Spring 17 Psychology in Poetry

Maladaptive Daydreamer

By Danielle Fraser

A Journey of Trauma and Healing

Symptom I Trauma Stigma Symptom II Creating Life More Alive than Life Daydreamer Symptom III Ashes Phoenix Never Alone Symptom IV Dying Gasp A Roar Symptom V $7.99lb Thunder in the Spotlight Symptom VI Journey

Daydreaming is an everyday occurrence experienced by almost everyone. When these daydreams interfere with academics, occupation, or interpersonal relationships, however, it becomes maladaptive daydreaming. Maladaptive daydreaming is a common coping mechanism among those who suffer abuse or trauma. Maladaptive daydreaming is not classified as a disorder in the DSM-V. When I daydream, it isn't the brief flashes of thought other people have. When I daydream, there's actually a plot to what I'm thinking of. There are real, fully fleshed out characters involved. In fact, most of the characters I write about when writing fiction start out in my daydreams. Being pulled back into reality for me is the same as placing a bookmark in a book. I return to reality, complete the tasks needed, and then slip right back into the daydream right where I left off. I can build on the same daydream for months or even years at a time, shift to another one, and then shift back to the first one. I actually kind of become the characters, to the point where I have felt the same emotions they're feeling during the daydream. One very common thing that the daydreams of maladaptive daydreamers almost all seem to share is the fact that the 'characters' in the daydream experience great emotional, or sometimes physical, torture. For me, that torture is just about entirely emotional. When I said that I've felt the same emotions as the characters in my daydreams, I mean that I've actually gotten so deep into the daydreams and into being that character that I have found myself physically crying in response to those emotions. Many of the people who experience maladaptive daydreaming find that it rules their lives like an addiction. In fact, that's where the condition gets it's name. However, it isn't always like that. I was in the third grade when I first started losing myself to daydreams instead of trying to cope with reality, and I spent so much time daydreaming that year that I actually ended up failing the third grade. As the years passed, I've gained the ability to control when I daydream. I've actually managed to harness them and use them to become a skilled writer. The chapbook that is being sent along with this email is a look back at how the abuse I experienced as a small child has shaped my life and how I've managed to turn that horrible experience into something positive within my adult life. The poems in the chapbook are fairly dark for the most part, but it isn't very easy to write about a dark subject matter in light, flowery terms. Though there are some spots where I've managed to do it.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club

Symptom I (Uncontrollable Daydreaming)

Starry eyed images flutter like jeweled birds trapped in your mind. Ideas build, a nest taking shape. The wide-open sky sits, ready for your maddened flight to erupt. Gravity’s iron chains are really made of wax. Break them like a person removing their spent, corrupted white candle from the holder.

Each melodious twitter promises a break from a world without flight. Each whispered note attempts to pull you away from the here and the now. Each song is a path into a world you can’t wait to enter.

Some days you think those birds are more real than the cold night air that surrounds you. Moments among others turn to flight. Some days you think those ideas are stronger than the metal surrounding you as you race down the road. Moments in your car turn to flight. Some days you think that nest is more real than the cotton-soft fluff you sleep on each night. Moments spent waiting for Hypnos to sweep you away turn to flight.

Reality doesn’t hold you like it does others. Flights of fancy, fleeting for others, are all that you live for.

Trauma

What would you say, if I told you I remember? If I told you I remember the sound that a human body makes when slammed against accordion-fold closet doors in the middle of the night? If I told you I remember the sound that a lonesome ambulance siren makes as it echoes off the foothills as it rushes the battered mother of a two-year-old girl to the hospital? You wouldn’t say anything, because you don’t remember that night. You don’t remember mixing those pills with the rancid contents of that can.

What would you say, if I told you I remember? If I told you I remember the night you first told her, you were leaving? If I told you I remember rushing from my room, being swung into your arms, as you threatened to take me away?

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club If I told you that after you put me down and I wandered back to my room, I snuggled into the pile of stuffed animals on my bed and whispered for them not to be afraid because yelling can’t hurt anyone? You wouldn’t say anything, because a four-year-old couldn’t have had that kind of clarity.

What would you say, if I told you I remember? If I told you I remember the night you kicked that cop in the shin because he stopped your drunken rage? If I told you I remember the day the corrections officer told my mom that, because the fight was just as much her fault as it was yours, she and I couldn’t see you? You wouldn’t say anything, because nothing can heal the wound of a five-year-old girl, Daddy’s little girl, whose world has been shattered over and over again.

