Catching you up (2)

(Selections from April, 2008)

I'm a baby at all of this, so please don't be offended at anything I say. I don't know the right words and everyday I learn something about myself or the world that makes me question what 'normal' is.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) took years for me to really accept it enough to get help for it, and even then it took me breaking down in tears when the doctor questioned my stress levels for it to come out in the open. I spent weeks deliberating how to approach a doctor about it; how to start a conversation about my trauma that barely even fit the DSM... to the point of writing out a whole document, weeks to fill a piece of paper, finally realizing the extent that it has been affecting my life, my whole entire life.

But I didn't have that paper with me, in that doctor's appt. And I still couldn't say a word about my trauma. I didn't need to say a word; just the mere possibility I might have to talk about it with someone, some stranger, sent me into tears, made me look away, gave me piercing headaches, and increasing stomach pains. I remember that day. Though we said very little, I must've made quite the spectacle. Something wasn't right. Something more than PTSD. She didn't say it out loud, but the implication was clear. I disagreed.

It's utterly terrifying to me to think i honestly could be bipolar. I really am not sure I'm ready to acknowledge anything more serious than PTSD (esp. something that requires medications). But now that I'm away from so many triggers, and all of these new and scary aspects of me come to light...

Reading those personal stories on the Black Dog site hit it home. Some of the accounts were just so similar to how I feel and think and live. All of these aspects of my life that I've accepted as part of me and coped with and learned from ...all of these thoughts and emotions I've managed... it's really hard to believe it isn't normal. That this isn't what everyone feels, all of the time. That everyone else isn't storm-chasing for most of their lives. It's a shock, pure and simple. I had an idea of what mental illness was, and it wasn't me. I'm thoughtful and sad and lazy, not depressed. I'm energetic and determined, not manic. I'm good at anticipating people's opinions and empathic, not paranoid and hypersensitive. I'm creative, not delusioned. I was strong. I am strong. But people come in all varieties of strong, even people with bipolar.
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It's twenty years since I first moved home: the easiest trigger to name. I could build the scene from scratch, looking at the white board with red smelly marks. Pros and Cons. My brother, our little Action Man, sat on the edge of the bed looking at my father for cues of what to feel. He didn't understand; he couldn't possibly know. I folded my arms, slender and pale. The list meant nothing to me. My eyes welled; my heart beat so fast. NO. I shouted, filling with anger. My mind raced: NO NO NO. My father became a stranger, stealing me away.

I ran into the bathroom and locked the door, buried in the yellow lights I would learn to hate so much.

Nearly 10 years old, and that is one of my first real memories of my father. Life became much more complicated after that day, and it is easy to ignore what came before it. But those years also hold the key to why leaving home was so hard in the first place. I wish I could remember more of my parents then. It's not my memory; I've always had an impeccably detailed, visually rich account of events, and the first decade of my life is no different. In fact, owing to the idealization of that childhood that trailed my 10 year old self through puberty, I remember more than I should.

I remember my grandmother, my aunts, and their houses. I remember the woods, every inch of the streets. I flew there again and again, every night, chasing happiness. I remember each and every name of all the friends I ever had; my cousins and my neighbors. I remember their faces, frozen as they were, at the end of the decade. I remember schoolwork, learning mathematics, and my advanced reading tutor. I, most of all, don't remember them. My parents.

It's a notable absence.

My father was young when I was born, barely finished with college. There are rumours he had a problem with alcohol in our early years. He was a stranger to me, always off on business. My mother, perhaps she was depressed or bewildered with her first child, having been a unplanned, later pregnancy herself. She was always quick to tell us she never liked children. Of course not us, though, of course she loved us, she was less quick to add. I don't remember her either. She worked, possibly harder than my dad, and so we were left with other people to make memories with.

