dave strider jumpscare

willow / 22 / contextually funniest pronoun / follows back from m***l**t

[willow-schmillow]

[edited 1/18/25]

Hey, I'm Willow, and also go by Trees or rat pack in some online spaces. This is a sideblog - I follow back from m***l**t.

I'm 22 years old, Chinese-American, and use the contextually funniest pronoun for the situation. I perform gender for the bit.

I am being treated for DID (diagnosed 2024). I entered remission for PTSD last year. I'm interested in talking to other adults about our experiences with recovery and dealing with life.

For a while, my goal was final fusion. Right now, I'm taking a sort of let-it-happen approach. I'm working towards feeling happy again, first. Everything else will figure itself out.

My syscourse stance is two-pronged: I have a job so I don't really care, and I believe other people when they tell me who they are. To say: I support endogenic systems and other plural people.

Less sad shit and more fun facts about me under the cut;

I like CRPGS and fantasy computer games in general. Currently, my favorites are Dragon Age: Origins, Baldur's Gate 3, and FFXIV.

I like indie horror: this includes analog/digital horror, indie horror movies and shorts, and indie horror video games.

I enjoy space horror as well.

I also like Star Wars (OT and prequels) and Mass Effect.

[carnivorous-arboretum]

ryne:)

[willow-schmillow]

incontinence Issues in the wake of prolonged sexual trauma kind of make me feel like im being drilled through the skull actually. oh sorry your body has been the site of so much violence and betrayal. have you considered pissing yourself about it

[birdmans]

Diary of a Wimpy Kid dir. Thor Freudenthal

[lemuenic]

[the-greenest-planet]

@nekotato

[willow-schmillow]

saw one of those aesthetic anime instagram mental health slides with the cutesy pixelated font saying SEX TRAFFICKING and i had to go outside and lie down in the middle of the road to calm down

[willow-schmillow]

in some odd way this feels serendipitous. having been in recovery from a major breakdown surrounding this exact trauma. it was like the shock and absurdity of the situation caused my pain to overflow and reset back to zero. so thank you, incredibly callous mental health instagram, for that.

[willow-schmillow]

figures that my need to snark outweights my need to mope.

[willow-schmillow]

saw one of those aesthetic anime instagram mental health slides with the cutesy pixelated font saying SEX TRAFFICKING and i had to go outside and lie down in the middle of the road to calm down

[willow-schmillow]

in some odd way this feels serendipitous. having been in recovery from a major breakdown surrounding this exact trauma. it was like the shock and absurdity of the situation caused my pain to overflow and reset back to zero. so thank you, incredibly callous mental health instagram, for that.

[willow-schmillow]

saw one of those aesthetic anime instagram mental health slides with the cutesy pixelated font saying SEX TRAFFICKING and i had to go outside and lie down in the middle of the road to calm down

[willow-schmillow]

integration-focused trauma therapy is always an ongoing process, i believe effectively dealing with trauma is something that i'm probably going to be working on for the rest of my life, but in the very moment i'm in right now - this exact amount of progress ive made - our collective memory is in the baffling space of "the entire system has our knowledge of data mathematics and coding in a few languages such that we can all do our job well" but also that "i know at least one of us has to know how to use a can opener, because we eat canned food, but i don't"

[willow-schmillow]

yk when people Usually bring up their problems with therapy and DID its not something like "my therapist thinks im a subsystem and im feeling weird about that" but hey, Guess What.

[willow-schmillow]

a while ago i saw someone on r/DID complaining about people who joke about the disorder and i'm not in the business of fighting with people online so i never replied. but what still sorta haunts me is that they specifically said "you wouldn't joke about an eating disorder."

HAVE YOU EVER SPENT TIME WITH ANYONE WITH AN ED. LET ALONE A GROUP OF US??? we are CONSTANTLY joking about that shit!!! we are the HARBINGERS of poor taste!!!

im just like so genuinely shocked that their archetypical online mental health community that exemplifies pro-recovery mindsets was the fucking. eating disorder community. the EATING DISORDER COMMUNITY.?? the mainstream destructive mental health community comes from us, buddy. we Are Not a good example for this argument.

