gosh

 I'm scared. Shaking in my socks.  I have never done this, simply send my innards into the world without control over who sees it.  I even wrote a play in cohorts with another person, and we hand picked the audience.  Well, it was difficult material.  We'd met in a women's crisis hospital.  She, I will call Elb. was already there, and the nurse who was showing me around, attempting to make me feel somewhat comfortable, as comfortable as a suicidal, Post Trauma's patient could be, pointed to Elb.  "That's Elb.  She studied theatre at Williams."  I looked over to the corner, yes in the corner, where a young woman was sitting on the floor drawing.  She looked like the poster child for the Chronically Depressed.  Bringing my concentration to the floor, I attempted to be Haughty.  "I studied theatre at Smith."  That also was a piece in our play.  How we met, what brought us there, and what we hoped for.  Actually the stay in retrospect was awesome, in the light of the women I met.  Incredibly courageous, beautiful women.  I had never worked with a multiple personality, tho I was a therapist.  I met two of them.  An honour to say the least, to watch, to share in their journey of horrendous pasts that brought them to the point of having to create protection in other personalities.  And the fact that one of those personality's is a time bomb, ready to take it's host's life, as protection against worse endings.  Like putting cyanide capsules in ones mouth incase of capture and torture. Unfortunately, to turn the self destruction personality off, means getting close enough to it's extinction to set it off.  Very tricky, terribly frightening, and what an insight for me! On certain days, I can look back on that experience, and actually feel joy that I'd been allowed to partcipate, even if it meant multiple tragedys and hell's fire burning, to be admitted.  In the evenings after supper we would troop on down to the volley ball court, none of us proficiant at the game and some of us, like me, actually ducked when the ball came my way.  But I learned along with the other women.  We were damn proud of ourselves as we high fived one another in the elevator back to the ward.  Sometimes there were eight personalitys to start on the court and before we were done, we'd be introduced to a handful more.  Fortunately not the Abuser, who is another personality absorbed in a multierperson's person.  There were other disorders, such as the terminally depressed like Elb and I, who became the local talents.  Comedy at nine or anytime when things got testy.

    I don't know why I wrote what I just did.  I just did.  Perhaps in an attempt to fit the pieces together; hopefully to beable to someday use my experiences in my writing.  To get over or through the fears that hold me back from expressing my most inner self to others.  That is why when I logged on today, and saw that another cool person had requested to be in my network,  that I simply need to try.  Just try Peg.  Just do.  Take that frowning clown off of my shoulder and toss him into the dumpster of the least needed.  Smack him and pull him apart if I have to.  The thing that all of us women had in common sixteen years ago, is that we were prisoners, still, of childhoods long past, but to forget them would mean for some, self destruction.  We had to face that pain; the losses, the horrors, and embrace one another as we rested upon the jagged face of  the mountain, the mountains, inorder to gain the strength to climb again, harder this time. To say that there were happy endings would be a fairy tale.  No, many never made it.  Me, I am still climbing. Tho sometimes thru exhaustion I come close to giving up, yet haven't.  And actually, yesterday, as I was grooming my Thoroughbred, love of my life, filly to go for a wild ride, I found myself singing a song to her that I heard long ago, and used to sing to her thirteen years ago, the day she was born and after, the Jiminy Cricket song.  My favourite.  The one I would listen to as I snuggled into my Daddy's stong arms and endless love: 'if we wish upon a star, makes no difference where we are........"

Love to all, PeggyAnn