prismaticbleed | tripping in triplets (Reply)

That title just popped into my head when I sat down to write this, so there it is.

Anyway.
I am SO confused right now.
I'm trying to review old entries from 2008 in the archive, and most of this stuff makes no sense. Plus the fronter from that time period was jarringly dramatic, so it's psychologically difficult for me to read.
I don't even know if I should be reading these things. They're digging up FAR too much old tar, and old memories that I buried for my own psychological safety. But maybe I need to face that stuff again.
I'm just not looking forward to how the lower system will react. That's making life a literal living hell right now. Yes, half of me loves them-- really, their role here is vital and I appreciate what they're doing-- but half of me is so tired of dealing with them, as they're all so broken and terrified and angry and violent. But I can't blame them. They hold all of the past trauma, for everyone else's sake. That's not fair at all. They have every right to be vicious. But... it's tiring.
It's tiring to wake up every morning with everyone fighting over the body: what it will do, what it will look like, where it will go, what it will eat, what it will say, so on and so forth. And it NEVER STOPS during the day. When one of the "non-alters" (the ones who insist "no one exists") takes over, it's almost a relief... if they weren't so horrifically suicidal, that is. So they're tired in an entirely different way.

The lowers try so hard, though. It's shocking now that they're acting out as their own coherent system, and not just a jumble of disembodied voices.
Today, some faceless female alter started trying to binge on chocolate as soon as we walked in the door. Normally I can't do anything about that as I'm not present... but the lowers were around. Knife got pissed, shoved her out of the way, and spat out what she was trying to eat. Then he told Emmett to front, so that the body could eat something healthy instead, since Emmett only eats green food (we hadn't eaten since 4PM the previous day I think? one meal a day is the norm now). And now, looking back on that memory of theirs, I am SHOCKED to see that Emmett not only fronted, he fronted WELL. Well enough that, as soon as he "anchored in," his first thought was "why is my mouth so short?" He kept chewing big bites with his mouth wide open, all exaggerated, trying to make his face "elongate." He got really distressed over everything feeling wrong. Then he realized there was more of a body beneath the head, and that made him anxious to the point where someone else stepped in. They told him to just relax and eat, while they moved the hands to feed him the food. It was so bizarre, it was like there were LITERALLY two people there. And then it got even crazier. The mother was in the kitchen then, and asked the body a question-- but neither Emmett nor the unknown girl moving the hands heard her, OR answered. A third person did. THREE PEOPLE WERE IN THE BODY THEN. All I know is that they somehow spoke through Emmett eating, and it's described as "like it was a recorded sound being played?" Like his biting didn't even affect the voice, like the mouth didn't move to speak at all, it just responded. So I don't know if that was the AP? But geez that is insane. I didn't know any of that could even happen.
I can barely believe this stuff is happening at all. I'm not fronting when it does, so I'll not know what's going on for hours, and then I'll look at what memories I have access to and I see stuff like this. It's... I don't know what to make of it yet.

