My Truman Show, Vol. III

My Truman Show, Vol. III

August 2023

 “Mom I’m going to tell you something and I need you not to freak the fuck out.”

Cold rush of panic punches hard in my gut and chest.  

We’re driving through the woods, leaving the camp that my (now adult) child has been at for the past five days. It’s a beautiful, peaceful late summer morning outside of the vehicle, in direct contrast to the storm that is about to be unleashed on the inside.

I take a deep breath and say “OK.” What else can I say to that? 

When I had arrived earlier to pick it up, the staff asked me who my child was and after I gave the name I mentioned it was 18, so it could sign itself out. The girl looked at me with relief and said “Oh! Ruby is 18?! We don’t have to tell you what happened then!” Ummmm?! That’s reassuring?! They did end up telling me that my child had a couple of panic attacks, but considering it’s been medicated for an anxiety disorder since age seven I dismissed it as a normal occurrence.  

“Mom, you have to promise not to overreact.” it reiterated.

“OK honey, I’ll do my best.”

“When I had my panic attack at camp, I had to run out of the hall because it was so loud and the next thing I knew I was in the safe space because I didn’t know who I was. I had a dissociative blackout and a new personality has emerged. It’s name is Heathen.”

Deep, deep breaths, so deep that I actually feel oxygen deprived because it doesn’t matter how deeply I breathe, I still feel like I am suffocating. 

“Then it happened again a couple of nights later, only this time the personality that emerged was only six years old and she was scared and crying because she wasn’t at home and couldn’t find you. I was wandering alone outside for about 45 minutes before anyone found me.”

Alone wandering outside at this camp that has frequent bear and cougar sightings. Great. 

Fast forward two days and we’re sitting in the doctor’s office. I had wanted to take Ruby to emergency psych on the way home from camp, as I consider dissociative blackouts to be a medical emergency, but I was accused of “freaking the fuck out” and it really, vehemently did not want to go. I checked in with my psychologist who said “Yes, go.” Then I checked in with our social worker who also said “Yes, go.” I was dreading having to force it. My kiddo was insisting that this was perfectly normal and there was nothing to worry about, so we compromised and Ruby agreed to go if a third professional made the same recommendation. 

“Yes, go.” said the doctor. So we went. 

This is our second time presenting at emergency for psych support. Last time it was for self-harm and the diagnosis was OCD revolving around self-harm and suicide. My biggest fear with the emergence of these alters, or “multiple personalities” as they were formerly known, is that one will emerge which encompasses the destructive power of the OCD and will harm my child. My beautiful, brilliant, gifted, silly, lighthearted clown of a child who wants to die. I have never been able to wrap my mind around that, even though it is now 18 and the first time it told me it wanted to die was over ten years ago. 

We are finally ushered into a room which is the stuff of nightmares. The walls used to be white, I figure, before the people punching and kicking them in an attempt to get out turned it a sort of dirty white bordering on grey. There are bootprints and little holes and chips in the walls with streaks of dirt everywhere. Someone has scratched LET ME OUT!!! into the wall beside the door with a pin, or keys, or something else sharp. It is terrifying. It is like a garage bay in that one of the walls by the bed can be opened like a garage door, and the other door locks from the outside. There’s a camera in the corner pointed at the bed and the monitor is mounted out in the hallway so you can see the patient from afar. 

We’re at the end of the hallway, the entrance of which is flanked by two security guards. Our door is not locked from the outside at this point, so I am sitting in a chair facing the open door with a view down the hallway. Three of the other rooms have the red lights above the doors lit, indicating that they are locked from the outside. People are screaming and pounding on the walls and one woman is calling 911 from her cell phone and telling the operators that she has been kidnapped. I am trying hard to disconnect from this current reality, staring down the hallway into the dark when I notice that my child has fallen asleep. Things quiet down a bit and then all of a sudden it is eerily silent. I’m not sure if I have fallen asleep sitting up or if I am just trapped in the part of my brain that disconnects when I can’t cope, but everything is surreal and strangely lit with a cool glow from below. Then I hear it. Squeak, squeak, squeak… I look up and Billy the puppet from the Saw movies is riding that fucking tricycle down the hallway toward me. I have to get up and close the door before he gets here! I’ll never be able to solve one of his stupid riddles. 

I try to spring to my feet but find I am paralyzed and then I am suddenly aware that I am snoring. Panic, paralysis, and insane laughter, all at once. I am asleep but awake and having a dream. I can’t stop laughing, mainly at the comical looking sinister puppet squeaking down the hallway on that insane looking tricycle, but also because I am snoring and it sounds funny. I leap to my feet as I gasp awake and suddenly Billy the puppet is gone. It’s the dead of night in the psych ward and my child is asleep in the bed, being watched on camera by the security guards at the end of the hall. I need to get the fuck out of here, but as I begin to flee the ward I have the overwhelming, uncanny sense that I am being watched on TV or filmed; this some sort of horrible joke and I am being punk’d. 

