Marisa’s blog

just skipping around thru time

03/26/2004

i'm so utterly anal. *snort* i have to admit, it's not just me. each of us in the Crew, in our own way, has an area where things have to be 'just so' in order for us to be comfortable. for me, it's in my writing. i cannot STAND trying to tell a story unless i can do it in chronological order. it's so important to me, i'll just not write rather than jump all over the place. at least, that's my excuse...

so, no more excuses. forget trying to follow a timeline. as charlie has said so many times, i need to just write it.

i can't pick up where things left off with bro. john. not yet anyway... but i can write about some of the things that came after...

when i was diagnosed in march of 1999, i was seeing a psychiatrist (dr. p) and a team from my church on a weekly basis. wednesday at 10 was my time with pastor randall, miss pat, and mona.

they knew nothing about multiplicity. their area of strength was in prayer ministry. mona had some experience in lay counseling but none of them had ever spent time with someone who had near the degree of problems i had.

born into a cult situation. abused as an infant. taken from the birth mother. adopted into a family that, while they did their best, was controlled by alcohol and rage most of the time.

my first conscious memeory of sexual abuse is at 5 years old. while i know 'something' happened earlier, i don't have those memories yet... but by the time i was 5 i seemed to have a sign on my soul visible only to pedophiles. "victim here" "easy target" i have a hard time even now understanding how one person can have so many experiences with so many people and there be no connection between the abusers. there was a neighbor, then a series of perfect strangers and in a few cases, people i thought were friends. ages 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15. some years there was more than one and at least one went on for a full year...

*sighs* enough of that. it's enough to say i was sexually abused... A LOT as a child. i was physically abused in my home. tho my parents loved me, they were ill equipped. they were not of a generation that believed in validating a child. they did not wipe tears or soothe away nightmares. chin up. stiff upper lip. grin and bear it. smile and be quiet no matter what is happening.

when i was 13, mum told me a story of a nun who was being given some small recognition. as she knelt at the alter, the mother superior pinned a small medal or brooch to her habit. unknown to the mother superior, the pin went into this nun's flesh. the nun never flinched. she never made a sound. she left it there for the entire day until she was alone in her cell. (quarters)

to mum, that was the ultimate example of how we are to deal with pain. never show it. never falter. never shed a tear and never ever even acknowledge it until you are fully alone. even then, what's done is done. why think about it now?

what a standard to live up to, eh?

while i no longer wanted to live according to the standards of my mum... that's exactly how i lived. especially in the years when the Crew was shut away inside. after 7 years, the person who went to this church group for help... was a nuclear detonation waiting to happen.

Defining Moments

03/23/2004

Defining Moments

Everyone has moments in their lives that prove to be turning points. They are moments that change the course of your life forever. Sometimes these moments are in the heart of crisis; in fact, they are quite often born of adversity.

I was sitting outside, having a cigarette and talking with myself on the day that has changed every moment of the last four and a half years. It was February. I wish I could remember the date.

Frustrated with myself, wishing away the voices I had known since childhood, I remember the sense of fear and unreality that hit when, for the first time, one of the voices spoke directly and clearly to me.

"If you have to call me something, you can call me Reese."

I sat outside in a state of shock for I don't know how long. This couldn't be real. Several days before a friend had given me a chapter from a book on prayer ministry. The chapter was about a person with multiple personalities. As I read this chapter, chaos broke out in my heart and mind. NO, I thought. This isn't me. Maybe it feels like that sometimes but it's not the same. It's just something a little bit like that.

Clutching the pages, I confronted my friend. On the verge of panic I asked if she really believed that was me. She reminded me of the times when speaking with me had been like speaking with a very small child. It was the only thing that seemed to fit, she said.

That moment when the voice introduced itself, I instantly went back to conversations with my mother as a child. She had a firm belief that I got my ideas for my odd behavior from books and television. While my parents reminded me constantly I was somehow damaged, they believed it had all been my choice. It was all a game to my mother. My behavior was an elaborate scheme to be the center of everyone's attention.

When I read The Exorcist at 13, she had looked at me and without even the hint of joking said, "Well, You had better not start spinning your head around and spitting pea soup."

