when your Normal Meter is off

Every time I post, I lose subscribers.

I have been thinking about it today — why it is, what it means about my writing, or about me. Probably not much — some of my most talented writer friends on this platform experience the same. That is the literary life: rejection, rejection, rejection. Lots of success and connection, too, but so much rejection.

In my case, some people jumped ship because of the DID. Or not the DID itself, but because I am talking about the DID. Readers seemed to enjoy my dissociation more before I knew about it and named it in my work. It felt dreamy, magical, surreal — now it seems mad.

Maybe naming DID sucks the magic out of it? Sometimes it feels that way. My spinal cord drawings have never felt the same to me. (Post coming about what happened to them soon.)

I think, though, for a lot of people, DID feels forbidden to name, regardless of how careful I am to not get too explicit about my traumas. I know for therapists it does. The first therapist I saw after my diagnosis said people who really have it are so ashamed they never tell anyone.

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(“You are the only client I believe about DID,” Dr. N. used to tell me. “Because you did not come here wanting it.”

“Why would anybody want this?”

“Attention.”)

Then there is my Normal Meter. It’s off. Way off. That’s true for most people with cPTSD and probably even more so for DID. All my life, when I would tell a childhood story thinking it was totally normal, friends would gape. That is so messed up, they would say. And I would have to figure out which part.

I think to some people, that looks like wanting attention, too — just not knowing a story is strange.

Or a photo. Dear god, my family photos. I have shown quite a few thinking they were funny or cute or maybe a little bit awkward, for friends or therapists to make the that is so messed up face.

Awhile back, I went back and blacked out a photo in a previous post. In truth, it did not need more redactions than what I had already made. The photo — absent any context — probably looks like a million family photos from the 1980s. (Or am I wrong about that?) If my mother were still here, she would say, they were just goofing around. My brother would say, we were just wrestling. Strangers might say the same.

But that is my point: not the picture itself, but the denial and permissiveness that existed around it. And how it feels looking at it now, knowing what I know.

When I wrote that post, I thought for once that my Normal Meter was right on, so I redacted a face and a baggy of unidentified white powder … and it wound up looking even more sinister, more abnormal.

It reminds me of that picture with Jeffrey Epstein smiling shirtless with a small child’s foot visible on the far left of the frame. Epstein is not touching that child in that moment, but because we know his crimes, the snapshot feels creepy, suspect, unbearable to look at.

This layering is how so many trafficking & organized abuse survivors experience their own childhood artifacts — maybe especially in the age of Epstein.

With my brother’s photo, I started to wonder if my redactions forced the needle way, way off the Normal Meter. That I had made it sinister. Which is to say: Maybe I internalized how two therapists in a row held up their hands to signal stop when I tried to talk about being trafficked. Don’t go that far, they said.

And maybe I am internalizing those un-subscribes, too, by going back and redacting the entire photo. I am not sure—I feel like this post resists internalization, by refusing to keep it secret. I just know I woke up in the middle of the night seized by fear or dread or shame (there is your shame, Dr. N.) and edited the picture. It did not feel like my shame. It felt like one of the Other Karries. But they are me, too.

All this is to say: Thank you to the readers who have stayed with me despite my defective Normal Meter. I hope to get back to my spinal cord drawings and my inks soon, even though they feel different now that I know about the DID.

I just started work on a new Intermedia piece, too:

See you soon.