Hey All

For years I've been suffering from a lot of disabilities at once. I have PTSD, ADHD, a still undiagnosed heart condition, had osteomyelitis, and turns out I may have even, my whole life, had Ehlors Danlos. It's hard to get answers in the time when I need the most help, so I've just slowly been eeking along with diagnosies and revelations.

I've also been suffering from a TREMENDOUS identity crisis that started young and just got worse and worse. I have undiagnosed but undeniable dissociative identity disorder. At any one time I am thirty, fifty, and even up to 180 people at one time. As irritating as it SOUNDS to experience, the irritation is nothing compared to the physical pain it causes in one's brain to be running so many programs simultaneously. Imagine the burn out of fifty people on one squishy mass of electrocuted fat.

Wonder why I don't stay in touch enough? DID. Wonder why I don't go to events anymore or show up to important things? DID. Wonder why I don't have relationships with pretty much ANYONE anymore? DID. You know what makes DID tremendously worse? OCD. Not the "I'm so organized!" BS, but the real thing. I have to put these alters on a random spin wheel every day because it's almost the only way that they will cooperate: is if they each have an equal or near equal shot of coming out.

But I have to build up the number I put on the wheel, or we'll split too fast and end up in pain and chaos. So I have to start with the same five-to-seven alters as the first batch on the wheel every day, and throughout the day I have to build up the list based on the order in which they first emerged from my consciousness.

THAT is real OCD: when you compulsively have to do a routine that might not even make sense or benefit your life or your day, but you HAVE to do it to relieve the anxiety, because if you try to do without it or alter it, your entire concept of functioning collapses like jenga, and you're left either frozen or shut down for the rest of the day or you have to try and start all over and do it the way you know you were supposed to do it to get through it in the first place.

Oh, yeah, and I'm on the autistic spectrum, so I'm prone to meltdowns when overstimulated or in too much emotional or sensory turmoil.

Safe to say, some disabilities are invisible, but just as debilitating as some of the most extreme physical ones. Despite my ability to mask at times and look and sound relatively normal in one or two social situations a month, I'm actually one of the most disabled people I know, including among some I take care of, and among my friends who are all also disabled in some way, and this has been the case for most of my life. I had to stop gaslighting myself out of accepting that reality. Often times the people around me would gaslight me out of that reality, out of the reality of the severity of my experiences and their repercussions, because it benefited them to think I was abled enough to take care of them, or because they thought of the determent it was to them if I couldn't pull my weight.

The truth is, I've been chronically exploited by my family for resources and labor since I was about seven years old, and avoided or manipulated or lied to and either loudly or quietly disowned by the rest. I've needed an adult my whole life and have NEVER had one. NEVER. Never one I could truly count on to be the adult. I've had a couple of who loved me, but that didn't make them good for me all the time.

I think part of the reason I developed so many alters is so I would have a community.

I know I've burnt out a lot of people by asking for so much help. I've burned through relationships just like my family burned through proper relationships with me because I was either too convenient or too inconvenient at the time.

Why am I saying all this? Because my baby brother's going through frightening health issues, because I could possibly lose the last storage space of the three that I had of mine in my family's belongings when it's auctioned off on the 7th of this month, because I still don't have a home but I'm still trying to save everyone, because I've lost friends and family who were dear to my soul who have passed away, because I'm wondering if I should just flee the country so I can experience healthcare and the help and social service support I need some day...

Maybe because I just need to relieve the pressure. I need to think that maybe one person in the world out there might understand the depth to which I am broken, have been broken since I was seven, have been completely disabled while still expected to take care of myself and my family, because people treat me like I don't have a job when I've carried a minimum of 3 to 5 my entire life since I was a teenager, and yes, that includes now, because no matter what job I take it doesn't seem to meet the full accumulative needs of a lifetime and beyond, a inter-generational pit of poverty and trauma and despair and untreated anxiety and depression.

Because I've burned through most of the relationships and some of the most important relationships with my constant needs that I've worked my whole life to overcome and/or balance, but haven't been able to because of the needs of others. Yes, I am learning boundaries, but it's hard to risk the idea of my brother's health, or the things more thieves will take from me in a couple of days, after everything I've already spent a lifetime losing.

I have so many dreams, have worked so hard, and I have no clue whatsoever of what to do. Or, more accurately, I have too many plans and too many people trying to enact them at once, and it's hard to make any progress that way.

