Cross Eyed

Meta Space 1

Or, where I tell you what you’re getting into in the world’s longest trigger warning

Howdy, our safe word will be ‘Heifer.’

This collection is a multi-genre blend of snapshots of my life pre-diagnosis and life after, with a heavy focus on maladaptive daydreaming and borderline personality disorder.  All have various forms of development—or in the case of maladaptive daydreaming, still so relatively new as to have unsure origins—but have a commonality of forming as a response to childhood trauma so severe that, in heavy summation, the brain splits its consciousness into either different personalities that are capable of handling one emotion/trigger at a time and can be switched out at the cost of severe dissociation for the main person. Or the brain becomes unable to process emotions or proper decision-making. Or the brain makes it easier for the person to disconnect through reality via daydreaming as a coping mechanism.

I also have general anxiety, PTSD, and mild-to-severe depression, to complete the highway of intersectionality of mental bullshit going on in my poor pink brain. Laughing is encouraged in this white space between this sentence and the next.

I’ve broken this project down in three parts: the part you’re about to embark on is all from my childhood, where science hardly mattered, and much less likely would have been accepted in the communities I lived in. The second part is a half delusion, half reality check, spread out over that fateful first year of college. Finally, the third part is a breakdown of the most defining moment of my life and a sort of cool down from the psychic workout of the first parts. It’s all very sad, very brutal, out-in-the-open, but I trust you’ll be armed with a box of tissues, a tall glass of cold water as well as a warm cuppa tea or coffee. Maybe a snack if you’re too cool to be bothered by the way food turns into a saliva-covered paste when you cry with some in your mouth. Maybe you like to court danger by swallowing when your throat is tight and subsequently choking for 10 seconds. You’re valid.

Real talk, I hadn’t planned to make this project about me. This was supposed to be a strictly pseudo-science fiction project, one that I developed during my junior year of college.  I spent the following summer trying to convince myself that I was going to write the first half of a novel about eco-terrorists and failed spy organizations and an agender double agent that would take out the CEO of Walmart. It would’ve been filled with violence and flowers and trees, not a single lover in sight but plenty of sex. But as my dad and I bought the books I thought I’d need and I opened them to read and annotate, that dream died right in my lap on a mid-May afternoon. I didn’t read beyond the first chapter of those books; I didn’t write a damn thing.

I hate trying to do schoolwork at home anyway, because home is where I can finally give myself a break and play games on my laptop and talk the entire day away with my partners, not where I continue to work myself to death typing away on Word, isolated from my family and my partners because if I talked to anyone nothing would get done. I never sleep, I never move from the center of my bed, legs locked in a tight crisscross to the point where my knees ache, hump-back knots tormenting me, becoming disabling enough that my 75-year-old Grandmother tries to scold me on my posture. As if I’m unlike anyone else my age with these knots, these early aches, and dark circles.

So, I come back on campus to start Senior year and now it’s time to panic because I realize, oh shit, I didn’t write anything and if there’s a chance the first assignment will be to turn in summer writing I sure won’t have it. But there isn’t a first assignment about summer reading, instead it’s almost 3 hours of sitting in one chair—my knees ache in the cold and I start to rock in place, my right leg muscles clenched not enough to be noticeable but enough to bother me, and I’m bored out of my mind. I take my writing pen—one with dark purple, watery ink—and I pen the first draft of ‘Church’. In theatrical timing, the professor says that projects can completely change, especially from genre to genre, that some people start with prose and end up going for poetry instead. That, in fact, at least one other student is doing her project in a mix of prose and poetry.

Cue my audible ‘oh’ in the middle of class and my trademark facial expression of comedic enlightenment: lightly framing my face with the stretch of skin between thumb and index finger on both hands, eyes wide and lips pulled as thin as my mouth can possibly go. Inhale deeply, lightly clap the palms, look around to my roommate and my close friend who are both named Anna and do a panicked giggle. My project changed, became about me, nature stayed behind as a coincidental theme, violence and sex rejoiced in my brain, the whispers of my unnamed head mates become a little clearer. I still didn’t know how I would tie this project together, what books to read, structuring, only that I was excited for this project in a way I never was before, and that was enough.

Here's the actual trigger warning paragraph: this project talks about Sexual Encounters, Child Sexual Assault/Abuse, suicidal ideation, mild-to-severe depression, vivid hallucinations/mental episodes, racism, homophobia, religious trauma/distrust/mockery/hatred, witchcraft, paganism, anxiety, PTSD, borderline personality disorder, violence, and maladaptive dreaming.

As you read this, I encourage you to do some online reading on the illnesses I’ve listed here, to have that semi-professional understanding of what I wax poetic about. I also want you to treat this collection carefully, it has a strength and a trauma factor of its own, it can hurt you. Finally, as you take in that last warning, soak in that semi-pitying, semi-confused somber feeling you just had for me, who has lived all these hurts, and let it marinade while you read, don’t come out of the bath until the very end.

Cheers,

Deja