12:53am June 28, 2014

Life is not a dream.

Psychiatry has no categories for the sort of things I did, because the sort of things I did were not the result of some process that they could pin down and analyze.  This is why I tend to use words like ‘crazy’ to describe my experiences, rather than diagnostic terms.  It’s easier, it feels more honest, and it feels closer to reality.

I badly wanted life to be a dream, and dreams to be real life.  That became my obsession for many years.  Despite this, I knew the difference.  I badly wanted to blur the boundaries, to forget the difference, to escape the hell that I was living at the time.  But deep down, a part of me knew the difference no matter how hard I tried not to.

In dreams, I had freedom.  I could jump out windows.  I could fly.  I could walk into any door I wanted to, touch anything I wanted to, say anything to anybody.  Nothing had to make sense.  Nothing had to be realistic.

I had read books about whether life was just a dream or not.  I had heard people say that you create your own reality.  I was literal.  I believed them.  I believed that if I tried hard enough, I could create a reality in which I was in a permanent dream state.  All I had to do, I reasoned, was treat my waking hours as dreams, and treat my dreams as my waking hours.  And this I tried to do to the best of my ability.

I also had other problems.  I had problems with what people would now call negative energy.  People blame you for that, but most of the time it’s not your fault that you got caught up in it.  People lose their defenses against things like that for all kinds of good reasons, and being molested is a damn good reason.

When I sat in psychiatric emergency rooms pounding my legs to keep invisible metallic creatures from entering my vagina, nobody seemed to make the connection with the molestation.  I was just ‘psychotic’ and ‘hallucinating’.  That was their word for an experience that, to me, seems a natural outgrowth of being molested.  I bruised myself badly before ending up, screaming, in restraints, where my psychiatrist eventually found me after I was transported to the usual mental institution that he worked at.

I worked hard at making reality into a dream.  I worked hard at ignoring what was right in front of me, and creating wondrous visions to take me to far-away places.  But the problem was after awhile the visions weren’t so wondrous, they were horrible.  All I felt like was being eaten alive, eaten alive by something I couldn’t even name.

I’d feel something jamming into my body, almost, and then I’d feel like I had to do something, even if it wasn’t something that made any sense.  And then I’d do the thing.  And I’d be asked why I had done it, and I would have no answer.  I got good at making up answers, even if the answers were “I don’t remember what I just did.”  That answer got me out of a lot because I didn’t have to come up with an explanation I didn’t have.

When I did have to come up with an explanation I didn’t have, it could range from the mundane to the obviously crazy.  I heard voices, I’d say, because that’s what some other kids said.  It wasn’t me who did it, it was someone else inside me.  Sometimes that one almost felt right, but not quite, because it felt more like someone else outside me.  Or I’d spin some wild dreamlike tale of having to go dig up a transmitter that was controlling my mind, and you people better watch out because it’s controlling yours too.  Hitler wanted me sterilized, I said, echoing the words of a boy who told me that I was crazy and ought to have been sterilized the way Hitler sterilized the crazy people.  

People don’t listen to the words of crazy kids too closely.  They don’t listen to find if there’s some meaning going on there.  They don’t watch us very closely, either.  And if they can’t come up with a label, then they force you into one until you fit, more and more and more.  And if you are like me, then as they force you into a label, you learn to conform to that label, because not conforming is called “being in denial”.  Also because having a label that you can understand, even if it clearly doesn’t fit you, is better than being in no man’s land like I was for so long.

(Autism was still no man’s land.  Developmental disability was still no man’s land.  These words held no meaning for me, and were therefore useless to me at the time of diagnosis.  I barely noticed them.)

Trying to be in a dream world meant wandering the mental institution hallways in circles at night, getting in the shower with my clothes on, walking straight into oncoming traffic without expecting to die, trying to do all the things that waking life says you are not allowed to do.  Hoping that one day, you would cross the door into dreamland and never come back, if you tried hard enough.

