Letters of Import: Hidden Within 6

Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Hidden Within 6
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated & abstract digital art by j. kiley
© jennifer kiley 2013
First Posting 03.19.13
Posted Early Tuesday Morning
Sixth Posting 04.23.13Tuesday, November 6th 2007

Dear Annie,

In my letter this week, I want to tell you some important things you need to know about the relationship between myself and another member of the group. It came to me that it would make sense for you to get to know me through other members of the group. I speak of two groups, the one you and I meet with every Tuesday and there is the all important group that live inside my own head. Where to begin? I thought I would be talking to you about Angie today.

The way she acted in group today was just a bit dramatic. I try to be understanding. I know about suicide. If it isn’t in my daily or weekly vigil when I sit with my mind I wouldn’t understand why she gets so obsessed with it. Her’s is different than mine. I think through the process, always living through the sensations of dying. But mine is more like the third act of a Shakespeare play. Except Juliet wakes up in time.

Mr. Xxx plays directly into her manipulation. She is not the only member of the group that has suicide on their speed dial. I, sincerely, want to be more compassionate but when someone takes up all the group time continuously, leaving no room for anyone else to talk. It gets tiring to listen. Call it selfish. Well, it is. I talk to Mr. Xxx about it and he tells me I am being insensitive. Well, excuse me, but it is my therapy time, too. I’m not the only one who will tell you they feel abandoned and also have strong feelings and thoughts of suicide.

Mr. Xxx has his two favorites and fuck the rest of us. It puts a giant wedge between our therapist and all of us inside of me. We feel neglected and ignored and abandoned. It isn’t really cool if a therapist repeats the habits of one’s childhood caregivers. He’s great at fucking people up. But Fuck this. I decided I don’t want to think about group any more. Except to say that you need to rescue us. I will speak for myself. I am mentally creative. The other terms I reject. I know I am bipolar and have a list of other mentally creative ways of using my mind but I need to be rescued.

I need to find my soul. It got buried underneath an ocean of invisibly blocked tears. If I ever get to a place when I am able to cry when I allow myself to own my sadness, Noah better be ready to build another arc. You think Alice got washed away in Wonderland. My pool of tears far exceed the norm. Since I was a kid and the tears were made to stop, I feel ashamed when even the slightest hint that a tear is going to escape the corner of my eye. I freeze. I become so embarrassed. I am so afraid for anyone, even myself sometimes, if I should get caught crying.

I can only cry at death. It breaks me down. I am so vulnerable to only specific deaths. My doctor died a few years ago. She was younger than I am now. It was a shock to everyone who knew her. I use to see her every week. It was a particularly bad time emotionally and mentally. Every suicidal method of escape had to be hidden from me. That meant I had to see her every week to pick up my psyche meds. She was my supplier. I’d get my meds. We’d talk. I felt we were getting close. Then I would meet with my psychotherapist after I saw Anne. Yes, her name was Anne. That’s what makes your name so nice. I love the sound of it.

It is so difficult for me to trust anyone. It seems I am a curse to them. They just keep dying. And they are always so young and have full lives to live. We just don’t know when death is coming for us. A woman I loved deeply, died so suddenly. I never thought the pain would ever be bearable. I think it’s bearable because the feelings are in hiding. I am taking my chances with you. I want to be open with you. Call it a compulsion. Something echos in my head about you. A voice calls to me. It’s coming from inside of you. You want me to be connected to you. I’m not sure why but you want to get to know me. If that is true, I feel exactly the same way. The feeling is strong that we are meant to know each other. We are meant to get close. I think we will. Let’s just give it some time. When the moment is right, we’ll know it. It will be like fireworks. Everyone will notice.

One last thing I want to be perfectly clear, I am a lesbian and I have alters, other personalities. They all come with DID, dissociative identity disorder, and still I am blessed with bipolar, too. I go high. I go low. I change into different personalities, never knowing who might pop out. It is a curse and a blessing. I got the positive, the creative energy DNA. It gave me other blessings, also. I’ll save those for another time.