This kind of thing was typical for my mother so when this voice spoke to me rather than at me as they had all my life, my first thought was that I was somehow lying to myself. The chapter I read days before had fueled this attempt to pin my troubles on the most bizarre or exotic thing imaginable. It was not real and I was simply latching onto something that would give me more attention. Somewhere inside, I must have wanted this, not because it was real but because I needed an excuse on which to pin my lifelong problems.

I had to have wanted it. In speaking with my friend and my pastor in the days after I had read about the person with multiple personalities, it had been suggested I try talking with the voices I heard. To say I was reluctant is an understatement, but I was becoming desperate for an answer. For almost 20 years, I had lived with the knowledge I was broken in some irreparable way. No amount of drugs, therapy, hospitals, love, support or prayer had ever made any real difference in my life. I could keep my life together for a few years at a time but it would always come crashing down.

What made these crashes especially frustrating was that they occurred not when things were difficult, but when my life was going smoothly. I would begin waking up to that terrible ache of deep depression, with no external influence to explain it. When I finally asked for help within my church, I had reached a point of being suicidal.

Here I was successful, beautiful large family, wonderful marriage, local celebrity, the epitome of a Proverbs 31 woman yet I was crumbling on the inside. My will and my faith seemed powerless to stop it.

In seeking an answer to why this cycle could not be broken, the idea of multiplicity never entered my mind, at least not consciously.

No matter what my mother drilled into my consciousness, this is not something I sought or asked for.

Still, on that day when Reese spoke to me, there was a sense of relief mixed in with the myriad of emotions swirling in my heart. It would explain so much. Especially the things I hid from everyone because they so frightened me. Perhaps if we could know that this was the missing piece to the puzzle of me, we could then put it together and I could finally begin to heal from my past.

That one day changed everything.

Nightmare Come True

03/23/2004

Nightmare Come True

I had not planned to go see Brother John. The church was 20 minutes away and driving was agony. I had begun speaking with Pat, an elder’s wife, a few times a week. She said the classes were wonderful and encouraged me to attend that Thursday. I showed up late, humiliated to hobble into the back of the church with the cane I now required.

The class was wonderful and I took pages of notes. There was some encouragement for me in hearing that my thoughts on emotional healing were scriptural. I felt I might still have something to contribute despite everything else. My heart has always been with the emotionally wounded and I was caught up in the teaching. I decided to come back for the evening service.

I was still afraid and that night I sat in the very back of the sanctuary, hiding as much as I could. I wish I could say I remember it all in vivid detail but I remember very little. Toward the end of the service, there was an invitation for prayer. I was torn between rushing to the Alter and sneaking out the door. I had been in this place so many times before. I was terrified that going forward would bring the same judgments to which I had grown accustomed.

“You’re letting the devil control your life.”
“You need to abolish all sin.”
“You are living in rebellion.”

Over the previous 10 years or so, I had heard such statements all too often. No one seemed to understand how hard I had fought break the chains of my past and live for Christ. The condemning words of pastors and church elders had convinced me I was forever alone in my battles. It all came down to obedience and life experience had shown me, even when I tried, I was incapable of doing what was needed.

I managed to make my way to the Alter despite the fear that made it hard to breathe and the noise in my head that left me feeling I was looking and moving through cotton. As I stood waiting my turn, the fear grew more intense and underneath, a current of rage threatened to burst forth in flying fists and screams. I remember standing, fists clenched and shaking, just trying to keep myself from flying apart.

Standing there at the front of the church, I was painfully aware of all the people milling around, praying, talking and encouraging one another. I was also aware of an indescribable rage boiling up inside me. Everything in me wanted to keep this rage hidden. Experience had taught me all too well, what would happen if I let it show. On top of the rage was a terror that made breathing almost painful. The words of previous pastors, parents and counselors whirled around in my mind and all I could do was to stand there waiting for the condemnation to come.

After what seemed an eternity, Bro. John made his way to me. All of a sudden, I became certain I had made the wrong decision. I wanted to run from the church and never return. Holding my head down and squeezing my eyes shut, I sent up a quick prayer for this man to be blind to what was going on and to dismiss me with a simple prayer.

