The Bitch in My Head
In the natural course of writing out my convoluted trek of/in/to mental wellness, illness, wellness, ILLNESS, WELLNESS…sigh… over the years, I have often identified “the Bitch in my head” as a dominant ongoing player of this nominally interior brainbody squabble. To those readers playing the home game, I mean to explain who She is. Among other things.
Top off your cuppa before you strap in for this one.
I'm sure that you can identify with the idiom “voices in your head”. Examples vie for centre stage, from echoes of things your Gran might have said to the ones that try to convince you to stomp the gas and ram that guy who cut you off in traffic. Where do they come from? I believe our histories have a complex soundtrack. An important section of which contains the reverberations of people who have, for good or ill, spoken into your life to this point. It mostly seems to coalesce into one or two primary tonalities. Usually, the voice is like our own or replicates someone who influenced us tremendously during formative periods. They get about the business of weighing pros and cons, determining the best course or practices. Dispense sage advice, warn of pitfalls. Normal stuff. Then there are other voices, some uglier, even murderous, some painfully condescending, uncompromising voices, some just oafishly glib and flippant that torment more than my beleaguered brainpan.
This is not to be confused with the voices/images/emotions I believe some of us can “pick up” from other people’s bold inner goings-on. We are, after all, I believe quantumly entangled with one another and I don’t think it’s outside the realm of science provable that we could be like radio towers. Each individually broadcasting and receiving our exahertz in a range of changing intensities. But that, that is a whole ‘nother blog…
My primary is very definitely in my own voice, and still, it seems Legion. Vague others chime in from time to time. But my voice seems to be the default setting for the fragments of myself that carved out significantly impactful and complex structured presence over the years. Not quite multiple personalities, just “fractured” I believe is the current term. Voices born out of a multitude of events and environments. Unconsciously they were cultivated seemingly hinged alongside my development of beliefs, hang-ups, hopes, dreams, phobias, politics and anxieties. Each sounding like me though not. Each holding stalwartly to an opinion or vantage point. The Sin Eater, the Artist, the Zealot, the Poet/Philosopher, the Victim, the Child, the Warrior, the Tramp, the Prophet, the Ghost, the Mad One, the Brawler, the Predator, the Trickster, the Lover, the Liar and sometimes the Thief...
I recognize them not being so much ME as they werearewereare projections of what/who I thought I {[(was) becoming}supposed to be]}am bringing into being…
It’s the complex quantumly entangled skein of my stranded core. And there is something wrong with these damn scissors… *bang bang bang* Must instead take the slower less traveled low road and learn to better unravel…
I am learning that when my inside voice speaks fear, violence, bitterness, doubt or any of their evil kin, which shard is playacting “whole girl”. It’s The Bitch; a nasty, mean, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing, self-sabotaging, rage machine that has no love or charity in her shard. Just hostile cynical disappointment fueled by barely surviving hoomanities compulsively antagonistic bullshit. She is the one who uses my mother and father to flog me as a failure. She is the one who tells me I am too fat, smell weird, or my work is boorish, garish and shit. She tells me I am an idiot, I’m fooling myself, I’m not smart enough, not pretty, savvy, fast or consistent enough to succeed even marginally at ANYTHING. I’m surprised she acknowledges I’m successfully potty trained! That’s why I call her the Bitch. She forgives nothing, esp not herself (i.e. ME). She tears me to shreds with her unanesthetized dissections of everything. Constantly overthinking, overanalyzing, and drawing wholly unfair comparisons. She says my best years are behind me, why bother, go back to sleep…what’s the point. And for the last question? She isn’t even listening for an answer.
