5:34pm June 28, 2014

➸ Life is not a dream.

youneedacat:

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…

This actually touches on some things we’ve wanted to write about somewhere. On how this kind of stuff interacts with plurality and subjective experiences. How they may be completely real for you, but it’s also possible to end up in situations where you try to push it towards your own fantasies of what you wish to be, or someone else’s fantasies for you. The social group where we all had to make ourselves into past lives was probably the most obvious example of it (and that definitely grew out of control and became a horrible trap rather than helpful after a while), but we did it a lot more than just that once, often in more subtle ways.

When we were in our late teens, for a while, we got pretty deeply into trying to construct a sort of fantasy life for ourselves, in a social group where other people were doing things like that, after we’d been through some traumas that shook us up a lot. It was a way of wanting to make ourselves innocent again. To burn away everything that we had been, when we felt we had been “stupid and gullible and deserved everything we got” and had only ourselves to blame, after some people took advantage of our naivete to hurt us. Not only did we want to burn ourselves away and start fresh, we wanted to gain control over the subjective experiences we’d been having since childhood, which involved wedging them into pre-existing models that some social groups were offering us. And it required a lot of constant “maintenance” to keep them in those slots, which is why we burned out and it all fell apart eventually, and we were left trying to pick up the pieces of something we weren’t even sure if the people we knew would recognize any more.

We were terrified they would abandon us, forget about us, when they realized we “weren’t like them” in all the ways we’d tried to be, any more. And we started scrambling as best we could to come up with replacement stories to explain what had happened and why we suddenly seemed like a different person and were having mood swings all over the place, stories that fit with the group mythology, but had very little to do with what was actually going on with us. We’re *still* not 100% sure of what was actually going on with us, because we were putting huge amounts of energy into blocking it out and telling ourselves it was something else.

And we were so… humiliated isn’t the word for it. Mortified. We felt like our entire life was a lie, but we couldn’t tell what parts were the lie. We had spent all this time in therapy with a therapist who was convinced they were going to find and dig out our “core self,” and what they presented to us as our core self felt like a horrible disgusting lie we couldn’t live with either. So it felt like we had buried ourselves under more and more layers of lies, and more and more layers of feeling like we had done something terrible, like we were the most awful, most stupid and gullible people alive. And all we could really do was take the group mythologies that various groups were giving us, which seemed to be mostly constructed out of ideas from roleplaying games, fantasy novels and video games, and use them to come up with stories to explain ourselves, over and over.

And the thing is, we had a hand in creating and maintaining those group mythologies too, like we had a hand in creating and maintaining some of the most negative attitudes in Pavilion. Because we had an investment in it. We don’t hold anyone “at fault” for it— most of them seemed to be, like us, caught up in ideas they had created for various reasons, and now had no other way to explain themselves. And most of them came from families that were screwed up in one way or another, or had very unhappy lives for whatever reason.

And we’ve seen all that mockery too. And what we want to say, or would say if anyone would actually be willing to listen, is… nine times out of ten, when you scratch the surface on someone who is trying very hard to live in a fantasy world, you will not find a spoiled brat who is just so spoiled they think they’re entitled to be Someone Special and created their fantasy because reality didn’t give them all the specialness they thought they deserved. You will find someone whose real, waking life is mostly unpleasant. Someone who is being constantly bullied, or abused by their family. Someone who has some disability that no one has ever acknowledged and just doesn’t understand why things that come effortlessly to others are such an uphill struggle for them. Someone who is cognitively completely out of synch with what others expect from someone of their age, and deeply confused about the most fundamental aspects of what’s going on around them. Someone with severe depression or anxiety or PTSD that started long before they tried to cope with it by creating a fantasy world because they had no other resources available to them. Someone who has few or no friends who aren’t bullies or pity friends, outside of groups that might give them an opportunity to do all this stuff in a place where it’s considered normal.

