I am delighted to say that Liza and I have finished writing our young adult/children fiction book “Mental Family”.
It started like a very personal project, in a really unpredictable way for me, when I only met Liza.
She is our four years old girl. She is Autistic, kind and deeply empathetic. And at first she was really afraid of the world around us, afraid to front. She used to spend almost all her life in the inside world and was scared that people outside would trigger her or abuse her.
When we met, It had been no more than two week since I found out that I’m part of the System, and like the main host who believed for years that there is only one in my head, I was overwhelmed. And so I found out this child inside my head, the scared child and at first had no idea how I could interact with her and earn her trust.
But Liza started the project that changed everything. It was her initiative. We always liked to make stories and write something, even when we were small kids. Liza knew it because she was separated from me when I was five or four years old. And she still likes writing, just like me.
So she decided to write a book that she wanted to read herself: the book about DID/Multiple experiences without demonization and pathologization, a story about the value of love and support in a System, a story about inner-friendship and the fight to be themselves in ableism worlds. About family abuse and abuse survivors. About acceptance- from people around who will accept you if they are your real friends. But, more importantly, about the importance of accepting your own differences (and it doesn’t matter if you a System, Autistic, queer, refugee or just weird).
This book became a kind of bridge between us. We were writing it during our most traumatized events in the System exploring process: when we found out how much stuff I don’t remember, when we have burnout and depression, when we figured out more about our persecutors.
The main character of this book, eleven years old Elizabeth, is the host of the Mental Family System. She doesn't know that she has DID - well, she knows that her best friend ever and her worst enemy Nadeen, little toddler John, wise Amy and other guys existed inside her head. She chatted with them really often. They knew her thoughts, dreams and deepest secrets - and some of these secrets even Elizabeth didn’t know.
Only Elizabeth hid her Mental Family from people around her, including her foster mother Mum Suzi and school kind-of-best friend, Syrian refugee Aisha.
Of course, Elizabeth wants to find out more: about herself and about her past that sometimes seemed not as she remembered it at all. She knew that there was something that Nadeen was hiding from her. Last experience with adoption ended really badly and Nadeen doesn't trust adults any more. She trusts only her Mental Family. But why and what if Nadeen lies to her?
And, more importantly, if Elizabeth is ready to accept the truth?
What if the truth could destroy her new life in Sheffield, her “happy ever after” with new foster mother, school friends and perspectives to finely
stop being a “freak” and have a normal future?
Luckily, one trip to London not-long before Christmas changed everything. After one extremely unusual meeting in a big march, Elizabeth has a chance to at least open secrets that Nadeen was hiding from her.
Would she be brave enough to start this journey and where it could lead girls.
So, yeah, we made our journey in System acceptance together with Elizabeth. And if you want to find out how Elizabeth and Nadeen’s story ended you could write me a private message and maybe become a beta-reader!
Me and Liza planning to publish this book in a future… and we really hoped that our own Mental Family story would be happy, and that our book would help other “Mental Families” (and all kids who feel like they are a weird on out) to accept that there is no such things as “norm”. And just introduce Plural life to singlet kids and help them to see that we are not monsters from Split, but real persons who just share one body.