spaz map

Originally published at Basically Clueless.

I learned during my sociology degree that we 'brain map' our social constructs so that we can retain context on all our relationships, personal, social, work, school, etc.

Part of my #brainfail through my life was being unable to retain this ability to remember my own timeline, much less map how I fit in with everyone in a continuous stream of change over time.

I've been working on this for decades, and I think I'm finding a way to piece it together in a working map. In my mind I'm constructing this map in a 4D kind of way, perhaps 5D, since it covers changes over time. In my mind it kind of looks like a cosmic event map in 3D but with an added timeline so that the map model can change by rolling forward or backward in time.

I didn't know most of my life that I'm a fragmented person. They used to call it multiple personality, now it's dissociate disorders of varying degrees. As I've been waking up to my 'selves' and learning to share info among my fragments, as opposed to feeling locked out of my own long and short term memories and confused and disoriented, I've been very slowly piecing together the points of impact or breakage, as it were. It wasn't at all clear, especially since most of the fragments are independent enough to take and absorb life hits on their own, but over time I've been using a free association technique that allows me to 'randomly' tiptoe through my head, and learning to stop and let my 'head' talk back to me. That's more simplistic than it really is. Learning to recognize reality sifting down through simulated materials aka the way we process and retain our memories and then tell our stories back to ourselves has been a meticulous and very sketchy process taking several years, as evidenced throughout my blog fleet.

Part of the challenge has been more than one of us learning to do this and leave trails for each other, sort of like leaving notes or tag tabs for other people in a big project. Imagine working on a very large project over a very long time and never seeing the other people coming and going, and every time you come back to the project, things have changed and you either get a shift change log with not the greatest notes or nothing at all, and you try to pick up where they left off, which requires quite a lot of redundancy. That is what trying to piece together a bigger picture of a fragmented person is like.

For the most part, I'm very stable nowadays, rarely switching back and forth. And I can tell nowadays when I do because of the headaches. When I get sharp stabby headaches out of the blue that dissipate just as quickly, sometimes with a sick dizzy feeling that also comes and goes just as rapidly, I am dealing 'on the fly'. For years I would fret that those feelings meant something horrible in my body, like illness or stroke or whatever, but now I know it's simply a high stress moment being taken over by another part of me that can better handle a situation. Sometimes I'm cognitive of sharing space and sometimes I'm not. Most times I retain most of those memories, but they can get a little blurry. It's like I'm there but sitting on the sideline taking a break.

"I" is not always the same person. I figured out awhile back that we take turns writing in blogs, sometimes paragraph to paragraph and even sentence to sentence. Even when I had no clue this was going on, we were all chipping in together. Writing seems to be the way I talk to myself, or share my head with me. Many times I've gone back through blogs and read things I don't remember writing, or sections that seem surprisingly 'other person' chiming in. Any of you who've read through a lot of the old stuff probably saw sudden continuity breaks and just thought that was poor writing, lol. Well, I'm not a poor writer. We just don't all agree on when to stop talking, apparently.

So this summer I have figured out more of the free associating feedback, and it feels like the others are becoming a little more open to being stalked 😂, so we all seem to be building a common map together that helps show us where we all fit with each other.

In my mind, I was explaining to a fictional figure in an ongoing alt life reality (some might call it a dreamscape or storyboard) that a few key mes were like epicenters during fragment events, and they became their own color families. I think that explains the pinkybluejacky thing, and why Jacky is stuck on which color of blue is the best, azure, cyan, royal, or sky. Lately we've noticed that soft mint and rustic orange together seem to strongly evoke memory fragments, as well, so however an event cracked that current local landscape at the time, they evidently got color mapped. I realized a couple of decades ago I am synesthete and seem to map many things in my life around hex charts, including blogs, and that each color family strongly attracts or repels other parts of me. We seem to be socially grouped. The blue/pink treaty involving Jacky and Pinky happened a long time before I became cognitively aware of the significance, and now I recognize it as a shaky alliance between the two strongest personalities who fought for control most of my life and finally settled into sharing enough space to stabilize. This settling happened with my second marriage to a very patient and forgiving man who doesn't make a big deal out of my weirdness (this is where men emotionally ignoring women can come in really handy), and now nearly 3 decades into this marriage, I'm finally getting a bigger picture mapped out.