What would you say, if I told you I remember? If I told you I remember the last night I called the cops because you broke into the house that was never yours in the first place? If I told you I remember the moment I stopped being Daddy’s Little Girl, because the scabs can only be pulled off half- healed wounds so many times before a scar forms on her very soul? You wouldn’t say anything, because every single time you said I couldn’t be your daughter because I wasn’t good enough, you killed another little part of my baby- bird spirit. And there are no words that can soothe that pain.

What would you say, if I told you that the greatest lesson you ever taught me was not that you could kill a man by slamming the palm of your open hand into his nose at an angle? You’re not supposed to teach an eight-year-old that, by the way. What would you say, if I told you that the greatest lesson you ever taught me was not that I was worth more than anything else in the world? What would you say, if I told you that the greatest lesson you ever taught me was that there was nothing I could do that would ever make myself worth as much as the liquid poison that comes in a can labeled “Steel Reserve”?

Stigma

Stigma is a word with just six letters. It is the reason people don’t look at depression the same way they do a cough. Stigma is a word with just two syllables. It is the reason that sick people get called attention whores. Stigma is a word that’s been around for hundreds of years. It is the reason that people would rather suffer in silence than get help. Stigma is a word that can break hearts. It is the reason that people feel alone in among 7 billion.

You can’t understand how much pain is not physical.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club I can’t understand how you think you know my heart. You can’t understand why I think the world looks so dark. I can’t understand how you can’t see the darkness I stare into each day. You can’t understand why I feel so cold in the face of your fire. I can’t understand why you don’t burn to a crisp at the center of the blaze.

Symptom II (Research Makes Daydreams Realistic)

You type away, finding paths of knowledge like glittering pebbles of the mind. Anything to take blurred edges and make them into a polished crystal pendant. Information is mined golden geodes. Dumped into a smelter, ready to be formed into stories no one can read.

Your keyboard is a path of rocks turned priceless; your browser history is a mystery. You’re the only one anyone knows who looks up baby names, how to pierce someone’s nose, and the stats for a machine that never even existed all at one time.

Your idle treasure trove of knowledge has no purpose; it’s not a currency anyone else can take. But your dreams can’t be complete without it. You’re not content with having your characters do something, you have to know how to do it too.

Creating Life More Alive than Life

Voices tumbling in gentle pirouettes, Bringing life to barren emptiness. Each vision a seed, Prepared to sprout and expand.

A flood of characters, Each more incessant than the last. Personalities expand and explode outward like weeds on a plain. No dam strong enough to hold them back.

I am dragged along with them, helpless to stop their demands. Their hands, surprisingly steady for being air and the fluff dreams are made of, Pull me in hundreds of different directions.

Outlandish stories flash by, Pelting, icy verbal barbs from the heavens. They drill through fertile intellectual plants intent on destruction. Leaving broken essay stalks and tattered quiz leaves in their path.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club Daydreamer

The alarm clock buzzes to pull the dreaming heart back to reality. Getting dressed is an idle, mindless task that allows me, To return to that field for just a moment. He calls her name as I brush my teeth.

Idle moments as red, blue, orange ants move along black tar, Belching exhaust, a chain-smoker’s cancer, Allow me to take part in momentary ballroom dances in elaborate silken elegance. The cellphone’s beep snaps my eyes back into focus as the traffic marches on.

I stand in line, the tacky lanterns bouncing slightly in the breeze caused by the door, My mind wandering to the battlefield and my hands take the controls again, My heartbeat one with the mecha once more. Until my name is called and plastic bags pull me back to the world of reality again.

I serve up the food made by another as my mind wonders back to my bed, Dreams of sheets made of cotton envelop my very essence for just a moment, Before the crack of fortune cookies bring me back to the table.

The steady stream of papery demands, Shrill shrieks from the red plastic whistle scolding the children racing, Through white-painted fields of green,

Mixes perfectly with magic spells that flash from fragile looking stick to fragile looking stick, Days spent floating above the clouds encased in metal and glass, And powers we could only imagine.

Only an instant of mist flutters and breaks the flow of jeweled reality.

Symptom III (Violent or Torturous Daydreams)

Hearts broken like glass thrown at the wall. Souls shredded like the love letter you never read. Psyches shattered like the pieces of you left behind. Rumbling ‘round your head, done to another and cold iron is your reward. Words are stark gunmetal lines, meant to confine the disruption inside of your soul.

Ashes

From surrounded by loved ones to left all alone. The vibrant landscape and iron-steady support of a lover, Suddenly ripped away by his own choice.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club As soon as his choice is made, the structure crumbles and I am left with no one and nothing.