Stephanie:

I remember feeling hands on me. Someone was holding my hands and each arm the way you would when physically supporting someone. A third person had their hands on my back. I knew I was up there for prayer but I had never been around in a church before without someone calling me a demon. I could hear the crying inside and knew if any of them showed up it would be the same thing.

I see it different now, but then, I just hated them all. I hated their piousness and self-righteousness and especially hated them for believing prayer would do a thing for me. I hated them for all the noise I had to listen to inside. It was the church and the preaching that started up the crying inside and I just wanted it to stop. I hated her for dragging me into this kind of thing again. She should have learned already.

I wanted to get out of there but it was already too late. If I had told them off or just tried to walk away it would have turned into some bullshit deliverance session. What I really wanted was to reach out and punch the pastor. He was standing about 5 feet away, watching with this weird look on his face. Not the guy who was praying but the pastor of the church. This other guy was a guest. He was going to be gone in a couple of days. This other jerk would be the one to spew the crap about Christians choosing to stay in bondage and all that horseshit. He would be the one to quote scripture and pretend to be God’s mouthpiece while telling me I was just looking for attention.

Reese:

I don’t know how to explain it. I was scared. More scared than I’d been in a long time. But at the same time it was like I could sort of feel that these people really cared even though they would still not understand. I always hated that. Feeling like someone cared and then watching them just walk away when I couldn’t be or do what they wanted. Sometimes I feel so stupid for getting hurt so much because I always let it happen. I just wanted someone to see and understand. This stupid hope I had kept getting me hurt. If I could have just shut off my hope then maybe it wouldn’t have happened. But then I guess it wouldn’t be better now either.

The Descent to Hell and Despair

03/23/2004

The Decent to Hell

I had come a long way in the 7 years since we had moved to South Carolina. We had moved here penniless, after being evicted from our home in North Carolina. After six months, my husband was unable to find work locally and took a job back in the same city we had just left. We lived separately for most of 18 months. The children and I lived for 8 months with my husband’s parents before moving into a dilapidated old trailer on the other side of town.

In those 7 years we lost everything to a fire. Our family grew from two children to five. We moved from the trailer to a nicer one, then to a nice little brick house in the suburbs. We slowly replaced our furniture and belongings that had been destroyed.

After my husband’s job ended, he came home and was hired over the telephone for a job that was only supposed to last 6 weeks. He’s still working for them and the Charleston area has become our permanent home.

I made and sold crafts, with work in a local gallery. I took a volunteer job as a deejay with a Christian radio station. Eventually I was offered a paid weekday shift and quickly became one of the more popular personalities at the station. It was a wonderful experience.

I reluctantly left the station during my pregnancy with our youngest child. I loved the work but off the air dramas and tensions with the station manager made it an unhealthy environment. The station manager was also my pastor and as hard as it was to leave the station, leaving the church was heart breaking.

We began attending a church on the other side of town. The pastor was young and excited and the church full of a very real love. Embraced by our new church family, we enjoyed being very much involved in the programs.
I had every reason in the world to be content, but after 7 years, the strain of pretending my past didn’t affect me became too much. Try as I might to ignore or deny it, the crushing wave of major depression was sweeping over me. My Super Woman veneer began to crack and in a desperate effort to maintain appearances, I pulled away from everyone and everything.

Despite hardship, loss, separation and accidents, we were a strong family with every reason to be content. Still, my past began to intrude more and more. Why wasn’t the wonderful life I had, enough? The weight of guilt and the condemning voice of my mother echoing in my ears reminded me, nothing would ever be good enough to make me happy. I could suck the joy out of anything. I was worthless, selfish, a mistake.

After a trip with the children to visit my parents, my last shred of strength to cope vanished.

Despair

It began creeping up in April of that year. The mind numbing, life sucking depression I spent so much of my time unconsciously trying to outrun. I wish I could say how bad it was when compared to other depressive times but each one always felt worse than the last.

