Keep My Words

I was watching Tim put together his electronic drum kit.

“So how drunk do we have to get you so that you’ll stop playing Ashleigh?” Tim asked.

In my confusion, I responded to his question with a question.  “Playing Ashleigh?  What do you mean?”

“Like, for you to be real and talk about your feelings or something,” he replied.

“I am being real,” I assured him. “This is me right now. And later I will be what I am later. I’m just… being me.”

That night at the East River Bar we were a few Jamesons in when he asked me about the guy I was seeing before he left for Albany. “He’s seeing someone else now,” I said. “She’s very skinny.

“I don’t get it,” I continued. Rather, I let the whiskey continue. “She can’t possibly have as great of a rack as I do. And she can’t be as funny as I am.”

“And she definitely doesn’t have as many personalities as you do,” Tim told me.

Multiple personality disorder (MPD) is now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). I have always said that I have quite a few occupants in my head, though I don’t consider this a disorder; I consider it mediocre. Never would I exclude the possibility that I am insane, however, if I am crazy I consider myself at least sane enough to function in this corporation we call humanity.

One of my personalities sees the world only through comparisons. So, compared to Larissa Schuster, I am a perfectly reasonable person. Or think over the case of Otty Sanchez. This summer, Sanchez used a knife to kill and dismember her 3 1/2-week-old son. She then ate parts of the child’s body, including his brain, before stabbing herself in the throat. Unfortunately, she lived. Sanchez said that she was hearing voices telling her to kill her son.

Even though I may hear voices, they never tell me to kill anyone. The voices in my head say things like “You really made a fool of yourself last night” and “You suck. What did you do that for?” and “Buy those shoes even though you can’t afford them.” My mental derangement is at a typical to above-average level, while Schuster and Sanchez’s levels of psychosis are off the register.

But I digress from my intended subject – dissociative identity disorder. I am pleased that the name was changed from multiple personality disorder. Calling something a “personality disorder” is a faulty concept to me. The person in charge of this diagnosis may be a psychopath his/herself. Furthermore, personality disorders are defined as a character type that deviates from the contemporary expectations of the society of the individual who exhibits it.  I have yet to find a complete list of personality characteristics agreed upon by the majority of Americans with which we can use to determine if our neighbors’ deviation from our expectations truly qualifies them as having mental illness.

So, dissociative identity disorder is a little easier for me to ruminate. Below are some signs and symptoms of DID:

• multiple mannerisms, attitudes and beliefs that are not similar to each other (I would need someone else to evaluate my mannerisms, however I have been known to embody political and spiritual beliefs that are at odds with each other.)
• headaches and other body pains (Every day, but this might have something to do with my current lifestyle.)
• distortion or loss of subjective time (I blame my alarm clock. See photo below.)
• depersonalization (Often I feel like I have no control over the situations in which I exist.)
• amnesia (I suppose it’s possible and I just don’t remember.)
• depression (Tim says it’s a phase.)
• derealization (Frequently I perceive the external world as strange.)
• unexplainable phobias (Click here.)
• sudden anger without a justified cause (Actually, I just hold things inside and take them out on the wrong people. So there is a justified cause, it just isn’t clear to the person who is subjected to my anger.)
• lack of intimacy and personal connections (I am perpetually single. This does not overly concern me since I generally consider myself bad at relationships therefore better off alone. Maybe this relates to the first symptom on this list, because although I stand by my prior statement, I do hope to fall in love one day. From what I hear, it is an enjoyable state of being.)
• frequent panic/anxiety attacks (Rona tells me that I need to practice my breathing.)
• auditory hallucinations of the personalities inside their mind (They are equally as comforting as they are troubling.)

In conclusion, I don’t really care whether or not I have dissociative identity disorder. But I do aspire to deviate from expectations in the most stunning and staggering of ways.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Pictures, Words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.