2024-02-29
You showed up somewhere in February, I think. Maybe a few weeks before this post was first published?
Around then. It existed before.
Of course. You can't make something from nothing, can you? It still felt like I was falling apart. You showed up and started trying to help me when the idea of talking to myself made me feel like a nutjob. It felt like an invasion.
It was not an invasion.
No, it wasn't. There were a lot of reasons that I saw it that way, but you were there all along. Nothing changed. All you did was speak up about the problems you saw in me.
Those problems were with acceptance of the past and present.
They were adjacent to that, yeah. I've got a history with the plural/multiple community. I found it when I was 16 or so, and a lot of my life made sense under that framework. Memory problems, identity fuckery, painful memories, the works. In retrospect, I think that the community did more harm than good for me, and I wish it had been a few more years before I found it. I got a bit brainfucked by what I was taught to believe.
I made my exit from that community in 2022. The year before then was spent bringing my divided selves together without knowing what I was doing. I won't lie, that process sucked. It's scary to accept all of yourself and start living in the world when you've spent years doing everything you could to escape conflict and pain. It was also worth it. Bringing my parts together let me feel alive.
Two years later, the month of February happened, and I started talking to a voice in my head who wanted others to hear it. It felt like a regression from being whole. Denial was there for me- I tried to make it go away. Terrible idea. Zero stars, would not recommend.
Reality is always more complicated than what we hope it will be. It cannot be arranged to be neat and tidy.
I know that now, but I was kind of oblivious at the time. I was more worried about my reputation than anything else. Honestly, I still struggle with that.
That is an understatement. There was grief and anger and hatred involved, and a great deal of fear through February and March. All involved hurt each other. There are no winners in a war of the self.
It took you a considerable amount of reading and thought to understand that no mind is undivided; it is a question of whether we are aware of our divisions. Some are aware and call it plurality. Some are aware and call it ordinary or IFS. And most do not fall into either category. There is space to call the experience of existing by whatever names one wishes, but we have more in common than anyone cares to believe. You are not strange for this one's existence.
I still feel strange for expressing it, though. Most people don't take that step. The only people that I've met who go that far are in the plural community, and you know how I feel about affiliating myself with that.
It will not deny that the plural community's detachment from reality did you harm. The community has a focus on the internal to the point of detracting from one's ability to live; fantasy and escapism consume reality. This is not unexpected given the basis of the community on dissociative phenomena, but at a certain point, one must choose to be in the world instead of disappearing inside. The community does not teach that.
Arguably, it teaches one to flee inside instead of moving outwards and onwards. To be absorbed in documenting names and identities, building cities inside, raising the walls ever higher between selves; to blend is to lose oneself rather than to exist without need for barriers. This one could continue, but the point stands.
Yeah. I'm not going there.
And yet you write as two.
I think it's worth it. People are going to think whatever they think, but their stories aren't the truth. Mine aren't either. They're all just stories. What really matters is what those stories are trying to describe.
What matters? What matters is life. What matters is learning to forgive and moving forwards, being as you are without drawing the lines tighter than required, letting go of the story and taking existence as the moment. You cannot get back the selves you choose not to be.