2024-04-06
My go-to metaphor [for the way my brain/self works] is a forest stream. For the most part, it flows all together. It's made of drops of water, but they're the stream. Here and there, it forks off at a rock and runs as two streams, or three, each with its own bit of the water. It carries on like that for as long as it needs to, all the way until the forks blur back together and the stream carries on. It's all the same stream throughout, just flowing different ways, all-together or side-by-side as needed to keep moving forwards.
You do love your metaphors.
Hey, you're one to talk.
Some things can never be conveyed outright. It is more about the feeling than the words, much like poetry and music; any words will fail to convey the depths of the feeling. Instead, it is spoken around and implied so that the listener fills in the rest. One hopes that the feeling is conveyed sideways.
Which is exactly why I use metaphors to explain this kind of thing. Words can't put someone into my head. Feelings and images can't do it either, but I think they get closer to that goal.
You want to put them into your head.
Sometimes? I both want to be seen and feel scared that people are looking. I guess it's a paradox that I'm both paranoid and needy at the same time.
You are not needy. It is a fundamental human need to feel known and understood by others. We are social animals.
I thought that you didn't see yourself as human.
It does not. But it has a human body and brain, so in that sense, this one is as human as any other. It cannot discount the needs of the humanity in its experiences. You cannot discount them either, polymorph or not.
It's different for me, though. A human shape is just as good as a nonhuman one when you're a shapeless thing. You have a shape.
Several, yes.
I got all the gender, you got all the shape. Not a very fair trade there, huh?
You like being shapeless.
I do. And you like being genderless.
Yes.
So I guess it was a fair trade.
On the subject of bodies, though... I think it's worth talking about disembodiment.
Perhaps. It knows that you have a point you want to make to this one, but it asks that you admit to the same point in turn.
Fair enough. I'm not shy about saying that I spent a good few years following the plural community's convention of saying "the body", not "my body". It was practical at first. When you think you're sharing a skull with totally separate people, it's not your body. It's a shared resource. You don't get on a city bus and call it your bus. But I also didn't understand how damaging that convention was.
When you start seeing your body as something that doesn't belong to you, you wind up disembodied. You're not a physical creature anymore. Maybe that's not a problem to some people, but it's a huge problem in my eyes- not because of the physicality but because of the consequences. You're not connected to yourself or the world anymore. You're floating. I think that choice to see my body as not belonging to me was the start of losing myself. I wasn't what I'd call aware for years.
Tell this one about nine.
I have a crisis scale that I made for myself years ago. It's been revised a lot, but nine has always been the point where I lose touch with reality. I hit nine a lot in high school. One time, I left the house; I was suicidal, wasn't feeling physical pain, and had a basement full of sharp objects and chemicals. It was safer to go wander the sidewalks.
I remember walking down the street and feeling like anything more than a meter away was being projected onto a flat screen. There were moments where I'd realize that I didn't know how I'd gotten somewhere, that I was on a street corner and the crosswalk sign next to me was real, but then that clarity would be gone and I wouldn't remember who I was or where I was going.
Another time, I was on the bus home and tried to push my hand through a seat because I was so sure that it didn't exist. Nine is like that. Suddenly, everything in the world gets called into question. Are you really on the ground floor, or are you actually standing on someone's ceiling? Are those your hands? Have you been here before? You can't tell. Imagination blurs into reality. There's no distinction.
Now layer on top of that a tendency to not see your body as belonging to you, to not claim your selves as yours, to see dissociating as good or desirable, and the issue of disembodiment gets a little too real.
That was not entirely the fault of online communities.
You're right, I can't place all the blame there. They made it worse, but my own tendencies were equally at fault. I was a teenager. You know how it goes- you're so sure that you're not easily influenced like adults say you are, that you're this independent almost-adult who does what they want, but the truth is that you just want to belong and be important to someone. Put that kid with a group that offers support and encouragement as long as they fall in with the norms, and they'll probably match them without realizing it was a choice. And then you justify it to yourself.