I used to drink to drown her/them out. Not so much a fan anymore. Bore tainted fruit battered my body and my life. Smoke the reefer now instead. Like bubble wrap for my head. A “Fuck It” buffer if you will, that still allows for conscious critical thought processes and positive physical function. Doesn’t work for all. For some, it’s lavender oil or kava tea. Pick your favorite. Don’t pay me no nevermind. You manage you the best way you can. I’m not a huge fan of most meds having tangoed with big pharma and ended up with weird undiagnosable ailments, a really big butt and teeth fallin outta my head. I’d rather toke up, be a little silly and feel like dancing, then chemically starve, watch my ass grow while shuffling about foggily in the inevitable saturation of a medication haze.
Out of all the voices, I have the most trouble ignoring Her. She is forever stomping around in Her spiked bloodstained jackboots demanding I bow my head to her perfect memory of all my fuckery and the other hooman’s beside… It’s familiar noise, and it soothes a real place in my masochistic brainbody. The place that demands I suffer. That I pay. For what? She’s stopped counting anything but cost. The only future She ever prognosticates is one of Blood Drenched Apocalypse so who cares, and why bother she says with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat of a mouth dipped in revenge and dread. And tho it seems all she does is assist me collecting more scars, I sadly trust her faster as I trust no one else’s voice to be of better motive or in my best interest. Fully aware that I have allowed the marks I carry to act as evidence for Her that I cannot be trusted in making healthy decisions for myself. Must learn instead to reach outside of self. To risk rejection, pain or abandonment, to risk externalized proof of bad choices, even as I risk losing control of the narrative. Because then I court potential! Things like rational objectivity, achievable goal setting, unclouded reason, efficient solutions, loving assistance, shared commonality, social inclusion among many others.
Stalwartly still I struggle, even as events occur (don’t even have to be acute). I gulp down the familiar trauma-toxins and then I; stop answering my phone (went without one for three years at one point). I climb back into bed. I can’t work, I can’t check my mail, e or otherwise. I can’t read or watch the news. Sometimes hiding from social media for months, sometimes hiding from the internet in general for years at a time. Forget any willing engagement with actual fleshy folk… So, overwhelmed by the unmanageable glut of energies manifested by the people group I was born saddled with. I shut down, freeze, go dark. Can barely people. Let alone adult. Unpredictable amounts of time will pass as I process some of the perspectives only born of distance, I purge some toxins almost accidentally. Then after a little more time passes, I begin to unlock. Slowly. At first, I run silent and deep. Skirting the internet’s edges, reading scraps here and there. Cyber creeping on friends and family’s Facebook and such to reacquaint myself with the world I had denied. Then engaging more bit by bit. Like a bizarre turtle-dragony crustacean thing warily stretching and unfolding from the safety of its shell.
I am unfolding myself again now, albeit unsteadily. I know in my Knower that peace is possible.
I have borne witness to others like me. Their snippets of real leaking out from in between the self-congratulatory free trade low fat keto burning gluten-free soy decaf latte duckface selfies. The Survivor stories that are surfacing en masse. The cries of the downtrodden and marginalized rising slowly but continuously. Challenging the status quo with flash floods of vital accounts now broadcast globally. The once silent now demanding their human histories be purged of the deceptions, their communities healed and defended. Cries to be forgiven, rescued. To have value, meaning…All of us crying out to be made Sacred once more.
So what do you do when the mercury that Mad Hatter’s you is inextricably linked to that which is sustaining you; like fluoride in the water, pollution in the air, GMO’s and known carcinogens in the food, gross inequalities in the systems of government, rampant social injustices, base religious abuses… What then? How do you safely navigate the slalom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in this quarrelsome time? Well, I think it means fostering a reasonable ability to recognize that people are imperfect however ideal their intention. That free will is a thing and many do not wield it responsibly. That you have the power to choose. I’m learning that I can tell the Bitch in my head to shut the fuck up. I can say no to another helping of covert misogyny or prejudice. That I can stay home, or I can leave. That I am capable of rejecting #whatis in favor of #whatcanbe. That I can strive to be a good steward of me and my patch of the planet. Knowing that whatever I do along this vein will be mountains better than the 'nothing' that consumed my 'before'. In these, we begin to weave a kind of wellness I think.