[willow-schmillow]

fused - from start to finish, the process itself was about 12-18 hours, though the groundwork had been laid for months. fastest that's ever happened to me damn

[willow-schmillow]

psychosis is incredibly destabilizing and best treated in me with close monitoring, sometimes inpatient care, and heavy medication, but i can technically lock in about it. because fundamentally even at my worst i understand i don't have to act on everything i feel. and i did get medicated and safe without having to resort to an inpatient stay. so, yay.

unfortunately there are absolutely conditions out there that you cannot "just lock in" about and one of those is a fucking pulmonary embolism

[willow-schmillow]

pregnancy loss, csa

i told my therapist this, and i think it's where i'm at emotionally. though don't know. i don't think i've had a miscarriage, to be blunt about it. if i'm wrong, and i did, i can emotionally prepare myself for that eventuality. the signs and proof i have in both directions fundamentally aren't worth investigating. the amount of pain i'll put myself through seriously examining this is just not worth it. if i'm wrong about my assumption... i'll know. eventually, i will know.

my dear friend and i came to the same conclusion about my childhood sexual abuse. i didn't have to find out. if i was ready, i'd learn. and i did. i choose to take the same path regarding this.

my therapist and i agree that the emotional implications of this are much better to examine right now. i hold a lot of guilt over being a bad parent - some of it is, unfortunately, source shit, but that was entirely a mask to hide that, regardless of what actually happened, i thought i killed my baby. it's all something i need to pull apart, and soon. it's our goal for the next however long this takes: work on how gabriel, specifically, hates himself.

it's one thing to hate myself for being a bad parent because a core piece of my beliefs was/is i killed my baby. and it's another thing to feel disappointed in myself for not protecting my little brother - he says the opposite, he trusts me, and it scares the shit out of me but he trusts me so i won't fail. and it's another other thing to feel disappointed in myself for how i show up for our child alters. kailey says i'm a good dad - wrote it down where i'd see it - and that brings up so much pain and self-hatred.

but - not for the first time in my life, but for the first time as an adult aware of my trauma - i've become a mentor figure of sorts to children. i'm approaching becoming the safe adult i needed as a kid. and i know that can't coexist with my self-hate. i know that hating myself doesn't just affect me, i know it brings my friends pain and my little brother pain and the rest of this system pain. but i can't let that affect the real kid who looks up to me. i have to tackle this. i have to find a way to dismantle my self-hate.

it's just... picking apart the core belief that i killed my baby is so much. it fundamentally forces me to deal with my blood phobia, my childhood sexual trauma, my guilt complex, my medical trauma, my reproductive trauma, my current active problem of heavily suspected adenomyosis+ suspected endometriosis, it's... all of it. it is the ultimate amalgamation of everything that hurts me. and it scares me. it scares me to feel I KILLED MY BABY. it's so unfathomably intense. but i can't not feel it. i can't keep running from this. i have to face this for the sake of everything i care about.

if it was just me, i'd let myself get washed out into the despair. but it's not. people - this system, and people out of it - care about me. rely on me, in some cases. i don't like myself at all, let alone enough to get better for my own sake, but i have to because i love them.

[willow-schmillow]

pregnancy loss. csa

i dug and found. i wrote and wrote and wrote. i made so much art and it was like vomiting blood and i saw my face in its infernal reflection and i saw a child. i saw a child who understood somewhere in his shattered mind that sex leads to babies and i saw a child who felt like he'd lost his baby somehow. a child who faced horrors nobody should ever go through who chose guilt to survive who feltlikeknewsomehowdeepdown he was supposed to be a mommy because why else would this be happening. a child who feltfeltfelt the loss and pain and rationalized it as something he'd come to later understand was called miscarriage but in the moment he had known - true or not he had KNOWN - he'd killed his baby.

i don't know and i don't have to know. i hope to god i didn't miscarriage as a child but i know this that in my shattered self trying to make sense of everything the adults were doing to him that i had felt the loss of a child. my hope is that it was a misunderstanding - my hope is that this too is a substitute belief i developed to deal with the pain - but i was scared. i am scared. i am a scared kid who's a scared adult who's trying and picking up the pieces and praying that this grief is imagined to deal with another kind of loss and, i'll be ok because i can feel this pain.