The actual traumas are incidental and fantastically boring to me by now, plus they've been written out all over my blogs, so I'm not going to reiterate anything. I do recognize that Janika is an epicenter that happened in the '80s, and that was so rough that I lost being able to map a continuous timeline for 11 years. I think all the really significant big stuff happened long before that last one, most of them during my childhood at various points over various very overwhelming events, but the key is realizing that two of the stronger personalities umbrella'd over and took control of successive fragment events. Jacky seems to be a parent figure for a few 'kids', and Pinky is the mom as recognized by other 'kids'. Claudia and Lydia respond and defer to Pinky making decisions and handling things, and since Pinky was universally recognized in my head as the interface with real world for several years, it was probably natural to become cognizant of those fragments sooner than others. Janika seems to be very rogue and is responsible for some of the 11 year messcapades, along with Yablo. From what I can tell, Yablo is a latent mostly nonverbal 'Loki' figure nearly completely disconnected from anything tangibly emotional to the rest, and probably saved our lives a few times during Janika's plunges into various miscreant behaviors. Not sure, but I think Yablo is the one who wakes up during surgeries and drove home during the heavy drinking. Yablo shares space easily enough, but without the emotional connections, the contexts are always sketchy. Yablo was around for a very long time before getting named by one of my sisters. Janika was named by my child when she was 4 years old.

Jacky and Pinky go way back to very early childhood with their own continuous timelines of memories. Janika doesn't have memories before the 80s, making me think that epicenter was from my friend being murdered and then the immediate dissociation for years. Personally, I think Yablo was already around and probably helped stabilize Janika from going over addiction cliffs, but just barely, certainly wasn't out of worry or caring, more like having a friend to pal around with. When I look into those two I can kind of see the switching off. Janika never passed out, ever. It was like Yablo could bypass all that and take over and drive. Those two easily shared space and have common memory trails, so as I've been learning to free associate back into my past, I've been able to pick up on that buddy system between a couple of ne'er-do-wells. At the root of that, Yablo is responsive to Jacky. Pinky and Yablo don't ever seem to cross streams, which may be the bigger cause for memory holes in Pinky than anything. Pinky is emotional, Yablo is simply unattached emotionally, so it's like they are mutually exclusive. Yablo also doesn't fight for dominance or control. Jacky, on the other hand, is very dominating and fought with Pinky for years over control, even though Jacky is flat effect. Jacky may be "the cat that walks by himself" (Kipling), but Jacky does care deeply that things not go off the rails and considers Pinky to be weak when situations get stressful. The only thing Pinky remains strongest over Jacky with is being the mom. Jacky isn't really mom material and probably lets things slide more than they should. Since my first husband and that whole mess came hot on the heels of my friend's murder, whoever was occupying and controlling head space at the time was clearly not being supported by Jacky until the epic control fight that saved my child from that marriage. I'm still not able to access that very well, even though memories come through clearly enough to know what was going on, so I can't help wondering if the 'kids' were muddling through that on their own with a dash of Pinky here and there. I just know my head was such a mess that I couldn't logically think through anything. That was before Janika started drinking, so it wasn't alcohol. It was more like still being in shock, nothing felt that real to me except having a baby. That was real. And the fear was very real once we realized we were very much in danger and that my kid was being so abused.

I can see how and why some people can't see reality around them when they are in bad situations. If they are already fragmented from abuses, the parts of them that recognize it just shut down out of some kind of weird psychological protection. It's hard to wake that up and then do something real about it, especially when danger gets overwhelming.

Anyway, my map looks like an undercurrent of babyhood that one of me calls Sasha for lack of better information, followed closely by a couple of epicenters that cracked Pinky and Jacky (and possibly others) into existence, and then a short few years later Lydia and possibly another, and then another few short years came Claudia. The ages look a bit like baby/toddler, 3 years old, 7 years old, and 10-11 years old. I'm only guessing, they just feel like that. Lydia is the one who started having the witch nightmares, calls them witch-cats, and she never talks out loud when she pops out, but she sees everything. Claudia is the crabby fighter personality who remembers how to kill things, rambunctious and argumentative. Not sure who the 'kid with the bike' is yet.

I have clear memories that go back to babyhood. The memories that we all share before fragmentation events are the strongest. I've been learning to go back in time to before those events occurred, finding the shared memories, and then sorting out the fractures as I slowly move forward. At each fracture event a new part of map emerges, and events with strong epicenters seem to reorganize the continuities into new behavior group patterns. Figuring out how each of my fragments relates to all the others has been a real puzzle, because over time they change, just like relationships do with real people around us.