Mental Illness (for me) is defined as;
So for those who wear the scarlet mark of “mentally ill” (forced or self-identified) and find themselves struggling with the daily realities of roles like; social/familial outcast, societal drain, useless eater, invalid, disabled, damaged goods, dangerous, unpredictable ad nauseum. Got a secret for ya, it’s all a lie. Your crazy is just yours, so it feels more critical. Everyone carries a damage they are struggling to overcome. Some are just louder, leak more messily or are on fire at the mo rather than just smoldering. But then I believe we are ALL equally mental health consumers with a fluctuating spectrum of need. It’s true that (freakishly), some seem sustained solely by pleasant meme’s, religious drek, popular entertainment and marginal levels of familial/social interaction. They seem to go about their days and nights with rhythm and purpose. They maintain schedules, accomplish goals and they seem to sleep well at night. They even have a five-year plan that includes pregnancy! I think they even have real money in savings. I hate these people. No, not really, but I DO struggle to find commonality with them. Then there are those folks who merely appear the ubermensch. Delighted to share about the fantastic jobs they profess to love, projecting to-be-envied financial stability, exalting in the singular joys of their vigorous social exploits, lecturing confidently around sociopolitical matters, photolanching your feeds with proof of their rewarding family lives. My cynical shard says it’s all Dr. Filter, advantageous angles and well-placed shadows. Chuckling bitterly that it’s either well-crafted social media spin or it’s better living through cult/chemistry and THAT shit erodes reliably over time every time.
Folks simply don’t recognize authentic mental illness for what it is because they bought an outmoded, outdated, and a grossly superficial concept of it as it is socially programmed, ahem, I mean taught academically in our failed capitalist western society. So then average people cannot fathom that they are only ever an acute event away from being caught in holes much like the ones I fall into. I pity them all their wake-up calls but will be peppily prepared with pithy anecdotes to garnish their exposure. I also have put aside barf bags, poise pads, band-aids, sterile gauze, suture kits, super glue, wet wipes and a new roll of construction grade plastic sheeting…what am I missing…
I believe we are an active and dynamic organic refraction of what we have experienced/are experiencing. A spectacular compounded mélange of quantum particles and dark matter that we are only just starting to catch a glimpse of. So much grander than we first imagined, so unmeasurable in possibilities. We are learning that history does not equal destiny and our genetics do not equal potential. We are investigating the rituals for rationale, the teachings for truth and claims for the cause. Yet we tremble on the edge of what seems an abyss of unknown unknowns. I for one am not afraid. Strangely instead, I am excited. Like the way I know you are supposed to feel at the top of a roller coaster about to descend. We are humans being. There’s no stopping the instinctive interchange of our particles in this ever-evolving Universe. And as we humans seem to crave conflict, like a rock tumbler, though loud and laborious, the Universe obliges, and we are burnished free of rough-edged ideation, smoothly radiant in the agitation of it all. All hail entropy! From it is continually birthed natural order! Trust the way you Can become. Silence the Bitch.
I know that this next anthro-social-unfolding we are about to undertake will not advance us far without a skirmish. We are not yet as unified nor amenable a student as I believe we could be. Struggle born of fear is inevitable, and fear of the unknown is normal. But honestly, I think our battle is more against the fear of having been wrong all this time and what that means we will have to take responsibility for or god forbid change. With the battle over our evolving truth, identity and ideals all but guaranteed and all the devastation that entails, tells me that we gotta get about the business of kneeling at those altars, bust out the good incense & light all the candles, align all the chi’s, draw our best sigils, open every heart chakra, go to our prayer closets, dust off the books of shadows, layout extra prayer mats facing Mecca. Whatever we do, it’s all the cushion we are gonna get. Cuz this next learning curve promises to be a steep one and it may cost more than a pound of flesh or idle hands to pay for the ride. Still, I ride.
My mother refers to prayers as “sandbags”. Can’t accurately predict how many will be needed, but more is always better. Could make all the difference in protecting what’s still worth protecting from the Coming Storm.
more later
~e
Top off your cuppa before you strap in for this one.
