#141 Why do I "torture" myself?

    Throughout my life, I have looked for ways to "torture" myself.  Not just self injury; but feeling hate and shame about my body, calling myself stupid at every turn and regularly putting myself in embarrassing and humiliating situations.  And obsessively worrying without relief  until I find myself in a panic and occassionally a firestorm which can only be stopped by self injury. A vicious circle of fear and pain.
    I think it is because when I get to the edge of....I am not going to survive...it triggers "the fantasy." 
    The fantasy that someone out there knows how much I am suffering and knows that I do not deserve this pain and they are getting ready to come and save me.
    Maybe today, maybe in just 5 minutes (if I can hold out for just 5 minutes more) that someone will arrive to take away the terror and stop the pain. I go into my head and pretend that 'help-is-on-the-way'.  Just one minute before I reach my limit (just a second before I die) someone will come.  I won't be alone anymore.  The pain will be stopped.
    This is why I torture myself.

#140 Paranoia?

Will it ever stop? 
Over and over.
"She doesn't like me because...."
"He is going to leave me because...."
I search daily,
to discover the reason
why they are going to dump me.
I will need time to prepare,
I will need time to brace myself
for the inevitable.
Soon,
I will be all alone again!

#139 The Floating Head

(If I had OWNED my body, I would have climbed trees and played baseball; I would have worn nice clothes and learned to dance. I would have taken care of my body instead of neglecting and injuring it. Maybe I would have had pleasure, found love and joy, if only I had OWNED my body.) Rylee

#138 The Same-Body

This is the SAME body
 it bears all the SCARS and the SCARES

The very same body
that was bruised and blistered

It is the very same body
that was poked and prodded by others

It is the same body
that suffered indignities and humiliations

It carries me from place to place,
performs tasks and creates art

But it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me
because
I refused to belong to it.

# 137 There-but-Not-There

   I show up at at social events, classroom situations, ceremonies every time that I am expected. I am there, but not there. I am harmless. I am no threat.
I don't join-in much although I am good at cleaning up afterwards.  I tell funny stories, contribute money, I don't make waves.
   I show up every time because I don't want to be conspicuous by my absence; the whole idea is that I remain inconspicuous; invisible even.
   I show up every time because if I don't I will be truly disappeared. I will be wiped from their consciousness. I will have never existed   again,
   Invisibility is my default mode because my mother indoctrinated me very early in my childhhood that: I am not as good as everyone else!
   I am ashamed of this truth so I try to make it so that no one gets to know me very well so they won't find out.
   In trying not-to-be-seen  as  not-as-good-as-them,  I have settled for
 not-being-seen-at-all.
   (Invisible by default - as a way to hide in plain sight so as not to be humiliated for being not good enough).

#136 A New Way?

    It has always been difficult for me to recognize and describe my feelings.  Now I am getting better at it.
   I have spent much of my life on automatic pilot, operating by remote control from somewhere up on the ceiling.  Now I am doing less of this.
   This mode-of-being has served me well as a survival mechanism. Now I am visiting my body more.
   Up until now, the main point of contact for me and my body, has revolved around physical pain; accidental, pathological or self-inflicted pain.
   If I am returning to my consciousness, I must be returning to my body; and if I am returning to my body, am I returning to consciousness???
   Unfortunately,  I am re-experiencing the pain and panic of my past.
   As a child, my natural defense was to stiffen against the pain inflicted on my body by others. Now I don't know how to defend against the pain I am re-discovering.
  

#135 BOOM!!!

Everything is overwhelming me.
I am too scared and too frustrated and too angry
and too confused to think straight. 
My head may explode. 
Soon there will be a spark that sends me over the edge.
To other people the trigger will seem trivial
but it will send me into panic or rage.
But if I hurt myself, I will feel calm once more.
Self-injury is the quickest way to regain control.

#134 My curse!

My curse is that I cannot forget!

I remember the hurtful things that people say
and all the unintentionally painful things
that people have said to me
FOREVER.

Even as I get older
and I cannot find my keyes
and I struggle to spell ordinary words,
my memory drags up
out of the depths of my mind
what someone said
or how they looked at me months or years ago.

Is it that
what was said is less important
than how it made me feel at the time?
Was I embarrassed?
Was I hurt?
Was I angry?

Is it possible
that my mind could have forgotten the words or looks
had my body not remembered the feelings?
So my memory retains the specifics:
the who. what, when, where
and forever wonders why?

