# Journaling, Another Session with Betsy



## starchild (Mar 1, 2013)

So here we go again. It's a new scene but the same scenario. The  therapist assumes many things, but does not know what the heck is wrong  with my brain. I just got back from my appointment at 2 pm. I drove  myself in my new car about twenty minutes to the office. I went two  hours early, because I was nervous about getting lost. So I took my time  buying banana bread and some oatmeal pastries and sat in the office and  read for an hour. I'm reading, "Before I Go To Sleep" by S. J. Watson.  It gave me plenty of inspiration for my session that followed. The story  is about a woman who has amnesia, and keeps a diary hidden from her husband, Ben, in a shoebox. She meets with a neuro-psychologist in  secret as well, who is trying to solve the riddle of her memories.

She can remember for as long as a day before she goes to sleep, then  wakes up with no memory and thinks she's still 29 years old. Her  husband, she dislikes, and he tells her she had an "accident" but the  doctor is perplexed and thinks that something else caused her illness.  After all, retro-amnesia usually doesn't have short-term memory recall  lasting for an entire day. So I'm already on page forty, and it was  quite a page turner. The therapist, Betsy, took me early. We discussed  all sorts of things, like the fact that I was always sociable means I do  not have Autism like she had thought on first impression.

This was only our second session, my last therapist handed me to her  with the remark "Maybe I just don't get you, Gabrielle." I explained to  the new therapist, Betsy, how I am consciously aware of everything I do.  She said that she had achieved that, but it was very difficult, in a  meditative state. I further described that I cannot do anything  automatically. From inhaling, blinking, tapping my foot or blinking, I simply cannot let go. I have to logically trace all order to know what I'm doing next. My dad doesn't even  understand it, and he thinks it's normal me because he's always seen me  this way. I also suffer sleep paralysis and out of body experiences if I  don't take my medication.

There have been a couple occasions where I had an out of body experience  grip me, or sleep paralysis, while wide awake. It was terrifying. My  body froze and I began having a nightmare of being raped. This recurring  nightmare scenario has gone on for over three years, ironically ever  since I was hospitalized at age seventeen for breaking a family  heirloom. The psychiatrist was convinced I had Bipolar, put me on Geodon  which caused or worsened my hallucinations and paranoia. I relapsed  within a week of leaving, by missing a single dose and I walked maybe  fifteen miles into a nearby town. On the way there, I thought that I had died.

I also have amazing long-term memory. I can remember events from age  three to seven, but lately the memories seem to fade the more I pay  attention to them, and re-create themselves. I don't lately have as  vivid long-term memory of my childhood. I feel I've crossed beyond the  need to remember every detail of age seven and onward. My mom has been  diagnosed with Borderline, Major Depression, and even Schizophrenia. I  can vividly recall details of her episodes, where she created false  memories and became occupied with childhood experiences. Such as  believing this thirty year old man she dated when she was seventeen, according to  my father, was someone who was banished by her parents and my dad was  the replacement. She used to write letters, lots and lots of letters.  Now she doesn't write, she drives in circles around town and thinks the  world was stolen from her.

I never had false memories, but I have had hallucinations. Some in the  form of sleep paralysis or nightmares, where my conscious mind seems  split from the subconscious. Or, I'll be in a restaurant, and suddenly  I'm scribbling on a napkin because the people behind the counter are  mocking me, and my thoughts. My thoughts begin to echo around the room.  Usually an older person like in the movie "Red Lights" will jerk up  suddenly, and say "I'm hearing voices" I swear it's like encounters of  the third kind. Unexplainable events happen, things no one else sees  literally. appearing on the mirror. Other things I'd rather not get into  as well. I had a vision of a bandaged and dressed soldier who told me  my nightmares were PTSD related, and that he'd had them during "the  Great War". It was the war to end all wars.

I've saw a man dressed in a red loincloth with golden spirals on his shoulders, tell me I was being attacked by a vampire incubus who preyed  on sexual energy. The Avatar or Angel told me the name in  mythology of what had been attacking me in my sleep. A word I'd never  heard, much like Tir Nan O'gh was chanted to me in the Blue Ridge  Mountains at a girls camp, the African man had a white horse, and went  down to a cave in the jungle to battle and destroy the Tikoloshe. After  that, the vampire like nightmares stopped for two years.

When I was sent to a mental hospital, I learned about lobotomies, losing  white blood cells from medications, that psychiatrists were supposed to  disclose to their patients but covered up, even if fatal. I had visions  of so many things, when I was in full blown schizophrenia, I had a  whole other life. I invented this girl who went to a Christian boarding  school, and encountered all sorts of debauchery, who took vacations to  Virginia Beach, and then settled into a flat the mountains. The visions  became so impractical and dominated my mind. She plagued me, it was  me--but not me. And it outlined a similar life to mine now. Almost like a  premonition of a destined path.

I could easily get wrapped up in conspiracies. In a manic state, or  doped up on caffeine or ADHD meds, I hallucinated a whole bunch of  conspiracies and suddenly my parents were the enemies. Everyone had been  a part of this cold war conspiracy to keep everyone submissive and  subservient to the New World Order. Hospitals were being re-made to  house dissidents, and camps to welcome all gifted individuals or social  activists. The spirit of man, would be split into shells of the past. We  would all be re-made, re-engineered. Forever longing for that one  missing piece that shell of who we were--and the path we were meant to  be on, and God would be re-born in the spirit of salvation. Stuff like  that. Stuff that I could make up, and it would either be plausible or  another good 1984 story.

The brainwashed girl in my fantasies, became the real life brainwashed  girl. At fifteen I was stuck in isolation, but instead of like in my  story--these were not blinding white lights, but it was total darkness.  It was truly torture. There was no way out, I would be  maintained...spirit of life, destroyed. The search for the answer to  civilization, taken. Human beings would breed with Aliens, and life as  we know it--wait a minute, I'm getting side-tracked again. Such is the  life of a schizophrenic woman, forever plagued by her own ingenuity of  creative abstraction and curiosity, believing in the world more than it  believed in her.


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## Kevin (Mar 1, 2013)

This is a fascinating read. Should it be in the 'workshop'? Nevermind.  First off, the descriptions are gripping. There are some concepts which are difficult to grasp. For instance: "autonomously or by sheer force of nature. Everything..." There are some minor errors in grammar, the use of a period, instead of a comma. A break needed between this or that. There were a sentence or two that could/should be re-worded. Perhaps 'placed' for 'stuck' (...in isolation) 'for' instead of 'of' at the very last. Overall, well written, but in need of further edit.


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