I'm sure that you can identify with the idiom “voices in your head”. Examples vie for centre stage, from echoes of things your Gran might have said to the ones that try to convince you to stomp the gas and ram that guy who cut you off in traffic. Where do they come from? I believe our histories have a complex soundtrack. An important section of which contains the reverberations of people who have, for good or ill, spoken into your life to this point. It mostly seems to coalesce into one or two primary tonalities. Usually, the voice is like our own or replicates someone who influenced us tremendously during formative periods. They get about the business of weighing pros and cons, determining the best course or practices. Dispense sage advice, warn of pitfalls. Normal stuff. Then there are other voices, some uglier, even murderous, some painfully condescending, uncompromising voices, some just oafishly glib and flippant that torment more than my beleaguered brainpan.
This is not to be confused with the voices/images/emotions I believe some of us can “pick up” from other people’s bold inner goings-on. We are, after all, I believe quantumly entangled with one another and I don’t think it’s outside the realm of science provable that we could be like radio towers. Each individually broadcasting and receiving our exahertz in a range of changing intensities. But that, that is a whole ‘nother blog…
My primary is very definitely in my own voice, and still, it seems Legion. Vague others chime in from time to time. But my voice seems to be the default setting for the fragments of myself that carved out significantly impactful and complex structured presence over the years. Not quite multiple personalities, just “fractured” I believe is the current term. Voices born out of a multitude of events and environments. Unconsciously they were cultivated seemingly hinged alongside my development of beliefs, hang-ups, hopes, dreams, phobias, politics and anxieties. Each sounding like me though not. Each holding stalwartly to an opinion or vantage point. The Sin Eater, the Artist, the Zealot, the Poet/Philosopher, the Victim, the Child, the Warrior, the Tramp, the Prophet, the Ghost, the Mad One, the Brawler, the Predator, the Trickster, the Lover, the Liar and sometimes the Thief...
I recognize them not being so much ME as they werearewereare projections of what/who I thought I {[(was) becoming}supposed to be]}am bringing into being…
It’s the complex quantumly entangled skein of my stranded core. And there is something wrong with these damn scissors… *bang bang bang* Must instead take the slower less traveled low road and learn to better unravel…
I am learning that when my inside voice speaks fear, violence, bitterness, doubt or any of their evil kin, which shard is playacting “whole girl”. It’s The Bitch; a nasty, mean, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing, self-sabotaging, rage machine that has no love or charity in her shard. Just hostile cynical disappointment fueled by barely surviving hoomanities compulsively antagonistic bullshit. She is the one who uses my mother and father to flog me as a failure. She is the one who tells me I am too fat, smell weird, or my work is boorish, garish and shit. She tells me I am an idiot, I’m fooling myself, I’m not smart enough, not pretty, savvy, fast or consistent enough to succeed even marginally at ANYTHING. I’m surprised she acknowledges I’m successfully potty trained! That’s why I call her the Bitch. She forgives nothing, esp not herself (i.e. ME). She tears me to shreds with her unanesthetized dissections of everything. Constantly overthinking, overanalyzing, and drawing wholly unfair comparisons. She says my best years are behind me, why bother, go back to sleep…what’s the point. And for the last question? She isn’t even listening for an answer.
I used to drink to drown her/them out. Not so much a fan anymore. Bore tainted fruit battered my body and my life. Smoke the reefer now instead. Like bubble wrap for my head. A “Fuck It” buffer if you will, that still allows for conscious critical thought processes and positive physical function. Doesn’t work for all. For some, it’s lavender oil or kava tea. Pick your favorite. Don’t pay me no nevermind. You manage you the best way you can. I’m not a huge fan of most meds having tangoed with big pharma and ended up with weird undiagnosable ailments, a really big butt and teeth fallin outta my head. I’d rather toke up, be a little silly and feel like dancing, then chemically starve, watch my ass grow while shuffling about foggily in the inevitable saturation of a medication haze.