One thing I've been learning is that just because a personality seems to be latent for a long time doesn't mean they are inactive. They are literally part of a real time brain, a whole, and it doesn't just shut off like a light switch. Even latent personalities can hear, see, filter, and incorporate information into themselves even if they are not sharing cognizant space with other fragments. They may be a little lost in time and confused in place when they do present, but they aren't stopped and started again like a dvd player. Each fragment is part of a real person, and it's rough feeling left out of the loop and suddenly having to deal in spite of a big gap of continuity missing, but that personality being out and active might be a crucial development in dealing with something. Whether we are cognizant of each other or not, each fragment is important to the overall stabilization of the whole person.

Part of mapping some of the fragments into relationships has depended heavily on our willingness to share feelings without self recrimination and even self harm. Jacky and Pinky intensely disliked each other for many years, to the point of sabotaging each other. If you have a disorder wherein you are self sabotaging, you might want to look into a duality playing out that is seeking common ground. You may not be fragmented as such, but you may need some kind of reconciliation therapy. It's ok to forgive yourself. That was a very important part of my own processing. Parts of me are OCD level perfectionists, other parts of me are life fail depressionists. That battle between two conflicting personalities only made things worse. Learning to share space with agreements not to inflict insulting judgements and guilts on each other was a huge step, and reaching a place of understanding that the root of that bitter fight all along was Jacky loves Pinky so much that Jacky would force Pinky into submission out of harm's way so Pinky wouldn't cry was utterly heartbreaking. That was a real thing, and reaching that place broke down a lot of barriers.

thoughts about George in his broken brain in Sublime (2007)

This is a repost from my PinkFeldspar blog. It's originally part of a movie review, but so much of this section is a reflection on what it's like living through what I call 'brain fail' and 'glitchy brain' that I think it needs to go on spaz blog where other medical posts are collected. If you get distracted and want to see more about this movie in general, you can find it among my #TomCavanaghWatch posts.

This is super random like a writing prompt and not intended to be part of the review, and is especially super spoilery if you haven't seen the movie yet, so go watch it first before you wander back.

I've blogged before about movies / TV shows and characters being how we emotionally connect into stories that we personalize while we deal with or process our own life journeys. The movie Sublime that I have reviewed recently has been one of those uncanny connects for me.

I spent years publicly blogging my own 'mess' of 'glitchy brain' fail that began, in part, in 2004 with what my doctors assumed to be a viral infection on top of years of autoimmune challenges. That is one of the layers I've been processing through. When this happens to an already fractured mind from childhood trauma and a lifetime of PTSD, I'm here to say it can be pretty devastating but survivable.

I'll jump right in. When George asks to be taken on a tour of the broken East Ward presumably under construction, he doesn't realize he's surveying his own brain fail. I've had numerous dreams like this over several years, it really does work like this when you are trying to figure out the problems that you can't see and your brain starts helping you consciously assess internal damage from the point of view of an entity that isn't human like you are, because it's existence is lived as an organ that processes data. Oddly, brains can't just type us notes, so they 'simulate' scenarios. If we break it on down, a brain as an organized entity is itself made up of numerous selves that continually work on construction and vital systems management protocols, like securing and shipping energy and oxygen. When shipping and/or nutrients are interrupted, the entire system can plunge into massive fail.

A brain is a living thing that wants to work properly. Like a machine, it runs automatically without our cognition, but like an AI, it connects to us and talks to us in dreamscapes, riddles, visuals, experiences. Our brains can interact with us as a separate entity from us, yet still be one with us. Consciousness, arguably, is not completely dependent on the brain, although the brain is how our consciousness is able to interact in this world reality we see around us with other people in it.

During this tour of the East Ward, George chances upon a room full of files, a sort of archive of information. It is organized but the version is outdated, a hard copy backup of a digital system. He finds his own file with his name on it, and in the very thick file he sees hard copy of many organ and tissue assessments. This is literally what the brain does, in one sense. Our brains know everything conceivable about what goes on in our bodies, that is their job. When there is brain disconnect, or fail, that information can stop being updated, or even be lost, and the brain automatically fills it back in with real time information gathered from what we'd think of as diagnostics. I went through this when I went through central nerve fail and memory glitching. I could feel this happening. Sometimes it was painful, most of it was maddening from a conscious aspect. I didn't know what was happening, but over time, with very patient inner communication, I was able to consciously piece together my own archive of thoughts and reflections about what I was experiencing as my brain was working on healing.

