Abandonment
by Teresa

(Note: Anna is our therapist)

I still feel a huge hole where Shandra should be. I feel abandoned. Anna was saying that our system seems to have a pattern where people go inside for a long time and everyone else feels abandoned by them and I think that's true, although it is not the same this time, because Shandra was _shoved with murderous intent_ back if not killed. But Anna does not understand killed. Neither do I really but I know the difference between away and violently attacked.

I remember when I first really _found_ the word abandoned. I started therapy with Anna and Carl started a job in Hamilton. He started to leave at 5:30 am and get home at 10:30 pm because he is a workaholic who likes to work 7 am to 8 pm anyway. I used to go hysterical if he was late for dinner (after 7 pm) and had just kind of worn myself out from the terror, but this new thing of really not actually seeing him during the week was horrible.

He used to get incoherent messages on his cell phone and come home to find things smashed or my arms cut.

But finally with Anna's help I got a word for it: abandoned. I felt abandoned. It was a big word. I sat with it for a long time, like, all the things that means. Someone going forward and leaving me behind, forever.

By myself.

Terror. Anything but that. Because, you know, if you tell - no worse - if you are _even aware_ of being different, not just about having been abused but that too, but also of being multiple - _no one will ever ever ever love you again_. They will leave. You will be left an orphan that no one wants.

So Monday to Friday I was in this place where no one was ever going to love me again because I was some horrible freak. And this programming - societal, parental, grandparental - was and is really deep, it goes all down through me really really really a lot. With so many things. With the list, with my job, with random people who might not like me.

But especially with the few people I really let into my life. I am always, always waiting for them to realize - something, I don't know what - and _leave_. And I will _be left_. Without Carl I was _left_.

So I decided to try being left.

I realized that I could sit with myself and my system without him even if I didn't like it, and for several weeks I laid on the couch every night surrounded by my favourite foods and with a video on and three books to read in case one got boring and the phone in my lap and I made all these plans for "my monastic life where no one loves me except my cat and then my cat runs away and I live in a stairwell."

And oh that sound easy but it wasn't. I smashed things still and would pinch myself and cry and feel really... really... alone. And the strange thing was that no one _died_, Carl still woke me up when he came in the door, he was very very there on weekends. But I was in acute grief for - what? Dinner? I don't even know, but I just let it happen, even if it was crazy.

After a little while I started to enjoy eating what I wanted and not what Carl wanted, and watching what I wanted to, and reading so much. Although I still have a contingency planner in my head. I'm always looking for a cheap bedroom to live in when everyone else goes away.

But I realized I would _live_. There is, in the end, a me that no one can take away, even if I don't know her very well, who will never abandon _me_. So yes, even Shandra and Lyria and JJ and Amie and everyone inside could, but there would be me.

My parents and Carl and my sister and my best friend and my other friends and even my dog could, but there would still be me, eating french fries piled with chives and grated cheese and tex-mex seasoning. Reading a book (yay libraries).

It is a bit scary to have a me that isn't just reacting to other people, but here she is anyway. She made it somehow.