Out of all the voices, I have the most trouble ignoring Her. She is forever stomping around in Her spiked bloodstained jackboots demanding I bow my head to her perfect memory of all my fuckery and the other hooman’s beside… It’s familiar noise, and it soothes a real place in my masochistic brainbody. The place that demands I suffer. That I pay. For what? She’s stopped counting anything but cost. The only future She ever prognosticates is one of Blood Drenched Apocalypse so who cares, and why bother she says with a barbed wire wrapped baseball bat of a mouth dipped in revenge and dread. And tho it seems all she does is assist me collecting more scars, I sadly trust her faster as I trust no one else’s voice to be of better motive or in my best interest. Fully aware that I have allowed the marks I carry to act as evidence for Her that I cannot be trusted in making healthy decisions for myself. Must learn instead to reach outside of self. To risk rejection, pain or abandonment, to risk externalized proof of bad choices, even as I risk losing control of the narrative. Because then I court potential! Things like rational objectivity, achievable goal setting, unclouded reason, efficient solutions, loving assistance, shared commonality, social inclusion among many others.
Stalwartly still I struggle, even as events occur (don’t even have to be acute). I gulp down the familiar trauma-toxins and then I; stop answering my phone (went without one for three years at one point). I climb back into bed. I can’t work, I can’t check my mail, e or otherwise. I can’t read or watch the news. Sometimes hiding from social media for months, sometimes hiding from the internet in general for years at a time. Forget any willing engagement with actual fleshy folk… So, overwhelmed by the unmanageable glut of energies manifested by the people group I was born saddled with. I shut down, freeze, go dark. Can barely people. Let alone adult. Unpredictable amounts of time will pass as I process some of the perspectives only born of distance, I purge some toxins almost accidentally. Then after a little more time passes, I begin to unlock. Slowly. At first, I run silent and deep. Skirting the internet’s edges, reading scraps here and there. Cyber creeping on friends and family’s Facebook and such to reacquaint myself with the world I had denied. Then engaging more bit by bit. Like a bizarre turtle-dragony crustacean thing warily stretching and unfolding from the safety of its shell.
I am unfolding myself again now, albeit unsteadily. I know in my Knower that peace is possible.
I have borne witness to others like me. Their snippets of real leaking out from in between the self-congratulatory free trade low fat keto burning gluten-free soy decaf latte duckface selfies. The Survivor stories that are surfacing en masse. The cries of the downtrodden and marginalized rising slowly but continuously. Challenging the status quo with flash floods of vital accounts now broadcast globally. The once silent now demanding their human histories be purged of the deceptions, their communities healed and defended. Cries to be forgiven, rescued. To have value, meaning…All of us crying out to be made Sacred once more.
So what do you do when the mercury that Mad Hatter’s you is inextricably linked to that which is sustaining you; like fluoride in the water, pollution in the air, GMO’s and known carcinogens in the food, gross inequalities in the systems of government, rampant social injustices, base religious abuses… What then? How do you safely navigate the slalom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in this quarrelsome time? Well, I think it means fostering a reasonable ability to recognize that people are imperfect however ideal their intention. That free will is a thing and many do not wield it responsibly. That you have the power to choose. I’m learning that I can tell the Bitch in my head to shut the fuck up. I can say no to another helping of covert misogyny or prejudice. That I can stay home, or I can leave. That I am capable of rejecting #whatis in favor of #whatcanbe. That I can strive to be a good steward of me and my patch of the planet. Knowing that whatever I do along this vein will be mountains better than the 'nothing' that consumed my 'before'. In these, we begin to weave a kind of wellness I think.
Mental Illness (for me) is defined as;
any mental state that interrupts or stymies positive progress around your quality of life.
