Edie's View

Edie is not too impressed with the last post - far too adult. So I'm going to post something she wrote last year before my father landed a nail bomb on us! Edie was just coming out at that time and is just feeling now that she is able to come out again. this is how she came into being. I've had to use initials for lots of the parts as they don't feel comfy sharing their names here.

Edie’s story:

            I remember that it was cold in the bedroom after they dropped us off. It was late and very, very dark. They felt cold, the others,  their skin that had burned before was shivery now, huddled under the covers, slightly wet from the hosing down.  There was nobody around. He had gone to the big, dark bedroom next door and fallen asleep. We  were awake. R and S were laid out before me, there eyes dark, sunken in their white bone faces. What they’d gone through was wordless, it sat in their eyes like a black hole, turbulent and raging. By morning it would have mellowed to a stagnant pool of blackness. Well, that’s how Archi describes it anyway - to me they just seemed nearly dead.

I know it must seem weird, me talking about them as if they are not me and I am not them but that’s how it feels.  I was floating above them, rising up and away from them so that somebody was on the outside. What they felt was unbearable, I didn’t want to be in it, I wanted to be on the other side of their skin.  I had to be on the other side of it to help them. I wanted to help them but I didn’t want to be  them.

Eventually they fell asleep. There are others who help us in these sorts of situations. Shush is great at getting us to sleep- she shuts her eyes and it’s like a blanket of anaesthetic settling right around us. Only Nightowl can resist Shush and sometimes she does it with a dogged determination and we sit awake until 4 or 5am refusing to forget.  But I don’t think she knows why she is doing it and we just get very upset and tired.  Maybe she just wants us to remember that there are other feelings even if they are unbearable. This night Shush was still finding her strength and it was a while before we did get to sleep. It was in the time after S and R were laid on the bed, shivering and  before sleep that I realised I was needed. We needed a skin, not the skin we all shared but another skin, on the outside of that. I would live in the space between the first skin and the second skin filtering what came from outside and I would send all the good things inward.

There was no one to comfort R and S. I could see that; no adult was going to be there to hold them and make it better. J (mother) was worse than useless. All she wanted to hear was that we loved him. She didn’t want to know anything else.  He  did hug us sometimes, soothe us and make us feel safe again, but he also made us take the blame. I didn’t like him and I didn’t want R and S or any of the others  relying on him.

I don’t think I planned how it would all work – at least not then. All that I’ve told you was like instinct, the gut instinct of a 5 or 6  year old girl. It’s not a choice splitting away from the main body. It doesn’t work like that. It’s more a survival thing – a child can’t cope without love, without comfort or without a way to change bad feelings into good feelings. Archi knows more about these things than me. All I know is how it feels.

I didn’t know what was going to work to help them but then the next morning as we sat opposite him  in our school uniform befuddled and cold on the inside, I saw the toast sitting on the table. He kept looking at us and S and R were trying their very best to be invisible to stay behind their skin.  The toast was warm and sweet. I knew it would taste nice. The tension of sitting opposite him was getting too much for S and R- they began to be visible, not just in the eyes but on the outside. Tears were coming, they might even begin to tremble or worse still one day they might shout. I grabbed the toast and sunk in my teeth.  The sweetest sensation came over us as it filled my mouth and slid gently down my throat. It landed like a pool of heat in my cold tummy.  I took another bite and another bite – as many as it took to prolong that feeling of being embraced on the inside where R and S were huddled in their broken selves. They were grateful, so grateful for the sweet, buttery lifeline and like a full well fed baby they finally sank quietly away. They stayed on the inside of our skin and we were safe again.

It didn’t take long for me to be relied upon. It wasn’t only S and R that needed me, the others began to seek my help as well. I was really useful for the ones that felt angry – like P and M, S too.  There was nowhere for them to ‘be’. Nowhere at all and somehow we had to make all that angry bearable. The same with CC and GGJ – it wasn’t so simple with them. They had to be good  and accepting of things that really were unbearable.

 I think of our insides  like a rope. GGJ, D and CC for instance are at the end of the rope, very near the surface, the outside.  They are a long way from anger. They are concerned with staying safe – very safe and they don’t rock the boat. They have to swallow lots and lots of things, they have to pretend they have no feelings of their own. They have to do what others want, they have to submit. But if you stand behind them with your back to their back and look deep down inside us you will see the others – A, M, P, S, raging away like mini tornados. They are a problem, they are all a problem I suppose. Children aren’t meant to be the way we are. All split up into pieces, with different jobs and no way of talking to each other. Living without adults. I’m everywhere, plugging holes, soothing hurts, giving purpose and hope. I’m a nurse with no bandages but I do my best.

The hardest thing is that so many of them hate me. They give me their anger and their shame; their needs and their despair and I give them some warm, familiar comfort; a bar of chocolate, a routine of food a chance to forget for a while the pain they feel. I refuse to be starved – I get very angry if food is taken away from us.  It helps them because it gives some order to the chaos, it gives N something to hold on to, to look forward to, it fills up A’s gaping stomach that longs to be touched and accepted. I give GGJ fuel so she can keep meeting the needs of others which makes her feel safer and I offer the angry ones a chance to change their anger into hunger. If they take the exchange I can give them food and they feel full and forget they are angry.

It’s just that those feelings have not really gone away. I am still holding them, carrying them on my back like an overburdened donkey.  Nobody wants me because I am covered in dirty sticky feelings that they all want to disown. I am fat and the body I use is failing. It seems impossible for the others to accept the body; they rage at me for what I have done to it, but really it wasn’t just me. It was them too. If I’m not going to hurt the body then they will have to feel some of their own feelings.