I am sick to death of being portrayed as unstable by the writers and producers of our entertainment vehicles. I am not unstable. I am not a basket case. And I am not insane.
I am a victim of abuse and of a society that cares more about protecting the image of perpetrators than of protecting the innocence of children. As a child, I was powerless. My spirit was crushed. My emotions were locked away. In order to survive, I had to fit into the mold I was given. In order to fit into the mold, I had to cut away parts of myself. I had to pretend to be someone I was not. I had to live a lie.
Liar. That's yet another label from my childhood. I am not a liar.
I was an imaginative child. My life was intolerable for me, so I escaped into fantasy. At times, my fantasy life crossed over into the "real" world through the stories I would tell other children. My parents eventually heard about my stories and I was punished for lying.
To this day, my family still considers me flaky, dishonest, untrustworthy -- a failure. When my employer treats me with dignity and respect, I never know how to respond.
Last night, while flipping through the channels after the husband and kids were in bed, I recognized a scene on the USA network. I had seen the program before, but this time I watched it with new eyes. A woman was found murdered and the main suspect was her daughter who just happened to have a "split" personality. The daughter was portrayed as sort of a Jeckyl and Hyde type of psycho. One personality was an angry boy who wanted to make everybody bleed. I guess he was supposed to protect the other one -- a girl who belonged in a padded cell, from all indications. I was furious by the time the program ended. The girl, of course, was innocent, but everyone from her family to the cops that investigated the crime treated her like a big joke.
A few weeks ago, on a local newscast, a doctor was accused of sexual misconduct with one of his patients. This is not all that shocking these days, but this doctor was a chiropractor and the patient had multiple personalities. You can imagine the puns and the tongue-in-cheek reporting that story got.
I am not crazy. I am not retarded. I am not ...
Enough of what I am not! I am a mature, self-sufficient, gainfully employed female with above average intelligence and a past she would just as soon forget. I can love and I can cry and I can reason; I am alive. I am alive because I survived. I am a survivor because of my ability to dissociate from reality. I am a child of God.
I do have problems, but no more than the next middle-aged woman with three kids and four grand kids and a husband and a full-time job. I have days when I am stressed to the max. I have days when all I want to do is run away. I have days when no one understands me, especially my husband who just can't reconcile himself to the fact that I'm not a mind-reader. He also has a problem with my not being able to remember some things he tells me. He is a skeptic who wouldn't believe in DID if he had it himself. But then I have days I wish would never end. Like the day I had all of my grandchildren together under one roof for the first time (after one of them had been in foster care for two months). And the day I led my son to the Lord on the way home from revival.
I guess what I'm trying to say is I want to be accepted as a regular person, not shunned or given special treatment or ridiculed as an oddity -- a sideshow act -- a weirdo with all these people running around in her head.
I just needed to blow off some steam today. And for once Corrie actually allowed me to use the computer. Will wonders never cease?
Maggie M. McCullough
8/20/98