i have DID. why this?

06 Jun, 2026

3 hours, 27 minutes

preface: this post might sound more scattered than my usual writing, i did my best to make it flow well enough. i wanted to get an opinion out - one that is tied with my recent trauma processing, which i also wanted to write about for its own sake in case it helped anyone else feel seen; i have rarely come across specific accounts of what processing viscerally feels like that i could relate to. this is not a trauma dump though and i don't really share triggering details of what i actually went through. just know what you're getting into!

do you ever realize that you've been living an entirely different version of life than everyone else around you?

the mind is a sludge and we must swim

the thing is, some of us knew all along.

my entire life has been a project in how to run away from myself.

what if i told you magic is real? you just have to let your brain multisect itself into a boundless kaleidoscopic haze, from which any manner of hydra heads or shrimp colours can rise

let's try this again

hi, a few hours later.

the other week, i had an appointment where i was dissociating so bad, i would be asked a question and 15 seconds into replying, i couldn't remember what the question was - rinse and repeat about 5 times. thinking on the memory now, i am placed down and to the right of where my head actually was in reality. i've been aware of this characteristic of my memories in the past - my point of view would be slightly transformed, down into my chest or just above or left or right of my brain when recalling the event. would you believe me if i said that i've barely talked about this to anyone, because this wasn't something i realized i even needed to point out as weird in the first place?

i'm also realizing literally just now, in the midst of typing, that this corresponds with "where" i tend to feel certain alters. voices and presences have always emanated from particular areas, mostly my brain (front right for redacted, brain stem for redacted 2) but also from deep inside my chest, sometimes (also redacted 2).

other people with autism sometimes talk about feeling like a lone outsider navigating an alien planet. maybe i related to that a little too much <- has had to rebuild a sense of self basically every other week as long as i can remember because i never understood why everyone else seemed so confident in who they were, even if only a little. so holistic and consistent and comprehensible.

has everything ever made so much sense to you all of a sudden that it made you feel fucking sick?

other parts of me have talked about having DID before, or at least having alters. that's what's so hard to swallow about this. even before any suggestion of any kind of plurality whatsoever, i first formally recognized another presence in my head at [young] years old, and was conscious of how she would take over my body so we could leave the bedroom. i thought she was a guardian sent to me by the stars to help me survive. i've described her existence to a few people, plus the existence of other suspected alters, and referred to them as "headmates" and "my system". despite all of this, i was still in denial. i existed in a tortured liminality where i (someone?) understood we were many, while i (someone else??) also believed that we couldn't really claim DID because a very denial-heavy part is convinced we were lying, we were trying to be Irresponsible, we didn't know what we were talking about. surely we were just weak underneath it all. talking about it as if it were true anyway felt like skating on opaque ice - something done completely in spite of knowing there was no way to know what laid underneath, and that it may very well be nothing at all.

the denial iceberg is a crazy thing. in my 2025 art about my C-PTSD explosion a year prior, i used imagery of being thrown to the mercy of outer space to portray the realization that you are tethered to reality in a way that most aren't; to finally observe this tether for what it is, the nature of it, the shape of it, and how it shapes you. that there is a "you" that can be shaped without this tether. this suit used to be so comforting - i never imagined i would start to feel it close in on me. this experience probably happens to many people with different traumagenic disorders, and i really didn't think at the time that it was system-related. but for me, in retrospect it exposed that what lied at the root of it all was my (our) brain's complete and utter investment in myself (any one of us) as the lone fortress in the mire. i (some) have always known that i was multiple. i knew there was extra noise. 2 years ago on that fateful day, angry spirits from my past who my brain told me i'd prayed away came clawing back in force. my next step would also be part of the process. i thought that my mission was to curate a sense of self against these monsters, to reject them and triumph and make every critic i've ever had proud. once i had the stability to look at them a little too long, i saw my own eyes staring back; i was a monster, too. i had no more claim to my life or my body or my personality than any of them. understanding this was 1) deeply validating, to finally have something that explained so many things about myself i could never articulate before, and 2) existentially terrifying: no part of me was the True Heir to our existence. i am complete only as a fractured whole.

being exposed to the idea of multiplicity as a teen probably helped me. despite that, the acceptance process has been a weirdly asymmetrical one. i think the presentation of systemhood as like, purely a matter of "identifying as one", something that is easy to discover and that you always understand to be true, did hurt my ability to recognize it in myself - i didn't know what the actual internal contours of having DID or OSDD looked like, that it is often so profoundly existential. i didn't know that even realizing you're a dissociative system is a very complicated and painful process, requiring almost a war with denial and self-phobia. multiplicity is not inherently dysfunctional, but i have sometimes seen (kinda predictably i guess) a very real phobia of discussing how trauma influences this mode of existence in certain multiple spaces. maybe the single defining constant of my inner life is i have always wrestled like hell with myself to fight off "inner influences", and only now do i realize that something so fundamental to my day-to-day existence, that i felt like was a broken but still load-bearing part of myself, is actually something extremely nameable that has been observed in millions of other people. what do you mean i can pull this brick out of the tower and it's still standing. i'm hopelessly dependent on the ingot.¹