i hate myself for a lot of reasons and some of it is that i killed my baby. says my child self i stare at his eyes reflected in the viscera and he-i scream, I KILLED MY BABY and the guilt crawls and settles into my skull and i hate myself. i hate myself because i'm good with kids, because my little brother trusts me and the children i care for trust me and the children in my system trust me and all i can think is my body is going to eat you and destroy you and ill kill you. and i don't because despite everything i will become the adult i needed and that makes me hate myself too. but i can hate i can feel hate i can feel grief and i try to tell myself this is not my fault-

im on birth control pills (WE SCREAM AGAIN WITHOUT WORDS THIS TIME) and im bleeding anyway and my head throbs and i think this is not my first time i recall my fears of being pregnant i recall my nightmares about miscarrying i recall everything and it coalesces into bloodgutsBABY ripped from my body splattered onto tile the shower head washes it away, and i cry and cry and cry. and i'll live because my body and brain let me feel this. the fear crawls through me in its fullest force and i think though i am petrified, i think i FEEL and that's freedom.

[willow-schmillow]

[raucous cheering] pk;m delete

[carnivorous-arboretum]

Portrait of the Warden-Commander of Ferelden, 9:34 Dragon

[antiarasaka]

I said something that proved controversial, so I wanted to elaborate on my point here, without being confrontational, and to allow anyone and everyone to give their own perspectives and thoughts. This post is particularly pertaining to CDDs/DID/OSDD, however you want to label your traumagenic system, I'm not your boss.

Anyway, I said in response to another system's fragment saying they would be "sucked back into the void" that it was truly up to them whether or not they wanted to remain an alter or allow themselves to be sucked back into said void, because I recently spoke to my own specialist about my front-stuckness, and he empowered me to realise that it's my brain, and it's up to me (big Me, big I here) to choose what's best for my system. I think there's a lot of really intense mystification around dissociative systems and how they work, and a lot of systems feel that they're stuck functioning a certain way because that's how their mind unconsciously copes. I want to bring the perspective of empowerment and inner strength and discipline.

Would love to hear other syscourser's thoughts on this.

[willow-schmillow]

Not a syscourser but I think this is a valuable concept to engage with so I will.

I think I see what you're saying, in that the direction recovery goes is influenced a great deal by one's willingness to put in the work. I don't think that's the only factor, though.

There are some things I just never will be able to do. For example: my eyes are just wrong. Corrective lenses make me functional and well enough to be a safeish driver and read printed books. But I'll never have binocular depth perception and will probably have trouble catching things for the rest of my life, even if I decide I want to spend a lot of time learning to catch stuff. I can get better, but I have a hard time imagining myself as, say, a good baseball player. And I don't think I need to be a good baseball player to be happy.

This extended comparson is all to say: the kind of control over one's traumagenic system that you're describing is probably more achievable than most people would evaluate it as, but it's also not something I consider achievable for everyone or necessary for healing and happiness. The direction I've decided to go with therapy leans more into radical acceptance and the idea that, no matter what happens to me, I'll figure out how to adapt. My system has been in flux as of late, but I don't feel the need to try to control it because I/we know we'll be alright anyway.

Would I be capable of exerting this kind of control? Maybe. I haven't tried and don't really intend to. I could certainly make some progress towards it if I tried. I can't guarantee success, though. I succeeded with DBT but couldn't progress with CBT, despite a lot of effort on my part. Modified IFS did me better than CPT. Pursuing fusion went well, where pursuing control over switching did not.

Recovery will look different for everyone. I believe in a couple things: one, nobody is obligated to recover; two, some people may not be able to achieve "full" recovery. I don't think that's a flaw or a fault. Sometimes, it's just like that. People can lead fulfilling and happy lives even with it. I'm on a fuckoff huge dose of antipsychotics and still experience hallucinations. Some people would call that failing at recovery. I can live with that and think my life is pretty good. My eating disorder is chronic and will probably affect me for the rest of my life. I'm still happy, anyway. I would posit that someone choosing not to pursue / or, pursuing and failing to gain this kind of control over their system is similar.

I find discipline and control as concepts to be things I.. don't really value for myself. I admire them in other people, but I don't think I need to be that to be happy. Arguably, I'm disciplined in a lot of areas of my life. I do very, very well at an academically rigorous university, and volunteer often, and work part-time, and exercise. Choosing to take a more relaxed, "I can handle whatever happens" approach to my DID is just right for me. I don't think I need discipline over my mental health issues to be happy. I think other people would feel the same, and I think other other people would prefer to build the kind of control you describe. But I also think other other other people would try to build that kind of control and fail, not out of some flaw with themselves or lack of effort, but because if everyone could do everything if they "just" tried hard enough then humanity would experience collective apotheosis.