Mental-Health Day

by Laura, Allegra, and Mary

Today we took a "mental-health day" from work.  We were supposed to take tomorrow off anyway to take our father to the doctor, but we've been so angry and stressed out lately that we asked for an extra day off.  Our boss and his boss agreed, as they could see the difficulty that we were going through.

To clarify:  (1) our place of work doesn't differentiate among types of days off, in the sense of sick days.  There are generic paid days off, but they would only be tagged as family-medical, bereavement, short- or long-term disability, or the like if circumstances warrant and the request for said designation is granted.  But there's no distinction of sick days, mental-health days, or vacation days. Those are just general paid time off.

And (2)....Oops, we forgot what (2) was.  :-/  Oh, yeah....they don't know that we're multiple.  We figure that we should get this question out of the way here, even though we believe that it's irrelevant whether or not our co-workers know that we're a "we."

Multiplicity isn't the problem.  The trauma(s) that made us multiple are the problem.  We struggle to resolve the anger that engulfs us because of that trauma, anger that we've repressed for so long but somehow seems so obvious to outside people of late.  We can't repress this anger anymore.  We have to deal with it.

Perhaps the difference now is that Charity has begun reclaiming a lot of the trauma that she deflected onto other people inside because she couldn't handle it when it happened.  She certainly didn't intend to dump things onto others.  But the nature of multiplicity, at least where trauma is involved, is that one or more others take on what one person can't handle.

And Charity is learning that at its greatest intensity, the stinging pain of depression is often rooted in anger.  Anger that we can't handle somehow becomes less unmanageable when converted to depression.  Realizing this is a step forward, but it's a slow and painful process, a process that we'd like to be done with, but with which we forever have to be patient.

(Edited at 9:55 pm Eastern to improve the wording of the third paragraph.)