“How could Maroondah discharge me like this?” I wrote to my therapist at 5:11AM on Sunday. “I was so depressed I couldn’t even shower or get changed. I wore the same clothes the entire 6 days I was there. I tried to kill myself multiple times on the ward. I was suicidal the day they discharged me. I’ve been mute for a month. Now I’m home I’m trying to medicate the lows with ADD stimulants and now my brain is melting out of my fucking ears. I can’t sleep, I can’t look after myself, I sit on the laptop for 15+ hours straight, day and night and I get headaches all the time. I don’t know what the fuck this is but it’s not just a fucked up personality. But that’s all they see, an annoying bpd bitch who shouldn’t be kept in hospital or else she’ll become dependent. No other patient is treated this way. I feel like maybe there’s something really wrong with me medically. Like my nails break all the time now and I get bruises all over my legs and I have no idea what from. I probably have scarring all over my brain from a lifetime of trauma. They should have organised an MRI for me in the hospital, and they should have made sure I got a quiet room rather than leave me behind a pathetic blue curtain where I was going mental having to listen to everyone else’s conversations. I didn’t get much sleep there either as they were waking me up at 8am every morning to offer me a tablet of olanzapine full of shit like talc and does fuck all for me anyway so I refused it every time and asked them to stop waking me but they kept doing it. So I was kinda glad to go, but I’m not ok.” Continue reading “Descent into madness: The Matrix come to life”
“You build me up, you break me down. My heart it pounds, yeah you got me. With my hands up, you got me now, you got that sound, yeah you got me.” Ke$ha – TiK ToK
It is the first time I’ve been able to blog since my last post a week or so ago. It’s felt like the longest week of my life. I feel like I could write a whole book on this week alone. The disturbing saga continues, without resolution, like a piano with endless keys which just get lower and lower.
The psych ward only gave me two nights, even though I asked for longer. They wanted to dump me in a facility called PARC, a non-clinical mental health facility, which people stay in for a week as a “step down” from hospital, or a “step up” from home to prevent a hospital admission. But there were questions about my medical stability. I was barely eating and the hospital wanted to do a blood sugar level test which involves pricking your finger but I was scared of the test so refused it. The nurses said they’d come back in half an hour. I then got in the shower when they came to the door to avoid getting the test done. I was so traumatised in general- by life, by the way they just wanted me out when I was acutely unwell- that I became mute. I am still speculating on what is causing my muteness, which I will discuss later, but whatever it was, I just couldn’t will myself to speak. The day of my discharge one of the doctors came in and told me PARC wouldn’t take me if I wouldn’t speak. I felt like she thought I was being manipulative and could blackmail me into talking. I brought up The Shutdown Dissociation Scale research paper on my phone and showed it to her. One of the symptoms is muteness. There is some more great information about the different responses to trauma on this page.
“We don’t follow that here,” the doctor said.
She said if I didn’t go to PARC they’d just be sending me home. I couldn’t believe it.
“So you’re just going to send me home in this state?” I wrote to her, with gestures of disbelief. “This is discrimination against people with disabilities.”
Becoming non-verbal is common in autism when we become overwhelmed, as is shown in the series Heartbreak High, with one of the autistic characters, Quinni, becoming mute for a while after her horrible girlfriend put her through hell.
“I’ll get your discharge papers ready,” the doctor told me. “Have a good day!” Continue reading “Negligent hospitals, mute, trauma, autistic burn out and the fight for freedom”
I am on the train with my crush, a waitress I met at my favourite café. She agreed to have a chat with me, but she leaves early, telling me she has something on. She doesn’t seem to be all that interested in spending time with me.
My life rewinds fifteen years to when I was in high school and my only group of friends has broken up. I speak with Jess, who had been distancing herself from our group for a while before things blew up between me and Grace and Fran, no longer hanging out with us.
“What are you doing at recess and lunch time these days?” I ask her.
She tells me she’s started hanging out with another group of girls. While Grace had always been considered her best friend, she actually felt closer to these girls. Unlike Grace, these girls wanted to see her “shine”. She was tired of Fran and Grace’s immaturity.
I run into Fran, who was my best friend before she hated me for quitting our debating team due to my social anxiety. I didn’t have her wit nor her confidence. For once, we have a civil conversation. We are on a platform at some kind of party, with music going.
I then see Grace sitting alone on a bench. We had started speaking again. I sit down next to her. She tells me I seem different.
“Maybe it’s the music,” I say. “Or maybe it’s because I’ve just spoken with Fran again.”
Grace was an instigator. Instead of trying to mend things between Fran and me, it was like she enjoyed watching us fight. But I still loved her. I reach out my hand and she takes it. We then have a race to the other end of the platform. I wake up.
Trauma can emotionally freeze us at the age it occurred. A part of me never left school. I still long for my old friends, even though they have all, probably, moved on with their lives now. I still wish we could have made things right. I left this school in Year Nine. Amongst all the people who hated me I couldn’t see the people who loved me.
This is the card I sewed my therapist about two years ago. She got it framed and put it in her office. She has now callously discarded me, telling me I’m too “unstable” to work with, but I doubt she’ll take this down or return it to me. She will keep it up as she has no remorse. She may even keep it up as a trophy. I similarly spent six months working on a painting I gave to another therapist who did the same to me. I lose a little piece of myself each time. Continue reading “Thoughts on loss, life, and asexuality”
“But I know the difference
Between myself and my reflection
I just can’t help but to wonder
Which of us do you love?”
– Evanescence, “Breathe No More”
I often get told that I am easy to talk with. Strangers tell me all about their dark family secrets. They tell me I am a very nice person and I make them comfortable. But the truth is I don’t really know if it’s “me” they like, or a version of me created through trauma. Pete Walker talks about the “Four Fs”. When we cannot fight or flee, sometimes we freeze and sometimes we fawn, placating people by becoming who they want us to be to avoid further abuse. I wear a smile plastered to my face and I serenade people, ironically making them feel at ease when I am anything but. I am like a duck that seems calm but is furiously paddling away beneath the surface. Continue reading “Fawn”
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