My most pronounced alter is Brad. He gets really protective. His rages scare the shit out of anyone at the other end of his outbursts. I promise he will respect you. I won’t let him get angry with you ever. He does listen to me most of the time. The abusers helped create them, the group. The first one born is Marnie. She was abused while we were just a baby, barely able to walk. Our bastard of a father abused her until we were a teenager. The last time was when he attacked us and we fought back but we don’t remember winning. We buried that memory for years.

Why do you have that effect on me. You have cast a spell on me. An Honesty spell. Ask me anything. I’d give you the truth. Maybe I better stop now. I told you far too much. This is going to kick back on me. I can feel the triggers ready to shot me full of regret. But I want you to get to know me. Next time we talk, it’s going to be about you. I want to get to know you. As much as you are willing to share. I know you shrinks don’t like to share much but I am someone you can trust. I would never abuse your trust.

I want to close this letter with a poem I wrote that I thought would be revealing. It is the first poem I have written since I started seeing Mr. Xxx, other than the one I wrote about Princess Diana after she was killed. I am trusting you not to laugh. It is rather primitive but also raw and revealing. I think getting to know you has inspired me to start to write again. It is scary for me to share this but I want you to read it. I’d like to know what you think of it. Keep in mind it has been a long time. I wrote this a few days ago. I will leave it at the end of the letter.

I don’t expect you to respond to my poem after you read it. It is only given to you so you will see what is going on inside of me. Something that may help you to understand a deeper part of who we are inside. Try not to be a critic. Instead look at the feelings and the pain of the betrayal that confused my whole life and created who I am or who we are. That almost kept us from staying alive. But we fought through their trying to destroy us. We wouldn’t let them. Even though they tried really hard to steal every part of us away so we wouldn’t even know who we were and who we are now. The last part of the poem, I am not entirely sure we know the answer to that, the who we are bit. Keep this in mind while you read it. What is contained in the poem is what I have been trying to work out now and have been working on since I started this trip as a teenager.

Don’t worry, I will tell you more as the weeks go by and we get to know you. We really do want you to know us. Somehow I think everyone wants someone important to them, to know who they are and to mean something special to them. You are one of those people to me. I want someday to be important to you as I am finding that you are becoming important to me. It makes life more meaningful somehow. To share your self with someone else. Someone you love and care about and to hope and have them care and love you back. It is a special feeling to share that with someone. It is happening inside of me with you. Someday, I would like it if you knew that about me. Someday, I hope you will.

Well, I better stop now or I will write more than I mean to write and say too much and scare you away. So, until our next moment of honesty I will say I care about you, even though I don’t know you well. You just give off something that makes a person want to care. Read my poem with an open mind and open heart. Good-bye for now.

Regards,
Madison
This is to ensure that I write these in the strictest of confidence.

To Annie,

At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.

I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.

Regards,
Madison Taylor.

Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.

Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”
“Who Am I?”
By Madison Taylor
Nov. 5th 2007

“Who am I
The writer
The lover
The thinker
Or the fool for not hearing
The silence for not screaming
The feelings trying to explode
Where was the awareness?
We say quietly
Welcome to the surface
Now what needs to be done?

Releasing the energy ensnared
For decades amongst twisted webs
The voice is seeking freedom
Holding onto multiple secrets
Of rape
Of abuse
Of wanting love
Of not wanting sex
Of not wanting sexual arousal
Of creating a world locking us inside our mind
Of leaving the outside one behind
Of living a fake life
Of a fake person
Of a puppet we sent out to represent
To hide in plain site
Where no one would find us
Or know our hiding place
We learned to be safe
That world no longer protects us
It has changed
We are learning
Beginning to live
Finding answers to questions
Finding our place
In a world we have a right
To live in
We are here
Wanting to be alive
We chose life.”

(c) madison taylor 2007

Roger Williams — Somewhere In Time (1980 Theme Song # 6 for Letter of Import: Hidden Motives 6

labyrinth of a wandering wonderland where madison, scottie and their cats, Sparky, Patrick and Toker, love to escape to

“A Dream

The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor

“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”

“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist

“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
QUOTATION on SECRETS:

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ― Roald Dahl