DID is, ultimately, a coping mechanism. and it's a fuck of a one. most manifestations have concealed symptoms (up to 96% according to one figure²) that only become overt during "windows of diagnosability". and the way the symptoms present are not, to most people, stereotypical of DID at all:

Instead of showing visibly distinct alternate identities, the typical DID patient presents a polysymptomatic mixture of dissociative and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms that are embedded in a matrix of ostensibly non-trauma-related symptoms (e.g., depression, panic attacks, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating-disordered symptoms). The prominence of these latter, highly familiar symptoms often leads clinicians to diagnose only these comorbid conditions. When this happens, the undiagnosed DID patient may undergo a long and frequently unsuccessful treatment for these other conditions.

—Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, from International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation

put this way, i finally see it in myself. it is utterly no wonder why i just couldn't relate to any discussion of mental health or therapy whatsoever. it sounded like most others had clear symptoms that fit into obvious patterns; i never really knew what was "wrong" with me. i wasn't depressed necessarily, i didn't get manic, i didn't have super obvious flashbacks. all i knew was life felt like being brushed the wrong way with a microplane. the only constant was how little i related to anything. when someone would say something like "i managed my anxiety with CBT", i would basically feel something like "what if your anxiety gets mad at you and fights back?" and then not wait for an answer because i had no idea how to even begin articulating that concept - or the despair it caused me to feel like these discussions that supposedly should be enlightening and relatable, were not even a little bit. i just couldn't be reached. oh well; my spacesuit really was the only place for me, i guess.

but now, i know. i finally have the "x" that crosses all the boxes: my phobia of mirrors and doppelgangers, my tendency to feel "unlike" myself or like my life is a pinpoint on a projector screen and i exist outside it, the constant existentialism. the crazy somatic experiences. always feeling like i was receiving feelings rather than just experiencing them. the pre-occupation with my past, the sense i get sometimes i'm living a double-life inside and outside my head, having a deeply particular and spiritual collection of semiotics for communicating within my mind and relating to the outside. there are other pretty specific bombshells also mentioned in the ISSTD treatment guildlines, like the fact that DID patients often first present in therapy as having avoidant personality disorder³ (something i've related very much to for a long time!), and that it's common to have developed coping mechanisms that are basically accidental pseudo-hypnotic techniques⁴. it's like i found my theory of everything. i can't tell you how incredibly relieving (and kindof shattering) that is.

why do we always assume everyone knows everything about themself, and knows how to control it?

i went through life in this dissociative cheese-grater matrix until A Circumstance forced me to consider i might be unhappy in my marriage at 27. what might've been for a lot of people a typical "i'm having some problems in my relationship" conversation led to me, a couple hours later, floating above my desk as a leviathan unearthed beneath me; my nightmare was here. my hurt was truth and the narrative of the marriage revealed itself to be the knife it was. a few days later, my girlfriend⁵ apologized to me for saying something unrelated that freaked me out. i stared at her without blinking. she kept reassuring me, not really sure why i was looking at her like That. i was just... so confused; this was the first time anyone showed any remorse at all for hurting me, especially unintentionally. my vision twisted, my eyes were so wide. her tenderness felt not unwelcome but logically wrong, like 2 and 2 suddenly made 5. at the edges of my confusion, i began to recall that i had long ago buried something: a certainty i used to have that i was right. i was right to be hurt, and to seek understanding and remorse for that hurt. so long i quested for anyone to see my pain. so fruitless was that. i'd stopped believing it could ever be real, until a random tuesday in my late 20s when it dropped right into my lap courtesy of my girlfriend. i will never forget how utterly and completely baffled i felt in that moment, how i felt reality itself had literally just broken, the sheer despair in realizing in one instant that my entire life was a lie built to normalize disrespect for my pain - and specifically that, at some point, i started to buy it, too.

to address what i'd buried, i began researching different types of therapy - CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, somatic therapy, EMDR... having stability in the form of my relationship was a prerequisite for kickstarting this whole thing, but the first technique i intentionally pursued was heavily inspired by "brainspotting". it comes with its jargon, and there's debates about its premise/efficacy like many therapies - if i understand right, it's based on the ideas that 1) where you look in your field of vision influences how you feel, and 2) the mind knows how to heal itself on some level, so guiding your vision to certain "brainspots" can unearth trauma and trigger this automatic process. whatever the underlying explanation, reading about brainspotting fascinated me. i did tend to stare in a very specific direction when "zoning out" in a very specific way. so, i tried it - i let my eye reset to that familiar point in my vision and reflected on what i felt. something stirred, and then erupted: my first PTSD flashback i consciously identified as such. i have to admit in the ensuing months, it really did feel like my mind knew exactly where to take the reins, following back a labyrinthine path marked by notes left by my brain for when i was ready for the return (and that's barely a metaphor). my pain really was the truth, all on its own. it was the most bizarre experience i'd ever had - a comment i saw later by a practitioner compared guiding a brainspotting session to tripsitting. it was intense, profound, and completely beyond words. it flew totally in the face of what i thought any mental health work was "supposed" to feel like. i thought it was for people who could do it cleaner, more respectably, more palatably. someone who could say "this is what's wrong with me" and get exactly the help they needed. i didn't believe that even i could be accounted for.⁶

why are we cruel to people who are struggling, especially if not in a palatable or understandable way?