Being fit into a label that didn’t fit me also had drawbacks.  I felt like I was letting everyone down by conforming to labels that did not fit.  Someone told me that if you made your necklace straightened by pulling the clasp all the way to the top, you could make a wish.  I sat on the toilet in a residential facility, straightening my necklace a hundred times in a row.  My wish:  To actually have the conditions I was being diagnosed with, so that I would no longer feel like I had to pretend.  But there was no choice offered.  To not pretend was to be in denial.  My psychologist even liked when I did little things to defy him, it showed him my symptoms were real.  It was very strange.  He was awful.  He was the same one who beat me into eye contact.

What do you call a 17-year-old who still believes that sie can make reality into a dream if sie tries hard enough?  Who works harder on hir dream world than sie does on hir homework?  I don’t know.  I call hir an autistic person who had more developmental delays than anyone guessed, in certain areas.  That’s the closest thing to a label that I can come up with, and I believe it to be correct.  I did not have this capacity for fantasy at the usual ages in toddlerhood.  I only acquired it in adolescence, and when I read about the development of toddler fantasy worlds, it is eerily familiar to me from adolescence.  This is not to assign myself a mental age.  Not even close.  But it is a known thing that some people with developmental disabilities go through stages late, or in the wrong order, and I seriously think that happened here.

I also seriously think that I was a badly traumatized child — yes, child, because adolescents are part adult part child and some more one than the other, and I was more child than adult until I reached the age of 19 — who was looking for a place I could go where I could be safe, where nothing of the bad things in my life could reach me.  And I think that, combined with a sudden and powerful drive towards alternate realities, dreams, and fantasy worlds, contributed to everything that happened.  I also believe that my sense of reality is unshakable, because no matter how many drugs I took, no matter how much I assailed it with perception and logic and reason, I could not get rid of the sense that reality was reality and fantasy was fantasy.  That sense was ironclad, even when it didn’t look it.

I had an elaborate fantasy world in which I was a forest-dwelling creature who lived inside of trees, was thousands of years old, and had somehow incarnated inside the mind of this teenage child on Earth.  The fantasy world wasn’t as elaborate as I wanted it to be, because honestly I kept running out of material.  But I tried to immerse myself in it as much as I could.  I eventually ran into communities of people who seemed to be doing the same thing.  I got my hopes up:  Maybe I would meet someone from my same world and that would prove it was more than just a fantasy.  I never did.  Not only never did I, but I became wholly disillusioned with these communities, which seemed to take their ideas largely from role-playing games.  It made me realize that what I was doing wasn’t likely to be real either.

People look at people like the teenager I was, and they laugh.

They laugh and they feel superior.

There is nothing to feel superior to.  I was fighting my way through an ableist and abusive world on a daily basis.  I was being molested.  I was going through a complete reconfiguration of my brain’s abilities, that left my academic skills in ruins, the only skills that anyone said would ever get me anywhere in life.  My self-care skills were not developing as planned, nor were lots of other skills.  My friends were all bullies who liked to see me suffer for fun.  No teenager in this position is going to come out well-balanced, and it is disgusting to think of our coping strategies as pathetic or laughable.  

Not everyone in this position copes in the same way, but I coped with what I had.  And I didn’t have a lot of things other people had.  My ability to reason wasn’t working as well as it used to.  My speech and language abilities were crumbling, and they hadn’t been more than superficially good to begin with.  My motor planning skills were crumbling.  I had these enormous gaps between what I was expected to know as a teenager, and… I didn’t even know things that most people learn in the first five years of their life.  I was not coming at this situation with the resources to solve any of these problems, and yet I was coming up with my own solutions.

