My Dissociated Life

So I’m struggling. One of the hardest parts I’m discovering about my brain is that there’s limited energy capacity and it’s not just a case of “do I have energy for this one things I have to do”, but “do I have the energy/time for all the things all of me wants to do” and the answer is always, no.

I’ve been balancing parenting, working, self-care, DID management (things like journaling, treatments, therapy appointments, self-reflection etc), relationships with friends and my partner, and life for a while now and it was going well until I over did it. I can only work part time but I did a few more hours than I should have and didn’t take any reset time.

There’s a 4 year old inside who is always the first to feel overwhelm and because it wasn’t showing up in the way I was used to, I ignored it. I’m used to hearing “too much” and knowing it’s because there are too many big things coming up, commitments and appointments, holidays or trips. But this showed up differently, as “I wanna go home”. I shrugged it off because we are home, but now I know what she meant. She wanted to go to her home, she wanted us to go up to bed, create a nest of stuffies and lay down safely cocooned to reset. I didn’t listen and a few days later she got so overwhelmed we pretty much shut down completely. She cried, we needed a stupid amount of weighted blankets on top of us, and everything was “too much” for a solid 3 days.

I’m out of that now but the weeks afterward have been difficult, trying to prevent her from getting to that place again. I am exhausted. Everything feels slow and heavy, my body hurts, my head hurts and everything feels like it’s too much work. Last night I had to “nest” after work because it had been a long day, which meant nothing got done that needed to, and based on how I feel today, it wasn’t enough. Nothing got done yesterday that needed to, which means today is full of all those things plus all the things today brings like parenting and going out to see friends for Canada Day. I’m still not recovered from Monday, which means Monday’s need for reset spills into Tuesday and then Wednesday too, bringing with it all the things that are building up from all those days.

I know this is a recipe for disaster. That the next time I’ll have time on my own to reset is Friday but that’s 3 more days of juggling, and then the time it takes to recover from 5 days of juggling, then we’re back into the fray. All of it gets pushed until something breaks. And when it breaks, it BREAKS.

Sometimes I get really frustrated with why I can’t just be like other people. Why do I need so much recovery time? Why can’t I just work and parent and have time to myself and be happy with it like other people? Well… because I’m not other people and there are multiple “selves” we need to find time for. I’m not just one person navigating the world but a little community, who’s members have the potential to shut us all down if their needs go unmet for too long.

So here I am, trying to figure out how to carve little moments of reset into the next few days, where I can cut the demands of my day to gain an extra ounce of energy to be squeezed into survival of this week… knowing it’s not just this week but every week.