Obliviate

Today is not a good day. Levels of dissociation are high. It is like living underwater, trying to work through a thick haze in and around my head. The world looks unreal, the people are robots, I don’t exist. I have no sense that the hands typing this belong to me. And K has been wiped from my mind completely. I have no sense of her, of why she is important to me, of what we have done and talked about in all the hundreds of hours we’ve spent together. In my brain is just an empty space where she used to be. I want her back, because when she is in my head the world is a little safer. I am a little safer, a little more real.

The longest we have gone without proper contact (i.e. not just ‘I’m ill’ ‘get well soon’) in almost 3 years is 6 full days. I struggle to hold on to her even in the time between sessions, between contact, and we met 2 or 3 times a week for two and a half years, with phone and text contact in between. Even if we had not had the awful rupture and she hadn’t hurt me so badly last week I would be really struggling with an unexpected break of 2 weeks with no phone or email contact arranged. I need therapy, it’s why I go every week without fail and we have contact inbetween sessions. It’s why moving from 2 longer sessions to a double session once a week back in March was such a big deal. I struggle to contain and hold everything myself for all that time. I miss her, I need her. I wish I could hold on to her when she is not here but I can’t. When she went on a yoga retreat 18 months ago and we had no contact for 4 whole days and I knew I couldn’t contact her my brain wiped her away by the time I got home from my session. It took so long to get her back again, to feel connected, to rebuild a sense that she is real and we are connected. It hurts us both when I go to sessions and have to tell her I don’t know her, can’t remember her, have no sense of ever having been in her home before. Both of us could do with less hurt on Monday I am sure, but I am powerless to stop my mind doing this.

I want to cut so badly, to bring myself back a little, to feel real. I want to reach out to her, to check she is still real, still here, that I am still real to her. Because I cannot understand how I can still exist to her, when this has happened for me. How do I still exist when she doesn’t?

I am struggling so much with suicidal thoughts and feelings today. I went to the gym. I’ve managed to get something big done for work. I’m trying as hard as I can, but thoughts of blood and not existing anymore are never far away. Monday feels forever away. And at the same time I am so dissociated and cut off that in part it is like if I never see her again we will all be fine. Dissociated, but fine. It is so disconcerting to lose all sense of a person. It is the greatest defence mechanism ever in so many ways (who cares if I am abandoned because I don’t know them anyway, right?) and yet it fucks with my life so much. Out of sight, out of mind. And everything that person gives me and enables me to be is wiped away.

It makes me scared for what will happen on Monday, whether I should even go. I’m scared I will be so upset by the level of disconnect when I arrive that I will be unable to tell her she hurt us all so badly last week. I will be so relieved to connect with her again I will just want to move on from the hell that was last week. And also when I’ve gone before in this cut off state where her house is unfamiliar and I don’t feel I know who she is it has often taken the best part of 90 minutes to get any kind of connection back again. So then what happens about all the shit from last week? Where does it go? And all the stuff I wanted to share last week about my Mum and narcissism and engulfment and shame – what about all that? Another week holding that and waiting to repair this. And what if we can’t or she doesn’t want to? What if she is still ill?

I feel so lost. Like I said on Monday – I am lost inside myself. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes it feels as though there is no hope for me, for any of us. I want to see blood, just to know I still exist. I want to feel pain, to feel something – anything. I want to feel the sting and know I hurt, because I know this dissociation is covering a huge level of pain and I just cannot feel it. I am an automaton. I am barely here, barely living, and I wonder what the point is – this is not a life.