I had managed to stave it off for months with obsessive activity. I cleaned and crocheted constantly and spent enormous amount of time online keeping up with various email groups. I knew the depression was catching up, as my normally outgoing personality seemed to fade away leaving someone almost terrified to leave the house. I quit singing and dropped every outside activity except Sunday morning church services.

During the summer, my mum began asking when we would drive up to visit. My younger sister was on break from the Academy and no one but Mum had seen my youngest son, it would be so nice, she said.

I love my family dearly, but I am not comfortable with them. We have so little in common, it seems. Family gatherings had always meant great stress and confusion, with a feeling of being a teenager in their home all over again. Still, I agreed to go. My husband was not able to break away from work for the visit, so with five kids in tow, I made the 10-hour trip on my own.

Overall, it was a nice visit. I met my brother’s new wife and their combined family of five children. Our kids all fell in love and had a wonderful time. I finally met my younger sister’s fiancé and shared long talks with a brother and the sisters I had not seen in so long. On the surface, it was lovely.

Deep down the effect was overwhelming and when I finally made it home, the last scraps of my defenses crumbled. I was a wreck. I simply stopped functioning. Moving through my days like a robot, I cooked, cleaned and took care of my family. I did all these things as much as my back allowed but I was not really there.
I began vomiting after meals in an effort to concentrate the overwhelming emotions into a behavior I could control. In three months time I had lost 30 pounds. What little appetite I had before was gone and when I did eat, it was painful.

Slowly though, I was making the effort to let someone in. I was speaking almost daily on the phone with Pat, one of the Elder’s wives. We had a lot in common. We discovered she and her family had lived less than 5 miles from the home my parents still lived in, when I was a teenager. I was a volunteer at the school her son had attended, while he was a student. It seemed so impossible to have been so close years before without ever having met, only to meet 500 miles away, in the same church. The connection to my hometown made it that much easier to talk to her.

Pat was encouraging me to seek counseling, but I resisted. There were not enough positive experiences to draw on and trust in a professional counselor was too dangerous to consider.

An injury to my back was growing worse despite treatment and over the summer, my mobility was so limited that the frantic activity was no longer possible and I finally crashed. The voices were a constant roar within my mind and the external voice that only spoke in the lowest of places had returned. By the time school started in August I was spending hours each day laying across my bed, awake but lost in my own mind.

This continued for weeks as my back deteriorated so much that walking became near impossible. An MRI showed compressed and bulging disks in my low back and arthritis in virtually every joint. My doctors said it was manageable but would gradually get worse. At 29 years old, I had become an invalid, at least to my mind. It was the final straw and in despair, I simply gave up. At the end of September a visit from a guest pastor, teaching about emotional and spiritual healing, was the catalyst for one of the most frightening experiences and one of the most wondrous I ever encountered.

A Memory and The Broken Mirror

03/23/2004

please excuse the repetition of some parts of these entries. as i read over them before posting, i see several areas that overlap. at some point all this will be straightened out and put in some semblence of order. for now, we just need to have it all in one place.

Memory

When I was 13 years old, a man named Kevin did some housesitting for a neighbor. He was a very attractive man and all of us adolescent girls on the block would watch him jog in his short shorts and dream. When Kevin began seeking me out to chat, I was beyond flattered. I was a very lonely girl, with few friends and he was a very handsome man in his twenties. When Kevin invited me to come by the house next time I was lonely, I felt special. Despite comments from Kevin that suggested he had watched me through my bedroom window; I felt drawn to his company.

I had not planned to take him up on his offer, though it never occurred to me what he had in mind. I often wonder at my timing that day. If I had shown up an hour earlier or later, would it have been different? He never touched me that day. I had realized the mistake of coming as soon as I had stepped in the house. I stayed through his suggestiveness and his encouragement to participate then came up with a hasty lie and left in terror.

Two weeks later, an episode of Little House on the Prairie dealt with the subject of rape. While Kevin had never touched me, the shame of the what-ifs pierced my heart like a dagger. Toward the end of the program, I had run crying to my bedroom. I hid in there, unable to stop the tears and wishing I could die.

