re weak,” she said, “And we are strong. And that’s all it is.”

 

[Kintsugi]

The last time my father—although it was both of them, my parents, at least the united front they always maintained that always looks increasingly superficial in hindsight—used words that so diminished my experience, I blacked out.

All I remember hearing was something about

Why is this such a big deal?

And the description:

...Some fondling

I’ll never forget that word: fondling. I’ve never used it since. When I see or hear it, it’s like smelling a liquor that almost killed you from heaving sickness. It’s like being hit by an incinerator door thrown open in my face. I want to turn, duck, cover. It makes me remember the flash of pure fury before I blacked out.

When I came to, I was tucking crisp printed pages underneath their door. I didn’t remember anything. I let the edges of the paper fall from my fingertips and went to my room, jumped onto my bed, pulled out my beloved word processor (yes, children, we had computers. It was 2006. But I was partial to these. Only four lines visible. No distractions. Lightweight.).

I started reading what I didn’t remember writing. What I printed. What I put down under the door. I had traversed five flights of stairs and over two hours of time. But I didn’t remember anything at all.

I was reading first person accounts of the abuse. Vignettes of memories. Now that I remember so much more, stopped pushing away the ones that truly scare and disgust and shame me, these were tame. But all things are relative. I don’t remember them being tame in the moment. I remember them being clear and raw and beautifully transposed and ruthless in the unflinching gaze of their narrator, little 4-6 year old me (roughly). There were three pieces. The last one ended with implications and questions that even now I recognize as illustrating, as cruelly as possible and in my own teenage voice, horrific and glaringly obvious answers that would turn anyone’s stomach, but especially theirs. About the other kids. About families who suddenly wouldn’t have anything to do with ours.

These pieces came together to form one clean message from me to them:

Tell me: what part of my experience did you believe you knew anything about at all?

This is why, above any other reason, I chose writing over math.

I consider it an old and powerful magic. I can transport you. I can cut you. I can make you cry tears of joy. I can engineer the inside of your mind. I can make you feel what I want you to feel and see what I want you to see. I can take you back in time. In writing, I control everything. I don’t need to be close. I don’t even need to be alive. When you begin to read, you’re in a world of my making, and I dare you to pull away. I dare you to feel nothing. I dare you to come out of my world untouched.

I’m not sure what I will do this time, but no more blacking out.

My parents were forever shaken, afraid, haunted by those pages. I said nothing. They said nothing. But their faces were white and taut and newly lined whenever they saw me. They saw me. Just a sliver. For the first time. They saw a flash of the inside of my life, their fifteen-year-old straight A college student who did her homework on weekends and holidays and worked nights and played violin and cooked all of her rapist’s meals in addition to half of theirs.

I wasn’t bad at fifteen. I wasn’t. But I was dissociative and emotional and unfocused and young and barely uncovering what happened.

I don’t know what I will show him. A thousand betrayals he perpetrated glimmer in my mind like the strobing streamers of projector lights filtered through film. Then there is the grisly stuff—fellatio, foreign objects, getting on top of my brother’s naked body, and the other boys who heard the rumors and would lie in wait to snatch me, take me behind the dumpster, force me on my knees, pull pff my clothes. The older girls who thought this was “attention,” kicked me to the ground after I was raped by three boys taking turns. I’m three, four, five, maybe six by the time the girls started noticing this “attention.” I was hunted everywhere. My house. My synagogue. My street.

I remember being about five when a family friend came over, and she bent down, hugged me, and gave me a pat on the tuchus, they’d say. She always did this. She was the wife of the man I considered a second father. She did nothing wrong, nothing different.

But then I’m screaming, shrieking, crying, hiding as far as I can behind the couch, hiding my face, begging for help.

The adults, including my parents, were shocked. What was the matter?

I just remember saying I couldn’t go back to the synagogue. I was scared. Don’t make me.

When pressed for why, I gave up the girls.

