I woke up for the first time in a Las Vegas hotel room, almost oblivious to who or what I was.  Some mental mechanism was in place to prevent me from completely wigging out when I started to really think about any particular memory.  I felt like I was accessing my brain over a really slow internet connection: I could see all the directories and could access them all, but it just took a while for the information to download.  Although I had all kinds of information in my head, none of it really meant anything to me, in an emotional sort of way.  There wasn’t that subtle tug of familiarity that I knew was supposed to accompany important things in one’s life.

Jess was there and she helped me out a lot.  At the time I thought of her as a really fun person to hang out with.  I didn’t have any access to my past feelings for her.  I know now that if I did, I would have short-circuited the process that had started and it would have to start again.

I returned home to a life that wasn’t exactly mine.  I really didn’t care for where I lived, the job I had, or the friends I hung out with.  I also had three cats I was suddenly responsible for.  My first thoughts were to just leave it all behind and move to some other state and start over.  Gradually, though, I decided to wait it out and see how I felt after a few days.  Jess explained that it would be irresponsible to start making drastic changes to a life that wasn’t really my own.  Nevertheless, I cut up all the credit cards, bought some new bedclothes and dropped this art class I was in.  It was a compromise, I guess: I was exercising some authority over my life without doing anything truly irreversible.

As I became aware of what was happening in my head, I thought I had the power to decide that I could simply live my life on my own, shutting out all the other people.  Regardless of whether I was hallucinating the voices or if I actually did have some kind of dissociative disorder, I thought I could just put it behind me and move on with my new life.  I even went so far as to visit a psychologist to obtain medication that would silence the voices.  He diagnosed me as borderline psychotic and charged me $125 to listen to me talk for 45 minutes.  But I got some pills and tried them out.  They worked, but I realized the horrible mistake I had made.  These other people had as much a right to exist as I did.