This week is Part 2 of a special three-part mini-series centered around stories about mental health, told from two different perspectives. This mini-series is guest hosted and produced by Story Collider senior producer Misha Gajewski. In this episode, both stories are from the same storyteller, EMT and special service teacher Jenice Matias, and they show just how life altering one diagnosis can be.
Part 1: Jenice Matias wakes up in a psychiatric ward with no recollection of how she got there.
Part 2: While coming to terms with her diagnosis, Jenice Matias finds a new appreciation for her life.
Transcripts
Part 1
It’s 1998 and I wake up in an all-white room. I get out of bed and I'm wearing just a hospital gown. There's an open door and from the shadow of light I could tell it's evening.
Jenice Matias works as an EMT and as a special service teacher. But her passion is performing. She is a dancer, singer, actor, comedy writer , comedian and storyteller.
I wander out into the hallway and it's only lit by the moonlight or the rays from the moonlight. I could hear a TV set playing in the distance and I walked towards the sound. There, sitting in a chair, is a white man in about his mid-30s and his hair looked like it had been attacked by his scissors.
He looks at me and he says, “Who are you today?”
I just look at him.
He said, “I hope you're Carmen, because I like the way she curses in Spanish.”
I sit down in front of him and I guess he could tell by my confused look, he says, “Before you ask, you're in St. Joseph's Hospital in Paterson in the Psychiatric Ward.”
I was not surprised that I was in a hospital in a psychiatric ward. What was disconcerting to me at that time was why I was there and how I got there.
I have always, throughout my life, had an issue, a problem with time and space. What I mean is that I would lose time. I would wake up being me but being in a different place or different clothes or with different people.
The first time I could remember me fading out or I called blackouts was when I was two years old. I was in the front seat sitting between my parents in a car. And I remember my parents started arguing and then it led into actually my father physically abusing my mother while I was sitting between them. I remember not being able to breathe and I remember just closing my eyes and just going away.
I can't tell you memories of my childhood. Like some people can say, well, they remember the kindergarten teacher or their best friend. I have no memory of that, of going to school. And this continues all the way until I was 28 where I can only tell you like clips, like MP4s of episodes of my life or just snapshots or pictures, but I couldn't tell you exactly what happened, what was going on.
The next thing I remember was that I was standing again in the lounge and this nurse comes up to me. This nurse calls me by the name of Nicole and she motions towards me. I'm confused because my name is Jenice.
She says to me, “Do you know why you're here?”
And I said, “I don't remember. The only thing I remember was this white woman in my living room with her hands around my shoulder saying that I needed help.”
The nurse says to me again, “Well, do you know what your problem is?”
“Problem?” I said. “I'm married. I have kids. I got a dog. I'm in grad school and I work. Maybe that's it. I just overwhelmed myself and the fact of self-medication might have not helped me.”
And as she spoke to me, again, I started this cloud of blackness just clothing me and just blacked out.
I do remember while I laid in the bed in my room in the hospital, a vision of me being in this abandoned building. It was when I was about eight years old. And I remember they tore down this whole block and it was only a skeleton of buildings. It was a shortcut to going to school.
I remembered that I had a friend and she and I would always take this shortcut. I don't remember ever seeing that friend again until I was in the second grade or first grade. And I remember sitting on a table surrounded with my classmates around it, and the kid across from me said, “Yelda, do you know what happened to Susan?”
And the other girl said, “Yeah, she's dead.”
And then right then and there I remembered, again blackout. And from then on I don't remember anything. First, second, third, junior high school just glimpse of pictures.
While I was in the psych ward, this woman comes up to me. She says she's my doctor.
And she says to me, “Who are you today?”
And I am so confused of people telling me, asking me who I am, so she says, “Follow me.”
She takes me into a conference room and she sits me down at the table and she puts before me all of these paintings or drawings made from pencils and crayons. And as I'm looking through these drawings, I say to her, “Why are you showing me this?” They're pictures that look like it was made, drawn by a child, and except for one picture that was very well detailed.