So for those who wear the scarlet mark of “mentally ill” (forced or self-identified) and find themselves struggling with the daily realities of roles like; social/familial outcast, societal drain, useless eater, invalid, disabled, damaged goods, dangerous, unpredictable ad nauseum. Got a secret for ya, it’s all a lie. Your crazy is just yours, so it feels more critical. Everyone carries a damage they are struggling to overcome. Some are just louder, leak more messily or are on fire at the mo rather than just smoldering. But then I believe we are ALL equally mental health consumers with a fluctuating spectrum of need. It’s true that (freakishly), some seem sustained solely by pleasant meme’s, religious drek, popular entertainment and marginal levels of familial/social interaction. They seem to go about their days and nights with rhythm and purpose. They maintain schedules, accomplish goals and they seem to sleep well at night. They even have a five-year plan that includes pregnancy! I think they even have real money in savings. I hate these people. No, not really, but I DO struggle to find commonality with them. Then there are those folks who merely appear the ubermensch. Delighted to share about the fantastic jobs they profess to love, projecting to-be-envied financial stability, exalting in the singular joys of their vigorous social exploits, lecturing confidently around sociopolitical matters, photolanching your feeds with proof of their rewarding family lives. My cynical shard says it’s all Dr. Filter, advantageous angles and well-placed shadows. Chuckling bitterly that it’s either well-crafted social media spin or it’s better living through cult/chemistry and THAT shit erodes reliably over time every time.
Folks simply don’t recognize authentic mental illness for what it is because they bought an outmoded, outdated, and a grossly superficial concept of it as it is socially programmed, ahem, I mean taught academically in our failed capitalist western society. So then average people cannot fathom that they are only ever an acute event away from being caught in holes much like the ones I fall into. I pity them all their wake-up calls but will be peppily prepared with pithy anecdotes to garnish their exposure. I also have put aside barf bags, poise pads, band-aids, sterile gauze, suture kits, super glue, wet wipes and a new roll of construction grade plastic sheeting…what am I missing…
I believe we are an active and dynamic organic refraction of what we have experienced/are experiencing. A spectacular compounded mélange of quantum particles and dark matter that we are only just starting to catch a glimpse of. So much grander than we first imagined, so unmeasurable in possibilities. We are learning that history does not equal destiny and our genetics do not equal potential. We are investigating the rituals for rationale, the teachings for truth and claims for the cause. Yet we tremble on the edge of what seems an abyss of unknown unknowns. I for one am not afraid. Strangely instead, I am excited. Like the way I know you are supposed to feel at the top of a roller coaster about to descend. We are humans being. There’s no stopping the instinctive interchange of our particles in this ever-evolving Universe. And as we humans seem to crave conflict, like a rock tumbler, though loud and laborious, the Universe obliges, and we are burnished free of rough-edged ideation, smoothly radiant in the agitation of it all. All hail entropy! From it is continually birthed natural order! Trust the way you Can become. Silence the Bitch.
I know that this next anthro-social-unfolding we are about to undertake will not advance us far without a skirmish. We are not yet as unified nor amenable a student as I believe we could be. Struggle born of fear is inevitable, and fear of the unknown is normal. But honestly, I think our battle is more against the fear of having been wrong all this time and what that means we will have to take responsibility for or god forbid change. With the battle over our evolving truth, identity and ideals all but guaranteed and all the devastation that entails, tells me that we gotta get about the business of kneeling at those altars, bust out the good incense & light all the candles, align all the chi’s, draw our best sigils, open every heart chakra, go to our prayer closets, dust off the books of shadows, layout extra prayer mats facing Mecca. Whatever we do, it’s all the cushion we are gonna get. Cuz this next learning curve promises to be a steep one and it may cost more than a pound of flesh or idle hands to pay for the ride. Still, I ride.
My mother refers to prayers as “sandbags”. Can’t accurately predict how many will be needed, but more is always better. Could make all the difference in protecting what’s still worth protecting from the Coming Storm.
more later
~e
Damn, little one!
ReplyDeleteYou keep on with this and it could get messy, eh?
People are listening.
Keep talking.
Love you.