JM. Austin

My therapist tells me that dissociation is a skill

The way I can escape my body like a magician

Float to other worlds for whatever I need

Peace, safety, solitude

Dissociation was my first friend.

Grasping me by my hand and carrying me away from the horrors of the here and now.

I learned how to build a castle amongst the clouds.

I learned how to be content alone.

Could be left alone for hours before recognizing the sadness of empty.
The heartache of alone. 

But I am never alone.

Sometimes I feel haunted by myself

And as I grew I cultivated a mask so successfully and beautiful it fooled near everyone.

I was gregarious, warm hearted, and full of laughter.

Always happy to help and full of compassion.

No one talks about how dissociation is building a castle in a lightening storm with a glass mask.

The moments in between lightening strikes feel like calm. Like safety.

Like the mask won’t fall and shatter.

It doesn’t speak to the lonely of building all alone

The exhaustion and burden of placing the mask each morning to remove it at night lest it become tearstained as we drift uneasily to sleep alone each night

The pain of practicing vulnerable
To admit the oceans of pain you try to escape each day

To be dismissed back to a dam of resiliency.

But dams were not built for oceans and I can be surrounded by those who love me Most and still be drowning in these waters as I try to drift back

To my castle amongst the clouds. Alone but safe.
Because when love makes lonely even stronger, the stone walls grow like trees, unaffected by the storm.

We dissociate, and we do so alone.

We survive our childhoods to seek escape each day as adults
This magic keeps us alive
But it does nothing to soothe the pain of waking up each day
Still cemented to the ground, and not in a castle amongst the clouds.

I want to be grateful for life and being in the here and now
But if you were to open my heart like a book
It would pour heavy emptiness
Splash ink across your hands
And stain lonely unto skin

Dissociation is a skill she said.
But for me, it’s just another friend who comes to abandon me again and again.