I leave the room and the security guards stop me because no one is allowed to leave this unit once admitted. There are also two police officers standing there, as they are reporting on the people they have just brought in. I explain that I am the parent, not the patient, and they let me through. I grab a coffee from the all night coffee counter and head outside for a smoke. I recently took up the habit again after almost twenty years smoke free and I am constantly chastising myself for it but the unreality of my life makes the fact that I am smoking seem unreal, and therefore inconsequential. 

While sitting outside smoking I decide to distract myself with some games on my phone. Yay! There are lots of Pokestops at the hospital. I spin a few and click on the other game, which is Wordle. Zoning out on some word games seems really appealing. I make my first guess, which is always TRAIN. Oooh, there is a T and an I in this word! Off to a good start. I guess again and again, but I can not seem to get the answer which is strange because I usually get it in three tries. I am getting more confused and upset as I continue guessing and then the unthinkable happens. I have made five guesses and unless I get it on the next one I am not going to get the answer. 

I stare at the screen for what seems like forever. I light another cigarette. I am confused and upset and my brain feels like a black ball of string that is tangled and knotted. Suddenly I see it. The answer. No. There’s no way this is real. I enter the letters MULTI and bling! The screen lights up and there it is, mocking me, on the night that I am losing my sanity sitting with my child in emergency psych due to the emergence of multiple personalities, the wordle of the day is MULTI?!

I look up to the sky, thinking I will see a camera somewhere above me. I look directly up, and then into the four corners of sky directly surrounding me. There have to be cameras. This can not possibly be real. There is no way that this is a coincidence. The word can not be MULTI on the day that I am sitting in this surreal environment with a child who is exhibiting multiple personalities. I have got to be on some sort of live stream or TV right now, with people watching the shit of my life for their own entertainment. There is literally no other possible explanation. I am the star of my own personal Truman Show. 

The rational thing to do in this situation is to consider that maybe I am experiencing stress induced paranoia, so I force myself to stop looking up at the sky for cameras like a psycho and take some deep breaths. I take a screenshot of the word and send it to a few friends who know what’s going on. One of them says “You have got to start writing this shit down. This just doesn’t happen in real life.” I’m glad to hear it, because I always think that I am overreacting to weird coincidences like this, and they happen way more often than I think they should. 

I walk back into the hospital, get buzzed into the back and make my way down to the psych holding area. I see my child on the monitor, sleeping soundly in the bed where I left it, and I become unstuck in time. It’s 2005 and my baby is in an incubator in the NICU, not on some monitor in an adult hospital psych ward. I consider that the intense medical trauma that my child has been through for it’s entire life may have contributed to the reason we are here today, but that seems like too much to think about so i push it out of my mind. What I can’t seem to push out of my mind is the fact that despite my best efforts my child is not OK. I have seen this trauma coming since day one, when my baby was lying on my chest and lifted it’s head, locked eyes with me, and screamed as though it were in massive pain. A one day old baby isn’t supposed to be able to do that, but mine was slowly dying and nobody knew it yet. As things got worse and worse, I would point it out to the nurses and they would say “Oh there’s no problem, you’re just a nervous new mom.” Yeah, right. Me being a nervous new mom is causing my baby to turn denim blue and vomit bright green bile. Needless to say, there was a problem.

I love my child more than anything. I want that to be clear. I have watched it endure a lifetime of chronic illness and invasive awake procedures that would traumatize any child. They traumatized me and all I had to do was hold Roo down while they did the tests and procedures. My baby never got much better after the surgery which saved its life, but the failure to thrive is mine. I failed to build a healthy body for it in my womb during pregnancy. I failed to provide it with a positive birth experience because an emergency c-section was required. And then it almost died. I failed to attract positive healing energy from the universe by being a horrible human being. I failed to figure out a way to make it healthy and to make its dad stay so that it wouldn’t have a lifetime of abandonment issues. I failed to protect it and parent in such a way that it could avoid the mental health struggles that dominate our lives. It is all my fault, and the sensation that I am being watched like Truman or tricked like on Punk’d is obviously some sort of punishment. Everybody is watching and knows that I have failed my child. I don’t have a word for that feeling but it is with me always, as is the narrative which runs in my head describing what is happening as though I am writing or reading a book. This simultaneously saves me and harms me by keeping events from seeming real. I am almost 19 years into not processing some very heavy emotional trauma and it is catching up with me.