This is a page dedicated to the Void System. The goal of this blog is to give the system somewhere to vent/rant/express themselves.
Alters in the system may use depictions of themselves or stay anonymous. This is dependent on their level of comfort and privacy.
This is also a creative space. Fictional scenarios/stories/art may be created by the alters or featuring the alters and will be tagged as such in ways like #fiction or #notsystemcanon
The host will be referred to as Void. The host is in a long term relationship with their spouse who is referred to as JJ.
Rant/Vent/Posts about thoughts and other topics will be tagged by their fronting alter EG: #voidfront or #hostfront
Please respect our feelings, but feel free to ask us anything. <3
The collective agreement we have semi-regularly that some of the head mates are just..
Fine as fuck. For no reason. Thanks brain. You’ve blessed me with an absolute specimen.
Liam? The Italian American vampire who looks like he’s fallen down the drug tree and hit every branch on the way down? Unnecessarily fine. (He’s sober now don’t worry)
Niall? Tanned skin Adonis of a man. Recently developed a skin condition that resembles vitiligo? Unfair. Completely.
WOMEN? I can’t live like this anymore. If y’all don’t stop flirting with me for “funsies” i might self exit.
I spend most of my time “inside” sleeping. I have a special little cubby hole I like to hide in while I’m away. I feel my spirit is that of a fox, so I’ve fashioned myself a little “foxhole” under one of the elder’s beds. I sleep days away under Niall’s bed, tucked away in cloth and fabric woven into a burrow..
It’s kinda like normal sleep..but also not in a way.
It’s true sleep. Rest. Guilt free, calm, safe, warm sleep. The kind you used to get as a kid when your mom woke you up to tell you it was a snow day and school was cancelled. No rush. No responsibilities.
It’s the only true comfort I’ve felt since reaching young adulthood.
Life is impossible. Adulthood is terrifying. I’m going to soak up all the comfort I can possibly hold onto before I start to sink into derealization and I’m forced to come back to reality.
Psychiatry and the Assumption of Absolute Diagnosis and Treatment
I'm not here to pull my punches, so let's all be honest about the state of things as a system on the internet. I don't care if you're traumagenic, endogenic, whatevergenic, "fuck the labels, we're just here". You can spell your pain points out in detail, be honest about the shit you deal with, show all the suffering in the world, be a perfect textbook presentation of The Suffering, Disabled Multiple who sees themselves as more trauma than person-
and still, the second you say it's not hell on earth, show signs of trying to live with each other better, or find even a speck of joy or interest in your life despite whatever pain you're dealing with, that's reason enough for strangers to turn on you. Liking your systemmates and getting along well is reason enough for strangers to say you have "narcissistic involvement". You're just a trauma response, not a person. Your self-understanding is wrong- no, I don't have proof, I just have theories. Proof would be unethical. You understand.
You don't exist unless you're actively on fire, suffering as your brain burns down to ashes that all hate your guts, and treating all of that as a horrible disease that needs curing to make you normal again. And if you are diseased, then "you really need to stop having symptoms, it's not good for you. Get some help. Go to therapy. You're too crazy to understand yourself accurately."
It's not just us. I see it happen time and time again, played out the same way across a dozen different websites, slowly driving us all mad as we rip each other to shreds to appeal to strangers who see all of us as broken murderer stereotypes. It doesn't matter why you exist. It doesn't matter what you deal with or how happy you are. Someone, somewhere, is going to find a reason to punch down and go for the throat. Someone is going to justify it using psychiatry's medical model of the mind.
In a community so centered on medicalizing every little experience, no matter how mundane or common, I look around and get really fucking worried about some of what I see: the sheer amount of sucking up to people who think we don't exist in the first place is disturbing.
My friends get asked if they want to kill people when they open up about being plural. We get threatened with incarceration, eviction, and the loss of our livelihoods. People like us get their kids taken away from them, get denied the ability to enter other countries, have their autonomy taken away time and time again for the crime of being a little too different. We're called imaginary, insane, violent, confused, and a thousand other words that all add up to, "we don't see you as worthy of the same respect as us."
And yet, we're all stuck on this idea that some of us are more acceptable than others, and that casting off the people you disagree with will save you from the people who see all of us as exactly the same level of crazy and dangerous.