They were spoken to. I was sent back... every Saturday. Every bit of it just got worse. And worse.

But it didn’t matter. It’s not like I was safe anywhere else. The majority of the gang rape—five, six boys plus my brother—happened while 8-20 adults were upstairs. I was alone with them down there. I still remember the way the laughter sounded through the floor. The dining room was directly above where they would strip me.

Which one, faced with all these in my mind?

What do I rub his nose in.

How many years could he have stopped?

Why was it never questioned, leaving a preschool aged girl in a basement full of young teenaged boys while the upstairs roared with wine and revelry?

Yeah. I have plenty of f*cking worlds.

You know, @new gamma rays, you’ve given me a truly excellent idea for how to craft this project. How to plunge him in. How to make him walk through the fire he left me in to burn forever.

I’ll curate all nine layers of Hell.

f*cking watch me.

I don’t have to view my truth silently, alone, politely. I don’t have to be the only witness.

He saw it?

And he did nothing?

He said he wasn’t sure what he saw.

I can help with that.

Wait till he feels the textures I can render.

Maybe it’s his turn to know what it’s like to choke on a dick.

To carry the smell in his nose forever.

To see a child’s plastic screwdriver and know how badly it can hurt a little girl.

To reach up and turn the lock on the door obediently, as a matter of routine, glimpsing me in the full length mirror hanging next to my three, maybe four-year-old face.

The way I have no clothes, and neither does my brother laying on his back on the bed.

Taking it in as I turn and know already what to do.

How high up the bed is.

How I balance my tiny hands on his chest, the curtains pulled, seeing the warm lamplight turn our bare skin different shades of yellow, as I center myself, too small to touch the mattress with my feet, before everything goes completely blank.

 

[Renaissance]

The last time my father—although it was both of them, my parents, at least the united front they always maintained that always looks increasingly superficial in hindsight—used words that so diminished my experience, I blacked out.

All I remember hearing was something about

Why is this such a big deal?

And the description:

...Some fondling

I’ll never forget that word: fondling. I’ve never used it since. When I see or hear it, it’s like smelling a liquor that almost killed you from heaving sickness. It’s like being hit by an incinerator door thrown open in my face. I want to turn, duck, cover. It makes me remember the flash of pure fury before I blacked out.

When I came to, I was tucking crisp printed pages underneath their door. I didn’t remember anything. I let the edges of the paper fall from my fingertips and went to my room, jumped onto my bed, pulled out my beloved word processor (yes, children, we had computers. It was 2006. But I was partial to these. Only four lines visible. No distractions. Lightweight.).

I started reading what I didn’t remember writing. What I printed. What I put down under the door. I had traversed five flights of stairs and over two hours of time. But I didn’t remember anything at all.

I was reading first person accounts of the abuse. Vignettes of memories. Now that I remember so much more, stopped pushing away the ones that truly scare and disgust and shame me, these were tame. But all things are relative. I don’t remember them being tame in the moment. I remember them being clear and raw and beautifully transposed and ruthless in the unflinching gaze of their narrator, little 4-6 year old me (roughly). There were three pieces. The last one ended with implications and questions that even now I recognize as illustrating, as cruelly as possible and in my own teenage voice, horrific and glaringly obvious answers that would turn anyone’s stomach, but especially theirs. About the other kids. About families who suddenly wouldn’t have anything to do with ours.

These pieces came together to form one clean message from me to them:

Tell me: what part of my experience did you believe you knew anything about at all?

This is why, above any other reason, I chose writing over math.

I consider it an old and powerful magic. I can transport you. I can cut you. I can make you cry tears of joy. I can engineer the inside of your mind. I can make you feel what I want you to feel and see what I want you to see. I can take you back in time. In writing, I control everything. I don’t need to be close. I don’t even need to be alive. When you begin to read, you’re in a world of my making, and I dare you to pull away. I dare you to feel nothing. I dare you to come out of my world untouched.

