Dissociatedbi - This Blog Is My Therapist's Idea

That fanfic author feeling when you post a fic and refresh the tab every 10 minutes for the next 72 hours to see if anyone commented or left kudos 🫣

ima be honest if I wasn’t bipolar I’d conceal carry. I am so fucking done with abled people assaulting me and getting away with it. If you threaten my life casually I should be allowed to return the favor. get the fuck away from me. don’t fucking touch me. don’t fucking grab me. don’t fucking push me. I am a pipe bomb. I will kill both of us I swear to fucking god

I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes.

— Callista Buchen, from “Taking Care,” published in Thrush

The deep ache in my chest when I hear that family members who claim to love me are traveling to visit my trafficker (mom).

The degree to which I wish she would just fucking die already.

Lost time while I was cooking dinner tonight & burned tf out of the chicken. It was so bad we had to open all the doors and windows to let the smoke air out of the house. Idk which of my parts was fronting at the time but I guess they didn't know we were supposed to be watching the stove. Ughhhhh

Something that drives me fucking crazy is when I have trouble with word finding or remembering something, then explain it's just a brain injury problem, and the person responds by saying something like "oh I'm the exact same way!"

You're not the exact same way, if you can read without technology assistance, if you can hold a job, if you can stay verbal 100% of the time, if you don't have to wear an emergency bracelet with your husband's phone number on it any time you leave the house without him, if you can drive a car, etc. It's not the fucking same, stop being an invalidating tool.

feeling trapped

i think one of the things i'm struggling with the most is the feeling of being trapped. it's what the majority of my nightmares focus on, either with memories of real events or invented trauma-based dream nonsense, but i haven't parsed out exactly why this is such an issue for me still.

for all intents and purposes, i'm not trapped anymore. i've been out of that environment since 2008. i've been no-contact with my abusers since 2018. i'm married, living in a different county, in my own house with my partner and two dogs. i am the least trapped i've ever been.

though i do feel trapped in my body- it's maddening sometimes, having to deal with my chronic illness and disability on top of this mental health baggage. it's frustrating. but i don't really think that's what the issue is, with this trapped feeling.

i know it somehow relates to my trauma, but i can't put my finger on why my brain feels the need to process this now. what even is there to process? i was trapped. often physically, always psychologically, but like why does my brain keep telling me there is something deeper about this that i'm not understanding? it's like having a word or phrase on the tip of my tongue. there is something but i don't know what.

one of the reasons my therapist suggested writing online, anonymously, is because my trapped feelings can be triggered when i want to talk about my trauma but get stuck in the potential consequences of doing so with my identity attached. my abusers have both, separately, threatened me with lawsuits should i ever attempt to report them again or go public with my story. defamation, libel, countersuits if charges are pressed again. as if i would even want to go through the trauma of legal proceedings, all over again, since all it ever did was make my life harder. that court experience was worse than some of the rapes i remember.

so i'm writing, to see if putting this out into the world helps this feeling. or maybe it will help something else inside of me. part of me wonders if i'm just using it as an excuse to lean into the trauma more, since feeling broken down is more comforting than feeling strong, even now. the pain of it feels safe.

A Tweet by Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle (@DrDoyleSays):

"When we grow up emotionally neglected, we're vulnerable to a certain fantasy that IF ONLY we can 'make' someone understand where we're coming from, we MIGHT get the care & attention we need. Hence the anxious 'overexplaining' thing."