Appeal to nitpicky strangers all you want, but someone out there is going to hate your guts for existing in a way they disagree with, and they're not going to see you as being on their side if you join in and beat up your friends. Sanitization just kills us from the inside instead of the outside.
So screw whatever fears we had of being a little too unhinged on this blog, I'm opening up the can of "honest thoughts about psychiatry" to talk over some thoughts around the mental healthcare industry. Want to go off in our inbox or comments about how much I suck for having opinions? Skip it and block us. You'll save us both time.
Psychiatry is a Mixed Bag
I'll start by porting over some thoughts from a conversation we had today that sum things up decently well:
I'll make the argument that decisions about what's best for someone's life aren't always best left up to a professional who does not live that life or necessarily share their values about what makes a life rewarding, worthwhile, and meaningful.
Some people seek mental healthcare because becoming more normative fits their ideas of living a good life. Other people feel harmed by that pressure to outsource their decisions about their life and identity to mental health systems, or they may fundamentally disagree that one has to be "normal" to be happy and successful in life.
The psychiatric system can be very helpful to some people, very harmful to others, and anything in between to plenty more folks. I don't think that psychiatric care should be forced on someone just for having unusual ideas about themselves that aren't causing them or other people concrete harm in their daily lives. I think that as much as possible, it should be left up to them whether they want to seek that kind of support, and that even in cases where there is a risk of harm to self or others, it needs to be handled a lot more respectfully towards that person than it often is. There's a reason that there are movements of people speaking out against psychiatric abuse and mistreatment- the industry has its problems, just as it has its merits, and those problems have hurt people just as much as not seeking support has hurt other people.
We approach a lot of things from a vaguely psych-abolitionist perspective, especially me. This shit needs reform at minimum. Keep that in mind.
Sometimes Western psychiatry helps people. Antidepressants saved our life in high school by giving us just enough of an emotional prop to work on fixing the root cause of our depression at the time. Antipsychotics let our friends work and live independently. Therapy helped us learn how to process a shitload of trauma and fear around things as mundane as blue rubber bands. We've picked up some tricks from clinical textbooks.
Sometimes psychiatry's absolute dogshit. A psychiatrist suggested taking the door off our bedroom and never giving us a moment of privacy as part of treatment. Another one told our mom that we just needed to play outside more when the problem was that we were self-injuring to cope with trauma (nevermind that we spent all day outside already). A therapist told us to "just stop thinking bad thoughts" instead of helping us figure out why we were in pain.
We know people who called emergency services, then were handcuffed, sedated, and institutionalized during a crisis. We know people who were medicated against their will, had their trauma dismissed as a factor in their pain, had their actual concerns ignored in favor of what the clinician wanted, and had psych wards deny them human contact or companionship when all they wanted was a hug. We know people who were diagnosed, then had those diagnoses weaponized by everyone in their lives to take away their autonomy, credibility, and independence. We know people pushed to use modalities that weren't available to them, or that did concrete harm to them in the past.
Psychiatry isn't all bad. But some of the shit that goes on isn't right.
Psychiatry isn't Universal
Even if psychiatry didn't have its issues, it's not universal. Some folks live in areas that do have Western mental healthcare, but they lack the means to access it. This shit isn't always free or cheap. Even if it's available, some folks can only access mental healthcare based on paradigms now considered to be harmful or unhelpful under the Western model.
Some folks have access to different takes on mental healthcare that aren't "take Prozac" or "talk in a therapist's office for an hour a week". Different medications, no medications, physical interventions, understandings of mental illness that look nothing like the DSM. The Western model of mental illness isn't the only way to make sense of suffering.
Some folks have access to healing modalities, spiritual and cultural interventions, and other approaches that don't pathologize their experiences as "diseases" or "disorders" in the first place.
Some folks have no access to any form of mental healthcare whatsoever.
Despite that, the internet's first response to someone struggling is to toss them, "you need to see a therapist", "get diagnosed or you're faking it", or suggest that they go on meds to get rid of their suffering like any of that is a readily-available magic cure for all suffering and abnormality. Every weird experience is pathological. Every pathology should be fixed with Western treatments and understandings.
