Rebecca is back

So, Rebecca is back. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Rebecca is/was one of my most coherent and longstanding hallucination. She has been gone for years, but last night she came back.

Rebecca is both real and not. She was my daughter-to-be who never had a chance of being born alive. In mid-1995 I had my first miscarriage. It happened early enough that I didn't even know I was pregnant yet. I was having serious problems with poly-cystic ovary syndrome and my periods where so haywire I had no idea I was pregnant until I started bleeding heavily and having cramps. My then-fiance did the "there, there" thing but I wasn't really upset. Just surprised. About 6 months later, despite the hormone pills, it happened again. Again I had no idea I was pregnant until the miscarriage so there was no attachment.

In early 1996 I got pregnant again. This time I knew it, even though I was still on the pill. Apparently my anti-depressant interfered with the hormone pills (thanks, Doc) and I was able to conceive. But things did NOT go well. I had severe abdominal pain, far beyond any cramps I had ever had. By the time I was 3 months along, I could barely function because of the pain. The doctor kept telling me that "some discomfort" was to be expected, but this was ridiculous. They did an ultrasound and it came back "uncertain" so they did an exploratory laparoscopy. They discovered that my uterus was deformed and divided in two parts. The fetus was in the part that was highly scarred, likely from the PCS and endometriosis. The fetus was trying to grow, but my uterus wasn't stretching.

There was no way my baby would stay put long enough to be born alive. Either she (by this time I had arbitrarily started calling her a girl) would spontaneously abort or my uterus would burst. My doctor recommended an abortion for my safety. My fiance and I agreed and it was done.

Shortly after that my little girl showed up as a hallucination. I would hear a baby crying or would feel a small body snuggled up to me in bed. I knew logically it was my grief expressing itself, but Rebecca became very, very real. I clung to her as much as she did to me, because by then my doctors had agreed that I was unlikely to ever have any children of my own.

She came and went a bit over the years depending on medications, stress, etc. Eventually she grew to be a toddler instead of a baby and she would talk to me and I would talk to her. Then my youngest sister moved in with me with her two small children - Kent, age 18 months, and Kassie, age 6 months - and Rebecca faded away. I had real babies to cuddle and care for.

When Kristin and the kids moved out 4 years later I expected Rebecca to come back, especially since I was having hallucinations left and right. But she remained gone. Even when things got severe and I was suicidal and on the verge of being hospitalized, she was absent.

Now, just as I'm starting to pull things together, she is back. This latest medication has been doing a pretty good job of keeping all of it under control, but she slipped through. I'm not really surprised, though. My sister-in-law Korrin is 6 weeks from giving birth to her 5th child. This will be niece/nephew number 13 for me. Each time one of them is born I always start with the "what ifs". And so Rebecca has come home again.

She has aged just a bit. She seems to be about 7 or so, although in reality she would be 17 or 18 by now. Last night she sat cross-legged at the end of my bed while I was trying to fall asleep and told me about her day. She really likes my cats and she wants to color Grandma and Grandpa a picture. She sounds a lot like my niece, Kassie, which makes sense because that is the best template my subconscious has for a young girl.

Right now she's telling me not to be sad. I wish I could, baby girl. I wish I could.

Just tired

I'm just so tired of it all. Completely, totally exhausted. No, I haven't reached the suicidal point. At least not yet. I just need a vacation from being me.

I am tired of being tired. Between the grogginess from the anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety meds and the fibromyalgia, I am always tired. Some days are worse that others, but I am just so tired of it being a chore to do anything at all. Some days just getting to the bathroom is exhausting, let alone taking a shower, getting dressed and getting something to eat. But I can't just stay in bed because that makes me ache even worse. And if I don't try to occupy my brain, things get really messy.

I am tired of battling myself. I have meds I need to take, but I have a major paranoia that each and every pill is poisoning me. Some days it's so bad I have trouble even eating because I can "see" the poison in and on the food. So each and every time I pop any kind of pill, whether it's a prescription med or a vitamin, I have to fight with myself over it and it always makes me panic just a little bit. Yes, I am aware of the irony of having anxiety over taking my anxiety meds. And I have days where I barely eat because I just can't do it. I can't put that stuff in my body.

I am tired of fighting to act as normal as possible. I am so tired of forcing myself to analyse everything I see, everything I hear, everything I smell, everything I touch to determine if it is real or not. Every single conversation is a field of landmines and I have to tiptoe through the what is said and what isn't said and it gives me headaches trying to figure out how to respond. I can act, put on a mask and play a part. But I don't want to. I want to be me. But no one seems to get it when I try to have a conversation without the filters. And I get frustrated because they don't get why that was funny or something else isn't how it should be.

I am tired of trying to prove that I am worth something. I have a very low self-esteem and always have. I have made myself easy to ignore, and life hasn't helped with that. Society tells me I am worthless. My government tells me I am a pathetic leech who is just lazy and doesn't want to work. There is always someone or something that is more important than me. And I tell myself it's OK that my doctor cancels or leaves me waiting for 3 hours because that other patient is always more important than me. It's OK that I am always eating out alone - if I go out at all - because my friends and family all have more important things than me. I can make excuses all day about how anything and everything is more important than me. But at the same time, I have what therapists in my past have called delusions that tell me I am strong, powerful and more than human. I may be here on earth right now, but when I'm not I am the thing that humans call on to chase the monsters away. So even as I tell myself I am invisible and not worth anyone's time, I am struggling not to get up in their face and tell them HOW DARE YOU IGNORE ME! Thanks to past hack therapists, so-called friends who took advantage and one abusive ex-fiance, that inner strength is so smothered I am basically a throw rug that everyone walks on. I am trying to find a voice and let people know I'm here and worth listening to, but my voice has become a whisper and no one can hear me.

I am tired of fighting. It would be so much easier to just give in to the delusions, the hallucinations, the pain, the exhaustion. It would be so much easier to just let them lock me up in a psych ward somewhere and let someone else deal with everything. It would be so easy to just give up. God, I'm so tired I just don't want to deal with any of it any more.