I’m not sure what I will do this time, but no more blacking out.

My parents were forever shaken, afraid, haunted by those pages. I said nothing. They said nothing. But their faces were white and taut and newly lined whenever they saw me. They saw me. Just a sliver. For the first time. They saw a flash of the inside of my life, their fifteen-year-old straight A college student who did her homework on weekends and holidays and worked nights and played violin and cooked all of her rapist’s meals in addition to half of theirs.

I wasn’t bad at fifteen. I wasn’t. But I was dissociative and emotional and unfocused and young and barely uncovering what happened.

I don’t know what I will show him. A thousand betrayals he perpetrated glimmer in my mind like the strobing streamers of projector lights filtered through film. Then there is the grisly stuff—fellatio, foreign objects, getting on top of my brother’s naked body, and the other boys who heard the rumors and would lie in wait to snatch me, take me behind the dumpster, force me on my knees, pull pff my clothes. The older girls who thought this was “attention,” kicked me to the ground after I was raped by three boys taking turns. I’m three, four, five, maybe six by the time the girls started noticing this “attention.” I was hunted everywhere. My house. My synagogue. My street.

I remember being about five when a family friend came over, and she bent down, hugged me, and gave me a pat on the tuchus, they’d say. She always did this. She was the wife of the man I considered a second father. She did nothing wrong, nothing different.

But then I’m screaming, shrieking, crying, hiding as far as I can behind the couch, hiding my face, begging for help.

The adults, including my parents, were shocked. What was the matter?

I just remember saying I couldn’t go back to the synagogue. I was scared. Don’t make me.

When pressed for why, I gave up the girls.

They were spoken to. I was sent back... every Saturday. Every bit of it just got worse. And worse.

But it didn’t matter. It’s not like I was safe anywhere else. The majority of the gang rape—five, six boys plus my brother—happened while 8-20 adults were upstairs. I was alone with them down there. I still remember the way the laughter sounded through the floor. The dining room was directly above where they would strip me.

Which one, faced with all these in my mind?

What do I rub his nose in.

How many years could he have stopped?

Why was it never questioned, leaving a preschool aged girl in a basement full of young teenaged boys while the upstairs roared with wine and revelry?

Yeah. I have plenty of f*cking worlds.

You know, @new gamma rays, you’ve given me a truly excellent idea for how to craft this project. How to plunge him in. How to make him walk through the fire he left me in to burn forever.

I’ll curate all nine layers of Hell.

f*cking watch me.

I don’t have to view my truth silently, alone, politely. I don’t have to be the only witness.

He saw it?

And he did nothing?

He said he wasn’t sure what he saw.

I can help with that.

Wait till he feels the textures I can render.

Maybe it’s his turn to know what it’s like to choke on a dick.

To carry the smell in his nose forever.

To see a child’s plastic screwdriver and know how badly it can hurt a little girl.

To reach up and turn the lock on the door obediently, as a matter of routine, glimpsing me in the full length mirror hanging next to my three, maybe four-year-old face.

The way I have no clothes, and neither does my brother laying on his back on the bed.

Taking it in as I turn and know already what to do.

How high up the bed is.

How I balance my tiny hands on his chest, the curtains pulled, seeing the warm lamplight turn our bare skin different shades of yellow, as I center myself, too small to touch the mattress with my feet, before everything goes completely blank.

@Simply Simon, I’m horrified to learn of your experiences and traumatization (please excuse me for this quote feature. I’m new to this site and didn’t mean to use that). I was also sexually abused, although I didn’t develop any PTSD symptoms as a result (I do think I have CPTSD from my childhood, and I believe these are very distinct conditions).

Please let me know if I am triggering you, but your abuse happened from ages 4 to 6? The abuse that I suffered happened starting at age 3, by my best estimation.

I feel for you extremely for the horrible things you have suffered. My heart goes out to you and I’m sorry for your pain.

