Where I Came From and Where I’m Going

My name is Asa, not my legal birth name, but a name that was given to me by a very special person. It’s literal Aramaic translation is healer of that which is broken.

Where I came from….

I want this story to be about where I am now, and about my journey forward, but all stories have a beginning and this is mine

I don’t remember much of my childhood before about the age of 14. From that point on my memories record a chaotic mess. I never knew why I felt the way I did or behaved the way I did, and my life became a mix of amnesia and events happening to me that seemed out of my control, like I was watching out of my own eyes while somebody else moved my body. Nobody knew what to do with me, I began to internalize that I was a failure. At the age of 17 I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia because of the internal voices that constantly talked in my head.

Between the ages of 17 and 35 I lived a repeating cycle of trying to find an answer, trying to pick myself up, and then falling again. I gave up, attempted suicide over 15 times, and decided that I was just really sick and their was no hope. Finally at the age of 35, while doing an intake to be admitted long term to a state psychiatric hospital, the clinician gave me hope for the first time in my life. She listened to my story and said to me that she didn’t believe I had paranoid schizophrenia, that I had all the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder.

Over the next two years, I advocated for myself with every professional treating me, and still, in their opinion I was schizophrenic. By mid 2018 I was on 7 psychiatric medications, including 3 antipsychotics, and averaging a suicide attempt and hospitalization every 2 months. With every suicide attempt came the questions….Why do you keep doing this? Are you taking your meds? Why don’t you learn some self control? They still didn’t know what to do with me and needed to put me somewhere so they admitted me to outpatient drug treatment program although I have never had an issue with addiction in my life. With little hope, I attended the first day and went through the normal intake process. The medical nurse asked me about my diagnosis and I told her that I was diagnosed with Schizophrenia, but I also had been told that I could have dissociative identity disorder. She shut the door and spent an hour talking to me about all my symptoms and my memories. At the end of the hour, I was in tears and she told me that she too, had dissociative identity disorder and that she would get me the help I needed. My second moment of hope.

With her help and a new therapist who officially diagnosed me with DID, I was referred to a hospital that specialized in treating trauma and dissociative disorders and it changed my life. Since being discharged from the hospital last fall, I now take no psychiatric medications and have felt, for the first time in my life, happiness, self worth, and a purpose.

Where I am going……

Today, I live in a new state with family that loves me, a big change from living in group homes and long term treatment centers. I attend weekly therapy, but the focus in my life is not my illness, it’s on my spirituality, my faith, finding joy, and using my unique situation and past to make a difference in my own life and others. I stopped calling it an illness or disorder and started calling it an adaptive coping response.that allows me to view and interact with the world in a different way than others do. I truly feel grateful to be alive and have a chance to finally have more than just an existence, but a real life.