Let's talk movie clues.

When George is arguing with the care team (in his mind, since the IV bag fluid is milky white), the date on the file he found, according to the medical lawyer (a brain perspective trying to share information to his consciousness), was Feb. 29, 1947. That was not a leap year. (That had also changed from what he saw originally.) But there is also a name connected to that file that George thought was his, that actually of George Spelvin, if I heard that correctly (I could be wrong, I suck at transcription). If this is the case, then the pseudonym and nondate are key clues, along with the unidentified bandaged man that George thought he saw murdered, are really himself as an empty slot. The file contents are his own brain content being interpreted, the file identification shifts between the time he discovers it and later argues with the medical lawyer. His 'evidence' is slippery, and his brain is filling in the lawyer's words with substitute answers. Is his brain updating in progress, indicating more loss? Or is this like a dreamscape where hope plays tricks and information is slippery anyway? In any case, his brain itself is aware of loss, but communicating that into his consciousness isn't easy. George is in full fight or flight mode by the time he seizes out during his brain slamming another fail simulation at him, his necrotic leg. That scene is a giveaway since necrosis to that extent takes time. The brain is screaming that it cannot find his leg, it cannot connect and assess, but in George's consciousness (in his vegetative state), it becomes interpreted as a diseased and then missing leg.

The mystery of problem solving inside a broken brain can send a person hurtling around an emotional rollercoaster. It's hard. I was very struck by the opening theme by Bird York, Have No Fear. It's nearly impossible not to have fear when your nervous system is part of the breakage. It's like living inside downed wires and massive grid damage when you can't move around correctly or easily speak what you mean. It's like feeling trapped in a maze of confusion, so much fail going on and no way to share the fear in a way that nets back badly needed emotional support. And sometimes that support is so misunderstood in all the confusion that one can only recoil back into solitude. I have thankfully never experienced a vegetative state, but at one point I made the decision to wrap my mind around preparing for the what ifs of a complete communication sever. The intuitive response is to fight, that can translate into combative patient and poor treatment, and I chose to bend my will toward remaining calm, accepting, and pleasant, trusting what I could not trust. That is very hard. (The key to accomplishing this is to, as George found, wrestle one's demons, face the truths inside that we refused to see, and acknowledge our life fail of allowing bad things to happen, very much like a life review.)

Add to all the confusing emotional rollercoaster the jumble of real life still coming at you, the torments and persecutions of judgments from people all around you, whether those are perceived correctly or not. George reliving memories of his birthday party, assuming he was even remembering correctly, was part of the big puzzle, many pieces that needed reassembling before he could cognitively understand how to take action months after a medical accident. To recognize that he had this power to make a decision was a giant lightbulb after so much misery.

One thing this kind of life challenge wakes you up to is information. Information in general from everywhere, everywhen. Time has no meaning when one is compiling information trying to restructure. Sorting things like timestamps comes later. I personally developed an obsession with timestamps because I lost my sense of time. What I discovered was compiled information.

Using twitter as an example, I am unable to keep up with real time linear interaction flow. For a long time I couldn't keep users straight, much less their personal information that made them unique. I learned to use the twitter search bar with keywords and hashtags to pull up a time order for users and particular thoughts, and I was able to remember the timestamps for some reason. I noticed that a person might say 12 different times over 4 years how terribly sick they were, and then at other times say they never get sick. In their linear experience, they might not remember, while they are in a vital healthy phase, regularly picking up seasonal colds that last a week. I could easily pull up their histories and see that while we are in linear experience mode, we are in the moment and don't pull up all the files. Once we step out of linear experience mode, we can see all the files more easily. Well, I crashed out of linear experience mode early in life when I started dissociating, and parts of me are 'research hounds', obsessed with finding and knowing information for various reasons. Add a 'brain crash' to that and I felt like I simply dropped out of humanity synch with world time. I used social medias like twitter to see the rhythm and try to slide back into it (like jumping into an ongoing jumprope game, perhaps). I'm still not very good at that and eventually let go of trying to keep up in real time. I live in my own real time now.

We cannot explore all the files this way until we step back from in the moment reacting. George tries to react in the movie, but he's lost his moment and can't find the way back to that moment. He's stuck on a moment unaware that months of time have been passing, trying to problem solve what went wrong with very minimal access to information. He can see the broken parts, and he can see the diagnostics, but he can't see how he himself fits into that.

