Circles and Circles
Heidi's Story

"Monsters are the best most wonderful things
...you have to fight for your right to have a monster."
~Tori~

...And once you know what that's all about, you can destroy them.
 

---

Hi! I have recently updated my story and where I am at with what happened. Please read on.

This is kinda like the preview to my story ( a type of disclaimer, even though I have nothing to disclaim)   I don't remember a lot of what happened, but what I have remembered I am working through. I am currently in ending-process of therapy with a wonderful therapist and I am learning about the parts of myself that were formed in order for me to survive. So you don't get too confused, I'm going to give you a brief synopsis of what Dissociative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder (DID/MPD) is. I really hate the whole diagnosis-labeling  thing, but if you had to categorize me, I guess that's what you would call it.

DID/MPD is what happens when severe abuse occurs during childhood. Not everyone who has been abused forms DID/MPD, but everyone who has DID/MPD has experienced some form of severe abuse.  What generally happens is that the abuse is too much for someone to handle, so the person creates "alters" or other parts of themselves in order to deal with the abuse. Different parts are formed in order to keep a person functional.  They allow a person to survive. Certain alters are formed for certain situations and come out when faced with that situation.  It becomes a coping mechanism that is ingrained in the soul and takes surface in physical form.  Some alters know about others. Some don't.  A good site for a whole lot more information on DID/MPD can be found at Shattered Selves.

For me, a system was formed whose main purpose was to keep what was going on a secret. A lot of people don't believe that DID/MPD exists. All I can say to that is that this is my reality. I am not ashamed of it. I see it as the most creative way for me to survive what I went through. My daily life sometimes gets overwhelming. I "lose time" to these other parts of myself, and I get frustrated because I don't remember a great portion of my life. But I'm learning what they have to say, and sometimes I hear them calling me and telling me their stories. Sometimes I just want to close my ears to them because they tell me a reality that I have denied for a long time. But to do that would be denying myself, and I've done that for too long.

Ok, so it's time for me to update where I'm at. It's been a few months, and the changes that have happened inside myself are changes that I never expected to see happen.

I believe that I have finally done much of the healing surrounding what my neighbor did to me. I do not have to take out all of the emotional pain on myself anymore. I do not believe that I deserved what he did. I do not believe that I was a bad person from birth to have had this happen to me. I do not have to let what he did rule my life any longer. I am not his whore. I am not anybody's whore.

I recently went on a trip to Germany...it became more of a vision quest to find the part of me that died that day that he first raped me. And in the mountains and in the forest, I heard this voice start speaking to me from inside...a voice that has been buried for way too long. And for once, I just shut up and listened. I found myself...I found who I want to be, who I *really* am if I take away the definition of "victim" or "survivor." For the first time, I feel comfortable being called Heidi. I found her; I found me. I see myself now as an innocent, pure and passionate, but with an enormous amount of knowledge on how to survive.

Am I normal? Hell, no. I dont want to be. There is still *a lot* of stuff I haven't dealt with...stuff that happened that really has nothing to do with what my neighbor did to me...stuff that happened that I do not feel comfortable writing down just yet. I always find myself saying "This much simply can not happen to one person in their childhood and they could still be alive and somewhat functional." I find myself doubting my past...and what my gut tells me is true. But I will never be whole if I do not look at these things. Sometimes I am convinced that my self-analytical ways are sure to lead to my demise, but when I come out on the other end of this seemingly never-ending cycle, I am always a bit closer to being whole than I was before.

Perhaps the most important thing that I have learned in the past couple of months is how to live. I am 22 years old, and up to this point, I realized that I have never truly *lived.* Everything has been about survival. Everyday was, "I can not kill myself today. I must get through this second." Now I am learning what it means to LIVE...to breath in life, to enjoy life, to inspire people to love life. It's a hellova lot more fun this way.

You can always go through writing your story a million times, but the reality of what happened never really hits you.  For me, it's always been like someone else's story that I could tell like I could tell you about what happens in some low-budget movie.  But recently, more pieces of what has happened has forced me to recognize that all this happened to me, and that is a truth that is hard to admit.

For a long time, I forgot everything that happened. In the past couple of years, the reality of what happened has come back.  It creeps out at the worst times, and it consumes me when I don't want to look at it, but it is at those times when I am most vulnerable that I am able to attach all the emotions of what happened to the story. And that has been the most difficult part of dealing with this. A lot of what happened has been separated off into different parts of myself. Some people call them alters, some people call it Dissociative Identity Disorder (or Multiple Personality Disorder), but mostly, I just see it as the only way I knew how to keep surviving in a world where I couldn't let anyone know what was happening.

