Honestly, I just want to be home. I Don't Even Know what home is anymore. Not like this house I live in. just home. I just want to be home. Everything is so exhausting at this point. I just want to feel at home somewhere.
(VERY long post ahead, most of it is under the read more)
Hi, another mental health post, this time I was wondering if any systems could help me out? I’m trying to figure out if I am a system and if I have OSDD (I’m nearly 99% sure it’s not DID) or if I am just, idk, doing smth weird with my personality.
My entire life I’ve been very much into making up stories and characters, and I think I may be a maladaptive daydreamer as sometimes the stories become too real and cause me anxiety. I especially love making up characters and sometimes get attached to them, and in the past I’ve also occasionally “talked” to them regarding their story (such as, “Brian, you’re going to do x thing.” “Really? But why?”) however they’ve never felt like a part of me. In the past I’ve experienced emotional neglect and I couldn’t trust my parents to properly comfort me as they didn’t know I had adhd (although I think I may be autistic, not adhd) and never reacted well to my meltdowns and such. Since then I’ve had my main “characters” (what I choose to call them) who I always just considered the different aspects of my personality, however I’ve begun to feel like they’re more than just that. All of them have different appearances and personalities and do different things, and they feel like other people inside me. However I am hesitant to call it a system as the others rarely front, and if they do it’s pretty much impossible for anyone besides us to tell that something is different, and although we have extensive communication I cannot distinguish if a lot of what they say is spontaneous and from them or if it is me giving them stuff to say as I do when I talk to my actual made up characters. I thought I would give you some detail on who they all are, too.
Seth is the most talkative but also the rarest to front, like a kid in the back hanging onto the driver’s seat and annoying them. He is around 12-13, and if we are a system and he is an alter, we think he is a developed introspective of Gumball from TAWOG, as that was my favorite show growing up and gave me an escape from everything going on around me. He is sort of the class favorite (but that could also just be that his ego is so big it’s literally leaking into the host’s thoughts. If so, Seth, get out of here.) In a story setting, he would be the stupid character (sorry) (he’s mad at us now and I feel bad Seth I’m sorry) that serves as a stand-in for the audience to maximize exposition. He’s immature and the bigs of the group educate him a lot.
Ethan is me, the host, I’m up front maybe 98% of the time unless there’s someone else we don‘t know about. I guess I’ll give you some more details about the body here, since there’s nothing much else I could put. When I was very young my family was more dysfunctional than it is now (we were still healthy for the most part, but my mom had a lot of anger issues and past trauma she was still trying to work through that effected her parenting). Things we experienced that we consider trauma due to current and past repercussions are my parent’s mishandling of meltdowns (specifically, they isolated me when I was upset for no reason “until I calmed down”), more recent events regarding mishandling of nightly panic attacks (didn’t know what was going on and brushed it off, causing more panic), and also a lot of yelling which may not seem like much but I am extremely sensitive to sound. These events caused me to emotionally mature past my age, develop a second me to look after myself (Hestia, we’ll talk about her later), and when I was much younger I had an inner voice which was terrifying and difficult to describe. It was a muffled yelling/screaming voice that degraded and shamed me in a very fast voice so that I couldn’t hear an exact sentence but got the vibe, and it would stay at one volume but rise in pitch. It tormented much of my life until second grade when I figured out a way to ward it off. I’ve always struggled with being too guilty about things and the voice would yell at me for simple things like spilling something, accidentally hitting someone, and stuff like that, probably due to my mom’s overreactions to the same situations. I am very slow to trust, socially awkward and introverted, and very factual/logical. I also have terrible social, separational, and generalized anxiety. I am a minor, which is also why I am not sure if I have OSDD as it is not usually diagnosed to people my age.
Ella is the responsible person, she is logical, clever, kind, and acts as a big sister. She often takes over when I talk to boys younger than me (probably because she is the main caregiver for Seth, who is younger than me) and is the second most present of our group. She is usually the one to take more control in social situations, calming everyone down and mirroring until it is over. We don’t know how old her or any of the bigs are, but she seems to be somewhere in her early twenties.
Hestia is complicated. She existed before her name, and after we named her she changed a little to became a bit of a developed introspective. She was the first to appear, taking care of our emotional and physical needs throughout childhood because we couldn’t rely on our mom. She is very maternal but rarely shows up anymore, and she never fronts, just appears beside us as a sort of guide. We don‘t know what age she is either, but she is assumed to be late twenties/early thirties. She does not talk unless we are under emotional stress.
Molly is one of the smaller (rarer) ones, she is the least developed. She is assumed to be late teens/early twenties and is very aggressive. We think she might be a late introspective of our only best friend, who in the past was aggressive (not EXTREMELY aggressive, or even very aggressive) in the way that they were the only friend we ever had to offer us physical and emotional protection (a stand-out memory is someone said something to hurt me in fourth grade and they got mad and said they’d punch them in the face, or something). Molly does not do much by way of emotions, however she is very angry all the time and vocally threatens pretty much anyone to annoy us (by vocally I mean in our brain, not actually out loud). She is most present in times of high stress or anxiety, such as the school day, and offers more of a relief. We would not act on anything she suggests, and she rarely fronts, but if she does it has never physically endangered anybody, she’s just an angry person.
As far as we know, that’s everyone. After reading this post back to myself it feels obvious to me that I do have something somewhere in OSDD, but I’m just not sure because people my age just don‘t get diagnoses for this, and because I make up characters and talk to them a lot anyways. If you made it all the way here, thank you for reading all of this, and I wish y’all a great day.
I tried being normal but instead i got this dumb ass named Fynn who lives rent free in my head and says he was there when the trauma was there, but the thing is, I don’t remember the trauma.
Do you have any tips for writing systems/characters with DID respectfully?
I’d say it’s the same as writing any group of people that you’re not a part of! Do as much research as your willing to, and just write people.
The trouble with DID stories is that most of the time it’s specifically about the disorder. And there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s what the story is supposed to be about, but if it’s just something a character has, then it’s a bit tasteless to make it their whole character. Like how Autistic characters in media are autistic first, and people second. Or any other token diversity character. They /are/ their race/sexuality etc. Avoid that as much as possible!
And I will tell you, you’ll never be able to please everyone. Just like everyone else, we are a community of individuals who all have different views on what’s the “right” way to portray us. Most of us agree on certain aspects, but there will always be things that we disagree on. And that’s okay!!
The long and short of it is, do reserch, and ask yourself: “if this was about me, would I want to be portrayed like this?”