My own solutions weren’t good enough, according to my psychiatrist.  He said I was pathologically passive.  Meaning that all of my defenses against bad things in my life had to do with going inside my head.  Playing with my autistic and migraine-related sensory abnormalities.  Making up stories like a young child.  He wanted me to develop more active ways to defend myself, and I am certain he had a point, but I was not ready at that age to even understand what he was trying to tell me.  Only in reading my old records do I have any inkling of what he saw of me, and why, and what he was trying to get me to do.  Some of it might have worked, had I had the cognitive skills to catch on.  I didn’t.  So it didn’t.

The things I said in my waking-dream-world didn’t feel like lies, except when they did, and then I felt horribly horribly guilty.  Sometimes I woke up screaming, thinking someone, somewhere would find out that I had done things worse than anyone on the planet.  Nobody could comfort me.  I was sure that by trying to make my dream worlds a reality, trying to make unreality a reality, I was doing something beyond bad, beyond horrible.  I cried inconsolably.  When I could, I apologized profusely for things I hadn’t even quite done.

And many of the things I was doing, I didn’t even understand.  One day, a boy handed me a FAQ for a dissociation support group.  I didn’t understand the word dissociation.  I read the FAQ as an instruction manual for how to behave in this forum.  So I behaved that way in this forum, and began taking it elsewhere, and the boy was quite delighted with this because he and his friends had been wanting to convince me I had multiple personalities.  And now here I was, acting as if I did, no coercion necessary, because I’d read a FAQ that I thought was a social behavior manual!  When I realized, I was mortified, and I apologized as if I had done the world the greatest wrong possible.  My bullies still like to trot out that apology post as if it means that I did this for no reason, that they had no hand in it, that they weren’t claiming to be multiple themselves for their own reasons (in one case, to pick up vulnerable chicks, basically), and so on and so forth.  They bend the truth on purpose, further than I ever bent it by accident in my desire to find a place to fit in, to find a reality that would have me, or a dream, if necessary.  And even in this group, I was operating in dream-world, where what I said didn’t have to be real because it was all a dream and dreams are made up as you go along.

My psychiatric records of the time specifically say that I must be kept away from the bullies, and away from that support group, because the bullies like to encourage me to behave in pathological ways.  Not a lot was getting past my psychiatrist on that front.

I’m writing this for all the teenagers who are doing the same things I did.

I’m writing this to say that when you’re ready, reality will be waiting for you.

I’m writing this to say that no matter how hard you try for that dream world, it won’t work.  You won’t get there.  But you might find comfort in it for awhile anyway, and therefore I would never suggest you take it away before you’re ready.

I’m writing this to say that you’re not weak.  You’re not doing the worst thing in the world.  You’re not a fraud, and don’t let anyone call you that even if you’ve been coerced or enticed or even wanted to take on the attributes of conditions you don’t have.  You’re trying to negotiate areas of life that would confuse anyone, and you might be trying to negotiate it without the cognitive resources that a lot of people have.  You might not even be aware how much more other people know about the world, than you do.  How comparatively little you have to go on, and how much you are making of the little you’ve got.

You’re surviving.

I survived.

You can survive too, I’m sure of it.

I not only lived through this.  I’ve lived through over a decade, in adulthood, of ridicule, defamation, stalking, and blame for the way I happened to handle my personal trauma and severe emotional distress as an adolescent.  I’ve had people go over everything I said and everything I did and make me sound like a monster.  And in the end, I’ve only grown stronger, because nothing they say can truly hurt me anymore.  They’ve already said everything.  Nothing they say can touch the core of who I am.  They can’t even see the core of who I am.

And the core of who you are is always safe.  And it is always invisible to anyone or anything that would seek to destroy it.  It’s embedded in the deepest parts of the universe.  It’s embedded in the most perfect love.  Nothing can touch it.  Even if you yourself wanted to destroy it, you couldn’t, because the parts of your ego that would do such a thing, are oblivious to your core self as well.  That part of you is fundamentally safe in the most extreme possible way, no matter what else happens to you, no matter how shattered the rest of you feels.

And that’s not a dream.

55 notes