What he didn't expect to see were the jagged details of collected memories exposed in the brokenness, his demons, if you will. Evidently, George was very aware of the political divergence going on around the world that supported his real life success. He was aware of the human abuses going on that supported capital gains in his world. He chose not to 'see' them while he was in the moment. He believed he deserved his success because he had earned it himself. Likewise, he had chosen not to really 'see' or be cognizant of how his wife was feeling. The simulations are valid communications about his fears and feelings and situations, but since he cannot translate them logically, they create panic. His fear grips him and then all he can think about is feeling trapped and wanting to escape.

I can say that level of vividness is very real with 'broken brain' stuff. It's catastrophic to realize we are stuffed full of information that we don't even know we have. All our brains are absorbing all the things all day long. Good things, bad things, all the things. We might consciously choose to focus on our own interests as the days go by, but that doesn't mean all this other information collecting going on constantly is being deleted as overage. It's all still there, and it's all important. Why are things we ignore important? Good question, especially since humans seem to universally experience compelling life review phenomena.

When I see George really noticing these political atrocities among his jagged broken East Ward, I see him realizing the reality of what hadn't been real to him, real people, real lives affected in the kind of life he had been constructing for himself. Whether they were actually fallout from his own financial decision making is probably beside the point, because who could know that. In general, however, there was a connection, he knew it was all connected, and he chose in his linear in the moment life to not see those connections. He turned away from taking responsibility. That this is affecting him so much in the dreamscape simulations is a very strong hint that he went out of his way to stifle these feelings in his everyday life. He stayed busy making money, probably nightcapping his way through his marriage after long days of wheeling and dealing. I can't judge since I don't know, but it's looking like the rude awakening after the brain fail was a seething pile of guilt he managed to lock away for years.

How one heals from a broken brain, assuming one has that option (like me), can involve a very deep dive into cleaning out one's soul. Pulling everything out of the closets of the mind, sorting through it all, repacking and organizing- this is all inherently part of healing when a mind scatters into pieces after the structure crumbles. Restructuring is rebuilding. I think at one point I compared it to reassembling a building piece by piece out of the original materials without a blueprint after it had been blown apart. That was so many years ago I can't find which blog I wrote that on.

:edit: Found it. "Like someone reconstructing an earthquake smashed mansion brick by broken brick without a plan, I am reconstructing my brain today. Like someone who lived in that mansion, I know I lived in my brain, and I know it's all still here. So I glitched again, so what. It's not gone. I just have to go over all the little connections and see what needs to be plugged back in." Dec. 27, 2012

Having our consciousness interrupted from illness or injury is a terrible thing. I compared losing my intellectual capability to beautiful people losing their good looks to some calamity, which we all know can be very devastating. I became very dumb and spent years crawling back from that. I consciously could not logically piece together my own history. I've had to wait while my brain heals bit by slow bit.

In George's case, there was no more healing. Nothing more could be done to cross back into the 'real' world of linear in the moment with his family. He had healed just enough to become minimally aware that he had a choice whether to stay or leave. Whether he was truly cognitive of his family around him is unclear, and as messed up as his awareness was anyway, we'd still only be guessing at what he truly was aware of at the end. However, he did seem, inside his head, to be aware enough of himself to reject remaining in that state. Even on life support he managed to 'escape'. There would be no way to measure if he truly did that or if his brain just stopped working, since he was considered to be effectively medically unable to ever respond again.

I could be like Fangoria and talk about Sublime's "health scare plan", but I'm not going there. I do think it's valid, though. Click to go check out issue 261 published on 9-28-19.

silence condones, part 1

This is a very long post, but it's a huge truth reveal in several parts. This is not the first time I've written about these things, which can be corroborated with other timestamps elsewhere, so if you see this published anywhere else without my name on it, it's not with my permission.

Since so much is coming to light with underground anons and odd news items starting to break the surface in mainstream medias about how prolific sexual abuse is across politics and entertainment, which seems far away to many of us and therefore not really 'real', I've been thinking about bringing the focus closer to home in the way of personal experiences.

This is a mental health issue. For the nation, for every state, for every city and town, for nearly every household. Definitely for the world. The statistic when I was working on my masters degree in college was three of every 4 people are sexually abused by the time they reach adulthood.