Yes, I am aware I need medication for that. I've even found some that works: S.T.R.O.N.G. THC edibles put my brain back together into one person, and it takes the pain away, so much so that I often cry, ball my eyes out even when the relief starts. But with my family and belongings stretched all over the country, sometimes I have access to it and sometimes I do not.

Oh, yeah, and the fate of whether or not I have human rights to my body and autonomy and whether I need to somehow, on top of everything else, flee the country, is just another little shit cherry on the sundae.

People get to vote on my body and who controls it, yay! That just goes to show you that a lot of this trauma probably has to do with the fact that I was never considered in any way legally or rarely socially to be a human being in the first place!

That's it for now, I guess. I think I just had to rant and get it out there.

LOL, just kidding. I need real help, too.

The funny thing is, I still function better alone than if anyone tries to give advice on the shitstorm they don't understand. No offense to anyone. I validate anyone's mental health journey or struggles, it's just that I'm more comfortable with people who give advice when I ask for it, which I do, just not as much as people would like to give it to me. I'm still the ultimate authority in my life because most people around me have made way, way worse decisions, even with all my messed up. So then there's the problem of whom to open up to about this (LOL, just kidding, I'm an autistic writer: I tell everybody). There's still needing to try and trust in society enough to not think I'm going to be locked up for it just for sharing.

So much anxiety. I haven't lost teeth and cracked others because I don't take care of them, by the way. I've done all that from grinding them together, even when I'm wide awake. I'll wake myself up clacking them apart, though. I bite THROUGH mouth guards. I grind my teeth away: it's actually how they ended up sharp in the first place. When I was young grinding them together made points and curves and kind of made them look cool. I didn't realize *I* was doing that by a process that would destroy them as an adult.

So, yeah. That's my life. I'm working on my mind set to create a better reality for myself, but sometimes I also just have to speak on the now and what my story has been.

I'm a writer. It kind of works that way.

Thank you for reading, if you did. It's its own kind of caring in a way.

Why I Love Beyond Burgers and Friends Who Make Them.

A double-stacked beyond burger with cheese, with veggies and mac and cheese for sides, on a white floral plate resting on a floral blanket.

I’m a person with a lot of executive functioning issues, which can make me difficult to live and work with. I bring that up because sometimes it helps to have friends who also have executive functioning issues, because those friends understand. And those friends who are traveling across the country with you to work might also understand at great times, like when you’re hungry and haven’t quite made it out of bed yet.

I love Beyond Burgers because they have chunks of coconut oil in the patties, so when it’s cooking it’s sizzling in its own oil. I love it because it’s made with pea protein instead of soy. Soy’s gotten a bad reputation lately for a lot of good reasons.

So when a friend with executive functioning issues like yours happens to make it out of bed earlier and is functioning better than you that day, it’s especially awesome when they make you a double-stacked beyond burger with toppings and sides.

So here’s to good friends, awesome food, and steps towards a more humane world.

If we knew one way out another

To shudder

To sing forth fairy

Outside a disgrace field

Waste field

Forward follow in a

Finance tizzy

Tundra 

Turning

Under

Burning

Business asunder

Out the blunder

Search for one ticket

Away to fail

In fortune a new earth

To this one in jail by

Monument

Suffering

Syndrome out a passion to this

One under the stash of it,

Quick with the Nash of it

Another city on the splits

From the Ritz

As eloquent as a pigeon

Something in remission

Never mind the Winder back to blitz.

Drifting

Which way to the mountain scape,

to folly,

to foundry

I have something about me

about you through me

in the middle tree

finding a wafer

nothing to or through to have it known

nothing spilled outside the rocket-foam

breath known

waiting with welcome

wavering

nothing out for the winter musk

out the structure

this one a tusk

torture

the tandem

through the fandom

if nothing for the bright-eyed bringing.

Imposter Syndrome and Me

Escorting Helene de Boissiere - Swanson to my local senators’ offices after she walked to my state to speak to them about the Equal Rights Amendment.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that imposter syndrome isn’t real, at least not in terms of being a psychological condition. I disagree.

I only have an associates degree in psychology so I’m probably not the professional whose final word you should take on the subject, but I do have a lifetime’s worth of experience in imposter syndrome.

I’m the kind of person who has done a lot of crazy things that you would find on a lot of bucket lists. I’ve dug up dinosaur bones, I’ve traveled to Hawaii and the Bahamas, I’ve been on television (a couple of times), and I’ve even been published a few more times than that.