It was a beach scene. And in the ocean were these skeletons in the form of devils holding pitchforks. There was this one skeleton devil with a pitchfork looking directly at me and I said to the doctor, “This is some scary shit. I mean, it's really a nice drawing but it's scary.”
The young doctor who happened to be Muslim and she had a Muslim attire, she sat next to me and she puts her hands on my hand. She says, “I think you have personality dissociation.”
I looked at her and the only thing I knew about personality dissociation from the movie Sybil. And I say to her, “Sybil? Well, that's about a girl who was tied to a piano and her mother tortured her and did unseen things to her. I don't even have a piano.”
And she just says to me, “I can't refer you to any outpatient because of your age. There's nobody that treats adult personality dissociation.”
She just gives me a prescription for anxiety and depression and she gives me a letter with her diagnosis and said to present it to whoever I go for help.
So I asked, “Well, what can I do? How long would it take?”
She said to me, “Well, you're going to have to admit yourself to a psychiatric ward and go through extensive psychotherapy and medication.”
And I said, “Well, how long is that going to take?”
She said, “It might take years.”
As I thought about that possibility, again a cloud of blackness just faded over me. I don't remember leaving the hospital. I don't remember going home. I do know maybe weeks later I found myself at my local mental health association where I volunteer as a mental health player.
And I confided to the director, her name was Penny, about my experience thinking that she was going to agree with me that the psychiatrist or the doctor didn't know their elbow from their butt. To my surprise, she throws up her hands and she said, “No wonder. No wonder all the different names, the different clothes, the different voices.”
And I looked at her and said, “Did everybody know I had a mental illness except me?”
Penny agreed with the diagnosis and I said, “Well, I can't afford years of therapy. I barely can go to the doctor and pay for it.”
And she was so kind to say to me, “Don't worry. I'll take care of it.”
Some time went by, I think a few months, and I get a call from Barnert Psychiatric Ward in Paterson and said that they had set up an appointment with me with their therapist who was a children therapist. When I went to Barnert, I walked into a room and there were all these kids playing. I felt out of place and at the same time it didn't really hit me that I had a problem.
So, the door opens and this white woman, Jewish with a beautiful, friendly smile motions me into the room. She sits me down at a table, a children’s table, and I'm sitting down in this little child chair. She sits next to me and she puts her hands on my hand and she said, “I cannot help you to merge your personalities, but what I can do is to help you find them, to introduce you to them.”
I don't remember exactly the therapy but I do remember I would come in at my scheduled appointment and she would play a recording of me speaking in different tones, just different voices, and I couldn't believe it was with me. And she would show me these paintings that I did and I didn't remember.
And she prompted me to create this room and to put a table with all… she told me put 11 chairs around it with me being the 12th. And I remember maybe when she would hypnotize me or put me in a deep meditation state but I would never forget the moment. I opened my door into this room that I created in my mind and there they were, 11 of me sitting around the table. It was at that moment the reality of my personalities were real for me. It was the moment that I realized that these different parts of me were my saviors. They were my protectors. They were my heroes.
Part 2
When I think back on that moment where my therapist had me create this room and she had me to specifically design it. It's an oval room and there are 11 doors all around the walls. It’s made out of wood, dark wood, and there's an oval table in the middle and there's chairs. When each of my personality will walk out of the room, they can walk directly to the chair and sit down.
I remember that moment where I walked into my mind and there they were, as clearly and distinct as I can see anybody. Each of them were looking at me. Each of them had their own unique look, clothing.
I was shocked. I did not really, really comprehend until that moment that I actually had multi‑personality disorder.
As I sat down in the chair, they all looked at me and they smiled. One of my personalities that I never really met but for some reason I had this overwhelming fear was sitting across the table, at the head of the table and was looking at me. She had a baby's face. I called her The Dark One.
