Just muddling through. Doing the best I can. @felis-the-complex-multiple - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
Just muddling through. Doing the best I can.
@felis-the-complex-multiple
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.
Being in neck pain every day is really starting to make me super fucking irritable. It’s so fucking limiting and really frustrating. And just made worse by being back at work and having to prioritize my few functional hours for work tasks during the week.
I started seeing a new PT on Thursday who’s a spine specialist. I think I’m officially in the stage of it feeling worse before it feels better wrt the exercises he’s having me do. My neck muscles feel like tight fists pummeling the base of my skull. But at least this guy has a plan. My hEDS PT seemed sorta at a loss on Tuesday and that really fucking sucked. Spine guy thinks that my situation will be an “easy fix” and that he doesn’t think I’ll have to come in more than three times.
I would not believe a word of his cockiness except that W recommended him to me and she said that he saved her life when she was experiencing CCI. So. I guess he knows what he’s talking about. I definitely noticed some improvements right away. Today has just been really hard because the muscles I’m working with my new exercises feel absolutely horrific.
Shit has just been a lot. We’ve had an influx of new trauma memories show up in the past week and a half…some really heavy ones that seem central to some of our core programming related to our mom. Lots of life and death stuff (um, literally, and like, intentionally caused NDE and stuff) that I think this neck shit has been partially responsible for bringing to the surface. I see how everything is connected and it’s extremely overwhelming. And excruciating and devastating.
Just like. Hard to process the concept of your mother nearly killing you multiple times. It’s really a mind fuck when the person who you depended on to keep you alive as a child was also the person who seemingly wanted you dead. An unsolvable contradiction. Anyways. Been trying to process tons of shit related to that but also like…limited in my processing because I have to be mindful of my neck at all times. Super fun.
The bright spot is that these new memories have reinvigorated our commitment to life. E tells us all the time how incredibly brilliant we were and are to survive. She says we always knew how to survive. Somehow we always managed it. Even when there was no way out. We’ve been reframing our collapse states that we frequently have as the echo of a last ditch effort to live. A desperate fighting for our life. Like a possum who wants to live so badly that they’ll pretend to be dead until the danger is over. Collapse is not dying or failing. Collapse is a refusal to stop living.
There was no way out back then, no way to solve the impossible life threatening attachment quandaries. But eventually there was a way out, and we found it, and we took it. And every day we wake up is just another data point of evidence that we’re alive and we made it here to this life we created for ourselves.
The Last Unicorn really said “There will be times when you can’t find other people like you and there will be times where you'll wonder if you're really the only person experiencing the world as you are and others will even try to take advantage of you through commodification and exploitation to the point where it starts to dilute your own sense of self and will make you question if you were ever you to begin with but it’s important for to resist the urge to assimilate and find community because there will always be people like you who will understand and have experienced these same things and the only way to combat a dark world who wants to smother your light is to FIGHT FIGHT RAGE AGAINST THE RED BULL DO NOT GO GENTLY INTO THAT OCEAN.”
And I just think there’s something beautifully and inextricably queer about that
How does one write from within an absence of memory, from within a loss that is less remembered as a story or an image or a thought than as a mood, an existential void, or a sense of annihilation? Writing is performed in the shadow of a lost object. Writing is the shadow of an absent voice. Writing assembles an undergrounded body's fragmented speech.
Gabriel Schwab, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma
partially-managed mental illness is so fucking funny i'll be sitting around doing my job and suddenly think "wow i hate myself" and immediately get confused because, like, that's not TRUE! i love myself so much. who are you to talk to me like that