I was personally not traumatized sexually as a child (that I know of or remember, backed up by how ridiculously naive I was about sex right up to adulthood), but I'm surrounded by people in my own household who were. What I'm sharing here is an example of how closely this touches us all, how blind we can be to this being all around us. This is important to grasp because, as a nation hanging on to the 'news', we might find ourselves feeling pretty rattled over the next 6 months as dark information comes to light. This is nothing to be ashamed of. We have all been trained en masse to cover up secrets. Society protects its own, and unfortunately, high ranking society isn't immune from some very dark secrets.

Part 1

I was a virgin when I married a pedophile. I had no idea what that even was. I was in a bad place emotionally after my best friend was murdered and I managed to move forward in very narrow tunnel vision. I was not aware during my 4 years of marriage to this pedo that his nieces and nephews had been accosted, that incest was rampant in that family. There were hints and the usual red flags that never quite came out saying THIS HAPPENED, and I was very normal looking past those because I didn't understand them due to my lack of experience.

My first hint was an old doctor, who was doing my first ever pelvic exam, literally pulling my husband into the exam room while I was still in stirrups to show him I was still a virgin several months into our marriage. I had been feeling pretty sick and apparently was riddled with STDs. In spite of this obvious evidence, that old doctor practically spat me out the door insinuating I was the bad guy, and I went home crying. My husband was completely off the hook while I was completely lost in what just happened.

I gave birth at a local hospital when I was 21. A patient being wheeled down the hallway, who apparently knew my husband, lost his temper and nearly jumped out of his wheelchair threatening to beat him up, alleging that it wasn't cool to knock up 15 year olds. I confirmed I was 21 and married to him. I was too naive to realize back then what that could possibly mean about my husband's reputation. He was a handful of years older than me, and for some reason I've always looked much younger than I really am. I guess I made an unwitting cover for him...

When our kiddo was around maybe 8 months old, I often found her hiding in odd places being very quiet and still, like by the water heater. Sometimes I wondered how she even got in there. About that time, several other things happened. I got my first taste of spouse abuse to the point of permanently damaging a nerve near my left rotor cuff. (Much later, years of physical therapy finally gave me relief from unremitting pain my entire adult life.) Our daughter also went through a spell of severe constipation. One evening after the initial attack on my arm, during my dissociating pain shock, I heard her screaming in the bedroom and wasn't able to respond. I knew my husband was back there and would take care of her so I didn't worry. It never entered my mind that anyone would purposely make a child cry like that. A couple of weeks later I stumbled across a locked trunk he'd always dismissed as junk from his deceased father, picked the lock, and discovered a wealth of the nastiest porn like nothing you ever saw on retail shelves anywhere, including kids. He was so angry with me when he found me looking through it that I became afraid of him. Within another week I had moved us back in with my parents. I was too rattled to tell anyone.

As my husband started establishing with the county health department that he was unable to work (the scheduled visits all returned negative confirmations of his list of problems, which were obviously psychotically based on TV shows and other people's stories of having a metal plate in his head, a rod in his spine, plastic kneecaps, etc.), I got work and we moved back out again. He watched our kiddo while I walked down the street to a drive-through fast food franchise. A couple of months went by before I found out he was driving all over the county with our 2 year old and a friend of his while I was at work. She confirmed years later that he'd been trafficking her to his brothers and other acquaintances, which explains the weird strangers walking up to my daughter and I during grocery shopping and going on and on about what a doll she was and they'd like to take her home. I didn't have a clue what they were talking about, but it felt over the top and creepy.

During this time, the longer we were away from my parents, my husband became more and more hostile to me at home, he and his friend humiliating me whenever I was off work, kicking my butt with their boots and laughing, which hurt. I was afraid to say much because he always had a black powder pistol on him, within reach, or beneath his pillow at night. He took to watching out the window on nights he couldn't sleep, gun in hand like he was waiting to be raided, and maybe he was. He had also started bringing home other people's guns to take apart and blue, hanging them from the shower rod, so I had to skip showers before work. Eventually a coworker approached me about him stealing their gun and I simply said go talk to him, not my stuff.

