Split Ends
Non-Fiction by Jill M. Talbot
I don’t know how to tell this story so I’ll start at the end. It is raining outside and I am sitting with my cat. It is Sunday, June 2nd. It’s only natural that the present is the end. Now that the facts are out of the way we can get to the meat. I don’t know if I’m ready for this. It all depends on which voice is currently in control. I hope it’s someone who can write and who doesn’t hate me. It is difficult to manage all of these voices. We are learning to work together.
I don’t know if this is a good idea. I’m already lost and I just started. Maybe I need to start at the beginning.
In the beginning my parents asked for a Moderately disabled child. I asked my mom if that was me and my twin and she never answered the question. In the beginning there were a lot of questions.
Once I had pink Barbie underwear — I was in my early twenties and I got it from the Women’s Resource Centre in Nanaimo when I was in the shelter after abandoning/losing/ forgetting my clothes in Vancouver.
The first time I did heroin I didn’t know what I was doing.
My twin and I are Geminis so there are four of us.
I was valedictorian in Grade 7.
I had turtles named Tim and Tom.
I once told a man I couldn’t fuck him for money because I had to go practice the clarinet.
I once took an ethics course for somebody else. In the massage parlour my name was “Jo.”
The confession you really want from me I don’t have. Perhaps it exists and I simply don’t have access to it.
Believe me, I’ve tried to uncover it.
I’ve uncovered as many clues as I can.
Dissociative Identity Disorder used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Trauma prevents a child from forming a distinct personality and instead splits into various parts. I’ve been in and out of denial about this for decades. I don’t remember when I first realized that I have DID. I don’t remember much of anything. In the beginning there were only fragments of memories. Being sick somewhere in Europe. Birthday parties with Polly Pockets. Birthday parties with Dairy Queen ice cream cake. Playing with POGS, playing on the trampoline. Being at the US border and being asked by border patrol if this was my father driving us. My sister was asleep. I paused, that pause said everything.
Being asked, “Do you find my questions funny?” by a doctor when I had an ear infection. I didn’t mean to snicker. My mouth filling with blood when my brother took my chair out from under me. Being forced into musical theatre. This is all I remember from the beginning. That is a lie, but I can’t share everything with you. I’m not there yet.
I’ll go back to the beginning. I was born Shelly McCuish in St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. My mother was sent to psych and my twin sister and I were sent to foster care. Then we were adopted and became Jill and Anna. The voices are all interrupting each other. They get threatened going back so far. They don’t want to fall apart, or to be reminded about how everything fell apart — sometimes those are the same thing.
Denial is not a river was put on the whiteboard in rehab. I just froze for a minute. Some voices get angry when they are edited or removed from a story. Stories are supposed to have beginnings, middles and ends but this only has split ends.
Let’s start over. In the beginning our mother made us pink and blue bracelets which were later lost. She wrote us a twenty- two page letter we never received. She died before we were allowed to meet her at age nineteen. In the beginning I was Shelly and my sister was Pomme. In the beginning I have to believe that not everything fell apart. I need some constraints here, I can’t be too free. Maybe the end hasn’t happened yet. In the middle I promised my friend that I’d never do heroin. That’s what they call foreshadowing. The truth is that heroin saved my life. It became my best friend and shielded me from the darkness. It took over the beginning, middle and end. It was a warm hug on a cold day. The hot chocolate commercial got it wrong. Now I want my old friend back.
In the beginning I learned to write by holding my pencil like a knife. Psychoanalyze that as you wish. In the beginning there were Spice Girls and pink bubblegum. My friends and I would walk together to the corner store like a gang. We would put ourselves in boxes and knock each other over. In the beginning I didn’t know there were voices, I didn’t know that until the very end — the last of the split ends. Other words for voices: parts, personalities, alters, fragments, identities. Some voices never grow up, some grow up at twice the speed. In the beginning I was there, trust me, I wish I wasn’t. Sometimes having DID feels like having a superpower. More often it feels like having a curse. That’s all for now.
I used to save the lists of items that came for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the psych ward, as well as the hospital bracelets, as if I needed proof that I had been there and what I had been fed. To be honest, I actually miss hospital food. I have been to rehab three times, detox twelve times and the hospital, too many times to count. This is me trying to stop everything from falling apart. Maybe if I don’t say it it never actually happened. Maybe if I say it out loud it will stop haunting me. Maybe (probably) nothing is that simple.
I’m on extended leave, which should be called never-ending leave. It basically means I’m certified, but not in hospital. Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a box, that comes from the movie Gia about a heroin-addicted model. I need to stop acting like writing is a scavenger hunt and the end will bring me some sort of redemption.
In the beginning I was Shelly. In the beginning there were no voices. I wish I could stop everything from falling apart, as if trauma is a snowflake you can catch in your fingers. But trauma is not a snowflake, it’s a fucking wrecking ball.
But back to the story, the non-story story. I don’t know how many voices there are. I froze again. But the point is…I don’t know what the point is. I was hoping that I would naturally finish that sentence if I just tried to start from the beginning… you see why I have problems? I’m starting to lose my junkie identity. Some people say I can’t say junkie. Who are those people helping?
The part that identifies as a junkie is different from the part that does the craving. When I’m on heroin I don’t need to identify as a junkie, I am nothing and nobody when I’m chasing the dragon. I don’t know what I would have done with- out it. With enough boxes you can make almost anything.
