Identity

The Circle of My Identity

I wondered what this blog post would be about. I figured after Partial Hospitalization that I would dig deep into my past and try to heal the traumatic moments, or at least see them from a different perspective, and that perspective was that my dad was a narcissist. Turns out it didn’t end well. I sent them to him, and he had stuff to do before he wanted to read “a downer” because he knows he and I don’t get along. He knows we don’t see things eye to eye and remembers things differently. I wonder why that is…

Anyways, I want to heal and grow. So I’m going to start at the start of PHP and work through some of what we worked at and see if I can gain deeper appreciation and insight on my own through what we went through. The first day I was there, we talked about identity and what makes up our identity. It was rough for me since I always saw my identity growing up as this giving, spirited child turned into this intelligent kid at school and at church. And that’s where I got my social circle: school, church, and family. That was my identity. And that was my identity for years. If I wasn’t at school, I was at home. If I wasn’t there, I was at church. Half the time I would be reading a book, so my social life wasn’t too social, but the friends I made were mostly at church. My faith was made at church. The facts I knew were from church and school.

The exercise was actually to draw a circle and in that circle to show our identity. I drew two circles because my identity then and my identity now varied so differently. The one now had Paul, my husband, in the middle circle, surrounded with a layer of food and drinks, because those have been very important coping tools for me. When in my deepest depression, it was the taste of some of the sweetest foods that let me know I was being pulled out of it little by little. Surrounding that was a layer of mental and physical health. I have Major Depressive Disorder like my biological mother did, General Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety, Chronic PTSD, OCD, and most recently dystonia and FND, which is basically pain every day in all parts of the body, nerves, muscles, joints, everything, even with muscle relaxers and pain killers. Tremors when I get stressed or randomly for no reason at all, and blepharospasms, which are when both eyes blink, or worse crush shut for seconds to minutes at a time, again for stress or no reason at all. Extra tension in the body too. And that’s the gist of dystonia. Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) is a fancy way of saying that nobody knows why this type of dystonia happens, but you’ve had some trauma in your past and symptoms are made worse by your stress or happiness or any high emotional level, so you just need more therapy and physical and occupational therapy to beat it and your symptoms can be “managed”. 

Pushed to the outside of my circle of identity now are morals, values, spirituality, memory, worth, social group, and work. I don’t know when I will be able to work again, and I was raised that productivity and worth were tied together. If you weren’t contributing in a useful way, you were being useless. Therefore disability made a person useless. I’ll talk more about that later. In the big wide open space between the nucleus and the things being pushed to the edge is room for a personality which I am trying to figure out who I am. I know I like helping other people. But even after knowing that it comes from walking around eggshells most of my life and always needing to hold my family together and not set someone else off, I still feel a desire to help people in some way. I feel a strong sense towards both justice and mercy, which in a lot of cases are opposites, so I’m still trying to figure out how to sort that out. People have called me insightful, but I feel like I’m always studying to keep up in conversation and have to rehearse to be able to speak what I want to speak, and it takes me a while to process and gather my thoughts, and most people don’t want to take the patience to listen to me. Even now I have guilt telling me I’ve made this post too long, so I will continue in other posts. Thank you for reading!