Choosing not to Run (Ch. 12-14)

Hello everyone! I hope all is well! I have finished the book and here is my reflection piece on chapters twelve to fourteen.

              In the final chapters of The Sum of my Parts, the main character Olga experiences intense suicidal ideations. She doesn’t trust anyone and has trouble performing basic tasks like grocery shopping. She explained how she felt internally divided. Some parts would dictate to her that she wasn’t safe, particularly younger parts, and older parts would try to comfort these younger parts. This must have been taxing to have such a strong internal conflict occurring and I can imagine it would have been nearly impossible to satisfy either demand. As time progressed, Olga learns to cope with this and adopts skills to negotiate with these parts. I find this so interesting that she can communicate with these parts and negotiate with them. Its kind of hard for me to wrap my head around. It’s like she’s having an internal conversation with herself, but instead it’s a younger version of herself that she can’t entirely control. She wasn’t afraid of the thoughts and memories these parts brought forth anymore and she felt as though she was back in control. Her mental health was beginning to improve, but her relationship with David was failing. She explained falling out of love with him and feeling as though she couldn’t trust him anymore. Ultimately, Olga and David got a divorce. Furthermore, she explains having great difficulty in sustaining close intimate relationships, as I had previously predicted. Following the divorce, Olga was diagnosed with a variety of disorders including dissociative identity disorder. She feared telling anyone about her diagnosis as she believed they would judge her and that she might lose her job. This is such a huge problem within society. Stigma attached to mental illness is a crippling phenomenon, preventing people from living their best life. They often fear scrutiny and expand extra effort to cover up any evidence of the mental illness. Today’s society has come a long way in accepting mental illness, but we still have a long way to go in riding the stigma attached. An opportunity arose for Olga to speak publicly about her trauma and mental illness, in which she agreed. It was hard for her at first, but once she got used to it, she found it very empowering. She would speak about the trauma she endured as a child and the psychological effects she experiences from it. She wanted to educate people on the disorder and teach them how to support someone with dissociative identity disorder. Things were going well for Olga and she met her new partner. She came out as lesbian and realized that she had been this way since she was twelve years old. She married her partner Casey and they were very happy together. However, Olga still struggles with trust and doesn’t foresee this changing. I can relate to Olga as I have a very hard time trusting people as well. Due to childhood experiences, I believe mistrusting people becomes a trait that is encoded in you. You constantly feel as though you need to evaluate people and watch for certain triggers in order to protect yourself. Sometimes I believe this happens on a conscious level and other times on an unconscious level. Ultimately, I agree with Olga that this mistrust of people will not go away and that we must learn to cope with it.

Thanks for reading! Please share your thoughts in the comments section. I would love to hear what you think! 🙂