I've caught myself monitoring my thinking, not easy for someone with a Dissociative Disorder, but it happened. I was dismayed to become aware of how many dozens of times, in any given day, that my thinking took me to the old times of daily childhood abuses.
Today, I found myself clapping after completing a trip to the grocery store and filling the cupboards. I spent the better part of my childhood hungry...very, very hungry for days at a time. I'm haunted by the memories of hunger. I wonder if I'll ever accept that there will always be food in the house.
I'm frozen. So much more I was going to write, however, that last paragraph has me going in all directions.
Since I have Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD, I wonder a) how many of my different parts or different people, as I call them, suffered with the irrepressible, unmitigating and gnawing hunger? In order to derail this train of thought, will I have to address it with each alternate personality, one by one? Or is it possible to strictly address the feelings and emotions around starving and would that somehow filter down or through all the various alters?
Starving, hmmm, that's a word I don't like to use. The word is a trigger that elicits the old memories. That tells me, in my 20 odd years of therapy learning, that I need to further explore this item.
Starving is cruel. It's body betrayal. Your body is begging for something it desperately needs and there is no way of fulfilling that need, as a small child.
I want to run...away from this topic, this writing...the memories and this insane wanting to examine them.
Ah, another clue that I am on to discovering some dirty faced, unpleasant and heavily suppressed thoughts and feelings. Run, dammit, run, stop.
Discomfort, high discomfort and unsettling distress. Part of me wants to run; to keep that door shut and locked away behind the heavy, burlap, dark curtain of denial, whilst the curious warrior of me, that breaths to heal peers her eyes, flashlight in hand...wanting to know, to solve this vexing problem. An invisible challenge of wills. My physical symptoms of high anxiety tell me that I am oh, so close to learning something...something important, painful and hidden.
Starving, being hungry for hours at a time, opening the cupboards and eating crumbs, uncooked and stray spaghetti strands...no, that's the story I always say. The feeling, the physical sensation, the growling pit, the weakness of having a body that needs, needs, needs and it hurts, viscerally, hurts the mind, the spirit and the heart...hunger is utter, undisputed helplessness...there is no running from it. It doesn't fit neatly into a box or jar for the shelf...It Didn't Go Away!!! To nap, to sleep, when I'd walk or read or play, the Pain of Hunger Never Went Away!!! If I slept hungry, I awoke hungry. If I walked to school hungry, there was no distracting from the discomfort. I couldn't wish it away.
I hated it! I hated it! And I couldn't fix it, couldn't make it stop or even calm down at all. Hunger was an untamed beast that consumed me to the point that I couldn't focus on anything else. It was such a needy, constant companion. I just wanted it to stop and go away and it wouldn't, it couldn't. I need food and I had none. I needed money for food and I had none. God, I hated being alive and starving!!!!!
I envied birds that ate worms and crows that feasted on garbage. I stole lunches from other kids; took snacks from the teachers lounge. I tried finagling ways of getting invited to classmates house cause I'd hope they had food there.
Nope, still no big mystery solved. I listen; I feel. My thoughts race trying to distract me from the truth...from the truth of...things I would eat that shouldn't be eaten...
I ate other people's garbage.
At school, I'd linger so that is be the last one out. I remember watching the other kids dumping their leftovers. As casually as possible, I'd reach in and snatch a sandwich crust, half eaten apple and, if lucky, a cracker or homemade cookie. Then I'd hightail it to the restroom, shut the stall door and eat whatever morsels I'd gathered.
I was so embarrassed, deeply ashamed of what I was doing. I felt guilty, stealing like that and hiding. I couldn't let anyone else see me. Couldn't let a teacher catch me cause then I'd be in big trouble...no one was supposed to know, or so mom taught. Hunger was something to be ashamed of. Stealing was just as bad.
In the summertime, you could find me perusing the garbage cans at the local park we played at everyday. Weekends were the best with leftovers from picnics and family get togethers.
(Hangs head. Deep, deep sigh) I used to look forward to trash day when the streets were lined with garbage cans. I'd find excuses to not walk with my siblings, so that I could find something to eat. I loved...sigh, just read that...I loved finding the rare garbage cans as most people used trash bags were I lived. Picking from cans was relatively easy whereas finding an open trash bag wasn't. Sometimes I'd just look at a bag to see the different shapes the exterior made. Pizza boxes were always worth the risk of opening up. I scored probably more than half the time on getting crusts or a stray pepperoni.
It makes me queasy to think about...to write about...to admit...the depth of desperation...to lower myself so, all in the name of hunger. God I was so hungry.
Hunger isn't like a bruise that slowly starts to fade and lessen in intensity..just the opposite; it got worse with each hour.
Going to sleep hungry was the worst. Knowing that in the morning I'd wake up even more consumed.
I was a garbage eater. That is the thought, the memory that I was hiding from myself.
Now, my stomach turns, my eyes fill with water and I'm filled with the sense of, for lack of better phrase, being a low life.
I was just a kid. A hungry, starving kid and I did things to survive, ate things that were highly questionable, dug through others garbage and I'm filled with...humiliation and even regret. Desperation forced me.
Sigh, yeah, I'll get other this...at some point now that I know what it is.
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