Mischief, mid-30s, ze/zem/zers are my formal pronouns but I don't give a damn. Use whatever; they is plural. Multiply disabled and living with psychiatric TBI. (Mostly) friendly but empathetically challenged. Blunt. Capital Q Queer, intersex, and genderfucked. Solidarity among all; trans unity or bust. Partnered. I have a degree in STEM (psych). Slut for research and peer-reviewed scientific literature. Liable to post anything on a whim. I'm old enough to consensually and respectfully hit on your parents and I don't want to censor anything I post, so 18+ only, and make it goddamn readily apparent in your bio or pinned. Asks and unhinged confessions welcome; I pretty much never answer DMs. I am Schrödinger's man, so "men DNI" blogs take notes. I block freehandedly. Anon once told me this bio sounds like AI. If you made it this far, here's a croissant - 🥐 Header by @TheShitpostCalligrapher (based on my post).
I never expect an immediate text back. I have friends with whom it's normal to go weeks between messages, on both sides. But I don't like it when there's a noticeable pattern in which someone only talks to me when their partner isn't around or they're bored and lonely or I'm just their drunk text. Especially when 90% of their messages are just "Omg I miss you so much" and then ghosting.
It's partially curiosity, but also I'm dipping my toe into DID-adjacent (OSDD) waters, and I was wondering what your initial journey to realizing you had DID was like? idk I'm worried that I'm making shit up because I'm friends with a number of systems.
I'm gonna let this one get wordy, and I'm speaking more collectively than individually since I wasn't a/the host when our system was discovered.
There were things really early in my life that I noticed but didn't attribute to DID because I didn't know. Now I look back and recognize those things as part of the journey to discovering our system.
As young as 6-7 I would watch myself do things while not having any conscious control of my body, like I would hear myself say or do things, or get up to walk somewhere without being able to stop. So the very literal experience of body hijacking that people sometimes talk about. Some of these things got me in trouble, and I didn't know why I did them. There were some things that others around me noticed too, like my mom says that one day I came home from school a completely different person. I was supposedly stuck that way for a couple of weeks and then just as abruptly went back to my norm.
When I was a little older I had an incident where someone at school I thought I'd hardly talked to insisted that we were friends and described how we'd even been to each other's houses. They talked to me like I was either lying or crazy for denying it. On the other hand one of my best friends told me I once randomly didn't speak to them for 6 months. People would tell me I lied about things I said/did that I had no memory of whatsoever. Minor things like saying I liked something I hated and vice versa.
When I hit young adulthood I apparently wrote a letter to my mom (that I found years later) describing how when I got too upset I'd just go blank and didn't know what happened afterwards. I felt confused and frustrated by the way other people would describe me, too, because the person they were talking about made no sense to me (one of my friends called me Bambi but I'm anything but). There was an argument with my partner in which I directly told him I wasn't the [me] he knew (figured out later who said that; they'd known for a long time).
Things finally hit a point in early 2020 in lockdown when I was stressed beyond breaking. I got really symptomatic, time was a blur, I was suddenly not remembering things from my everyday routine. I was looking up a lot of stuff trying to understand; I thought I might have a brain tumor like my uncle or absent seizures or early onset dementia. The therapist who had diagnosed me with PTSD a few years prior noted "dissociating and acting strangely" or something to that effect, so that was something that came up too. I watched YouTube videos about DID and thought I couldn't possibly have that because I didn't really relate. But everything that I searched kept coming up as DID/OSDD.
And then one day I met Jack. He was the first to help ease me into discovering our DID. Then Aden. Then Micah. And it became undeniable to me that I was sharing my mind and body with other people. Communication between us not only opened up but it was clearer than ever (in the past I would VERY often "hear" others' thoughts, but I thought they were me "having a busy brain from anxiety" since that's what a former former therapist had called it). For about a month or so I thought I'd handle it alone because I didn't want to go to therapy again or risk being told that I was crazy. I never really planned to tell anyone in my life other than my partner. But it quickly got unmanageable for me to navigate.
I had to go through like 12 therapists to find one who worked with CDDs. I was terrified to say it out loud; I had to say it all in writing at first. Given my history, and that I basically had a list of Shit Going On and went hey please tell me what the fuck is happening, it didn't take that long for them to diagnose me. It officially became a Thing I had to figure out what to do with--but it was also a huge relief to have confirmation that I wasn't dying of something else.
I still don't consider that our full system discovery, because we only knew of 5-7 alters at the time. It's been ongoing. For years we worked on coordination. At some point about, I want to say 4 years in, we realized that we're polyfragmented. Now that we're nearly 6 years in, I can say that it feels like a pretty established thing that we're used to working with and we feel familiar with our system.
Oh they're being very direct about trying to push puritanical values now. Which was always the basis for fatphobia but they usually don't say that part.
by the way. it never is too late to decide you want to be happy. the woman who helped me get hormones didnt start hers until she was 70, and i met her at 73, beautiful and smiling - and told me that the last three years of her life had been her favorite. your favorites might be ahead of you too. why not hang around and find out?
we've definitely posted about this before but if i see one more person act like the only forms of childhood trauma that exist are abuse from family or sexual assault i will actually start crying and it will be so so so loud everyone will hear it from every corner of the earth
THE SCHOOL SYSTEM !!! PEER ABUSE !!!!! ISOLATION !!!!!!!! RACISM !!! SEXISM !!!!!! MEDICAL ABUSE !!!!!! NONCONSENSUAL SURGERY !!!! POVERTY !!!! SO MUCH MORE !!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Natural disasters! I never see anyone talk about that one and as a result I spent years thinking that watching my hometown get destroyed on the news and subsequently having to uproot my entire life at the age of seven wasn't Real Trauma because there was no Abuser™
