T w e n t y S i d e d
There is a lot myself, my dad, and my family never brought up on this site. The closest this place got to ‘the real’ was when my dad and I each wrote books about our real life experiences, and of course, when dad died. Dad wrote about my seizures briefly when they happened, and some of our money problems when the house foreclosed, but a whole human life doesn’t really fit on a blog. It’s hard to know how much to share, when to share, and how to share it, especially with strangers, even in a place of familiarity. It doesn’t take rocket science to read my dad’s autobiography and know there is some very deeply set generational trauma in our family. Dad always tried to write kindly about people, but also be entirely truthful, and I really admired his ability to balance both of those things even when they felt mutually exclusive.
I loved and admired my dad, but I was also very much abused growing up, those things also feel mutually exclusive. But if my dad taught me anything, it’s that they aren’t. Someone can make a valiant and honest effort to do better, and still fail. Dad never spoke from a place of anger about his own dad, even though he had every right and even reason to. My dad was a live-in absentee father, and my mom is now entirely estranged from myself and my brothers. There can be sad and horrible without cartoon villains. I won’t speak much on mom, since she’s very much alive and able to be affected by things I make public, but just know things are better for everyone this way. No need to prod the nest or play the white knight, the dust has settled and we are all much better off. I hope she is too.
From the title of this post, some of you may suspect what I have to say. I suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder. We’ve known this for years, long enough that dad knew about it, and it was honestly shocking we didn’t notice earlier in life than when we did. We spent some time as a medical anomaly as a child, because of it. After our seizures we lost the memory of our last two years of life; things would come back in blips, but always with debilitating headaches. It should have been brain damage from the symptoms, but there wasn’t any. For a brief period after, we tried to get people to call us ‘Ray’. No one liked the nickname, so it didn’t stick, but it was weird by all accounts because before the seizure we’d been apparently trying to go by Emily.
Dissociative Identity Disorder is triggered by repeated trauma experienced before the age of nine, which is around when one’s personality begins to fully form, in children who have the innate tendency to dissociate already. We don’t fully know why we are a system, but it’s clear to most that it happened around the age of four. It seems to happen when fight and flight are no longer enough, and the child simply cannot handle life as it is anymore, and they can only imagine someone stronger and more capable to survive it. This goes far beyond imaginary friends, though, as the person they ‘create’ is just a part of them, isolated with memories intended to help them navigate the situation. These ‘alters‘, as they’re often called, can be ‘trauma holders’, designed to ‘hold’ the unhappy memories so the child can function, ‘protectors’ which are alters designed to take over when situations are unsafe and scary, and many, many more. Once one is created, more can be made. Instead of the usual fight, flight, fawn, and freeze, they can also split and switch, switch being to change who is ‘fronting’ (being in charge of the body), and split being to make a new alter entirely. A group of alters is called a ‘system‘, as in ‘we are a system’.
Experiences vary a lot from system to system. Some switch easily and smoothly while others have harsh and abrupt switches. Some systems have alters that primarily all get along, others may have constant arguing and trouble communicating.
Some systems remember things between switch-outs pretty well, others have firewalls of amnesia between them. We are the latter. This is not a pretty disorder, I can look an old friend in the eyes and have no idea who they are. Haircuts and tattoos have to be agreed on by an entire group of people, and the societal understanding of systems is very poor. “Are any of you…evil?” Is a common question, which really takes the fun out of parties. None of us are evil, we have a stick-in-the-mud, if that counts, but he’s working on it.
There is no cure, and the most common treatment until recently was re-integration (therapy to become one person again), which can sound appealing to non-systems but ultimately isn’t for everyone. First of all, you’ll forever have DID and can split again in the face of trauma. Second of all, what if I suggested you became someone else tomorrow, someone you’d never met. For the Doctor Who fans, would you choose to ‘regenerate’ and become someone else entirely, with different wants and needs, or would you rather stay you? For some systems reintegration is the answer, for us, probably not.
The they/them pronouns we use on the site are hilariously because we are actually plural. The images of us on the site are from ‘Pippin’ our only actually non-binary alter. We haven’t looked like Pippin in years, since not all of us were cool with the hair chop (which happened before we knew). The name Bay was chosen years ago by a long term host (someone who does most of the fronting for a long time). We all like it well enough to use it day-to-day, but we also have our own names independently for our loved ones to use. We have Jaxson, Pippin, Ava, Bay, Ella, Samantha, and Intern. We use Capsule as a system name, because when you use a gashapon machine you get a capsule, but which one? It’s a surprise.
We don’t know how to handle a site as a system, but we think it’ll be better if the site actually knows. There’s been a lot of writers for the Sims Overthinking series and it keeps changing tone depending on who’s hosting at the time, and we’re burning out trying to play normal. Seven people in one trench coat is a bit of a squeeze.