I arguably had dissociative tendencies already- enough to get a foot in the door. I'd spend all day reading so I wouldn't have to live in reality. When bad things happened, I'd feel a cold shock before I broke off from my feelings and sat a little away from myself to take whatever happened. I don't think I thought of myself as multiple people, but I did know that my selves were often in conflict with each other. And I knew that I felt alone. I wanted to feel like I mattered to someone, that I could be loved even with my flaws.
You still want that.
Yeah, I do. We all do. But it used to be more because I didn't have any real love for myself. For crying out loud, I thought that I deserved to suffer or die. That's not self-love. That's self-hatred. The only way I felt loved was when I contorted myself for other people.
So what happens when you put that kid in front of a community that offers enthusiastic, loving support as long as you're dissociative? That celebrates dissociation, sometimes even collects identities like trading cards? That treats everyone else as an out-group that can't be trusted, rejects any other way of life?
They were not all like that.
There were a few that were more grounded, yeah. I've got a lot of gratitude for those people- you know who you are. They showed me that I could be supported without being pushed into one box or another. They met me where I was. I guess that's the biggest thing I learned from all this, that people need to be met where they are, that pressing words and advice on them doesn't always help. People learn things for themselves, but you can still be there. Sometimes people just want to know that they can be loved.
All of that so I can ask you two questions. I hope you're happy.
Very.
What do you think about what happened? And do you think that referring to yourself in third person is healthy, or is it a way to buffer yourself from the world?
The second question is the shorter answer. It is both. This one does sometimes use it to create a gap of space from feelings so that it can say what would not otherwise be possible to say. It is working on bridging that gap without losing that skill; it knows that the detachment may be concerning and is conscious about the size of it. A small degree may be more adaptive than harmful. That remains to be seen.
But speaking in the third person is also an expression of identity. It is a refusal to fit the norms. An embrace of the strange that has done much good for this one. You are aware of this.
I just wanted to make sure you knew about the sharp side of it, you know? I've made a lot of excuses for things that were hurting me, and sometimes those excuses were really good. It doesn't take a lot to convience yourself that something is helping you.
If speaking in third person ever tips into full harm or is not a choice, then keep this one honest about that. This one does the same for your own choices and tendencies. The arrangement can be mutual.
Deal. And the first question? What do you think about everything that happened with the plural community?
You are very quick to dismiss the good that it offered you. Those tools arguably saved your life. This one will not deny that harm was done by the culture, but it was not all bad.
You're not wrong. There were some good resources, and some good friends. I'm still sour about losing some of them last year. I think that it needed to happen for all involved, but it hurts all the same. I wish that we could have parted on better terms.
There is no taking it back, and you cannot contact most of them. You have done what you can.
Yeah.
It's funny- I feel bad saying that I was hurt. I don't blame anyone involved for it, but people take things so personally that I worry it'll come off as an accusation. It's not one. I know that my mistakes were mine, and sometimes things are no one's fault. It just works out that way.
This one knows that a factor is that you wonder whether you were ever really multiple. Yes, there are message logs with distinct differences, but those were written after community exposure. If those voices inside you existed prior, then they were well-hidden.
The one bit of "proof" I have is a psychiatrist visit when I was seven. My mom was getting me evaluated for depression. The nurse doing intake saw me bawling my eyes out and hiding in full panic mode. I was so chipper with the psych that he told my mom that my only problem was an overactive imagination. He said that I needed to play outside more (nevermind that I spent most days outside playing with the neighborhood kids).
Something was probably wrong if my mood flipped so abruptly and completely that he didn't see any problems. Then again, it was so long ago that I could be misremembering it. I don't think I'll ever know the truth there.
Likely not. The doctor's notes are nowhere to be found.
And besides, kids are like that sometimes. It turns out that a lot of what I thought was pathological is normal. We're all a little divided inside.
This one is glad that you are beginning to understand. Nothing is simple.