Frozen embers drift forlorn, Through a seared forest landscape A shattered mirror glistens darkly, Among forgotten memories of crumpled paper hearts The titanium spider’s web crumbles to ash, As the secure net melts like wax to flame

A forbidden crystalline figure shatters into dust, As the steel pillars twist and cave to the dark abyss The neglected garden gives way to stark concrete walls, As the terminal corruption blackens the soul and scorches the rotting flesh The gentle loving hands that keep the punctured heart afloat, They become the thorny vines that strangle it

The Poet sits among the ashes of the home she built No roof shelters her from the blistering rain No walls buffer the scorching wind from tearing her tender flesh to shreds No floor separates her from the clawing roots determined to drown her No caress sooths her oozing wounds No one guides her from the crushing darkness back into the healing light

Phoenix

Engulfed in swirling crimson mixed with brilliant orange that turns to flares of molten white. Turned into drifting grey that falls from the heavens, a cloud of down. The pile shifts and quivers as dead ash becomes living scarlet again.

Battle scars that once glared through shredded feathers are rinsed away As the blaze courses through, scorching broken back into wholeness. Broken talons, no longer fit for war become tempered steel once again. World weariness is chased from the soul by racing flames.

Each word is a spark, each frozen drop of hatred a tiny pinprick of light. When this world becomes too much, as it always does, These baby embers ignite my deepest, darkest part. Rushing outward from the core of my being, They become the solar explosion that renews my very essence.

Nothing can extinguish the wildfire you’ve brought to life in my heart. No one can still the raging storm my newly cloaked wings beat into being. I fight back, a vicious warbird instead of a timid songbird.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club No matter what I thought, I never needed you. No matter what I thought, I never needed them. No matter what I thought, I can stand on my own. No matter what I thought, my will to live isn’t connected to your wants.

I have my own needs, my own wants, my own song to sing. You were just a note in my fiery song. I am a Phoenix, and you’re less than the grey pollution in the air.

Never Alone

The star you gaze at, wish upon, already long gone. Notes of sorrow strangle your heart. Echoes down the hallway of lonesome memories, Ignite the skeletal night like the sea drowning the beast locked inside.

Thoughts swirl about, windblown seeds excited to die. My phoenix fire flickers and dies. Fed by nothing, drowned by everything. Red flame meets water turned frigid grey.

The bare bulb, worn and stained, splatters light like dark ichor as I dream. The blade fills my spirit with an ice-bright glow. So easy to leave, so hard to come back.

The hand is stayed by the tiny promise. Love is not so far away. Eternal darkness is never a key to the light. Gentle warmth embraces rigid metal, turns it from frigid ice.

The rusted and battered clockwork heart remembers to love, Spurned on into beauty by the melody of comradery. Gossamer remnants remember the shape of wings long destroyed. They flap in time with the ringing of a tin soul, long pounded out of shape.

Tempered by the Alchemist’s flames, Tin will once again become silver. So long as I am truly, Never alone.

Symptom IV (Triggers and Physical signs)

A blank, white wall the mind’s canvas and a ticking clock the mind’s soundtrack. Rocking, talking, sighing, dying alone inside while the outside world races by. Electrified again to start the brutal cyclone of thoughts made words.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club

A melody to you, is a warm invitation to me. Each note beckons me on with tiny inky fingers. Down the rabbit-hole I leap, like Alice many yesterdays ago. My mind bounces from here to my own personal heaven, In the time it takes you to exhale.

Dying Gasp

I feel like life is a nightmare I cannot wake up from. I feel like the world is closing in on me. I feel like there should be a roar every time I’m left unsure of this place. I feel like there should be a mechanical roar.

There should be a mechanical roar, but there is not. Whipped around, shredded and shoved back together under dizzying lights. Billions of rotted hands, spongy with decay, tear and pull in every direction. There is no Gold and Mirrored Heaven, only this macabre Tea-Cup Hell. Drawn forward, pulled back, spun around in never-ending loops.

This tunnel vision gives me migraines, But without it all I can see is roiling nightmare beasts in bright makeup. It’s not a gaudy Funhouse, it’s a washed-out Madhouse. There should be a roar but only silence shakes the metallic frame.

Trying to stop this rushing Carousel Clydesdale is like trying to stop A Cotton Candy pebble falling from the orbit of a Ferris wheel. Halt the whirling, twirling, maddening ride, I wanna get off. But getting out of this hard, bright red plastic seat would be quitting.

A Roar

Standing fall, titanium statuary is sharpened and gleaming against frigid imposition. A bloodstained, paint-streaked battle cry shatters your spindly porcelain expectations of my shredded clockwork normalcy. This is not the gasping, rotting existence of a dying moth slammed repeatedly into the cracked, mildew façade of a smoldering soul sputtering for air.