All I know for sure is that this DID thing is getting disturbingly real.
Honestly, even our most doubtful members are finding themselves forced to admit that "I can't really pretend this isn't happening anymore." I'm not sure why the undergrounders banding together suddenly punched the intensity of this through the roof, but... it makes sense, conceptually. Like I said, they're the oldest voices up here; they just haven't had lives until now.
Let me give you an example.
We went to a novena with the grandmother today. I don't know who got dressed, but the body was wearing shorts and tights when we started driving. When the lower system realized it, three of the traumatized boys and the overload girl started screaming. One of the little boys began hyperventilating. It was too triggering, too scary. But someone was already driving the body, and we couldn't stop it; lower people aren't allowed to front normally. So it was like hell, knowing that's what we were wearing, and we couldn't do anything about it. Plus the grandmother was there of course, and most of the lower people either hate her, or are scared to death of her. I know Razor and the overload girl actually tried to mentally gang up on her at one point, desperate to get rid of her somehow, to make the terror go away. They do that a lot.
Memories are choppy. I don't remember getting there. I remember sitting in the inside of the church and looking at the altar, and suddenly feeling TERRIFIED because it reminded me of Infinitii but that reminded the lowers of traumatic abuse and people started to shriek again. And I was scared too. THIS, this holy thing, was now a trigger?? And THAT bad?? I didn't know what to do. No one did really. We were so dissociated, so shaken... and then a FREAKING BABY STARTED CRIYNG DSFMND
(sorry that's the lowers)
Sorry. there was... a child in the church. You'll understand that I have no recollection of it other than the fact, because about five or six people downstairs lost it when they heard it. It was a cacophany of fear and pain and rage and terror and hate.
Somewhere around here there was a really sickening jolt, in the mind and body... some sort of convulsive shiver, like an elevator dropping a few feet, the room spinning back with a punch to the face. And in an instant, I felt the active level SWITCH.
Suddenly the lowers were back underground, mercifully free from having to front at that time-- and Central was back in the front seat.
Then I was upstairs-- me, J! I remember that much. (I haven't been typing this entry btw, sorry I didn't clarify that; things are too messy to do so lots of times.) I was talking to Xenophon and explaining to her that the lower system felt pain differently than most. To them, sharp physical pain-- blood and knives and scars-- was almost comforting. It was reassuring to know exactly what it was, and why it happened. To them, that kind of pain was good, it was sensible. But hearing a child? That was horrifying. Same with being touched, even just a poke on the shoulder. I explained to Xennie that even though that didn't physically hurt, it hurt them emotionally and psychologically. To them, a touch or a sound like that was so triggering, that it felt like a warning siren... one they couldn't escape from, one that was lethal. To them, it meant that within the next few seconds, they WERE going to be hurt again... badly. But although that didn't always happen, they could not afford to take chances. So they lived in terror of those things, never feeling safe, waiting to be attacked by that child or that person, just so it would "be over with" and they could run away somewhere else. I remember the catatonic red voice came out when the others wouldn't stop screaming, for that very reason. He looks so much like me. It's heartbreaking.
The next thing I remember is Josephina driving.
Yes, JO!! Believe it or not, headvoices (Central people) don't usually front. That's not their job. But there he was, trying to keep things stable, as he was OK with the outfit and we were all vaguely aware that the lowers weren't happy with it.
Julie came out for a few seconds later-- there's a vivid memory of the very first instant she saw when she moved in, looking at the priest giving the homily. That is literally all I know of that.
I don't know how the rest of the service went. I don't know who fronted, when, or how.
But I CANNOT forget what that beginning time period felt like.
The undeniable, drastic switches... the inner turmoil... the knowing that I was only fronting for about five minutes...
This is getting really scary now. Sure, it was scary before, but... back during the "Julie days," at least "I" was the main person driving, until the infamous "mind leakage" thing with Laurie bleeding internally happened... and I at least KNEW who would hack me, and how... we knew her methods, and her triggers. We had a degree of control over the situation. But don't get me wrong, it was TRAUMATIC. The face-changing, the merciless humiliation, the... i dont want to write about it.
But it was that one thing to worry about. Just ONE THING.
Now... now there are 50 of us here, not 5. Those years of trauma broke us, badly. There are people downstairs who are so hurt that it breaks my heart on top of everything else. They're desperate, twisted, frightened souls, dark and bloody and bleeding, incapable of living the life they are forced to inhabit. Upstairs, we have it so easy now, compared to them.
I don't know what I'm trying to say.
The point is this:
THIS IS REAL.
I can't deny that anymore.
This is real, this is hell, and for heaven's sake, we need help.