Out of the Borderline Forest
comes this one punishing personality trait...

I cannot forget past injuries!

#133 FOREVER

There have been moments in my life that have become instantly sealed into concrete cells within my body. They crush everything around them.

I was scared, ashamed, abandoned, angry, selfish, or bullied. These feelings solidifed inside myself and apparently, they are forever.

#132 Blame Lifted.

#Fire Science 101

When a forest fire is raging, the experienced fire fighter lights a small, controlled fire directly in the path of the out of control blaze. This fire uses up the oxygen available to fuel the big one.

When I was a kid I was always worried about my Dad. He went away to the hospital 28 times in 4 years. Each time I was terrified that he would not come home again. Sensing the extreme tension in the house didn’t prevent me from getting on my mother’s nerves. The raging forest fire was the real possibility that my father might die and I, the carbon copy of him, would not survive that. He, who I loved above all else, was in constant danger and therefore so was I. A four year old can not figure out how to fix this.
So I lit small fires and my mother raged. The small things that I did to make her angry sucked all the energy from the forest fire of losing my Dad. When the small fire was extinguished, my mother and I both found some peace. My mother needed time to collect herself and my body needed time to heal. The pain was a distraction from the forest fire still baring down on us. The small diversion did not make my Dad OK but it re-directed the enormous energy needed to deal with the chronic fear. As an adult, self-injury would quite literally provide me with small burns to provide me respite.

#130 Battlefield Solutions

When I was a kid, my defence against overwhelming fear and helplessness was disocciation: "I can leave my body. This is amazing. Up here, I am not so scared."

But now that I'm a so-called adult, I often find myself in the midst of a firestorm of fear, rage, despair and hopelessness. The old weapon of disocciation is inadequate. But it does put me ten feet above the battlefield. It is not an escape from the firestorm but it makes it possible for me to bring in the big gun. We each have our own personal weapon of self-destruction that will send the demons back into the closet (for a while). My weapon of choice is self injury.

When I feel like I am about to explode or jump off a bridge, I leave my body to make it possible for me to burn or cut myself. To do violence to your body or your life is a terrible way to manage pain. Only a truly crazy person thinks this is a good solution, but it is a quick one.

#129 Incompetence!

People shouldn't be screwing around instead of doing their jobs! I want the trains to run on time all the time.
Incompetence! people who don't do their jobs make me crazy. I was never allowed to be incompetent, irresponsible, lazy, late, careless or forgetful. My life depended on it. My mother hated me if I was not getting it right!
I was never allowed to be wrong. Don't tell me that people are not perfect; that everyone makes mistakes. At 6 or 5 or 4 or 3 years old...even as a kid I wasn't allowed!
There has been a bomb ticking inside me for ever. A thousand times I have woken up in the morning and said: "Thank God - I put it off for one more day. The bomb didn't go off and I survived one more day.
I want to find that incompetent person and smash their head against the wall. They are putting us all in danger by being sloppy, careless and stupid! I want to kill them...I want to kill myself because I am so far from perfect. I want to kill my self because I never get it right. I smash my own head against the cement wall to drive out the danger.
I don't hear the bomb ticking anymore.

#128 The Explanation Point!

From the day that I was born,
my mother wanted an explanation!
"What's wrong with you?"

I dreaded the day
when I would have to explain...
so, I refused to talk until I was three!

then...
"What the hell are you doing?"
"What the hell are you thinking?"

now...
all these years later,
if I am sad or mad or scared,
I panic.
"What the hell am I feeling?"
someone wants to know.

Nothing. I am feeling nothing.
Nothing beyond the explanantion point!

#127 The Black Hole

I see myself sitting alone on the edge of a huge black hole. I know that I cannot survive being thrown into it again.
In there, I cannot touch the sides;
there is no beginning and no end;
it goes on forever.
So there, at the edge of the black hole, I split in two and abandoned myself.

The part that made her escape floated up to heaven where she could not see or hear or feel or remember....
or sometimes she just climbed into my head where she could fantasize about a place of safety....
and it was there that I learned to control time.
I could be outside time. She would shout, "it will be over soon!" I would project myself forward to a time when, it was indeed, all over!

Left behind, in the black hole, was little rylee. I left her alone, over and over, because I had been where she is now and I thought that I was going to die! I will do anything to avoid experiencing those feelings again. Including abandoning myself.

I will float away to heaven.
I will climb into my head and shut the door behind me.