Sanity isn't Universal Either
Of course, there's one true standard of what's sane and what's insane, and symptoms never happen outside of disorders. Everyone knows that. (Immense sarcasm.)
Yeah, that shit isn't universally true at all. Weird shit happens to people all the time outside of a diagnosis. Even in Western countries:
6-15% of the general population hallucinates without meeting criteria for a diagnosis.
Millions of people believe in ghosts, and a sizeable portion believe that they've directly encountered a ghost at some point in their lives.
Some writers hear the voices of their characters and find that they can act with autonomy.
An ACE score of 1 or more is typical in the United States, and a full quarter have a score of 3 or more. (If you're curious what an ACE score corresponds to, here's a questionnaire.) Most people do not see themselves as traumatized despite this.
I could pull more examples of "normal" people being crazy (conspiracy theories, anyone?), and I'm sure you could too.
If all of these people have the right to understand their experiences outside of the medical model, then why don't we? Why the insistence that a subjective experience has to be diagnosed to be real to you in the first place?
What if you don't live in a culture that treats your experiences as a disorder in the first place? Even if you do, what if you'd rather use another paradigm to understand your life? Where's the space for that on an internet that assumes that the only truth is a diseased and diagnosed one?
There are other ways to understand your "weird" experiences that aren't in the DSM. Even if you do make use of the DSM or ICD, you still have access to these other paradigms.
Things to Think About
The medical model didn't appear out of thin air. Diagnoses in the DSM and ICD didn't manifest in isolation either. Have you ever asked yourselves who decides what's normal? Why do they get to decide that, and who benefits? Who suffers? Who is disproportionately affected by the concept of diagnosis, and why is that the case? Where do we get these diagnoses from, and what value do they offer? Who do they offer it to? Who is it denied to, and why?
Take a minute, think on it. Work out how the medical model helps you, how it hurts you, and how you want to relate to it. It's worth your time to get both sides of your story around the medicalization of your experiences.
If you find it useful, great. Roll with that. But don't assume everyone else feels the same way.
I'll gladly recognize your right to take meds, go to therapy, use diagnoses, and take whatever else you want to take from the medical model. I want there to be space for everyone else who'd rather walk a different path or hold a different understanding- space to let them exist and be heard.
It's really a kick in the teeth when you realize that you've been causing more harm than good to the host.
What has intended to be protecting them from their conflictions and trauma has just led to handicapping.
I just wanted them to find comfort in who they are, yet instead I've been closeting them into an identity that puts them on edge while steering them away from what's comfortable.
I'm an accidental bigot apparently. So. My bad I guess.
I'm the host of this lovely system. Really it's just my shell we all share. I'm Void, I also might be known as AJ depending on who's speaking.
I'm 25, Non-Binary, she/he/they really any pronouns, I'm very fluid. I'm demi/pansexual. I've been with my partner (JJ) for 8 years. ♡ They are also non-binary, but typically use He/They pronouns.
I've been aware of my system for a long time. I knew I functioned differently than a typical person form about middle school, but didn't get into DID as the cause until my early 20's.
I have AuDHD, and I am currently working on seeing a doctor to try and find out if I have POTS/HEDS or some other type of disorder that causes a lot of my bodily pain/joint issues. ♡
Some Facts about me:
-I can crochet.
-Foxes are my favorite animal. I feel my personality aligns a lot with foxes. ٩(๑˃́ꇴ˂̀๑)۶
-I love trinkets, handmade items and shiny things.
No, we don't particularly agree with endo systems.
Yes, our system has some insys relationships. That's their business.
No, our host is not involved in any of them.
No, we don't constantly assign/identify roles to our alters. This make's them feel less like their own entities, and more like gears in a machine. It makes them uncomfortable. We let them do what they do, if they want to be identified as such, they will.
Yes, our alters have traumas, struggles and pain. They are people. Existing hurts.
We won't diminish ourselves to make you feel more comfortable. This is just how WE operate as a system, a family, a community. Not every system functions on a linear path.
This is going to be a masterlist for any/all alters who chose to identify themselves in one way or another. All their information will be kept together by their hashtags as well.
