This should scare me more than it does.

I’m in the middle of two stories about serious repression: in the fake newsverse, State of Grace, which dissects “Stephen Colbert”; and in Shine, “But What If She Weighs Less Than A Duck?”, which explores the history and reasons for the split personality of Yumiko/Yumie Takagi.

So I think it’s time to lay out my own. I’ll be changing names; the rest is true, as far as I know it.

I don’t expect every reader, or even most readers, to believe me. If you find yourself in doubt, pretend it’s a piece of fiction and keep reading. It’s interesting, even if you don’t find it credible. And weird. It’s incredibly, incredibly weird.

But it starts with something easy, something obvious, something that everybody who knows me for a while picks up on.

I don’t swear.

The reason is less obvious. The short version: I don’t swear because I can’t.

—

I know that probably doesn’t make sense. Let me give you some detail.

It isn’t that I don’t know any curse words. I’ve seen them and heard them in plenty of places. And it isn’t like I’m physically unable to say them; they don’t use any letters or sounds that aren’t found elsewhere in the English language.

But when I try to say certain words, or type them, or write them down, I freeze up.

I sometimes say that I have a mental block against them, but it doesn’t exactly feel like a wall. Ever tried to push together two like poles of a magnet? You know how at some point, before they physically touch, they just seem to bounce off of each other? That’s what it feels like. I’ll think of a word, and try to get it into speech, and it won’t work, but not because it slams into a wall. It just—bounces.

So of course I can’t tell you what these words are. Even allusions and euphemisms don’t work when I know I’m using them to refer to a word I can’t say. I can’t sneak around my own walls without my knowing it.

I could probably get past them unconsciously, but it is very difficult for me to be unconscious of these words. I’m hyperaware of them. If I open a book to a random page and there’s a curse word somewhere in the text, I’ll know. I’ll have to read the whole page to actually find it, but I know it’s there.

(Incidentally, this also works with some sexual words, even though they aren’t blocked in the same way. Throw the word “penis” in a block of text, and I’ll know immediately.)

Not long ago I was riding in a car, a fun-loving cousin next to me, Bowling For Soup’s “1985″ blasting on the radio. We were all singing along; I didn’t have to pay attention to what I was singing, because I knew the lyrics by heart. So I was swept up enough that I no longer cared how loud I was being, no longer cared that I had no tune, no longer cared about anything—

At the last second, awareness crashed down on me. I literally belted out, “She was gonna be an actress! She was gonna be a star! She was gonna shake her ahhhhhh.”

If I hadn’t been so caught up in the song, I would have just hummed the word, or thrown in a similar-sounding substitute (”It’s a damp, cold night“). I had given up enough awareness that I forgot the word was coming—but not enough that I could say it when it came.

I don’t think I could consciously make that happen. It’s like tickling yourself. It doesn’t work when you know that you’re doing it.

—

Different words are “forbidden” to different extents. I absolutely could not drop an F-bomb. It took me about ten minutes to work myself up to typing “F-bomb.”

There is a word in this chapter of State of Grace that was a childish synonym up to the last minute, when I took a deep breath, typed in the word that you see now, and then scrolled down very fast. (Shouldn’t be hard to guess which it is.)

There are words that I can say without this kind of effort, but am still very uncomfortable with; I rarely use them except to put them in the mouths of characters, and only when narratively necessary. “Damn” is one of these.

In recent years, I’ve gotten more able to use words and phrases with religious connotations. My characters say “Oh my God” and “what the hell” a lot, because those are pretty much the strongest things I can throw around with any frequency.

On the other hand, some words with legitimate meanings (”female dog”, “illegitimate child”) are still blocked, no matter what the context.

So how (the hell) did I get a sense of these words being unspeakable in the first place?

—

There was a time when, reading the Sunday comics, my younger self pointed to a string of @#*?s in a dialogue bubble and said, “Mommy, what are these?”

“That’s what they use in place of bad words that they can’t print in the paper,” explained my mother.

“But they say…” I protested, and pointed to another strip which included the word “damn”.

“There are worse words,” she replied.

I remember being baffled. There were worse words than that one?

So it’s quite possible that the block against swearing in general went up before the time when my memories start. It had certainly happened by the time of this memory. The reason I pointed to the comic rather than saying the word was because it was already behind my wall.