 

[Kintsugi]

Hello new member. Normally I welcome new members like it’s my job... in the Introductions forum, where I am enthusiastic, warm, and otherwise dripping with good will.

But you’re in my thread—my Dysregulation thread about rage. So I would like to say in advance that this is not a great place to meet me. The Simon you might encounter elsewhere is not this one. And because you’re new and clearly unfamiliar with our community, I am going to underscore again that you came here, to this thread, of your own volition. You may find me unlikable here. Cold. Welcome to my rage thread.

although I didn’t develop any PTSD symptoms as a result (I do think I have CPTSD from my childhood, and I believe these are very distinct conditions).

That’s your opinion, I guess. It’s a very confusing one. I have PTSD (and DDNOS and disorganized attachment bullshit, but that’s like parsing Lupus into its ramifications: Lupus is the source, so implying dissonance through distinction is unhelpful at best) from complex trauma. Some people have decided to call that cPTSD. I follow the DSM, and I think it’s somewhere between meaningless and counterproductive to categorize PTSD by trauma type (complex, combat, secondary...). If you understand the premise of what some people believe should be called cPTSD, you should understand that’s what I’m dealing with? But you think it’s not PTSD. You know... I just can’t, actually. I don’t really care.

Please let me know if I am triggering you

Being on the forum is intrinsically triggering. That’s just a fact. Welcome to Triggerland. But I think you might benefit from understanding the difference between a trigger and a stressor. So maybe check out that article here. Also maybe look through the rules and Community Constitution. Those will probably help you navigate this resource more comfortably. Anyway, I would encourage you to never ask if you’re triggering someone here. Assume you are. Recognize that that’s completely normal. Accept that it’s the nature of the resource. But if it makes you feel better, I am a veteran around here. I’m typically difficult to bother, let alone actually “trigger” in the true definition of the word.

I probably sound like a total asshole, and, I mean, I am. But if you stick around, I have faith you will look back on this reply and know I was trying to be helpful.

your abuse happened from ages 4 to 6?

3-7 is what I can confirm for sure regarding what I call my primary trauma—all that early rape. But I have endured trauma beginning at roughly two weeks old, and my last major trauma was at 26 (4 years ago). In that quarter of a century, I have had manifold assorted traumas, most of which lasted at least 3 years. After I turned 16, I got a couple 1-2 year breaks, sometimes more if we want to get really picky about what qualifies as CritA. Normally I would be all over such nitpicking.

But I’m f*cking exhausted. Lucky day for everyone suffering through this post, eh?

 

[Renaissance]

That’s your opinion, I guess. It’s a very confusing one. I have PTSD (and DDNOS and disorganized attachment bullshit, but that’s like parsing Lupus into its ramifications: Lupus is the source, so implying dissonance through distinction is unhelpful at best) from complex trauma. Some people have decided to call that cPTSD. I follow the DSM, and I think it’s somewhere between meaningless and counterproductive to categorize PTSD by trauma type (complex, combat, secondary...). If you understand the premise of what some people believe should be called cPTSD, you should understand that’s what I’m dealing with? But you think it’s not PTSD. You know... I just can’t, actually. I don’t really care

I just looked this up. I do not have CPTSD. I had the wrong idea about that condition when I typed that. I actually may have heard or read about an alternate version of what CPTSD is. There are many notions of what makes up this condition

I didn’t say that it is not PTSD. I said that CPTSD and PTSD are distinct conditions. I meant that you can differentiate between one and the other.

In re being offended/not liking your reply, I am not the least bit perturbed. Didn’t bother me at all.

 

[Kintsugi]

I’m not starting new threads in Nightmares or Dissociation because it’s all f*cking Dysregulation. I’m f*cking old now. I remember when we put Dysregulation in here. Hell... I modded it. Weird to think about when I’m in the shit again so deep.