And I think in the social groups we mentioned, there were some people taking the general norms of the group mythology, too, and thinking it was like an instruction manual for how to act in these groups. Some of them, in retrospect, were like “…was *anyone* in that group actually neurotypical?”, so I think some people really were just confused and thinking this was how they were “supposed to” act. For a while, before snark communities caught on to the term and began to target people who used it, there were a lot of groups where everyone was expected to have soulbonds (in the sense of “characters you talk to in your head”), and some people just seemed to make random lists of characters and have them go through these sorts of comedy routines, with everyone playing a stock role.

We also knew people who came into these groups having profound personal connections to certain fictional works or characters, in some way or another, tried to make those connections “fit the rules” of the group mythology, and ended up feeling like they’d lost the connections they started out with, when they tried to take really broad, subjective, not-amenable-to-rules, deeply personal experiences and make them fit the “rules” everyone else seemed to be agreeing on, just to feel like they could talk about them at all.

And we’d already been trained into self-caricaturing by people looking at us, trying to shove what they thought they saw into the nearest available model, and making us play it out for them, but we ended up caricaturing ourselves even more in these groups, too, because I think we actually didn’t have the necessary cognitive skills back then to understand— in any of those situations— that “this is how it works” didn’t mean “you must play yourselves out as a caricature of this at all times.” We thought being caricatures would make others see us as *more* legitimate, not less, and that it didn’t matter what *we* thought. It didn’t matter a whit whether someone whose “role” was to seem tough all the time wanted to soften up, or if someone whose “role” was to be vulnerable wanted to try standing up for themselves without being defended by someone else. All that mattered was that we follow what we thought were the rules, because we believed then and only then would people see us as real within certain social groups.

And thst was all that mattered to us— getting the approval of others and feeling like we were part of something— because we had completely lost sight of our “core” (which is a really abstract thing for us, not a person) years ago. The core that told us we were still real, still important, still valuable even when everyone was saying that whatever we were, it was wrong and needed to be changed. And we were so broken from stuff that had happened to us in the previous few years, including an abusive relationship where our abuser would deliberately bring our system kids to the front in order to molest them, and we wanted so much to burn all our bridges and start over, that our whole life got bound up in trying to follow and live out this group mythology, and create a sort of fantasy world that was very separate from our inworlds (which mostly appeared to us as series of deeply meaningful images, not in any dramatic storylike way), and then live it out.

You could use a lot of justifications in the group mythologies for what you were doing. Justifications for things that ranged from normal teenage behavior to PTSD reactions. Some of them we fell into without realizing it— there were options that were like being able to say “I heard voices telling me to do it” or “I don’t remember doing it” because you heard other people around you giving those reasons.

The feeling of “running out of material” is definitely familiar. One thing we remember we kept running out of material for, that was an ongoing aspect in some of these social groups, was that everyone was supposed to be having constant mental or magical battles against evil beings from other worlds and so forth. As bizarre as it may sound, there was a point where we actually wanted this to be true, because we thought it would explain the problems we’d never had names for, or why our mood swings could get so extreme that they made our life hell. And if we knew what the source of the problem was, then we could do something about it, and “fit in” in the groups where everyone else was always talking about being targeted by them, in the process, after labeling and medicating us had failed to solve those problems. It would be something meaningful, not just random suffering that we blamed ourselves for.

(I think now that we were being “targeted” in a sense, but it was by something way more subtle that people tend to miss in favor of big interdimensional battles— it was more like patterns that catch people up in them and you can end up perpetuating very negative things without meaning to. And those require a lot of subtle little daily self-checking and self-awareness stuff to keep from getting caught in them, as opposed to “I defeated the evil anger being that was influencing me, so now I’m not going to act that way any more.”)

But there came a point where it felt like we were reaching. Where we couldn’t take ourselves seriously about it any more. When the “real person” who was supposed to have gathered all these soulbonds around her and was the one person who had all these important connections to various worlds and could travel to them in her mind, just didn’t seem to have any substance in her own right. We worried that everyone else but us had a core with substance— that we’d dissociated again because we were “afraid to be me,” which was what one of our therapists thought about us. (In a way, they were right but for all the wrong reasons, if that makes any sense.)