And the reason I called her The Dark One is because whenever she came out, it was a bedlam of emotional pressure, beyond being depressed. It was like having a big rock just on your chest. And I always, when she would come out I remember I always felt like I was dying.
I looked at her and she had this beautiful little baby's face, big eyes, big cheeks, but she was encased in this human like a man's body that was encrusted with black, like if it was burnt. Like it was just burnt. And I realized that she was the first. That my trauma started when I was very young. And from her came all the others.
I got this impression that at a young age that she was like, it's like a mother grabbing a child that's going to be pulled back from being injured. You know, like maybe the child is going to fall off the edge or going to be hit by a car. You know how a parent would grab the child and pull him back to safety? That's the impression and the feeling I got from this baby face. That she was the one that grabbed me and saved me. Then from her came the others.
It's hard to really tell people how I deal with these personalities, these different voices and these different, unique in themselves, their own experience. To this day, I really don't fully know what the traumatic happened. It's something that my personalities fears that it would be too much or would be debilitating to me if I knew the truth of how they were created.
When I have tried in the past, I would go into convulsion. I spoke to one of my therapists and they said that wasn't a good idea. That I needed to be under supervision.
But as time went by, each of them…
[00:06:22] My personalities, they talked. After my diagnosis, I have developed this kind of relationship with my personalities. They understand that I'm in charge now. There's times where if a situation arises that is very stressful, I could tell that my personalities will try to come out and protect me.
They do that by there's times where I feel like I'm very sleepy, like I'm going to go to sleep. And I could see myself being sucked into this kind of blackness. When that happens, I know that there is something that's happening in my life that I have to deal with.
Or one of my personalities will say, “Well, if you can't deal with it, I'm going to deal with it.”
So what I'm saying is that I have created this bond with my personalities that I actually talk to them and confide in them and they'll talk to me. And I have these voices in my head. Sometimes it'll get a little crazy and that's times when I say to myself I need a mental health day.
But the thing about my personalities is that they're starting to tell me things about what happened and that I could understand. Years ago, I started having these dreams about being with a little girl when I was about eight years old. And I had this flash of being in this situation where I was raped. I was being raped.
One of the boys, it was by a group of teenage boys in Spanish Harlem. We used to walk through, this girl then I named Susan who is one of my personalities, we used to walk through there for shortcuts and we got trapped or attacked by a group of boys who raped us.
Unfortunately, she was killed. She was murdered. But I only remember little glimpse of it. I don't remember the whole situation. I just remember her face as an outline. But I do remember that I don't have any recollection.
But things started coming out and I think that one of my personalities, Susan, needed me to know that I created her in my mind because I couldn't deal with the reality that she was murdered and I was able to survive.
I think I spoke about the first time that I knew that I went into… I disassociated when I was a toddler and I was in the front seat sitting down between my parents and my parents started to have this fistfight over me. And I remember that was the first time where I felt that I couldn't breathe. And I remembered that I had like an out-of-body experience where I actually saw myself above me looking down at myself. And then the next thing I knew that blackness just grabbed me and sucked me into it.
I'm starting to remember little things like that of trauma that I experienced but not the full trauma.
Now that I know I'm a senior citizen and I thank my personalities because they're the ones who saved me. They're the ones who protected me. They're the ones who were there when I couldn't be there.
It was so interesting that all my life nobody knew about them, not even me. And that how I could just go through life going to college, graduating, going to grad school, having kids, that I was able to function and nobody knew that I had this disorder.
I take this moment and when I reflect back I am so grateful. I am so grateful that they… I don't know how they were created. I know how they were created. They were created through trauma. But I am so grateful to them that they loved me enough, that they cared about me enough, that they were willing to put themselves in place of me so that I could continue living.
I don't know what my life would have been if I didn't have them. They are truly my heroes and I thank them every day for giving me my life.