After a time, my brother Randy came into my room. Sitting on the edge of my bed, he asked what was wrong. Randy and I had a fiery relationship, we could be comrades one moment and at each other’s throat the next. By this time, we had put most of the uglier rivalry behind us and at 20 years old, he was someone I looked up to and respected. He was genuinely concerned about me and I knew if I told him, he could be trusted.

It was the first time in my life I had shared any such experience with someone in my family without the accusation I was a liar. Randy believed me. He held me as I told him, wiped my tears and argued with my plea for him to tell no one. He finally won out and I agreed to let him tell Dad.

The next day, Dad and Randy went to the house where Kevin was staying. Their intent was more than just confrontation. It was the only time in my life I was ever afraid my father might kill someone other than me. To this day I’m not certain the truth of what happened after that. I do know Kevin hastily packed and left that night. I never saw him again.

The next night my dad presented me with a gold chain and pearl pendant. He told me he loved me and that he was the only person I could count on to protect me. He also told me never to talk to Mum about what had happened.

While I was grateful for the show of love from my dad, I was confused. I understood why I was not to tell Mum. To her mind, anything like that would have been my fault. I needed to believe the necklace was more than payment for keeping a secret. Too many times in my life I had been paid to keep a secret. The idea of doing that for my father touched off an unnamable fear I could not let myself imagine.

To this day, even having shared memories with the parts of me who were there, I still cannot allow myself to imagine. Even knowing Dad never touched me in a sexual manner, the confusion and suggestions of incest by future therapists and doctors have created a confusion that still affects parts of me.

What I felt while watching a television program dealing with rape is what I felt when I have read such books as Lisa, Bright and Dark, I never Promised You a Rose Garden and eventually Sybil. It was the same panicky realization that I understood, from the depths of myself, what the characters were going through.

That understanding was purely terrifying. It was something I could not trust. My perception of myself was so confused; I fully believed I had no identity of my own. I believed, as my mother did, that everything about me, I learned for the sole purpose of gaining the center of attention. I had no clue at all who I was but I was certain my kinship with the profoundly mentally ill was nothing more than a sick wish. To me, that feeling was further proof of my hideousness as a human being.

Sometimes I think my mother needed to convince me the way she did. Had she not, she might have to accept that the very same things she was taught by her own life were lies.

The Broken Mirror

During my last significant hospital stay, in 1991, I remember trying to explain to someone what went on inside my head. Because I was clearly not schizophrenic, my claim of hearing voices was generally treated as a lie. Trying to explain the sense that parts of me were trapped at various childhood ages got much the same response.

Dick was the director if the Cephus program at the hospital. He was not a mental health professional but rather a lay pastor. The Cephus program was a Christ centered program, sharing space on this inpatient ward of a Fayetteville, NC hospital. Sometimes I think Dick's lack of psychiatric indoctrination made him more willing to listen to me when I tried to explain my perception of things.

I had told him of the struggle the year before with my birth mother. Because his spiritual beliefs were so close to my own, I knew I could tell him about such things without fear of being seen as delusional. Because I had no other spiritual support at the time, I spoke about matters of faith to Dick. In addition, Dick seemed to understand and believe what I sensed about myself.

At 21 years old, I knew I was multiple. Not in those words perhaps, but I knew. Because of my spiritual beliefs and the confusion of a poor therapeutic approach to Borderline Personality Disorder, I never dared talk directly about it until then.

I tried to explain to him as I had to all the staff who would listen, that at different points in my life parts of my emotional and intellectual self had split apart and stopped growing. I tried to explain the 5 year old who saw everything I experienced through the eyes of a severely abused child. I tried to explain that when I was berated at the hospital for my inability to stop crying, it was this 5 year old who bore the brunt of responsibility to be a "big girl". Big girls didn't cry.

When I perceived rejection or abandonment, something in me I could not control would take over. I would watch myself act and speak in ways that were not appropriate to the situation and I could do nothing to stop it.
One Saturday at the hospital, Dick came to tell me I had a visitor. He had told a friend about me. She was a woman with a ministry in emotional healing and she asked to see me.

We sat in the Cephus meeting room and spoke for ages. I did my best to give my history as clearly as possible. I did not try telling her the things I had told Dick. Experience told me she would be like others who told me I was lying.

