Altercations with alters

Ugh! Fuck.

...gathers self...

I mean, 'Hello World.' You may have noticed I am feeling a little bit peeved just at this moment. That is mainly due to two things, one being that I went back to work today. Did I tell you about the email I sent my manager on my last day before Christmas? I can't recall if I did, but it was basically explaining that the 'little extra work session' she had given me to do each week is turning out to be much more than that and that I don't have the time to do all of my other work. Well today I found a courteous email from her saying that we would need to discuss my workload and that she had looked at it previously and felt that I didn't have too much on! (Fucking ba&"*&d c$^"!!!!... ....gathers self again....). Now I am fucking shitting myself because I will have to defend myself face to face and confrontation makes me crumble like a fucking digestive biscuit. OK don't panic people... breathe... be logical. There's only one thing for it: I will have to prepare my case. Enough thinking about it for now though.
 
The second thing that has gotten on my goat is fucking SHAN (alter). She doesn't bother me much. She doesn't engage with me much. For the most part she doesn't come out much. She has a relationship with the world and Adam but not so much with 'us'. I am generally happy not to think about her or engage with her too. Not that I don't appreciate the role she has in our life, but I just don't feel the need to be best buds with her. But I can't help but feel she is responsible for T's Christmas card going missing before we got to give it to her.

For some reason, this year Shan decided to write her own card to give to T. Don't ask me why because as far as we're aware she has never really communicated with her in the sessions but meh. Candy did feel a bit embarrassed about the fact that Shan felt the need to write T a separate card whenever we had planned on sending a card from Candycan that would surely do as an all rounder. So anyway, we had the card from 'us' and the card from Shan and a letter from Pan which was really special. We really liked what Pan had said in it and it held an explanation about a picture that Pan and Little C had done for T with some assistance from Candy.

So the last thing I remember is it being the night before we were due to see her before Christmas. I had the card from 'us' and I was putting the letter and the card from Shan inside the envelope of the card from us. At this point Shan told Candy she shouldn't be so fucking arrogant and pompous to think that Shan was just an alter and Candy was the 'main person'. She didn't want Candy to put her card inside the other one and said that she had every right to give it to T herself and was not a sub part. Candy kind of ignored her and kept putting it in, thinking that it was fucking embarrassing anyway that we even had to give the fucking card to T... and that's the last I remember about it. I can't for the life of me remember what I did with it after that and I haven't seen it since. I felt sure it would turn up but this was now (erm hold on, I've lost count of what day it is...) over a week ago and I have looked everywhere I can think of, several times. I am coming to the conclusion that Shan has done something with it and not told me to spite us all. She's so stubborn! Ugh!

T said that if it turned up it would be OK to drop it into her tomorrow, which I think may be her last day. But it hasn't turned up and it doesn't look like it is going to. I just hope it hasn't gotten into someone else's hands cos that would be really embarrassing. It's embarrassing enough showing these parts of myself to T, even through written communication. I would not like for someone else to be reading things written by us. I'll get over it. I'm sure it's no loss to T, it's more Pan's letter that I am annoyed about. Shan, if it was you, why and where the fuck have you put it?!

So anyway, those are the two annoying things. Sorry for the swearing; although my apology is probably a bit late because anyone who is offended by the F word  will likely have stopped reading long ago. Sometimes it just needs to be used though I'm afraid.

My final thought for the day (I'm aware that I still haven't told you anything about Christmas and there are a few other things I need to talk about too but they will have to wait for another day) is that whilst combing through every scrap of paper and diary I own this evening (again) looking for the cursed card, I noticed that I didn't keep any kind of written record of the time between my old psychologist leaving at the end of 2008 and my starting with T or the weeks surrounding that time. From memory, I know it was really, really hard and I was not coping well or functioning on any real level, but I didn't write a thing down about it. This has always been my way. I've kept diaries on and off from the age of eleven and when I've looked back to search for words written about my pain years ago, I find pages and pages of writing about stuff but very few mentions of the real pain and the real hurt in my life. I have tended to shut down from those things and not record them. There is very little talk of my father in any of my diaries, even though he has been probably the biggest cause of why I am so fucked up now. The first psychologist leaving was really hard and I did the same thing obviously. I went into myself and didn't express how it was on paper because I didn't want to have any reminders set down on paper for the future, I guess.

So, presumably, one day I will look back at the end of 2011 and wonder how it was for me then when T left. I will want to find some words of expression about how I reacted and what I was feeling, so I will try hard not to hide from blogging. Although at the very moment I say this to you I am aware that while I was combing through the papers earlier, I was piling them up and putting them inside a plastic folder and shutting it and someone inside me was saying "good bye everyone, I'm locking you in here until T comes back." So I guess I need to think this through and make a decision. Am I going to face how things feel and try my hardest to express them and even to feel them, or am I going to let a shut down happen and switch myself into function mode? Part of me is tempted to not go to see the new psychologist next week and just see what happens if I try to pretend I am not someone with mental health problems for a few months.

I also went to the doctors today and asked about medication. She invariably has tried to convince me to take it every time I have seen her and I've usually declined, but now I am seriously thinking it's time I stop being a fucking naive ostrich and realise that I'm not doing too well on my own. She spent half an hour talking through the different types of tablets and wrote me a list of names of types. She said I should research them myself and let her know what I thought. They are: SSRIs (which I took before and she said we would probably avoid because they made my already barely existent libido, non existent altogether), venlafaxine, duloxetine and mirtazepine (she seemed to think this mirtazepine one might help with my sleeping problems a bit). She also talked about tricyclic antidepressants and said that these were too sedating and not beneficial enough to warrant that effect so she wouldn't recommend these. She also questioned whether my problems with libido were due to being on an antidepressant or other factors and I felt my head whooshing and she started to look a bit blotchy but I managed to get out that I knew it was to do with other things but that the SSRIs had made it worse.

She strikes me as the kind of lady who thinks that we should all just look on the bright side and that things are never that bad and maybe you're just being a bit over dramatic and you can't be that sick cos you go to work etc. That's great for her. I think that's a good ethos... I doubt she would be saying that if she saw what is going on in my head and perhaps got a few snapshots of me at various moments throughout any given week when I'm not going to work or sitting in her office looking like a half normal person. Or perhaps if she had some of the flashbacks and nightmares, she might feel a bit less motivated to look on the bright side. Not that I would want to burst her bubble, and besides, my hope rests in the knowledge that people like her exist: people who don't know what it's like to feel like your innocence and joy and peace and ability to trust were taken from you before you even knew the meaning of those words. I rely on people who see the good in life, because she help me to think that perhaps there is good in life and there is a way to wake up in the morning and feel like you are embracing being alive in this world.

So that's all for today. I am still feeling surprisingly OK. But then, I am still knowing that T is at work, I get  a lot of reassurance from that. How will I feel come next week when I am sitting in the waiting room outside of her office waiting to meet new psychologist and T is not there?