Autistic chronically ill person trying to keep the existential dread at bay. Early 30s. Living life with DID and focusing on trauma recovery. Queer and trans. Cat parent. Shark lover. They/them.
I'm an early 30s white adult with DID, and collectively we go by felis (they/them). I use this blog to write about my lived experiences as a queer, trans, disabled, autistic person with DID. This is primarily a trauma recovery blog where we focus on our collective life with DID and our work towards learning about each other, growing with each other, and healing together. I'm a licensed mental health counselor and often post about my job and the complexities of navigating that as a disabled person with DID. I also like sharks a lot. And Jellycats.
Our username is a nod to Richard Kluft's OG paper on DID called "The Phenomenology and Treatment of Extremely Complex Multiple Personality Disorder." Throughout the paper, he refers to his research participants as "complex multiples" and that's a title we've jokingly and lovingly reclaimed for ourselves since our system is pretty complex and confusing.
Click the read more for more details about us, our system, our life, and our blog boundaries.
We believe that our DID system is polyfragmented, which is a label we understand as referring to systems with a large number of parts and fragments (typically 100+), who also have complex splitting patterns, more frequency in splitting, complex internal organizations often including layers, levels, and subsystems, many parts with hyper-specific roles, and often (but not always) a complex inner world. Some parts shy away from this term or feel like it doesn't apply to us, but many of us feel like it's a helpful lens for understanding why our experiences can sometimes be different from people with OSDD/DID who aren't polyfragmented.
A lot of parts post on this blog and we usually don't sign our names to posts. We often front in clusters instead of individually, and we also switch frequently because our system functions by utilizing many different parts with different roles who all help us get through the day. As such, we’re often blended and blurry and don’t always know who exactly is around. We're also actively working on integration and this is bringing us closer together, but also making it harder to identify and distinguish between each other.
I am a cult survivor. I spent most of my childhood connected to a few different extremist fundamentalist and Christo-fascist “Christian” cults, and the rest of my adolescence and early adulthood in a very toxic and controlling church that wasn’t much better than the cult. I experienced many different types of abuse and trauma as a result of these communities and the influence of the cult on my family system. We write about our journey to process and heal from these experiences. We are also exploring the possibility that some of these groups and/or our extended family had OA ties and that we experienced RAMCOA in conjunction with that. We write about that almost exclusively on our personal sideblog (if you're a mutual or an established follower who we've interacted with, you can DM us and ask us for that blog's URL).
We collectively identify as a queer and non-binary trans person and have the most wonderful wife in the entire world. We live together with our three cats, one of whom thinks she’s the queen of our household (she’s not wrong), another who is a beautiful visually impaired chaotic disaster who doesn’t know how to be a cat, and a third who has cerebellar hypoplasia and is just wobbling her way through life.
If you interact with us or follow us from a k!nk blog or trauma/core blog with untagged references to SH, SI, or CSA, we will likely block you for the sake of our mental health and boundaries. We generally try to stay out of syscourse and prefer to just focus on what's useful for us and our recovery. Otherwise, asks are always open to people who would like to respectfully interact, learn more about us, or ask questions about our experiences with DID, our life, our work, interests, therapy, etc. Some parts in particular really receiving asks related to our experience as a therapist with DID who specializes in trauma and dissociation.
they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.
their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.
longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years
toxic flesh
has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.
lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion
largest genome of any shark
eats everything including moose and polar bears
ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you