After we talked, we began to pray. I don't really remember much about it except that I participated verbally and felt a tremendous compassion from this woman.

When we finished praying, she asked if I wanted to know what God had shown her about me.

My stomach tightened when she asked. Too many times in the past, well meaning pastors and teachers had cruelly dissected me while giving credit to the visions of God. My faith in a God who loved me was shaky at best. Christians in general, had done little to convince me He saw me as anything more than worthless. Despite what I believed would be a word of knowledge about how disobedient and wayward I was, I said yes.

She looked at me with the look of a person seeing something foreign and beautiful and said, "You have a fractured soul. Our spirit, mind and body are separate, yet connected. A human cannot survive without all three. The mind is the soul and yours is broken."

I sat staring at her almost afraid to believe she saw what I felt. I asked her to explain.

She told me to imagine my soul as a mirror reflecting my body. It was as if the mirror had been cracked many times. There were broken pieces separate from the frame of the mirror and there were pieces still within the frame. Each piece showed a different reflection of me. That, she explained, was a fractured soul. She had seen it in other people, she said, but not the extent she saw it in me.

I left the meeting almost rejoicing. Someone had understood and believed what it was I saw in myself. She had seen it and believed without my effort to explain. I needed a validation and it gave me hope. It was not a hope for anything specific, just a sense that perhaps someone else might understand too and be able to help me put the mirror back together.

Only hours later, my hopes were dashed. My doctor listened patiently as I tried to tell him of the visit. When I asked him what he thought, he launched into a lecture about Borderline Personalities. He spoke in clinical terms that went completely over my head, but summed up by telling me my only real option was to learn to accept the way I was. There was no recovery, only managment of my symptoms.

I would always be difficult. I would always avoid accepting responsibility for myself, as I was when I tried blaming my behaviors on other 'parts' of me. I needed to stop looking for some other answer and realize my only hope of change was behavior modification.

I don't know when, or even if I ever really abandoned the idea of the broken mirror. After my discharge from the hospital, only my husband seemed to believe and understand the concept. While my out patient counselor had seemed to understand, he had made it clear he didn't go in for the inner child beliefs. After 'indulging' me when I seemed to take on the persona of a little girl, sharing memories of sexual abuse, he finally stopped me one day. "No more of this inner child nonsense. I won't talk to a little girl anymore. You're an adult and I can't have you taking my time in this way."

I can never adequately describe the devastation those words caused. I remember a wall coming up inside and sealing everything I believed unacceptable away from myself. It was a big wall. It was a strong one. It lasted the better part of seven years.

Then it crumbled.

Doubting Myself

03/23/2004

these were written about (i think) 6 months ago. it was, in large part, a group effort.

I don’t remember when I first saw Sybil. I was in my teens and I was interested more because I admired Sally Field than because I was interested in the topic. At the time, it was hard to watch. At different points in the movie an overwhelming sense of panic would hit me. I would feel I couldn’t breathe but could not bring myself to change the channel. I remember too, the sense of having to sneak as I watched. I knew if my mother found me, she would make a comment then later accuse me of trying to be Sybil.

That sense of panic I felt when watching Sybil was something I had felt before. That alone made it worse and it would be years before I could bring myself to read the book.

I had always devoured books dealing with young women and emotional struggle or mental illness, but Sybil I avoided with almost conscious fear. I know part was the knowledge that I would relate so strongly to it. What overwhelmed me most was the fear of someone seeing me read and assuming anything remotely familiar to the woman in the book was an act, picked up from the pages by an adolescent drama queen.

It’s almost funny to think how my mother’s attitude so colored my world. Anything I read was suspect to me. Anything I related to in the lives between the pages was something to be ashamed of and hidden. For all the things I may have done to gain attention, far more was locked away in fear of the inevitable accusation of being melodramatic.

I struggle to this day with being able to understand how I could know I was multiple, yet feel such shock when someone else saw it for what it was. More than shock, my reaction was terrified denial. How could I possibly know and not know at once? Crediting multiplicity is the easy answer but I don’t believe it’s that simple. I had been taught very well over the years to treat my every thought and emotion with distain and distrust.