This is the explosive journey of a bloodstained white rose petal tempered by the flooding blaze of inner madness and trans-mutated in a million different ways. Trans-mutated until it becomes the hulking behemoth that splinters the shackles of your canid preconceived notions of freedom. With a roar of acid primed to devour your negativity like the crippling disease of the mind and soul it is.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club With my icy-cold, white hot, utterly unrepentant determination, I draw my line in the sand, draw my sharpened blade, and draw my last breath as your paper-doll victim. The last thing you will ever hear is my iron-bound roar as I slaughter the last of your light-numbing kind, leaving nothing by scabbed-over raindrop cemetery plots in your stead.

You’ll never stand a chance, because you’d never understand just how steady and strong my dream-made fortress is against the brittle ice of your disgusting reality. Go right ahead and batter yourself against walls you can’t even see. I’m safe inside, characters you’ll never understand keeping me company. They keep my company along with the privileged few who get to see the genius behind the madness you think makes me weak.

Fuck you, and your expectations. Someone once said “I reject your reality and substitute my own.” That is my life and this is my roar. Enjoy a world full of rot and corruption. That is your legacy.

Symptom V (Incredibly Vivid)

Vivid are my dreams, active is my imagination. You may call it “illness,” But I have always called it “adventure.” It is my drug and my balm.

I can’t imagine a life without these wonderful, maddening adventures. You can’t imagine how my life could be improved by something, you think should be fixed. I can’t imagine how your life couldn’t be improved by something I think should be celebrated.

In my mind’s eye, I see colors sharper than reality gives. I hear sounds the natural world no longer knows. I rest in a field of warm summer grass, While the rest of the world stares forlorn, At knee-deep piles of tiny crystals of ice.

$7.99lb

Anything else I can get you? The ham’s on sale, only $7.99lb! Needles stab, concrete drags down. Might as well sell my soul at the same time, only $7.99lb.

Hi, how can I help you? One pound of Potato Salad? Of course.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club We’re having a two-for-$5.00 sale right now. My very creativity’s up for sale to the highest bidder.

Never mind that it’s all I’ve got making this bleak world beautiful. I am merely an automaton, meant to slice and serve. Drab walls hold me in, sap my spirit, shatter my mind.

Green paper obtains my sorrow at a cost too great to sustain. ‘Making ends meet’ means putting myself into a little box and forgetting. Forgetting the beauty in exchange for the cold.

Thunder in the Spotlight

I A high-pitched ring that seems to sing. The lively dance of flesh frozen in decay. First too fast a tempo, then yanked to a blazing stop; Only to burst to obnoxious, explosive life yet again.

III The spotlights never dim; the pounding of the song never stops. Life is a massacre; you are the shield that slits the throat. Narrowed to a pinpoint, I see the universe. Whiteness in perfect clarity screams my agony for the world to hear.

IV Lightning flashes through my soul. A storm of agony meets this stage. Thunder rumbles through my lungs, Stealing my breath as the panic rips me apart from within.

V This torrential downpour mimics, The drumming of a heart, Set to a speed too fast for me to live through.

VI Is it thunder? Is it a stage? Neon flares stab my nerves, They jumpstart the part of me, I never knew existed. Never thought I could feel.

VII Every breath is my death. Each beat shatters my soul. A light so beautiful, so fragile, cannot be contained.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club Locked away, it will flicker and die a thousand deaths.

VIII

All I can do is run. But I can’t outrun my own racing heart. The spotlights follow me. The clouds stream behind me.

Symptom VI (Reason)

I may trade monochrome for agonizing darkness, But my darkness is my own. I can put it away whenever it becomes too much. Stark cold darkness shaped by razorblade reality is not so easy to flee.

The pain is my reason, shattered limbs are but a flesh-wound left dripping blood; Compared to whip-marks left on my soul by his words. I love them and nurture them, small black flowers. In return, these dark imaginings care the burden of the pain.

Journey

A condition, born from trauma. A condition, born from the trauma, reality of my childhood. A condition, born from a desire to escape reality.

To escape reality for just a moment. To escape the pain of one parent turned against another. To escape the pain of a broken world and a broken family. Age gives clarity, sophistication. Clarity and sophistication make the dreams stronger. As the dreams grow stronger, so does my attachment.

As my attachment grows, the dreams become stories. The stories become about people I love but can never know. People who have never taken a single breath, yet live alongside me.

My heart breaks when theirs do. My spirit’s warmed when theirs are. My emotions connect to theirs like a normal person’s never could.

They are my children, they are me, they are my reality. They are the result of a condition few have ever heard of. They are the heart of a Maladaptive Daydreamer.

Ohio State Lima’s Project: Positivity Psychology Club