But most of the specific words must have gone behind the wall during the time that I can remember, because at the time of this incident I simply didn’t know them.

My guess is that I figured many of them out from context. Here’s one for which I didn’t.

Mom and I were at the local Mars, going grocery shopping. (I remember this so clearly that I could tell you exactly where we were in the parking lot.) We climbed out of the car, and she slammed the door. It was loud enough to surprise me.

I said, “Oh my God!” (I must have heard classmates using it as a general expression of surprise.)

Mom said, “Erin, you shouldn’t say that.”

From that point on, it was unsayable for a very long time.

—

I don’t want you to get the idea that my mother was weirdly strict about this. My parents have never been strict: authoritative, yes, but not authoritarian. My mother has only yelled at me once in her life, and she apologized less than five minutes later. (Oddly enough, this was also in a Mars parking lot.)

So, while I want to make my parents happy, I’ve never felt the need to do everything they say. We’ve had plenty of differences of opinion. In some cases, they changed my mind. In others, I changed theirs. In a bunch of them we disagree to this day, and probably always will.

There is one other specific incident I remember when I realized a word was intense enough to go behind my wall. I was alone with a friend at the time, no parents involved. (This particular word is still unsayable, so I can’t tell that story with any fluidity.)

And the effect has diminished over time. Much more recently, I used the phrase “that sucks” around my mother, and she expressed her disapproval, and—nothing. No effect. There is absolutely no cognitive dissonance for me in saying something sucks.

On the other hand, there are several creative curses I’m sure I learned within the past five years (thank you, Internet!) that I can’t say. So the effect isn’t gone.

So far, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, this is weird. But what’s the problem?” Sure, it sometimes makes it very hard to write when my hands are tied like this. (I have a terrible time with Lewis Black’s dialogue; in The Lord of the Reports I actually have my co-writer do it.) But other than that, it’s just a weird quirk, right?

See, that’s what I thought too.

But I’ve started putting things together, and I kinda suspect it’s not.

—

When I was in third grade, my teacher (she was wearing a green dress that day, with white polka dots; let’s call her Mrs. Slate) pulled me aside one day after recess, shocked and upset. I had had a confrontation on the playground with another teacher, and Mrs. Slate berated me for it.

“What did I say?” I asked.

She wouldn’t tell me.

I really didn’t know. I had (and have) a vague impression of talking to the other teacher. I know I was mad. I had a conviction that I had been defending some other student; the teacher (who was wearing a blue shirt and, I think, grey pants) had been attacking her, and she wouldn’t stand up for herself, so I had to do it.

But that’s as much as I remembered, even then. I didn’t know what we had clashed over; I didn’t know who the other student had been; I didn’t know what had led up to it or how it had ended.

I kept asking Mrs. Slate what I had done. She wouldn’t tell me. I’m sure she thought I knew perfectly well what I had done. Even without remembering, though, I couldn’t fathom myself saying anything all that bad. I guessed that the other teacher just didn’t like to be talked back to.

I was ordered to write an apology. Didn’t even know what I was saying sorry for, so I went generic. And, oh, I laid it on thick. One specific phrase I still remember: “It is wrong for a child to question an adult.” Ridiculous and unjust, but I assumed that was what it took to make the offended teacher happy.

No one ever told me what I had said. I still don’t know.

—

Hold on tight. We’re skipping ahead a few years.

For six years from elementary through high school, I spent three weeks every summer at CTY. It’s an absolutely incredible program for gifted kids; not only did I learn the subject matter of the courses I took, I learned to handle homesickness, long-term disconnections from the Internet, and, most importantly, not being the smartest person in the class.

In short, some of the best times of my life were there. If you’re looking into it, I cannot recommend it enough.

But then there’s this incident. One year, when I was taking the course Crafting the Essay, I had a classmate (I don’t remember her real name; let’s call her Pam) who was incredibly difficult for me to handle. The reason: she kept swearing at me.

No, seriously. Every time she talked to me, it was “You’re a _____.” And I wished I could have given as good as I got, but the best I could do was a bitter “So are you.”

There was general aggression too. One time Pam and a couple of other people came in to have a conversation with my roommate, and she threatened to scribble on and ruin the topmost drawing in my sketchbook. (It was one of Sailor Lupe.) I don’t remember being angry so much as hurt and distressed. Why would she do that? What had I ever done to her?

