We are all in this together

I have too much on my mind and not enough confidence to share it. As Sandy said, it's all about riding with this flow. In this case, I mean it literally: pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder. Forget what it says on the wiki. The best description is that my emotional parts are on a boat floating at sea but for a few days before menstruation when that boat gets pulled back to shore. Every feeling is immediately, unavoidably present. Tears on demand. Anxiety on tap. All access passes to grief.

"They" say they do not know the cause, but it didn't take me very many cycles of studious observation to notice that the drop in estrogen correlates to anxiety and the drop in progesterone correlates to depression. Hence, as progesterone drops in the latter half of the luteal phase, I become sad. And when estrogen drops, the anxiety builds until the headache comes. Stress can bring on this same pattern, so I could probably chart my serotonin changes with reasonable accuracy.

For me, my reproductive cycle is clockwork. I can usually tell, with unnerving accuracy, what day in the cycle I am. So perhaps 'being a few days late' meant more to me than your average woman trying to conceive. After the fourth month of noticing another ultra-super-early-loss-that-really-wouldn't-ever-have-been-noticed-by-anyone-but-me, I had no more strength to keep trying. Something was preventing our fertilised embryos from implanting, and though the timing pointed to the quality of my husband's sperm, there really is no convincing a female body that the blame belongs to any body but her own.

It was around this time my last therapist suggested that I wouldn't really have been a good parent, anyway. That gentle criticism makes a lot more sense, knowing what I know now about how she felt about my prognosis then. But it still deeply hurt, about as deeply as I wanted to be a mother.

Rejecting her pessimism and standing up for my own desire was just one step in the process of re-gaining my confidence. She wasn't wrong, just like my old boss wasn't wrong in her criticism of transplant surgery. But sometimes there is more than one way to be right.

My intense desire to be a mother was enough motivation to move me rapidly up the steps to recovery, just like my husband's love for his sister was enough to motivate him to donate a kidney. It is a risky, painful, foolish thing to do. But it is also worth the risk, worth the pain, worth the tests, and worth the change, because it is brave, beautiful, and, moreover, something he wanted to do. He has a right to want that, and medicine has the ability to let him, with all of the screening and support they can give.

Something he wanted to do.

A year ago, would that have been enough, for me? Could I have made a decision for myself simply because it was something I deeply wanted, even against all best evidence and advice? At what threshold do my emotional parts overpower my intellectual control?

I feel lonely. It's that sort of loneliness one feels staring over a vast landscape, having just spent hours with rocks underfoot. A heavy climb. And then sky.

The river of thoughts runs quickly at this time of the month, but I'm holding on to today. I can feel that familiar restlessness tugging inside. Whenever my emotional parts get this close to shore, someone loud begs to cut them free.

That is a metaphor, of course. I appreciate that some of my readers do hear actual voices, but the only endless voice in my head is my own. My fragmented sense of self has more to do with chronically dissociating my emotions. Sometimes I wish these parts had names, voices, and identities, so that it would be easier to understand them as something more discrete than extensive and nebulous networks of dissociated emotional experiences.

Perhaps if, like Tara, I donned different outfits and identities, it would be easier for me and Drew to recognise when I've switched to my pre-adolescent or teenage self. Maybe then I would stop trying to make sense of why I suddenly am married to a stranger who doesn't know me, who can't possibly love me. Normal people don't have constant emotion. But normal people should at least have a continuity of emotional experiences. And I suppose that's what I find so difficult to accept about having a dissociative disorder. It gets me every time I switch. I assume that everything I feel now, every feeling I can recall now, I will be able to recall anytime I like.

But that isn't true. Some days they will be locked in an invisible tower. And I will be dependent on my cognitive memory to remind myself that, yes, my husband does know and love me. Yes, I do know and love him, and if we just wait, that tower will appear and we can find our way in again.

Admitting how much dissociation has affected my life is hard. As I go through The List, I'll show you. I remember a lot, but let's not pretend that memory is enough. In re-telling me, I will be weaving my emotions back into that story -- back into myself. I will be sharing stories with myself, even though my parts don't have names or voices, because my parts still have their own stories to share.

My therapist is no longer available to listen, but I am.