In the beginning there was a hole in my bedroom door. Someone taped cardboard over the hole, no one said a word about it. My sister wrote, “yay Jill is special” on the cardboard. A Garfield cartoon with a wrecking ball was my personal touch. No one could criticize what we put there without acknowledging the hole’s existence so we were free. That small cardboard square was our freedom. Eventually it was just cardboard.
The next time I was free I was in a shelter in Nanaimo and in my twenties. It is 7:24 pm now. I reference the time when I don’t know what else to say or do. I need to clear my head. I miss smoking cigarettes. I miss smoking heroin.
Don’t kill yourself until you have a book, a guy from rehab told me. Soldier, he called me. He had been a real soldier.
Did the war fuck you up? I once asked him.
No.
Did being out of the war fuck you up?
How did you know?
I know you.
But the voices were here first, they were here before addiction. First I was addicted to self-harm. Before self-harm there was trauma. The scars are on the inside, one counsellor said in response. But clearly the scars are on the outside and inside. Self-harm is an eviction notice for what’s inside to come out. My scars speak volumes.
I hear voices. I still don’t really believe that. I hear voices, getting warmer. Writing is a sort of dance sometimes. The truth comes out twirling. The truth does gymnastics. The voices applaud. This is all we ever wanted.
DID prevents stories from being told as a beginning, middle and end. DID puts everything in a blender.
This is my story blended.
Blendy is the term used when multiple alters are fronting and it’s not clear where one ends and the other begins. Fronting is being in control of the body. I never know who’s fronting, I just know that there’s one who smiles a lot. I don’t know why I’m telling this to you, not everything needs to be explained. A lot of people don’t believe DID is real.
I used to joke: Do people with DID make good writers?
I don’t know, what do you think?
It depends on who’s holding the pen…
I don’t know how to capture the voices sometimes. They used to come out in writing frequently, now they stay in the head. I’m in the middle of trying to convince a friend not to join Scientology. I feel less alone because this is something I would do. Believing DID is real stops me from doing things like joining Scientology, but barely. I used to be very against psychiatry, now it’s more complicated. Most of the time I don’t know what to believe. It depends on who’s loudest.
I wouldn’t believe DID is real if I didn’t live with it. Or perhaps my denial is greater because I live with it…
The voices want me to start over. In the beginning there was Nintendo. We played Super Mario and stubbed our toes when we walked barefoot on the hot pavement. We put on plays in the summer. We would dress up to cross the street when- ever a car came up the cul-de-sac. This is the childhood I remember. The childhood I don’t remember is buried in the backyard somewhere.
In the beginning I kicked the wooden slats of the bunkbed that my sister was on. We ate raw spaghetti noodles and iced tea powder. In the beginning I was lied to about my name, I was told the foster family named me because I looked like a shell but actually my mother named me after a cousin.
I’ve never written a goodbye letter to heroin, maybe I should. The other day I heard people say it’s easier to quit heroin than it is to quit smoking. I’ve quit both but I didn’t say a thing, I’m a fraud. Also I think it’s stupid to compare them, they solve different problems and have different consequences.
But what does this have to do with anything?
I wish I could start over — really start over. Summer is difficult for me because I don’t wear short sleeves. The heat is sticky, the heat is radiating. And it’s only getting started. Tomorrow I will have three years clean.
My favourite thing I heard in detox was: All of that bullshit over a fucking loaf of bread, a guy said when Les Miserables was on the TV.
I miss institutions sometimes. Lots to write about.
And yet, the last hospitalization lasted for four months and I wrote nothing about it, not during or afterwards. Same for the group home and supportive housing which came after.
I don’t know how or why but I lost the ability to write. This essay could prove or disprove that, I’m not sure.
I wish the voices would tell me what happened, what really happened. I can handle it. Maybe there’s no end because I’m not ready for it. Maybe my stories don’t have plots because my life doesn’t. I am on a constant roller coaster. A writer friend says it’s like I’m living in a Kafka story. I just want to live in a normal story. The voices all have stories but not names. I’m afraid that if I name them they’ll become real. I’m afraid they’ll become stuck in place like concrete statues.
Some people say you can’t say “normal” but they change the words without doing a thing to change the subtext, and then expect to be patted on the back for it. Stigma is more complicated than that.
DID is not a superpower, it’s a mindfuck.
In 12-Step meetings they operate on the absurd notion that there is a before and after, that a life can be summed up by before and after pictures, as if recovery were a plastic surgery. As if we cannot be defined by anything but our proximity to drugs.
Once upon a time means in the beginning. Maybe if I go back often enough, it’ll start to make sense. It’s the beginnings that are split.
In the beginning I was adopted. Child abuse, child abuse! my sister and I would chant. We didn’t know what we were saying, only that those words held power.
I stopped wanting to be a writer when I no longer had a way to find any power. Then I wanted to be something like a business woman. Then I wanted to be nothing at all. By the time I became a junkie I couldn’t care less. That’s a kind of power also. I could hurt myself more than you could, and I would prove it. When my counsellor started getting my parents to punish me for self-harm I really wondered what the logic was. Why was no one else getting punished for hurting me?
I started taking handfuls of pills. Not to kill myself but just to get sick. I usually didn’t tell anyone what I had done and I hid my illness. I don’t know how I survived everything, to be honest. Maybe DID is a superpower.
I’m tired of going backwards. Now I’ll end with the ending again. It is 8:17 pm on Saturday, June 15th. Tomorrow I will have three years clean. I don’t know what happened but I’m here, goddamnit, it deserves being repeated again and again
— I survived. We survived. That’s all for now, take care, I’ll be thinking of you. All of you.
Take that cardboard and build a home. »