after years and years of struggling to relate to anything online communities have presented to me, especially after 2020, i finally decided to pick up an autobiography from a person with DID and i chose kim noble's "all of me", because her art has already been extremely impactful and inspiring to me, and... wow.
her amnesia is a lot more stark than mine is, or maybe we do have similar experiences and she's just writing it in this particular way to help other people understand it better, but i finally feel like i'm reading something that i relate to.
i'm still only a little over halfway through it, but after years of "meet my alters" and public system lists and Fictive Dating and hyper-individualism and all this game-ifying the online communities have done to their DID (which is fine as a form of self expression, it's just really not for me and i do not relate to that experience at all right now)...
it's like i've been stuck in a funhouse mirror maze for years and wondering why i don't look or feel like all the other people walking around. now i've finally gotten out and have found an account where someone is talking about my life. coming to in places i don't remember going, having to figure out the context clues of what i'm doing and why, trying to keep it together long enough that other people don't notice, but they always notice and just end up thinking i'm air-headed at best, or being lazy and forgetful on purpose at worst. the constant fear of thinking i might be missing something, or that i already have, or that i've forgotten something important, or that i've done something terrible that i don't remember, over and over and over again.
i've also been on again off again reading the archive of the old "many voices" newsletter, which has been just as enlightening seeing personal accounts, stories, artwork, advice and book recommendations from other multiples. because it was recommended in MV at one point, i started reading a book called "the obsidian mirror" by louise wisechild, who is not a multiple but is an incest survivor and chooses to represent her story in a metaphorical way that's very similar, where she turns aspects of herself kind of into characters that are controlling her life in some form or another. like if thomas sanders decided to make an episode about incest instead of disney themed anxiety. i jest, but while i'm almost halfway through that one, it's a really good read so far, if you can handle its semi-graphic nature.
i hope to read more personal accounts like these. it's been really helpful and impactful to me, and i can't recommend it enough to other people with DID, especially if they're struggling to relate to the rest of the community, and/or feel the need to present themselves a certain way to fit in.
