Yeah, But... Life’s Still Hard

After publishing our Learning to Enjoy Life Again? post last month, we had some lovely comments from people saying how pleased they were for us. It was really nice – and we are happy things are easier, and that we’re managing to do some of the things we used to enjoy again – but our internal response to every positive comment was the same: “Yeah, but…”

There are a lot of buts.

Our world and life are so much smaller than before we knew about our Dissociative Identity Disorder. In spite of the gigs and other things we’ve been doing, we rarely leave the house. We manage not to get triggered by avoiding a lot. Our husband has learned how best to speak to us, and what we need him to do when we’re having a bad day.

We used to have a full life – with work, socialising, and hobbies. We can no longer practise the massage therapy and myofascial release we used to love. We do miss it, but there’s no way we could pretend to be a “normal” person, run a business, do all the admin, see clients, hold space for others in that capacity, and be predictable enough to manage any of it.

We don’t have a yoga studio we frequent anymore. Hot Yoga Commonside was like a second home to us before it closed, almost two years ago. We tried others, but life kept getting in the way, and now we just practise a little at home.

Yes, we’ve managed to make a lot of phone calls lately with the house stuff – but only because Ben really hates making phone calls, and that’s something we can step up for when needed.

The idea of us holding down any kind of job is laughable. Our mum and husband know this – and fortunately we’re in a position where we don’t have to work, thanks to Ben. We also get PIP, which gives us a little bit of independence and allows us to contribute a tiny amount to our household financially.

We need routine and familiarity. We manage to volunteer with the DDA because nearly everyone there has a complex dissociative disorder. And the volunteers who don’t are mostly therapists – people who understand, and who are there to support our community too.

We said we rarely get triggered, and we think that’s true – it doesn’t feel as normal as it used to when it happens.

A recent time was when we answered the phone to the doctors while in one of our safe shops. It was someone who wasn’t happy that we now live outside of their catchment area. We should have changed doctors when we moved, but we wanted to keep seeing the mental health nurse we liked and the doctor who had been understanding. So we didn’t tell them we’d moved – for almost a year.

Anyway, she was telling us that if we ever needed a home visit, they wouldn’t come, and tried to pressure us to register with a doctor closer to where we might be moving. But we haven’t moved yet. Nothing’s definite.

So we got triggered. We were standing in the shop, dissociating and crying, again. We headed to our favourite plant shop and spent an hour there talking with Charlotte, which always helps. (There was Bobby the dog that day too, which helped even more.)

We have our routine: the greengrocer, the zero-waste shop, maybe a charity shop or two if we’ve got the time and energy. And we visit Geoff the goose and her duck friends.

Over a month later...

Over a month has passed, and we never finished this blog post, because things happened and we didn’t have capacity to do so. Since then, we’ve had an assessment for ADHD and are waiting for another appointment in a few weeks, and we went to the Robbie concert last week.

We’ve been wanting to write about both of those things, but had this unfinished, which has been a barrier to other writing – along with countless other things. So we’re calling this done, posting it, and hopefully we can get on with writing things we’d prefer to write.

But it’s by no means certain…