Looking back with the clarity of hindsight, I had suspected since my eighth grade year. I do not know exactly why, but somehow I knew I wasn’t alone in my head. During the years in and out of hospitals, it was never a consideration. Various doctors and mental health professionals handed my parents several conflicting diagnoses and when I failed to respond to any kind of treatment, eventually wrote me off as a hopeless Borderline Personality. The drastic mood swings from moment to moment, the changes is speech and behavior and my lack of recall for the vast majority of my childhood were written off as part of my elaborate attempts to manipulate.
According to professionals and to my mother, I was highly intelligent but chose to use my intelligence to con everyone around me into doing my bidding. I was an attention hound and would probably not ever take responsibility for my problems.

Long after I married my husband, before the later hospitalizations and attempts to receive professional counseling, the consensus remained remarkably unchanged. I could do anything I chose to do but because I chose to cling so tightly to my dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors, I would probably never change. My husband’s parents urged him to leave me. It was suggested by several I be locked in an institution and forgotten.

Both the pastor from our home church in North Carolina and the pastor of what became our church in South Carolina were quite blunt in telling me I loved the devil more than I loved Jesus. I wanted to hear the voices. I wanted to stay damaged. I wanted it because I wanted the attention and based on what they could see, even my salvation was in question. Only in denying the devil access to me could my life change. The fact that I had fought as hard as anyone against the evil in my life meant nothing. Obviously, I was doing something wrong.

Eventually I realized the futility of trying to get anyone to understand. After the last conversation with the South Carolina pastor and his wife, I gave up. I attempted suicide the next day. The overdose is what brought me into Larry’s office, seeking nothing more than to appease the discharging doctor. With Larry I had a good working relationship and made real progress for the first time in my life. A year later, Larry made the statement that helped create almost total separation from every other part of me. Here was someone who had listened to me for a year. He showed greater compassion and understanding than any mental health professional I had ever encountered. Still, even he could not accept who was hidden inside me. I left his office that day knowing I had no choice but to be someone else. In the years before my diagnosis, I never once considered what would be unleashed when I once again dared ask for help.

looking back

03/16/2004

six years ago, i was super woman. john was still a baby and finally recovered from whooping cough. i still wasn't sleeping for fear i wouldn't know if he stopped breathing... but somehow i kept a clean house, cooked every night, did crafts constantly, kept in touch with dozens of people, sang on the worship team, never missed church and had this air of a woman who had it all together.

a car accident that february tore cartilage in my knee and hurt my back, neck and right shoulder. for 3 months my day consisted of dropping the girls off at school, dropping the boys at the babysitter, seeing the chiropractor, going to physical therapy, picking up rachel from kindergarten, picking up the boys, running errands if i had time, then picking up becca and krys before going home and tackling all that awaited me there.

on the outside, things looked spectacular. i had this idyllic life... a beautiful family, a fairy tale love affair with my husband, a fire for God and an awesome testimony.

i saw it coming. i really did. the depression was creeping back in before john was born. i ignored it... blamed it on hormones... just did my best to play pretend, but it didn't go away.

when john was six weeks old, he started coughing and turning blue. that began a nightmare of helplessness as i watched my son struggle to breathe, day and night, for weeks on end. the doctor at the hospital told me how lucky we were. most newborns with pertussis don't get diagnosed until the autopsy. they just die in their sleep and people assume it's SIDS.

by march, he was healthy and happy... i still wasn't sleeping and i watched myself slide uncontrollably into that familiar black hole i wanted to believe i had left behind.

on the outside, i was still super woman. it wasn't mania. it was desperate denial. if i could just ignore it long enough, if i refused to give it place, if i read my bible and prayed, if i did all the things a good Christian wife and mother did, it would go away.

somewhere along the line, i started pulling away. i stopped going out except to church. when there, i wouldn't talk to anyone. get in late and leave before everyone has started leaving their seats.

i couldn't walk past a mirror without verbally debasing myself. charlie and i started fighting. i stopped doing everything i loved. i severed relationships over stupid stuff... and i kept telling myself it wasn't happening.