Figuring myself out
I was recently diagnosed (and given a second opinion with the same diagnosis by medical professionals) with DID. I had no idea what this was. I didn’t know that I was any different. I didn’t know that they weren’t real. I always thought it was weird when people would say they were “just talking to themselves”. I didn’t talk to myself, I talked to other people. Other people that I still believe are very real. How can they not be? For 21 years they’ve been so real to me. I thought everyone was a host to many people. I guess the clues were all there. I’d say things and people would act so weird about it, like they didn’t experience it too. The gaps in memory aren’t common for me, but it happens with a few of my “alters”, as they keep calling them. And I’d notice that too, that sometimes I felt like I was missing the things going on around me. Apologizing for not showing up to parties that I did attend. My psychiatrist assumes I don’t remember gatherings like that because I’m painfully shy and have to protect myself by letting someone else take my body there for me. It just doesn’t make sense to me I guess. I think my psychiatrist is describing things differently than what I know. In the long run, I think that’s what is confusing me the most. Maybe I’ve just adapted to this, and my way of embracing it took me off course of the medical books. However, sometimes I think she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It feels more like she’s learning from me. She asks so many questions and I can tell there’s a perplexed side of her. She’s terrible at hiding her thoughts. What does make sense though, is our practice of thinking back to my childhood. She says that normally, these personalities are created during childhood to protect the host. Foster is the only person I’ve truly traced back though. She comes from the time my mother got sick. She was deathly ill for years. I never saw her. I didn’t have parental figures. Before my mother got sick, she was a foster parent. I guess my tiny brain associated a motherly figure with “foster parent”. I’m really getting nauseous thinking about all of this. I don’t want to write about it anymore, but writing is the only thing that’s taking my mind away from things. My roommate is away for the night and my boyfriend is out of town for the weekend doing military things. I’m completely alone. I tried watching tv, playing video games, reading a book. The things that usually calm me aren’t helping at all. I’ve just been sitting here with a knot in my throat, like I’m on the verge of crying. I’m in a big open living room, but I still feel like the walls are closing in. The air is tight. I’ve never really had a feeling like this that I can’t source and cope with. It’s just a lingering feeling with no cause. I wish I wasn’t so alone right now