As our marriage weirdly transitioned into something out of a TV show, our little girl started stumbling a lot. I started paying more attention, worried that she might have a developmental issue, and caught him tripping her, pushing her, even slamming her fingertips in a door. When he thought I wasn't looking he'd giggle or stomp away mad each time. I grew more fearful because his behavior was so strange. One day I walked in from work and he was peacefully sitting on the couch watching TV while our little girl screamed in the bedroom. He seemed completely unphased. I went back and found her turning colors from screaming so hard, her diaper was soaked through, and when I pulled it open I was extremely shocked to find a long pubic hair in her diaper and she looked a little swollen. With a terrified rush, I realized I had confirmation of everything wrong and quickly changed her before he could see that I saw, because I knew in that moment he was not above killing me. He had accidentally killed before during a hunting trip, according to one of his crazy stories everyone blew off. No one ever really believed that, in spite of his expert marksmanship and obsession with guns. I quickly arranged a babysitter while I was at work and demanded the one car we had, saying I'd lose my job if I were late walking again. I made sure only I could access her and pick her up, all without really confronting him, using excuses and acting dumb. I knew we were both in danger.

I wasn't sure what else to do so I went to a neighbor for help, the wife of an officer in our church. She suggested I stop watching so much TV. I was so crushed that I went home dying inside, not daring to cry openly where my husband could see. I tried to hold everything together for about a month until one of my husband's sisters showed up at the door demanding to know if I was a whore or just stupid, and she was really angry. I knew in that split second I had an ally, even though we weren't friends at all, and told her I guess I'm stupid and I don't know who to trust. She sat with me at a clinic to check my little girl out for abuse, but by then she was healed up and no one was able to confirm. I look back and wonder if she showed up because, with my child being more protected out of my husband's reach while I was at work, maybe her children were more at risk from their uncle.

One of my big unmistakable clues that the danger was rising was when he walked in one night, held a stolen rifle to my head out of the blue without saying anything, and didn't move at all until I rolled my eyes and turned around and ignored him. He held that position about ten seconds longer and then lowered the rifle and stomped away down the hallway without saying a word. My heart was thumping really hard but I didn't cry or act freaked out or anything from that moment onward through the rest of our marriage. I knew his crazy head meant it and somehow I called his bluff. If I had reacted at all, I have no doubt I would have died that day. I think he was really pissed because he hadn't had access to our daughter.

After that, I knew I needed outside help as soon as possible. I went to the health department and asked for a referal to a specialist for my child under the guise of developmental issues. I was still so naive that I didn't understand when, instead, they suddenly confronted me about the faint bruises that were nearly healed on her arms actually being cigarette burns (I'd grown up in a nonsmoking household and had no idea cigarette burns could look like that and argued that my husband just gripped her too tightly) and they said they were going to take her away immediately. I negotiated hard and fast, saying I'd have my husband out of the house within a week. I was so fortunate they were slack enough to allow me to leave the building with her. I quit my job that very day and asked for help from a lawyer who went to my church. He helped me map out a legal plan to get my husband out of our lives without rocking the danger boat. First he helped me file for legal separation on the spot, the rest would be waiting a few months for that to pass through court uncontested, and then hopefully proceed to divorce without visitation, and a big part of that sliding through successfully would hinge on not pursuing child support. It would be tricky, a long game, but he defined the goals and coached me how to behave to reach those goals.

After that visit with the lawyer (quite a lot in one day!) I picked my daughter up from daycare for the last time, telling them I quit my job, then went home the rest of the day. I was so glad my husband wasn't home when I first got there so I could set up a play area and get ready to face him. He walked in about an hour later after his friend dropped him off and was very surprised to find my daughter and I both home instead of at work and daycare. I explained to him that I had taken our daughter to the health department for stumbling so much and they were going to take her away on the spot, and here's where being brave gets really hard, and since I've lived it, I believe it when other people say how hard it is to get out of bad situations. I had to lie straight faced and act convincingly naive to a man who was already abusing me and had showed ample evidence he might hurt me very badly or even kill me. I babbled on how I couldn't understand what they were talking about, but I said ok and quit work and said I'd be staying home with our daughter myself and they'd come check on us in a few days, and within a few minutes he was packing, saying he needed a break. I never found out if he thought he might be caught for child rape, but I played stupid and nice and signed the car title over and told him come back when he got his stuff figured out. Once he was out of the house, I started packing myself and moved back with my parents. After that, it was a game of legally baiting him to out himself as a psycho while he signed away custody. He wanted visitation, and on the advice of my lawyer I insisted on a psychological assessment with the condition that he must sign a release for me to visit with the psychologist afterward before he could see her.

