Wild Woman

Since Sunday’s post, I’ve been thinking about all the time I spent in the woods as a kid. I’ve also been thinking about a part of my personality that developed out in the forest.

I sometimes call her “crazy girl.” Crazy girl lived outside. That’s where she came from. She was crazy the way nature is, unpredictable, cruel, wild and spontaneous. The trees and rocks weren’t placed in some grand design and neither was she. She was created out of thin air, out of the power of my mind. She was calmer there, alone, more comfortable. I didn’t have to worry about what everyone else thought. It was ok to climb a cliff without ropes because she was part of the cliff. It was ok to fall down hard because she was part of the ground. She wasn’t damaged; she was the original kind of crazy. The kind that knew how to control the sun and the stars and the leaves if she tried hard enough.

After a while, I started to lose track… did I make crazy girl or did crazy girl make me? Was crazy girl real? How could she be? Was she just a figment of my imagination? Could I control when and where she appeared? Outside at recess, everyone watched her, sitting there, chanting slowly to herself. I hung back and kept watch in case I suddenly had to pull my shit together. I could do it at a moment’s notice if I had to. Back indoors, I held her back and made her go inside my head so I could be in the real world. If I became overwhelmed by emotion, sometimes she’d lash out. It made me happy to have her in reserve.

She made me feel so different from everyone else. Why did things seem foreign and so unreal to me? Did anyone else need to space out and dissociate or were they all happy and nice? Maybe I was an alien or some super intelligent mutant. Or maybe I was crazy… Everyone said I was and teased me about it. It would explain a lot. So, if someone didn’t understand me, I’d use her. If I screwed up or got a bad grade, I could always blame crazy girl. When something upset me, I’d push crazy girl out to plead my case. She could be very intimidating and convincing. Sometimes I’d show her around just to entertain the other kids. I knew she was special but I did it anyway. I felt guilty for soliciting attention so I blamed that on crazy girl too.

And crazy girl could be a liability. She didn’t know she was alive. She didn’t believe there were consequences to her actions. If she cut herself, so what? It didn’t hurt; it was like poking a bowl of Jello that had formed a tough skin over it. If crazy girl didn’t feel like dealing with anything today, she’d decide to die. It wouldn’t be a big deal; she could do it over again tomorrow! She was part of the earth and the earth doesn’t die. When people took her seriously, they’d freak out and I could land in the hospital. Obviously, she was trouble and I had to keep her under more control. There were too many consequences. I liked it when people acknowledged her, but I couldn’t have her stealing the show.

As I got older I started to wonder if she was even there anymore. Sometimes I’d just tell crazy hospital stories to prove I still had the resume of a crazy person. And then I found alcohol. When I drank she would show up take over. Sometimes I’d sober up to find a world that looked foreign and out of place just like it had in the old days. I was back to being a visitor from another planet. It was fun in a nostalgic kind of way, but most of the time it just hurt. I’d have to clean up the mess and she’d head off for parts unknown. Back in the hospital as an adult, I finally felt like I fit in. I WAS crazy girl now and everyone understood that. As long as I didn’t look like I was enjoying myself, then nobody would suspect a thing. I didn’t want them to think I’d just cultivated or invented all of this just. I was crazy and I had proof. Crazy girl had steered me to my correct destiny, madness. It can’t be my fault.

Still.

I don’t want to live out my life in the hospital. I to keep my husband and have kids and travel and experience all kinds of normal things. I want to help others and write and do something with meaning. I know that to get all of these things I have to work hard and stop complaining. And more than anything else, I can’t drink, cut or do anything that might give crazy girl a window of opportunity.

But what if that’s not possible? Maybe it could be but what if it isn’t now? What if crazy girl just steers me back to the hospital or the edge of a cliff? These things tend to go in cycles. The longest I can pretend to be normal is about four years, and then she grabs the reigns. She doesn’t care. If I’m crazy, then I’m crazy and to hell with the rest, she says. Maybe crazy is my native tongue, like a homeland I feel nostalgic for. I feel more like myself there and I some days I don’t know if I want to give it up.

So I’m learning to make accommodations for her. She needs time in the day to do whatever she wants. And I’m still trying to figure out what that is... (Right now, she seems to respond well to: crappy TV, walks in the woods, fooling around with my husband, laughing like a hyena and gossiping about TV with my teenage clients.) When I work too much or try to force her to stick to a rigid schedule for too long, it doesn’t work. I can’t control her by slapping down more rules, more restrictions, and more responsibilities. It just makes her more rebellious.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not suggesting I have DID. (Dissociative Identity Disorder aka: Multiple Personality Disorder) But the fact of the matter is, Borderline and DID are kissing cousins. With both diagnoses, a person dissociates and their personality becomes more… fragmented. With DID, they fragments just tend to lose sight of each other. They forget that the other personalities exist. With Borderline, there are distinct personalities but they overlap a bit more. I know they’re all in there somewhere and that ultimately; they’re all parts of me.

Picture taken at Pinnacles National Monument in CA