Unmapped Miles
(Having grown up with abuse, I reached the point where I wasn’t satisfied to spend the rest of my life seeing myself as a victim. I wanted to get past the traumas and shames of childhood to something better. Not content to be a mere survivor, I decided to set my sights on becoming an over comer.
The following piece of writing is Part 1 of my account of the discovery that my abuse resulted in Dissociative Identity Disorder (what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder.)
You might as well face it: you are many. Inside of you resides a wealth of talents, abilities and longings.
Deep within you lies a metropolis of your own making, peopled with personalities only you could have created in the privacy of your own mind. An architect of sorts, you have built this underground world with your own blood, sweat and tears. You have done this to survive the outrageous thievery of groping hands.
And now your own hands grope like a stumble-bum in the dark, in search of the dim light at the end of the tunnel. Hesitating (for do you truly want to find that light-or rather, dare to hope against hope that it exists?), you stumble across an oaken door deep within a gloomy forest with the cryptic letters DID chiseled deep into the weathered wood. Beneath its brass handle, worn smooth from centuries of hands big and small grasping it as much for strength as for admittance, a rusty keyhole gapes a mute welcome.-but excited—acknowledgment of the rightness of those monolithic letters.
Squinting, your face takes on a slide show of expressions: puzzlement, resentment, indignant denial, and the first inklings of a subdued
Fumbling for your leathery backpack, you swing it around and toss it to the ground, then balance on your haunches while rifling through its contents. Your journey has been long and hard; you have not undertaken it lightly, nor have you turned to the right hand or to the left, but plodded ahead step by weary step, whether your path led through mountainous terrain or dismal valley. The elements have not been kind to you; neither have the forces of evil knocking you about at whim…but this has not deterred you. You’ve cried salty tears, which ran into the split of your chapped lips; you’ve limped along on feet swollen and blistered; you’ve slept under bridges with the other homeless, (some of them homeless for the same reason as yourself); you’ve gone days without nourishing food, months without a nurturing word from friend or stranger. Indeed, you have often fancied that you were all alone in this lunatic quest you seem to have engaged in—but a quest for what?
Frowning into the depth of your backpack, you heave a huge sigh of frustration, and your hand (weak though it is from decades of giving giving giving and rarely receiving more than crumbs in return, or cramped from staving off thieving hands) grasps something coldly metallic. You excavate an over sized key from the bottom of the backpack, and hold it in your open palm for inspection.
Your hands, rough and chafed from the rigors of survival, warm the metal as you turn it over and over, staring uncomprehendingly at its reality. You can’t recall when it first came into your possession, or how you knew to hunt for it deep within the womb of your backpack; you seemed to know instinctively that it was there silently offering its services should you ever choose to use it.
You glance from the key to the gaping key hole, and experience such a jolt deep within yourself that you blink in surprise. Could this possibly be the fit for which you’ve been searching most of your life? Your mind sifts forgotten memories which suddenly surface, memories of futile attempts to fit this key into other keyholes, keyholes which if labeled would bear names such as religion, marriage, motherhood, friendship, alcohol abuse, and so many more that you can’t even begin to recount them all.
Rising to your feet with a bewildered excitement, you clutch the old-fashioned key with such intensity that it bites into your palm, but you hardly care—it is the good kind of pain, the kind of pain which lets you know you are alive and on the verge on an enormous self-discovery of such magnitude that this moment, this breath, will forever be etched in your memory and heart.
Your faltering footsteps are like an old woman’s shuffle, for you are bone-weary from all that it has taken you to arrive at this point in time. As you hesitantly approach the door, key still biting into your palm, your form sways, and you nearly swoon with exhaustion and a lifetime’s accumulation of disappointed hopes. You think, as you near the oaken door, that you cannot take it this time should this turn out to be one more such aborted hope. You resolve, I won’t let myself hope this time, but something inside of you does just the same, something sounding oddly like a foreign voice (but you’ve heard it before, or was it merely a dream? So hard any more to distinguish dreams from reality!) You think, something is wrong with me that my perceptions are so jumbled, but still you move forward. This you do, you move forward.
(Part 2 to follow)
LoriSmaltz
Amazing to what extent the mind(with a mind of its own) will shelter an individual from. I understand how it is, to later realize things. it is really a shock when it materializes, i think. Hard to describe, however your attempt is successful, not everyone can describe these things.
I certainly encourage you to continue on this path! xox Lori