essays

Big war between the part of me that wants to be loved and the part that wants to get free. Hard for them to even share one body. I mean that literally. 

“Masking” makes the process of hiding your disability sound clean and simple– you construct a disguise and slip it on when the situation calls for it. That hasn’t exactly been my experience. Rather, when I was a kid, I took garden shears to myself and lobbed off all the parts that made me unloveable. This was a violent, unconscious process. And you have no idea how well it worked. My PDA became virtually undetectable. I was a straight A student, a favorite child, a kid who always had friends. I think this is the secret to making your mask successful: Flesh and bone, even mutilated, is much more convincing than paper mâché. 

I still wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve learned that the matter that makes up a soul can’t be created or destroyed. The parts of me I cut off didn’t fall away and die. I just became two selves. One who existed for others, and one who was full of rage. Thing One got real used to being endorsed, admired even. Thing Two got nothing. No human connection, no daylight. She’d come out at night and stare at the ceiling. She’d talk at me during the day, from the back of my mind. “I don’t want to be here. I can’t do this. I want to kill myself. I wish I could be a person.” Psychiatrists labeled these pleas intrusive thoughts. I didn’t know she was there so I couldn’t disagree. 

Then something shifted. When I was twenty two years old I hit burnout, and I got the opportunity to sit in my apartment alone for a year and a half. Day in and day out, no external demands and no contact with anyone. For the first time, Thing Two had a chance at a life. It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced. Getting to know her. Her getting to know the world. For many weeks we experienced agoraphobia. Couldn’t go outside to pick up groceries without experiencing a panic attack. I don’t know if that was because of the burnout, or because she’d never been around people. We got in the habit of going for walks at night when the streets were empty, and she responded well to that. We talked to each other. Filled eight or nine journals. Grieved. I got to know the full extent of my PDA— how opposed I really am to everything. 

Now I’m twenty four, staring down the barrel of adulthood. I know about the different parts of me, but I don’t know what happens next, or how to decide. The different parts have different priorities. Different abilities. Thing Two is tortured by my family, but Thing One doesn’t want to be an orphan out there in the world. Thing One wants to believe we can make a living the way everyone else does, but Thing Two knows it isn’t likely. Thing Two wants to speak her mind, but Thing One is still afraid of the negative attention we might get. Oftentimes, Thing Two says she doesn’t want to be a part of society at all. But I can’t quite imagine myself as a homesteader. 

So it’s a bit of a mess right now. We’re at each other’s throats a lot. So that original act of internal violence begot a lifetime of internal violence. 

So it would seem, to me at least, that pressure to be different than what you are can fracture a child into pieces. I just thought you should know.