People are trying to talk to me on Skype and I really can't do it. It's emotionally draining to talk like this. I am literally cut-and-pasting responses, just spitting out stock phrases and one-word replies. No one's noticed yet. It's sick that we're so good at this.
The most painful part is that I have no ill will towards these people. If they want to talk to us, I don't want to be rude and refuse. But it's just so, so difficult. As soon as I close this window I'm probably going to collapse on the floor.
I want to leave and exercise or something but I don't know how to say no. I don't know how to apologize and excuse myself. I'd stay on here parroting responses until 1AM if that's how long it took for them to get tired of talking to me, even though I have classes tomorrow and those alone are stressful enough.
I don't want to think about this.
Maybe I can just... yank out the internet cable so I'll have an excuse as to why I suddenly disappeared. Maybe someone else can do it. I don't have the guts. But someone else would have to feel they had a good reason to do so. "We're not your playthings," they essentially say. "We're not your puppets. We don't have to do ANYTHING you tell us to." Which is correct. They are living beings just like me. They're not "accessories" to me, just because I'm shamefully "proud enough" to consider myself the main fronter here. I wish I weren't. I really, really wish I didn't have to be the one up front all the time, simply because I'm the easiest one for the AP to shove out of the way when things get awful and we need to pretend "everything is okay."
You do know that's why the AP exists, right? It's a buffer. It's a censor. Since headspace is always moving, always watching, our words and feelings and reactions WILL and DO leak out unless something is in the driver's seat preventing anything from translating. Hence the AP. But it's a curse, too. It means that we literally wear a voiceless mask all the time. It means we cannot interact with people outside of a program. It means that NO ONE IS ACTUALLY IN THE BODY 90% OF THE TIME, AND NO ONE OUTSIDE REALIZES IT. People know and love a construct. All of us, the ones who are really watching and feeling and living and breathing... we're hiding behind it, afraid to show our faces, afraid people won't accept our existences, afraid of dying again. And some of us are getting very, very angry about that fact.

I think that's old too. Which is why I'm re-reading the archives in the first place.
I remember way back, when there were only four or five of us known in the system? But no one was anchored, so behavior was weird, and unconsciously painted... and there was this ONE TIME Laurie and I were discussing Julie, and she described our resident pink shadow as a normal girl stuck inside our body.
I have NEVER forgotten that. It was so weird, because Julie IS an "introject;" whoever the main consciousness was in 1997 or so CREATED HER, fully consciously... created her to be a waste receptacle for all the "bad things" and "evil thoughts" that the original fronter had and didn't want.
But Laurie was right in a way, and we ALL forgot that fact. Julie was created as just a girl. Down to the bone, that's what she was. And then she was stuffed full of tar.
I've never thought of us all that way before. I've never... never respected our situation enough to look at it through a compassionate, humanitarian lens. We're all just people. Even the nonhumans here, haha. Seriously though, that's it. We're individuals with a different life situation than most. We've been through hell and back and we keep stumbling into new hells all the time. But we're PEOPLE!! We aren't delusions, or fantasies, or fake things... we are REAL PEOPLE and we have REAL LIVES and we need to remember that, I can't believe I literally never realized that before.

...I can't believe I never realized that before.

Excuse me please, I think I need to let all of this sink in.

There must be something that keeps me awake,
Or some kind of pill I can take,
To break these bad habits.

I would lie if I said that this didn't get tough,
Two left feet on the floor in a Waltz,
At an odd tempo.

Am I stuck at the ankle, or caught at the knee?
A curious puzzle still cursing me,
To follow or lead.

You gave me a heart and then taught me to hurt,
I can't tell just which option is worse,
Dying pure or aware.

So these feet keep on tripping in triplets to beats,
Too far off for my ears to reach,
Just a hint of timing.

Am I stuck at the ankle, or caught at the knee?
A curious puzzle still cursing me,
To follow or lead.

And I don't know where I'm going,
Cause I can't see the road, oh it's winding,
Just as long as I keep breathing,
I've got this uncomfortable feeling,
Heavy feet, shaky hands, troubled heart.