Catherine Klatzker on You Will Never Be Normal

Catherine Klatzker is a retired pediatric ICU nurse, mother of three, and mental health advocate. Her personal essays have been published in multiple journals as well as her contributions to two mental health anthologies. She currently resides and writes in Los Angeles, California, where she has taken numerous UCLA Extension Writing classes since 2000. Her memoir, You Will Never Be Normal, was released in May, 2021. It is her first book. In You Will Never Be Normal, Klatzker navigates through denial, dissociation, and grief to eventually arrive at acceptance and healing of her traumatic dissociative identity disorder (DID) and PTSD. Her journey forces her to reflect on her early childhood in the Midwest, growing up wholly dissociated from the molestation in her family with an alcoholic father and her twelve sisters and brothers. At sixteen, she escapes her chaotic home and moves in with an older man. By eighteen, Klatzker is widowed with an infant son. Three decades later find her resisting unbidden early memories and alarming inner voices. When she dissociates, or splits off from her self, she cannot stay with her self as one person. Traumatizing events, beginning in meditation, launch her into a therapy that extends over many extraordinary years as her dissociated identities, or “parts,” intrude with increasing boldness. In You Will Never Be Normal, Klatzker details the ways her alternate identities or “parts” were created and what each contributes to her life, set against the backdrop of her steady second marriage, work as an ICU pediatric nurse, a life filled with children, and a desire to hide her DID, until it becomes inexorably integrated into her whole identity. She finally believes the trauma of her past and the genius of having unconsciously created DID “parts” of herself to hold the intolerable. Klatzker cuts through stereotypes around DID. She normalizes it as a response to complex trauma and emphasizes the role that each “part” played in keeping her safe. This is a story that tackles themes of sexual abuse, family relationships, romantic relationships, self-harm and self-love, mental illness, therapy, and the two ends of human experience, love and death. It concludes as a deep investigation of self-compassion and the reconciliation of opposite realities. http://catherine.klatzker.com Instagram @toomanyparts Twitter @mettah4 Facebook https://www.facebook.com/klatzkerwriter/