I have to be me and I have to be you.

When each of my therapists asked me to write in a journal, I raised my eyebrow and told them I have been journaling regularly for more than half of my life. There is a certain ironic flavour to this admission, because journaling is meant to "clarify your thoughts and feelings" ... "know yourself better" ... "reduce stress" ... "solve problems more effectively" ... and "resolve disagreements with others" (Psychcentral). Here I was, an avid blogger, starting psychotherapy precisely because I habitually dissociated my feelings, had no coherent sense of Self, and was so stressed I nearly became psychotic.

There is over 15 years of my writing, stored in books and then on a computer. 15 years of writing that I refuse to read. Reading it reminds me of me, and I hate being reminded of me.

"Write down notes during the week and bring them your session."

To my therapist's amusement, I took out my iPhone and scrolled through multiple yellow pages of notes. If ever my phone were stolen, the new owner would have stumbled on a bizarrely inspiring archive of one-sided therapeutic conversations. I say things to my therapist(s) in my head, in notes and in journal entries, that I wouldn't dare say to them in person.

My first note, written a year ago after I 'quit' CBT aka moved up to step 4 (psychotherapy):

"It clicked.
I have to be me and I have to be you."

I spend a lot of energy mapping your maps of me. It's a cunning form of perfectionism. Cunning because one can be unrelentingly perfectionist about being perfectly imperfect in your eyes. More on this another night. Back to blogging about blogging.

My journals are the best evidence of my dissociative disorder. They are the paper trail that follows me, starting with the integral year of puberty when dissociation became even more necessary as a defense. Before I 'met' Candycan and before my first therapist raised the idea of dissociation, I thought I was crazy. My journal entries were letters to myself, and I would regularly go back over them and reply, scrawling notes in the corners, crossing out my previous thoughts in rejection, editing my feelings.

I was editing myself. This sounds like a common practice of puberty, but I'm not convinced everyone experiences self-hatred to such a degree that they disavow parts of themselves to cope. I 'knew' what I was feeling (like two people) wasn't right, and I was sick of fighting with myself over it. So I gave in. I literally said good-bye, in a final letter, to myself. My journal entries became just as incomplete as my personality. This inauthenticity continues today. Yes, even here, even today.

I wish I were better at dissociation. But my brain seems to have drawn the line carefully around my emotions, leaving my cognitive memory almost completely intact. It is unpleasant, maybe even traumatising, to remember significant life events in such detail and not have access to the emotions that motivated them. What is sex without desire? Death without sadness? Marriage without love?

Inhumane.

I grieve each incomplete memory, because I know it should be more. I grieve each moment I am unable to be present, because I know I should be there. I can't belong like I want to belong, connect like I want to connect, and trust like I want to trust, while every bit of me is still suffocating under the shroud of shame that I covered myself with as a child.

Recovery is like conducting a perpetual symphony on a GarageBand loop, as I change each iteration, note by note, listening with a broken ear.