Daydream's Over

The Dream Jar is moving again.
After we found Clarence everything closed up for awhile. Nothing was fixed, nothing healed, but for a short time it stopped bleeding. I could at last get some rest. It looks like that time is over. Got to start moving, shift terrain, dig things up and get my life back into gear.
Already things have started churning up. Things I'd thought were hidden away, safe from view. Most are hairline fractures, flashes of memory so quick that I don't have time to register them, but there are more complete ideas thrown into the mix.

A pool, full of leaves.
Roadkill.
"Don't test me, little girl."
A certain hand motion, my right arm swinging inwards and downwards, fingers clapping together.
Skin touching skin. Holding hands.
Someone standing behind me.
"Ella... may I kiss you?"
A woman, tied down on a table. I'd hoped that one was gone forever.
The violent episodes I used to have at night. I forget the name I had for them, but they remind me worryingly of seizures.
Hands scratching at a wooden door in the darkness.
A plastic shed.
Lips touching beneath a tree. Oh God, I'm having an affair.
The day my back was slashed.
"I can get one of my dad's condoms if you like."
Trying very, very hard not to scream.
Crying.
I have no idea what it means.

I hate that I'm so weak. I hate that I always need someone. I've survived so much, there's no reason I can't be the strong one. But whenever someone needs my support I always let them down. I'm never strong enough. If I can't hold up myself, I can't hold up anyone. I hate it because I know I'm supposed to be better than this. I'm supposed to be powerful and noble and... and fucking able to help people...
I'm not who other people need me to be.

I've been living on my own for awhile. Not letting anyone else in. You'd think I'd be used to it by now. I just don't completely trust anyone any more.

The headaches are getting worse. So is the pain in my chest. It feels like there's something there that has no right to be inside of me. I want to vomit it up, slit up my chest, tear myself to pieces to get it out.

What I'm terrified of more than anything else is that I really am just making it all up. I don't really have a disorder, nothing ever happened to me as a child, the things I've seen nothing more than the products of a deranged imagination. What if I'm normal?
As a child, I always wanted to be special. The best one. One of a kind. So when I failed to become anything other than another student my mind... twisted itself. Maybe I want to be dissociative because that makes me "special". Maybe I want to have been abused because that justifies the way I think. Maybe I just tell myself I try to hide everything because it makes me sound like less of a petty, self-obsessed attention whore.
My psychologist has failed to give me any form of diagnosis. Those around me are clueless. My memories are inconclusive. Even those who recall their past selves, I read, find their memories so distorted and refigured that they don't even slightly resemble the truth. If my subconscious is as rotten as I fear it is, I will never, ever know if something really did happen to me. It could be fabricated, all of it, every memory, every symptom, every episode.
What would that mean? I've spent four years lying to myself. My whole life up to this point would be meaningless. I'm already scared that no one will believe me. If I lose faith in myself...
If someone could just say something to me for certain - yes, you do have a dissociative disorder; yes, you were abused as a child; yes, the demons you see are real - then at least I would have something solid to face. But not knowing, that's far worse. I'm forever searching for evil, something corrupt and rotten within myself to justify the way I am. Because if it's not there... I have no excuses. I can't shut out the rest of the world. I have to live my life as a normal person, with normal responsibilities. I could be the person I know I should be. All this might be just my excuse.
But if I am everything that I think I am, then such paranoia will only destroy me.

In the library, every day now, I retreat into an isle and pull Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse off the shelf. I don't sign it out, and I don't sit at a table to read it. I don't want anyone to know that I'm looking at it. Reading about SRA victims, all the terrible things they endured - the acts themselves, living for years with suppressed fear and guilt, having to remember it again, never knowing for certain if their memories are real - I felt nothing. I tried very hard to feel nothing. Not a muscle on my face moved. But every few minutes, I, who have not cried at anything in over six months, had to wipe the tears from my eyes.