We’ve been working on the piece for our writing class at the university. this class is on how to teach writing to adolescents and high schoolers; however, we have to go through the writing process ourselves so we can empathize with the road blocks and issues our students will face when they produce text. The semester just started two weeks ago and already we are panicking. We get certain accommodations but we still have to do the work. The piece we had to produce this week is called “I remember”…not an easy piece for anyone with a dissociative disorder. We were supposed to draw memory maps in our journal, which we went out and bought a cool skull journal that makes ME (a member named ME) happy. She loves skulls, crossbones, Johnny Depp. Anyway, so we gave in to the sucky assignment and drew the memory map of the neighborhood in which we lived. The assignment was that the memory map would jog our “memory” and we were to choose and write about three memories. WTF? WTF? WTF? i wrote down things. i don’t know what they are now. I’d have to go back

and look in the fucking journal. whatever. don’t think so.

switches all over the place. can we please get to it already.

i was thinking about it this afternoon on the exercise machine. Some of the best thinking is done working out. We came up with some memories but decided to leave out the ones that were the least repulsive. In other words, we chose to write about the memories (and embellish them for privacy sake) that were not happy or at least neutral or benign. The harder things were decided upon. i know this sounds like rambling.

For instance, we would rather write about doing 100 jumping jacks when we were ten because we ate a chocolate chip cookie than about the watching cartoons with another girl in the neighborhood or making “survival kits” of stickers, tootsie rolls, and bubble gum. The short of it is this: we are attracted to the bad. don’t know if it means we are pathetic and are harping on what will destroy us (where is the woman with the words? this makes no sense.)

i can tell when she’s not around.

i don’t want to write about happy shit. there was nothing happy about anything that took place in that house. i have to wonder why i don’t want to know or hold on to anything that is good.

i don’t want anything to do with that hell hole; i don’t want the stinking memories. i think it’s similar to what we go through today. if we let go of any of the bad, if we stop cutting, if we eat write, if we stop cursing Randy out, okay, if I stop cursing Randy out, who will we be? who will love us with out the bad? who will care about us if we are happy?

the movies and stories people remember and want to know again are the sad ones, not the comedies or memories that weren’t impressionable. how can we have an identity without embracing, clinging, clutching, and squeezing the life out of everything that had destroyed us? yet, we walk such a fine line. how can we live and die at the same time? how can we be functionally miserable?

all that came from some writing assignment about remember three things from the age of ten. i’ve maintained to most every one’s chagrin that writing about issues doesn’t let them go and this is supportive of that. i write and write and write and it doesn’t get gone, for lack of better English.

it’s all about change and i hate change. maybe i will do what we’ve wanted to do for a while and change our hair color to pink. what other changes could we try that don’t mean death or the desire for death. we could change our professor’s assignment to what we want, but then we’ll get an F. to skydive is to die. i think i’ll stick with pink hair, although i just became a “natural” blond again with the aid of my colorist.

i hate these types of writing. i feel like i said so much and said nothing. The Woman with the Words is missing and we have no hope in coining our words the way we want them. We can tell a vast difference when she’s here and when she’s not. We don’t feel like we got our point across and like we made sense. it’s more confusing than anything. what a waste.