One weekend, I was alone in the hallway looking at the schedule. (The schedules of weekend activities always had themes: incredibly funny, incredibly clever. Not only were they informative, they were a joy to read. I was rereading this one at the time.)

Pam showed up. Said something. I don’t remember what; I know she swore at me, but I don’t remember the words.

There is no static in my memory, no blankness, no sense of disconnection. It’s like watching a videotape with two different parts spliced together, or playing a DVD and skipping to the next chapter.

So whatever happened in between is spliced out, but the next thing I know, she’s on the floor.

—

Okay, it’s not quite a perfect skip. There’s vagueness before and after it. I already mentioned that I don’t remember what she said beforehand. I don’t have audio from afterwards, either. Nor do I know what her expression was like.

I think she was crying.

So I kicked her. Not like a punch to the gut; more like a shove with my foot. And I went back to my room.

I thought she fell over.

Have you ever seen one of those optical illusions where there’s a pattern with some kind of break in the middle, and your brain just fills in the pattern until someone points it out? That’s my impression of what my memory did. On one end, she’s standing up; on the next, she’s down; what happened in the middle? I didn’t do anything, so she must have fallen. I had an idea that I had kicked her in the shin, but nothing after that until she was on the ground.

When my RA (who had been very friendly; we had a great relationship in general, as with pretty much all CTY RAs) came in and asked what had happened, that, tearfully, was the story I told.

“She says you called her a ____,” said the RA.

I burst into fresh tears. “I didn’t! I couldn’t! That’s what she’s been calling me!”

And then I felt guilty, because I wondered: was Pam referring to my “so are you” comments? (But I couldn’t tell them exactly what Pam had been saying to me, because of course I couldn’t repeat it.)

When Pam and I had to tell our versions of the story separately to the counseling staff, I was brief: “She cursed me. I kicked her. She fell over. She cursed me again; I kicked her again; I walked away.”

Both of us were told that we should be friends, and I was more than happy to. When she actually started talking to me, I was so relieved that I didn’t press her about the reasons for her earlier behavior. I remember our conversations actually went really well. Then, before a dance, she helped do my hair, and shortly afterwards started brushing it.

“…Please tell me you’re not brushing your hair,” she said in disgust.

Well, that was kind of ridiculous, wasn’t it? It was obvious what I was doing. “I’m brushing my hair,” said I, baffled but amused.

She turned on her heel and left. It took me about three seconds after that to figure out that you’re not supposed to brush your hair after you put hairspray in.

One of our teachers told me that Pam had a difficult time in school. Her personal essays were all about how much it sucks to be tormented by the popular snobs. I could sympathize. I’d been there. What I came to think is that she conflated me earlier on with the people who tormented her (because I didn’t talk to her? I’m an introvert; I don’t talk to anyone. Some other reason? I don’t know), and decided to take the offensive early on.

(Of course, with her actively tormenting me, guess who I conflated her with?)

The perceived snubbing of her hairstyling aid must have fit into that image. It would make sense. It would explain why she didn’t talk to me again.

—

In both of these incidents, I was accused of doing something wrong during a time that I have little or no memory of. In the first, it was saying something apparently too shocking for Mrs. Slate to repeat; in the second, whatever else I did, Pam accused me of swearing at her.

There’s a third possible companion to these. It comes in tenth grade, and while it isn’t associated with any pinpointable gap in my memory, a lot of the features are the same.

Again, I was having trouble with a fellow student. Let’s call him Tim. He was later diagnosed with Asperger’s, which helped explain his difficulty relating to people. (Again, it was a teacher sympathetic to both of us who told me this.)

A sample difficulty: We had French class together, out in one of the trailers; the door had a wooden platform in front of it, with a railing around it and steps on the right. It was a few minutes before class started, and Tim was standing at the foot of the steps. He wouldn’t let me by. Either way I moved, he blocked my way. He was a big guy; he could do this with ease.

I walked around to the left side of the platform, swung myself under the railing, and went in.

I had gotten into the classroom and avoided a confrontation. All in all, I thought I had been pretty clever.

It was not long after this that another classmate (let’s call her Kate) and I were summoned to the vice principal’s office. Tim had written us up. The other accusations were, as far as I knew, blatant lies; but I didn’t start tearing up until—you guessed it—I was accused of swearing at him.