I was 3 years old when my neighbor first raped me. This is the earliest memory I have of anything that happened.  When I was a kid, my best friend was my next door neighbor (his son). I would always go over to their house because he had cooler toys than I did. I'll never forget the first time this happened, although I did for a long long time. I was in my best friend's room  looking for something. His father walked in and asked me if he could show me something. He sat me on the bed and began to unzip his pants. He wanted me to touch him. I didn't know any better, but I remember thinking that for some reason, this wasn't ok. Maybe it was the tone is his voice, or the look in his eyes. But I did as I was told. His wife walked in. That's when it all went downhill. He got angry and starting hitting her and told her she better not say anything to anyone. He threw her out of the room, and I just sat on the bed, not really knowing what to do. He was angry then. After a while, I figured out that bad things happen when he got angry. I'm not so sure of everything that happened, but soon he was on top of me, and I felt like my insides were being ripped apart. I wanted to scream, but nothing would come out. I thought I had died, and I know a piece of me did go away that day.  Everything went black. The next thing I remember is him telling me to get dressed and holding a knife up to my throat and saying that he was in me now; he would know if I told anyone anything and he would kill me if I did. That is a threat I hear repeated almost everyday in my thoughts.

Silence is a funny thing. It remembers threats. It remembers the fear.

My memories of everything that happened are somewhat scattered around. He forced his younger son (my best friend) to watch a lot of what he did. There's blood, there's screams...sometimes, I think these memories are something I make up in my head. No one could be that cruel. No one could do all this. But as I talk to more people, I am beginning to realize that abuse is a reality for many many people. It is just a reality that is sworn to secrecy by those who perpetrated it.

What happened at my neighbor's house went on until I was 9 years old. My parents decided to move out of that neighborhood and into a town 30 miles away. My parent's never knew what was going on when I went to play next door. I had formed parts, or alters, that could act like nothing ever happened, because to them, nothing happened. There was no monster living next  door, just my best friend's dad. This is the way I think I survived.

Time moved on, and by the time I was 13, I had forgotten most of the things that happened. But I was highly depressed, and always running away from everything. My parents blamed it on being a teenager, but no one could figure out why I was more "disturbed" than most of the other teenagers.

I always had in my brain that I was worth nothing, that I deserved nothing, that I was a horrible, bad, evil person. Nothing anyone could say could change that. When I was 15 I got in a very bad relationship with a boy who treated me very much in the same way my neighbor had treated me.  When he wanted sex, he wanted sex, and it really didn't matter how he got it. He called me a whore and a bitch, and basically confirmed all the lies that my brain had been telling me.

Around that time, a friend of mine sent me Little Earthquakes in the mail. LE flooded me for weeks after the first time I heard it. Here was this woman who knew exactly how I felt...I could identify with so much of what Tori was saying.  I think that CD may have saved me from a breakdown that was so quietly approaching.

The memories of what happened when I was a kid started coming back around that time. It might sound horribly cheesy, but if I didn't have the power and magic of Tori's music to show me parts of myself that had been buried for so long, I don't know if I would have ever acknowledged that what happened was not OK. I started thinking that, maybe, I was more than a piece of meat.

I was by no means OK. I was still horribly depressed and suicidal.  Most of the time, the only way to make all of the memories to stop coming was to be drunk or stoned or cutting.  One night, I was at a party where I had been drinking a bit too much. Four boys showed up who weren't invited, and me, being the drunk socialite of the evening, decided to talk to these boys.  I had to get something out of my car and they followed me. The next part is very blurry, but I remember them grabbing me, one of them held me down, and each of them took turns raping me. I remember looking up into the trees and then there was more black.  They stopped when a car pulled up in the driveway near where we were and they took off in their own car. I was left
there and didn't know what to do. The girls I came with found me and took me a rape crisis center. The cops never found out who those boys were.

After that last experience, I started looking at all these situations and began realizing why I kept getting in these situations. I thought I deserved it. I thought I was no more than that. When you walk around thinking that you are a whore and worthless piece of crap, your brain functions a certain way and doesn't let you see all the warning signs like "HELLO! Maybe this isn't a good place to be; maybe this person is not trustworthy." It takes a long long time to reprogram your brain; it takes a lot of
hard work and it's not easy. That's what I'm trying to do right now. And part of reprograming a brain involves going back and looking at all the things that happened. Sometimes, I have to relive it at a very raw, emotional level. It's scary as hell. A lot of the time, I feel like I'm going to lose my mind; that I'm going to die. Someone always reminds that I'm still alive...