Anyway. Where to start. I’m angry all the time, but I’ve made that clear. It’s my mother’s birthday today and my parents’ anniversary tomorrow and I already ignored my first timer cuing me to try to call her. I’m doing this thing these days where I barely get out of bed, but I’ve been stuck on this goddamn mountain for 20 out of the past 21 days so. My best friend thinks the fact that I’m showering every four days is commendable, and that means a lot coming from her. So I’m doing this thing where if I have to do something that feels Herculean, like get in the f*cking shower, I take drugs and set a timer and when the timer goes off I decide whether to repeat or do the thing. So that seems like it’s working. But not great. At least I have been hoarding meds for months.

So right. I’m pissed. Whoever is reading gets that. But I’m starting to realize it’s more than that.

I’m not blacking out or losing time. But the DID stuff. It’s really coming for me in earnest for the first time in almost exactly four years. Since I was “cured” of it being all the time. Maybe I’m not eating enough acid (okay, I am definitely not, but c’est la vie des pauvres or whatever.

So that cruel smart smooth shiny piece of myself that I keep locked in a glass cage in my head? The one I call Her/She. My therapist told me to stop pathologizing Her and see Her as an asset to control. She has saved my ass a lot. So maybe this is me becoming more integrated but I don’t know. She’s still always always always f*cking there, whispering in my head. Telling me I’m worthless, a failure, weak. That She can do better. And She can, sort of, except there’s never any bridges left unburnt if She gets out at the wrong time.

But now every time I pause my favorite show, which is like my own personal media Valium drip, She comes out. It took me awhile to realize it wasn’t just angry me. It’s not just that I’m mad all the time. My voice changes. My language patterns. She doesn’t eat, so I can be starving, about to dig into whatever was light enough for J to carry up the mountain with him from work, and as soon as I turn my attention from The Magicians (yeah, as Quentin says, “I’m just a depressed super nerd.” Come at me.), my appetite evaporates, and I just get SO cruel, and I crave what SHE craves: alcohol, fast cars, drugs, dangerous men, mind games, self-destructive shit.

On the plus side, I’m in a place where most people would need a hospital, but I’m basically in a ward anyway. I’m f*cking stuck up here. I don’t have my stupid fast (so, so f*cking beautiful) car, which is actually where all this started. I can’t get liquor. Drugs are limited by money and travel and oh, yeah, the f*cking drug test I sure f*cking hope I get a call to take because I STILL haven’t heard about this incredible job I totally CRUSHED the interview for (you know what, Strunk, go f*ck yourself with all the preposition nonsense). I’m in a place more helpful than a stupid mental ward. I have my husband and my dogs and I’m surrounded by nature and I can’t hurt myself because I can’t f*ckING LEAVE this 370sqft house in the middle of the f*cking wilderness.

So that’s good. But She is eating me alive. And I don’t know if I can control Her. My husband is scared of and for me. He’s met Her plenty of times, but She usually doesn’t just stay. Not anymore. Not since I was basically a kid. And I just get so angry every moment I have to think about reality that I’m growling and screaming into pillows and I want so badly to just put my fist right through a face. I want to kick the living shit out of someone. I want to break them. Anyone. Whoever. The next man to call me sweetie or say Damn, girl, you fine. I want to just obliterate him.

Which is actually an improvement over when I was like this as a kid. Because as a kid I just carved myself up instead. This rage is decidedly outward. I couldn’t even take my (purebred BFD—Big f*cking) dog for a walk around people right now, because he feeds directly off of whatever I’m feeling. Anyone who made me just a little annoyed on a normal day would get eaten alive right now. I know my boy. I’ve experimented with artificially raising my anxiety, feeding into my paranoia, making myself afraid on purpose of nothing, and he goes ballistic.

I am legitimately dangerous right now, and I’ve never been that before.

And then there’s the nightmares. But I can’t stand any more of Her right now. She’s so needy and so f*cking mad at me for being trapped here and she wants me to go snort all my extra benzos stat and I can’t have that.

So back to The Magicians.

“It’s an ouroboros of ass.”
-Eliot