The worst of it ended a few years later, when we found a mentor in the plural community who was able to tell us we didn’t have to fit all these extremes in order to be real. But we were still hanging on to a lot of ideas about what we “should be.” I know we had some arguments with them, years later, where they thought we were blaming them for how we tried to wedge ourselves into various non-fitting models in the plural community, and we had some really long talks with them where we explained that no, it wasn’t them, these were attitudes and beliefs that had been ground into our head years before we met them, and some things they said to us accidentally reinforced it, and nothing could have changed or prevented the way we reacted.

But we felt guilt. A lot of guilt. We felt so *stupid* when we looked back on some of the things we’d done, thinking we had control over things we didn’t, thinking we had more control and more understanding of various things than we really did because everyone around us believed we did, thinking all kinds of things had been conscious decisions on our part when they were the result of misunderstandings. It made us feel like we were cringing in shame and disgust at ourselves, down to a cellular level. It seemed for a while like we had a catalogue in our head of everything that everyone had ever said to us when they thought this stuff was under our conscious control, and it would come back up to torment and humiliate us constantly.

We remember when one other system told one of our friends they thought we were just faking plurality and copying other people, for reasons that actually had to do with huge discrepancies between what we actually understood, in certain areas, and what people thought we understood. Our writing skills in certain areas misled a lot of people. We genuinely believed for a long time— and believed at the time in question— that the way to get other people’s approval and make them think we were good people was to watch what they did, and imitate it as closely as possible. So yes, we *were* trying to imitate other groups at first, but it was because we really did still believe, at the time, that they would see us as “a good person” if we did all the same things they did.

And then people would say things like “You’re so intelligent. I can’t understand why you manipulate people in this immature way,” and we didn’t have the words to say no, we’re not trying to manipulate anyone, we want other people to think we’re good, and whether other people think we’re good is more important than whether we’re happy with ourselves. (Then again, is there anyone who’s been through psychiatric abuse, who *didn’t* get the idea, at some point or another, that being good and normal meant doing and saying what someone with perceived authority said was good and normal and right? And there were understandings we repeatedly gained and lost and still have to struggle to keep a grip on sometimes.)

…and these are all things I wish some SJ communities would take into account when they take the most negative view possible of people who seem to be asking if they’re “good people,” rather than immediately jumping to scream that their job is not to pat other people on the head and make them feel good about themselves. You have to look at where the person is coming from— are they saying “please validate me and tell me that I’m a good person for what I’m doing to my autistic child,” or is their concept of how to be good and be accepted something that’s developed piecemeal all over the years, with aspects of it completely out of synch with how most people expect you to learn these concepts, and they’re in way over their head cognitively in communities where people bat around bits of ideology and wordplay like volleyballs as it suits them?

So anyway, we’ve been working really hard on not hating ourselves for what we did. And it can be especially hard when you’re still in contact with people who remember you as you were back then, when you were swearing up and down to them that certain things were true about you, and you know that they developed an investment in believing those things. And now you’re standing in the wreckage of those things after they’ve crumbled around you, terrified that someone is going to pin you to the wall (figuratively at least) accusing you of lying, hurting them, leading them on, deliberately promising them something and then yanking it away, telling you they have a track record of people promising things and then taking them away and you’re just another notch on the tree now, etc.

But the truth has to come out at least in your own head eventually, so you can begin the process of forgiving yourself, and rebuilding all those bridges to the past that you burned— to understand your past self (or selves), what they could and more importantly *couldn’t* do, and understand that in many cases they grabbed at the only things that seemed to be available to them, at those moments in space and time where they were. Which does not make you bad. Just someone who was trying to survive, by whatever means was available to you at the time.

-julian