From the outside it would look like I don’t consider myself an imposter. I’m always doing interesting things. But I’m also swamped so much in self-doubt that a lot of those interesting things turn out to be one-shots, and I don’t end up building the kind of career or (the right kind of) notoriety needed to develop consistent relationships that would allow me to do those things long-term.

I destroyed a relationship with my anthropology/paleontology professor that would have allowed me to keep digging up fossils and restoring them for display. That may have become one of the best careers I could ever imagine having. Deep inside, I’m still that autistic little kid who only ever wanted to look at, interact with, or talk about dinosaur bones. Instead I gave in to my social anxiety and accepted a friend’s constant offers to smoke weed while out there. I’m not anti-pot at all, but there’s a time and a place. I knew better and I also knew that I had disabilities that put me in a headspace I should not be in around others - specifically many headspaces.

I blew it, and not only can I not go on digs that way again, but my professor isn’t even allowed to bring students on his paleontology digs anymore.

While treating an academic opportunity like a burn isn’t something that can be considered imposter syndrome, the permeating shame I feel at socializing at all in an important (or any) setting kept me from reaching out and communicating properly to anyone and the indulgence in a substance to calm myself down when I knew it was a bad idea was a self destructive behavior.

Now, the television stuff…

I’ve been on television a couple of times. My absolute favorite is what the photo above was from, was when I was on Fox 5 because I was helping a woman who had walked across the United States to bring attention to the fact that the Equal Rights Amendment still hasn’t been ratified to the constitution nearly one hundred years after it was written. I escorted her to my state senators’ offices.

I’ve been part of activist endeavors ever since but infrequently (in my opinion) and never as consistently as I want. I want to run for office one day but the permeating shame of some of the things I’ve been through keep me from regularly pursuing this endeavor, because, in part, it would open the door to everyone’s eyes again. I grew up from eighteen years old to my early thirties online. People have known too much but not a lot about me for a long time, and this is what I’m opening myself up to again.

I was an eighteen-year-old with undiagnosed autism and other disabilities who moved to Atlanta (and traveled a bunch of other cities) and decided I was going to be a model. Let’s not go down those dark corridors. Let’s just say that they can make running for office difficult, even though I have a lot of diverse experience that puts me in a position to understand systemic problems and to help create a world where human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of other kinds are eliminated with prejudice. Even though women’s organizations have been pushing women to run for office, especially local office, I’m reluctant to pit the diminished version of myself in my mind against who I really am, especially in the public eye.

I think rather than it being a separate condition in itself, imposter syndrome at the very least could be a real symptom that takes place side by side with others. I would be curious to study whether people with more trauma-based disorders experience imposter syndrome as crippling as the one that’s held my life in limbo for as long as I can remember.

I’ve done great things, but I’ve lacked in consistency to help me be successful at them so I can keep doing them. I think it’s something we all deal with in one way or another. ADHD, PSTD, and being on the spectrum doesn’t always help with that and can often be the source of the difficulty, as could my extreme case of agoraphobia. If you can’t even keep your environment straight, or your grooming or hygiene in order, much less go outside where there are other people, then how can you tackle life’s big mysteries and dramas, its horrors and its wonders?

Oh, yeah, and how can you save the entire human species and the ecosystem we can’t survive without after the human species has spent thousands of years trying to destroy it?

I suppose that brings me to a friendly reminder: everyone is facing something they don’t understand right now and it’s good to be kind to yourself and others, but especially yourself. You are living through an apocalypse, more or less, one of the big moments in the books. One of the things that is helping me heal the most is understanding that the littlest things really are victories. I finally called my landlord after months of letting the place I’m renting just rot and asked him to fix the dishwasher that’s been broken for two years (and he did right away because he’s awesome, I’ve just been too anxious to let anyone into my house), and I’ve rediscovered in two days that I am not a slob, I’m just not a domestic Goddess and I need a machine for that if the guys I live with aren’t going to pull their full weight in that department.

Also, if you’re a guy, please stop trying to get women to do things for you without substantial pay. Period. No, I don’t care if you’re in a relationship. We have enough to do just trying to become full citizens with all the resistance against the addition of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, something one hundred years overdue, if not overdue from the country’s very founding. If you haven’t, call your senators and representatives about that and demand ratification, and then stop whatever automatic urges you have to ask women to do things for you unless they work for you and you pay them very, very well, equally or more so than any men who may work for you.

And a third thing: be proud of yourself on this journey. I know I’m proud of you. Now wish me luck while I learn how to be better to myself and my ambitions.