And then the stomach aches came. I remember sitting at the table staring at my plate in silence, my insides knotted and head pounding. "Maybe if you ate your dinner, your stomach wouldn't hurt." Tinged with frustration, my parents left the table. I spent a lot of dinners sitting in silence. I stopped drinking milk, blaming the stomach aches on lactose intolerance. I still don't drink milk. The stomach aches stopped 8 years later, at the approximate time I stopped eating with my parents. Why does 9 years old seem impossibly young to be researching reasons for stomach aches? I'm still that 9 year old. I'm still researching the reasons for stomach aches.

I'm a solution person.

My father, he's a problem person. As in, he had a real knack for finding problems with everything. His problem: I didn't respect him. He points clearly at the tree diagram illustrating the theoretical principles of a parent-child relationship. My solution: Earn it. Smack. His solutions, albeit rare, tended to shut me up faster, so eventually I just shut up entirely. And so my clearest memory of my young father was watching him switch, in the matter of seconds, from treating his 10 year old daughter like a business colleague to pushing her across the room.

In the peripheral vision of my memories, I can see the pain and frustration in their eyes. They knew full well what a strange creature I was, the heart and needs of a child carrying the weight of an adult mind. I was a brilliant, acutely aware little girl, and it would have been difficult for any adult to know how to talk to me. But the very last thing a child ever needs is words. My own poor parents were children themselves when it came to knowing and loving me. And so I've become the self-made dam in this inherited waterfall of frail attachment, virtually neglected and then stolen away by strangers called Mum and Dad.

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Apparently, my childhood self got a teacher fired.

I don't even remember what she said that angered everyone. I certainly didn't complain about anything. But a classmate told their mum, who was shocked enough to ask my mum how I was doing, who of course said fine, why do you ask, and then she heard. And that's the story of the only time my parents acted on someone abusing me, and I didn't even know, since they never talked to me about what I experienced or how I felt.

I can guess why I didn't remember. By that point I'd already experienced loads of abuse. What was one single attack from a teacher? Normal, I suppose. Nothing out of ordinary, anyway. But it was enough to make my classmates blink, even the ones that were happy to abuse me themselves, and enough to make one of them tell their mother. Enough to make that mother think about me -- probably the most anyone ever did.

Maybe my memory of what the teacher said will make its debut someday.

My mum reminded me that my parents went to a parenting class a year or so after that, to give them some skills in motivating me to do my homework or the dishes on command. They met with my guidance counselor. She screened me as well. The verdict? I had sufficient coping mechanisms and nobody needed to worry. My mom doesn't remember what the coping mechanisms were. None of them discussed it with me. I do remember my meetings in the counselor's small, windowless room. She leafed through papers and glanced at me intently. I was terrified of what I'd be blamed for, and steeled myself for the interrogation. I suppose I can add 'consummate actress' to my ever-growing list of talents. I'm starting to believe that list is my coping mechanism.

I'd like to tear it up and start over.

I got confirmation on what I was like as a baby. It's worse that I thought. I was perfectly independent. Never cared who was around and never needed anyone. Never complained. It all rolled off my mum's tongue with a happy grin. I blinked my shock away. She really, even now, has no idea. Not a single clue that none of that was normal, just a contentment that she had such an easy, brilliant baby who never needed a thing. I've not had a single positive attachment in my entire childhood. Might as well etch a personality disorder on my face.

Did you know that one of the clues of an attachment disorder is a charming child?

I've heard these disorders described as a disability. Have I been disabled my entire life? I witness my small cousins becoming embroiled in the same abuse and misguided neglect, all of that creativity, sensitivity wasting away, and I can't help but feel useless again. They are one in millions growing more 'disabled' everyday.
I've told the third person about my probable diagnosis of PTSD. First my husband, second my manager, and third my mother. It came out the only way it could: while I was driving. Completely distracted and blessedly protected from looking her in the eye, we casually discussed the obvious lineage of PTSD in our family and broached, for the first time in our lives, the fact that we are strangers. I didn't discuss my trauma, though she asked.

I'm not sure I ever will, with her.


Read on the NHS Choices blog.