Tuesday, November 09, 2004
World View
We woke up this morning to a new world. A dusting of snow transforms familiar objects defining angles and softening defects. At our elevation we can have snow like this in September but it’s been a warm autumn. It’s mid-November and this is the first snow to stick. I let the dog out the eastern door sipping my coffee while he runs idiotically about the yard. I keep a watchful eye out for deer, bear or turkey in the pasture or the woods to the side of the house. It’s rutting season for deer. The bucks are stupid with lust. Yesterday a doe walked through our woods in mid-morning. Sure enough not five minutes later here comes a big eight point sniffing every few steps following her trail.
I can normally call Merlot off a deer. He’s pretty well trained. But I’m worried this time of year the deer might be aggressive toward him. Forget Disney. This ain’t Bambi. This is a sex-starved male animal half the size of a horse with razor sharp hooves and antlers that could pierce right through Merlot’s scrawny frame.
Maybe it’s just my world-view. One of my therapists explained there are two kinds of people; those who view the world as a safe place and those who view it as unsafe. I fall into the it’s ‘a jungle out there’ category. Given my life I think it’s a justifiable view.
That same therapist told me he only worked with one other client who reasoned in the same manner as those of us in Q. He was a concentration camp survivor.
So I’m standing there in the doorway, steam rising off my coffee cup with rising sun bathing me in thin wintery warmth. I’m the only one up inside or out except for Owl who rose before dawn for work. I pause and listen. It’s the perfect moment for genius. Nothing happens.
I call the dog in, feed him, sit down at the keyboard and start working. I pick up my cup to take a sip and my coffee is gone. Welcome to another Dissociative moment.
“Who drank my coffee?” I snap inside.
All I hear inside is “Echo, echo, echo” and giggling. I can’t figure out which one of them it was. And there are a lot more of us to sift through than there were ten years ago when the shit hit the fan. Talk about midlife crisis. We had the granddaddy of them all.
Anyway, I pick up signatures inside… Ian, Ry, el, Lillie, Keeper, Gwen… bingo, coffee thief.
“Go make some more,” she says still laughing. She throws her arms around my shoulders and peers at the computer screen. I’m redesigning a web page.
“It isn’t funny,” I grump. “You interrupted my work flow.”
“Workus interuptus,” she taunts. “By the way it looks good.”
Grudgingly I thank her and get off my ass to make more coffee. I value her opinion. Like me, Gwen is an artist. Unlike me she has an eye for graphics. I work in acrylics producing impressionist pieces when I’m at my best. My inside home walls are covered with paintings, most of them of Eyvonne. I seldom work outside anymore. With our business moderately successful there just isn’t time.
There are twelve of us now give or take a few. It’s not important to us to keep track anymore. Ten years ago I drew and redrew elaborate charts trying to make sense of who we were. I designed linear flow charts, concentric circles, lists of alters related by interests, mannerisms, who they looked like inside. There were tons of young alters for a while. Most of them have integrated with one of us now. I know, I said we hated even thinking about integrating… but somewhere along the line it just started happening. I think it’s mostly a good thing. It’s made me more complete, taking into myself those who fragmented out in my image to protect us all. But we steadfastly refuse to even consider trying to unify into a singleton. That just ain’t gonna happen. Trust me.
The integrating we’ve done is tenuous anyway. Keeper, who showed up about five years ago in response to the eb and flow insanity of our life, became unstable and irrational. He claimed he held a piece of each of us Qs. He said he had the ‘glue’ to make integration into a singleton work and he campaigned for it like a presidential hopeful. Our response significantly underwhelmed him.
Eventually he asked to integrate with me. I accepted. I viewed it as part of my job to protect the system, he was becoming unstable enough to threaten our collective sanity.
Integration works like this, at least for us. There is a request, discussion and an agreement. In this case I held out my arms and embraced Keeper until Keeper was me and I knew all Keeper ever knew. His reason for existing in the first place becomes clear. I lived in vivid detail Keeper’s pieces of our fragmented past. I felt Keeper’s feelings about abuse he endured. I knew his fears, joys and triumphs. It all became mine when I couldn’t separate it out anymore. Once I owned it, we were integrated. But Keeper’s glue didn’t hold after all. He stepped out on his own again not long ago.
For a while I felt the loss keenly. When a woman gives birth, there is a shifting of organs, an empty place inside her. I know it personally, because even though I am male, I live in this body. I know how a woman can cry with joy holding her newborn while at the same time mourning the physical closeness of sheltering that child under her heart.
As Q guardian and defender I watch Keeper closely. I don’t understand the forces that pulled him away from me once again. His re-emergence from under my heart disturbs me. His presence among us is like the distant warning of heat lightening. There could be a storm brewing. Or it could just blow over.
He’s different than he was before. He’s older, not as naïve. I’ve gifted him that I guess. I grew up fast myself once I decided to do so. I was 16 for 30 years. Then I met Eyvonne. She was falling in love with eliot (man what a weirdness that was at the time) and I was already in love with her. We met online. It’s a jaded story nowadays. Internet lovers. It seldom lasts once people actually meet. For us it has. Eyvonne frequented the same writers and poets chatrooms we did. She was witty and talented. We had a mutual chat buddy who lived in Australia. He discovered Eyvonne and I lived in the same state. We lived within one hour’s drive of each other. If I believed in fate I’d say it was inevitable. But I don’t. I’ll go as far as saying everything happens for a reason. There was a reason we both hung out in the same IRC chatrooms. Maybe the reason was she would someday be instrumental in helping me save my own life. It sure wasn’t about procreation as that’s impossible given that I’m trapped in the same sex body as hers.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
I can normally call Merlot off a deer. He’s pretty well trained. But I’m worried this time of year the deer might be aggressive toward him. Forget Disney. This ain’t Bambi. This is a sex-starved male animal half the size of a horse with razor sharp hooves and antlers that could pierce right through Merlot’s scrawny frame.
