Dissociation and Memories

I have an extremely difficult time remembering anything.

Not just a few things in my life.

Not just a couple of years.

Most of them.

I don’t remember much before the age of 12.

Since then, there are really big pockets of blankness.

Bits and pieces of memory here and there.

If I’m lucky.

Most of the time I have to be reminded.

Or see photos.

Suddenly I’ll have a passing flash of color.

And I’ll briefly recall something.

Then, back to nothing.

My life flashes in and out like that.

I think this is another reason I have a really shitty concept of time.

I can’t keep track of it at all.

Not days or years.

One memory from a five year span.

Another from a three year span.

When I do remember, it usually doesn’t fade again.

Usually.

I remember my life in fragments almost.

I remembered something from my marriage the other day.

Something shitty my ex husband would say.

But I can’t place the time in my head of when that happened.

Like, my childhood recollections are thrown in with everything else.

There’s no order to them.

Every memory is scattered in my mind.

I don’t see things in an organized manner.

When I dissociate, I do not remember anything.

I have just recently been able to catch myself when my eyes start to blur and I can feel it trying to grip my mind.

I have no idea what I do, when I do though.

No clue.

I’ll usually just notice that the time passed extremely quickly.

I’ll move things around on myself a lot.

It looks like I go through motions or actions for sure.

But there’s no pattern that I can decipher.

I’ll snap out of it and will have absolutely no idea where things are.

I’ve lost so many things doing this.

These things that I move can also pop up in the strangest places.

And at the weirdest times.

Sometimes they’re just gone though.

I must throw them away or something.

I mean, I have no idea what I ended up doing with some stuff.

Mind you, this is much, much more often than any normal “misplacement” of things.

It’s like a time warp.

Next thing I know it’s five hours later.

Three days later.

And I have absolutely no recollection of ever moving or doing anything in that way.

Things would be there one day.

And gone the next.

I hide meds from myself a lot.

That’s usually my go-to thing to fuck with for some reason.

Then I go to the store or wherever, come back and the medicine bottle will be on the middle of my bed or something somehow.

Or, the meds will be back in the cabinet suddenly somehow.

But they will not be on the same shelf as all the others.

And I hadn’t been able to find it for two days before this.

I’ll tear my apartment apart looking for shit.

Now suddenly it’s back.

Directly in front of my face.

Then the voices started to tell me people are breaking in, and stealing my stuff last year.

That there are people fucking with me.

Then both.

I’ve done the same thing with blankets.

They will be nowhere.

Tear the apartment apart.

Then I’d come back from walking Bruce (my dog) and it’ll be on the middle of the couch or floor.

As if it was recently placed there.

The neighbors are doing it.

The motherfuckers are not to be trusted.

They installed cameras and microphones while here too.

They’re working with the CIA.

They’re working with the FBI.

They want to kill me.

That was the progression for me.

It happened over the span of SO many years.

The dissociation too.

The only reason why I know that is because of these memory gaps.

It started innocently enough.

I can’t remember details.

But I have been able to recall the general idea.

They first happened every year or two or three.

Then every few months or so.

Over the course of a few more years, it escalated to every day.

No wonder why I couldn’t see what was going on until the shit hit the fan and broke it.

Mental illness took over me.

I have not been in charge for a long time.

They were.

This whole time.

My symptoms absolutely play off of one another.

My dissociative issues and my psychosis.

They overlap for me.

And then they encourage one another to overwhelm me.

Like they’re mischievous, douche bag best friends.

It feels like they live to be able to trick me.

To throw me into the grips of my darkness.

I have been working on a timeline of my life.

In a google doc.

I’m piecing things together slowly.

These huge gaps of memory are so frustrating though.

I’m trying to remember things.

I don’t have much yet.

And I don’t know how much further I can go.

I just can’t recall things.

I haven’t worked on it in a while.

It’s quite a tiring task.

I get my next injection this Tuesday.

I’m hoping that will help with my memory a little more.

But I’m ready to accept that what I can recall now, is it.

– Keren