Kate, a longtime acquaintance who had been in several classes with me, leapt to my defense. “He’s obviously lying,” she declared. “Erin doesn’t swear!”

I don’t know what the fallout of this was for Tim; but we weren’t punished for any of the accusations.

Now, though, you can see why I’m suspicious.

—

Looking at this from a literary standpoint—as if it were the first few chapters of a mystery novel—I know what conclusions I would draw. “I cursed out that teacher; I cursed out Pam, and beat her up in the process; and I cursed out Tim, too, and very possibly more people who never reported it.”

But it doesn’t feel like that. I have absolutely no sensation that these actions were mine. I don’t remember anything of them; I only know about them because of surrounding events. They aren’t connected to any me that I’m aware of.

Intellectually, I’m sorry for whatever happened, but I don’t feel remorse. How can I? “I” have no sense of actually doing anything wrong.

This has never happened online (so I’m never going to use this as an excuse if, say, I sent you a nasty email), or on video, or in any case where there’s a record. It’s never even happened in front of witnesses. It’s always their word against mine, and we’re both telling the truth as far as we know it.

I’ve done a lot of reading about repression in the past couple of months, which has helped me put this all together. Here’s the thing: repression is for self-protection. If I had the memory and actual sensation of having personally done something terrible, I would be overwhelmed with guilt. Especially if I swore, given my incredible sensitivity to cursing in general.

And what about the other student in the first incident, the one I was (or thought I was) protecting?

This is complete and total speculation, but I think—or at least, I suspect—it was me.

The sense of “I’m protecting this student who won’t stand up for herself” is all I remember of the time when I was saying whatever unspeakable thing I said to the teacher. Which suggests that it’s a memory from the part of me that did the yelling, which is split off from the rest of me, along with the memory of what I said and the ability to curse in the first place.

Again, if this were a story, I would say “Oh, that must be what happened!” But, well, it’s me. I could be completely wrong. I don’t know.

—

Did I consciously choose to split off these memories, or did it happen automatically?

I don’t know. If I made a choice, the memory of making it is also split off.

How badly did that girl get beaten up?

I don’t know.

Would I (or rather, this part of me, that at the moment I have no access to) do it again?

I don’t know.

I don’t even know what happened. I certainly don’t know how to stop it.

—

About every six months, I have a minibreakdown. I’ll feel fine; I’ll feel happy; I’ll feel grounded and Zen and able to deal with anything that comes along; and then something will set me off and I’ll spend a few hours crying uncontrollably, as if all the stress of the past few months has been saving itself up to hit me right now.

I had one of these a few days ago, triggered by the hard drive meltdown. Now that I look back, I can see the warning signs: working on State of Grace in the week leading up to it, I was tearing up as I wrote emotional scenes. (At the time, I figured I was just that moving of a writer. Sigh.)

Called my dad for tech support, and ended up venting to him about a string of events over the past month. He wisely observed that my distress was way out of proportion to the things that had happened. Well, I knew that. I didn’t feel nearly as sad as I sounded. But I couldn’t stop myself from crying.

I don’t know if this is directly related. Again, my literary tendency is to find the narrative in it: “The tears, unconnected to emotions you’re actually feeling, are coming from something behind my wall that’s spilling over. Trouble is, the emotions that actually cause it are still inaccessible, behind the wall.”

But, again, I have no idea if that’s the case. I mean, I was halfway through typing this entry when my computer had its meltdown. If you’ve ever read or seen Chobits, you know what narrative can be found in “a computer crashes due to an overflow of painful memories.” In the real world, it was obviously a coincidence.

The reason I bring it up is because Dad urged me to make an appointment with the counseling center, which is scheduled for tomorrow, and I’ve hurried to finish typing this so that I can print it out and show them.

I don’t know how to reach my inaccessible memories. I want to deal with them. I want to integrate them. I’ve grown up; I’ve matured; I don’t need the protection of splitting any more. (At least, I think not. I hope not.) But on my own, I don’t know where to start.

So it’s time to find out what the professionals can do.

It’ll be an adventure.

The problem is, while that sounds like a healthy attitude to take when faced with new and daunting possibilities, realistically I should probably be terrified.