Maybe it’s just my world-view. One of my therapists explained there are two kinds of people; those who view the world as a safe place and those who view it as unsafe. I fall into the it’s ‘a jungle out there’ category. Given my life I think it’s a justifiable view.
That same therapist told me he only worked with one other client who reasoned in the same manner as those of us in Q. He was a concentration camp survivor.
So I’m standing there in the doorway, steam rising off my coffee cup with rising sun bathing me in thin wintery warmth. I’m the only one up inside or out except for Owl who rose before dawn for work. I pause and listen. It’s the perfect moment for genius. Nothing happens.
I call the dog in, feed him, sit down at the keyboard and start working. I pick up my cup to take a sip and my coffee is gone. Welcome to another Dissociative moment.
“Who drank my coffee?” I snap inside.
All I hear inside is “Echo, echo, echo” and giggling. I can’t figure out which one of them it was. And there are a lot more of us to sift through than there were ten years ago when the shit hit the fan. Talk about midlife crisis. We had the granddaddy of them all.
Anyway, I pick up signatures inside… Ian, Ry, el, Lillie, Keeper, Gwen… bingo, coffee thief.
“Go make some more,” she says still laughing. She throws her arms around my shoulders and peers at the computer screen. I’m redesigning a web page.
“It isn’t funny,” I grump. “You interrupted my work flow.”
“Workus interuptus,” she taunts. “By the way it looks good.”
Grudgingly I thank her and get off my ass to make more coffee. I value her opinion. Like me, Gwen is an artist. Unlike me she has an eye for graphics. I work in acrylics producing impressionist pieces when I’m at my best. My inside home walls are covered with paintings, most of them of Eyvonne. I seldom work outside anymore. With our business moderately successful there just isn’t time.
There are twelve of us now give or take a few. It’s not important to us to keep track anymore. Ten years ago I drew and redrew elaborate charts trying to make sense of who we were. I designed linear flow charts, concentric circles, lists of alters related by interests, mannerisms, who they looked like inside. There were tons of young alters for a while. Most of them have integrated with one of us now. I know, I said we hated even thinking about integrating… but somewhere along the line it just started happening. I think it’s mostly a good thing. It’s made me more complete, taking into myself those who fragmented out in my image to protect us all. But we steadfastly refuse to even consider trying to unify into a singleton. That just ain’t gonna happen. Trust me.
The integrating we’ve done is tenuous anyway. Keeper, who showed up about five years ago in response to the eb and flow insanity of our life, became unstable and irrational. He claimed he held a piece of each of us Qs. He said he had the ‘glue’ to make integration into a singleton work and he campaigned for it like a presidential hopeful. Our response significantly underwhelmed him.
Eventually he asked to integrate with me. I accepted. I viewed it as part of my job to protect the system, he was becoming unstable enough to threaten our collective sanity.
Integration works like this, at least for us. There is a request, discussion and an agreement. In this case I held out my arms and embraced Keeper until Keeper was me and I knew all Keeper ever knew. His reason for existing in the first place becomes clear. I lived in vivid detail Keeper’s pieces of our fragmented past. I felt Keeper’s feelings about abuse he endured. I knew his fears, joys and triumphs. It all became mine when I couldn’t separate it out anymore. Once I owned it, we were integrated. But Keeper’s glue didn’t hold after all. He stepped out on his own again not long ago.
For a while I felt the loss keenly. When a woman gives birth, there is a shifting of organs, an empty place inside her. I know it personally, because even though I am male, I live in this body. I know how a woman can cry with joy holding her newborn while at the same time mourning the physical closeness of sheltering that child under her heart.
As Q guardian and defender I watch Keeper closely. I don’t understand the forces that pulled him away from me once again. His re-emergence from under my heart disturbs me. His presence among us is like the distant warning of heat lightening. There could be a storm brewing. Or it could just blow over.
He’s different than he was before. He’s older, not as naïve. I’ve gifted him that I guess. I grew up fast myself once I decided to do so. I was 16 for 30 years. Then I met Eyvonne. She was falling in love with eliot (man what a weirdness that was at the time) and I was already in love with her. We met online. It’s a jaded story nowadays. Internet lovers. It seldom lasts once people actually meet. For us it has. Eyvonne frequented the same writers and poets chatrooms we did. She was witty and talented. We had a mutual chat buddy who lived in Australia. He discovered Eyvonne and I lived in the same state. We lived within one hour’s drive of each other. If I believed in fate I’d say it was inevitable. But I don’t. I’ll go as far as saying everything happens for a reason. There was a reason we both hung out in the same IRC chatrooms. Maybe the reason was she would someday be instrumental in helping me save my own life. It sure wasn’t about procreation as that’s impossible given that I’m trapped in the same sex body as hers.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
