Understanding Self & My New Therapist

So here we go again. It's a new scene but the same scenario. The therapist assumes many things, but does not know what the heck is wrong with my brain. I just got back from my appointment at 2 pm. I drove myself in my new car about twenty minutes to the office. I went two hours early, because I was nervous about getting lost. So I took my time buying banana bread and some oatmeal pastries and sat in the office and read for an hour. I'm reading, "Before I Go To Sleep" by S. J. Watson. It gave me plenty of inspiration for my session that followed. The story is about a woman who has amnesia, and keeps a diary hidden from her Husband, Ben, in a shoebox. She meets with a Neuro-psychologist in secret as well, who is trying to solve the riddle of her memories.

She can remember for as long as a day before she goes to sleep, then wakes up with no memory and thinks she's still 29 years old. Her husband, she dislikes, and he tells her she had an "accident" but the doctor is perplexed and thinks that something else caused her illness. After all, retro-amnesia usually doesn't have short-term memory recall lasting for an entire day. So I'm already on page forty, and it was quite a page turner. The therapist, Betsy, took me early. We discussed all sorts of things, like the fact that I was always sociable means I do not have Autism like she had thought on first impression.

This was only our second session, my last therapist handed me to her with the remark "Maybe I just don't get you, Gabrielle." I explained to the new therapist, Betsy, how I am consciously aware of everything I do. She said that she had achieved that, but it was very difficult, in a meditative state. I further described that I cannot do anything autonomously or by sheer force of nature. Everything I do is controlled, from the awareness of controlling the breathing in my lungs, to my heartbeat and pulse, to my body movements like blinking. I have to think a word in order to know what I'm doing next. My dad doesn't even understand it, and he thinks it's normal me because he's always seen me this way. I also suffer sleep paralysis and out of body experiences if I don't take the anti-psychotics.

There have been a couple occasions where I had an out of body experience grip me, or sleep paralysis, while wide awake. It was terrifying. My body froze and I began having a nightmare of being raped. This recurring nightmare scenario has gone on for over three years, ironically ever since I was hospitalized at age seventeen for breaking a family heirloom. The psychiatrist was convinced I had Bipolar, put me on Geodon which caused or worsened my hallucinations and paranoia. I relapsed within a week of leaving, by missing a single dose and I walked maybe fifteen miles into a nearby town. So my issue is indeed a mystery.

I also have amazing long-term memory. I can remember events from age three to seven, but lately the memories seem to fade the more I pay attention to them, and re-create themselves. I don't lately have as vivid long-term memory of my childhood. I feel I've crossed beyond the need to remember every detail of age seven and onward. My mom has been diagnosed with Borderline, Major Depression, and even Schizophrenia. I can vividly recall details of her episodes, where she created false memories and became pre-occupied with childhood experiences. Such as believing this 30 year old man she dated when she was 17, according to my father, was someone who was banished by her parents and my dad was the replacement. She used to write letters, lots and lots of letters. Now she doesn't write, she drives in circles around town and thinks the world was stolen from her.

I never had false memories, but I have had hallucinations. Some in the form of sleep paralysis or nightmares, where my conscious mind seems split from the subconscious. Or, I'll be in a restaurant, and suddenly I'm scribbling on a napkin because the people behind the counter are mocking me, and my thoughts. My thoughts begin to echo around the room. Usually an older person like in the movie "Red Lights" will jerk up suddenly, and say "I'm hearing voices" I swear it's like encounters of the third kind. Unexplainable events happen, things no one else sees literally. appearing on the mirror. Other things I'd rather not get into as well. I had a vision of a bandaged and dressed soldier who told me my nightmares were PTSD related, and that he'd had them during "the Great War". It was the war to end all wars...

I've had an african man dressed like Thor or Xango from Hoodoo mythology, tell me I was being attacked by a vampire incubus who preyed on sexual energy. The Avatar or Angel told me the name, in AFRICAN mythology of what had been attacking me in my sleep. A word I'd never heard, much like Tir Nan O'gh was chanted to me in the Blue Ridge Mountains at a girls camp, the African man had a white horse, and went down to a cave in the jungle to battle and destroy the Tikoloshe. After that, the vampire like nightmares stopped for two years.

When I was sent to a mental hospital, I learned about lobotomies, losing white blood cells from medications, that psychiatrists were supposed to disclose to their patients but covered up, even if fatal. I had visions of so many things, when I was in full blown schizophrenia, I had a whole other life. I invented this girl who went to a Christian boarding school, and encountered all sorts of debauchery, who took vacations to Virginia Beach, and then settled into a flat the mountains. The visions became so impractical and dominated my mind. She plagued me, it was me--but not me. And it outlined a similar life to mine now. Almost like a premonition of a destined path.

I could easily get wrapped up in conspiracies. In a manic state, or doped up on caffeine or Adhd meds, I hallucinated a whole bunch of conspiracies and suddenly my parents were the enemies. Everyone had been a part of this cold war conspiracy to keep everyone submissive and subservient to the New World Order. Hospitals were being re-made to house dissidents, and camps to welcome all gifted individuals or social activists. The spirit of man, would be split into shells of the past. We would all be re-made, re-engineered. Forever longing for that one missing piece that shell of who we were--and the path we were meant to be on...and God would be re-born in the spirit of salvation. Stuff like that. Stuff that I could make up, and it would either be plausible or another good 1984 story.

The brainwashed girl in my fantasies, became the real life brainwashed girl. At fifteen I was stuck in isolation, but instead of like in my story--these were not blinding white lights, but it was total darkness. It was truly torture. There was no way out, I would be maintained...spirit of life, destroyed. The search for the answer to civilization, taken. Human beings would breed with Aliens, and life as we know it--wait a minute, I'm getting side-tracked again. Such is the life of a schizophrenic woman, forever plagued by her own ingenuity of creative abstraction and curiosity, believing in the world more than it believed in her.

What did it matter that I could see the future, read minds, hear thoughts, move mountains, charge cameras or open dvd players with my mind, or accidentally open up portals to the otherside, or create entire worlds inside my mind? What did it matter that I could conceive of the past, sense the truth, and know the future...enough to change it for the good of humanity? What does it matter, do they only wish to see me as a FREAK? Well, I'm no freak, and someday you'll learn that--if you can make it beyond your self-created oblivion.