While I waited for that to roll out, I did take kiddo to see her daddy one time after he got a place in town, mostly so I could confirm how he was doing. He took me on a tour of the backyard and the house while she played, and didn't seem at all phased to walk me right by an unmade bed with a big pool of not quite dried blood across the sheets. There was no way that was someone's period. I nearly had a panic attack at how blatant that was, how unaware he seemed to be about that affecting anyone. I told him he got lucky, it was a nice house, and he seemed proud of himself. Once we got back to the livingroom with kiddo, he almost started slavering, insisting I go shopping and he could babysit. I laughed and said no, I'm not shopping today, but I brought you the rest of your things, which he seemed happy to see (they were really more of my own things, including his favorite record albums), but then started pressuring again for me to leave for awhile. I rattled on while I ushered our daughter out the door, down the little lane, through the gate, and by the time we made it into the car he was hostile. I don't know how he refrained from putting hands on me, maybe because we were so visible while we were outside of his house. I just kept playing really stupid and got away.

He complied with the request to talk to a doctor at a mental health center, and I was able to visit with that doctor in private another day. From all accounts, that doctor believed everything my husband said, but I had come prepared. I expected that because everyone believed him about everything except when it was something 'ridiculous' like accidentally killing someone, which he didn't bring up with that doctor. Everyone really believed he had suffered through terrible things and horrible surgeries and had a metal plate in his head, a rod in his spine, and plastic kneecaps, including this doctor. The doctor even felt sorry for him, telling me it was a pity that he was unable to work. He was very surprised when I pulled a stack of papers out of my purse, and I started asking questions. Did he tell you when we got married? Yes, he did, and the doctor read the date from his meticulous notes. I laid our marriage certificate on the desk so he could see the date was wrong. Did he tell you our daughter's birthday? Yes, he did... I laid the birth certificate down. I asked question after question and laid down paper after paper. Every single fact my husband had told that doctor was wrong. I made sure that doctor became aware of the health department referral findings about there being nothing physically wrong with him. And when I reached the end of that stack of papers, I put them all back into my purse and said Thank you, that is all I needed to know, and smiled, standing up to leave. The doctor had looked more and more worried through the visit and suddenly seemed very anxious, asking Can you get him back here? He really did look worried, and I hadn't even told him about the guns. And I said, Sorry, I really can't, and I walked out. This is proof that you cannot talk to someone during assessment and know the truth about them, no matter how many professional years a person might have under their belt. This is also proof that my family and neighbors believing my husband's words over my own only shows how naive and gullible people everywhere really are in the presence of a mentally ill person. Society as a whole, in my opinion, is far too trusting. We should all be more aware of our neighbors than saying they seemed so nice and you can't believe they did something that bad when the police come for them.

So, obviously, I was married to a quackadoodle who compulsively made things up continually, confirmed by a number of doctors, and after that I screamed at him that he would never see his daughter again, and he hasn't. All the same, I had to remain very stringent for years watching out for possible kidnap, especially after a niece of his warned me in a phone call that he'd found her school, and she told me a man was watching her on the playground.

None of that helped anyone else believe me about the sexual abuse. Even my own mother called me a liar. So that's a real thing, unless people have literally been through something traumatic or know someone who has, they cannot process it as 'real'. I was alone for years unable to talk to anyone, and ostracized by my church as a divorced woman.

Anyone can be a bad guy and you'd never know it. If someone comes to you asking for help, don't blow them off like they're lying and making up fictions. Never trust anyone with your kids no matter how nice you might think they are, because you. don't. know.

Part 2

You know what, I'm going to put parts 2 and 3 in a follow up post.

A person I know on twitter posts these numbers every single day. I think these are U.S. numbers.

You matter. 24/7 Suicide 800-273-8255 Sexual Assault 800-656-4673 Domestic Violence 800-799-7233 Child Abuse 800-252-2873 Drugs/Alcohol 800-662-4357 Veterans Text 838255 for VA help Trans 877-565-8860 TTY 800-799-4889 Crisis Text START to 741741 for trained volunteers

I also made these links one year on a blog post. They should click out.

If you need someone to talk to right now- *click*
international suicide hotlines
national domestic violence hotline (U.S.)
veterans crisis hotline
24 hour crisis hotline (depression)

If you feel alone and trapped, find ways to let someone know you need help.

Article- Can a black dot on a victim's hand help tackle domestic violence?