talk therapy of any sort was wildly ineffective for the vast majority of my life. i couldn't relate to it, it felt invalidating and trite. i think i understand now that this came from the same place my DID has. my world as a child was a vacuum, without substance and without end. it was deeply, unflinchingly unfair. when you're abandoned by your world like this, the only solution is to turn inward and to cut your awareness up into parts. i never learned to trust the outside because i was the only one who cared about things being fair; it possessed me (!). i stayed completely in my own world, where i had my own semiotics, my own audience, my own family. i relied on and related only to myself. this wasn't just because of the overtly traumatic and neglectful things, either - i never quite integrated with the understandings we're meant to receive about how money, the economy, gender, and life in general are meant to work under capitalism. my extremely reasonable questions about these things ("why do people have to pay for things that keep them alive?") were handled the same as questions about why i was personally being treated a certain way: half-explanations, mockery, and escalation of abuse. why are you asking questions? everyone else is fine with it. i wasn't pointing out the problem - i was the problem for pointing it out.

i never really stopped seeing this sort of callousness to vulnerability in society, as much as i've been gaslit about it or tried to convince myself otherwise. i've spoken up in many different situations - family and peers' treatment of me, friends' and strangers' treatment of others or of marginalized issues (whether it impacted me or not) - almost every time, i've been shut down. told i'm too sensitive. i was also told the sensitivity was a kid thing, but as i've gotten older it's... been about the same. a major part of my healing journey has been coming to terms with the fact that being "sensitive" is actually a very normal reaction to living in the circumstances that we do. once again, i was right. i was right to not accept what i was given.

i don't think even people who identify with wanting to make a better world⁷ always stay wary of this tendency. i see it reflected in how we talk about those who struggle or are marginalized: prescribing an ideal and saying that people who don't or can't conform should find a different space, shutting down people who speak up about a rhetoric or word being hurtful by claiming they're "too sensitive" or "derailing the conversation". what's political is personal, too - people have assumed a lot of things about me because they didn't want to understand why i had a hard time, or wouldn't let something slide. i couldn't repress various aspects of myself, and that made me a target to my peers who knew the only thing saving them from the same humiliation was their ability to play the game. i struggled for nebulous reasons, and that scared adults into silencing or criticizing me because they knew deep down if they weren't convenient with their suffering, they risked being left behind by capitalism. it still scares adults, because i see it in how discourses move around its scapegoats - learned helplessness, NEETs, "you people can't do anything"-type statements. "you're too sensitive", "you're derailing". personal or political, doesn't matter. to me, it's a phobia of weakness. it was all the same thing when i was a kid, and it's still the same to me now.

in my early- to mid-20s, parts of me bought into it so hard. we did because we didn't have a choice - temporarily, we shuttered away our own sensitivity behind neural smoke and mirrors in an appeal to the logics we were raised with. this would cost us greatly; i hope talking a little about my experiences shows the herculean effort that's been necessary to reveal that illusion. especially when parts of me were one of those people, too, who believed i knew everything there was to know about myself and that i was functioning Fine. i was still nominally honest about having routine difficulties - i just thought if i could be neat about it, if i could suffer palatably, no one would scapegoat me anymore. i was critical of society according to my principles, sure, but i was also one for whom it managed to be working out at the time, and others who struggled couldn't possibly have an entire inner world, a viscerality to their experience that i can never see. i learned to agree with the pecking order i sought to ascend. i hated it, but those were partially my thoughts. it's bootstrapslop.

you can think you're right, while being so incredibly wrong. after leaving my marriage and finally surveying just how much i'd hidden away, my functioning crumbled. i was continually shocked and horrified by how much space i needed to take up, how much time and understanding. i thought i was done struggling, that i had it figured out. reliving the incuriosity and vitriol toward my problems growing up by trying to repress my dysfunction made things so much worse; the only things that reduced that shame were 1) learn to stop putting it away, even at the expense of keeping the peace, and 2) teaching myself to disconnect from the friends, the mutuals, and anyone else out there who talked like they knew exactly what to do with people like me⁸ - people who can't just put it away. i had no idea just how impossible it would become to not be palatable about it anymore. playing the game by conceding that i needed to run from the shadow of being a social ill or like i was "doing mental illness wrong" only made the eventual explosion harder to contain.

you just can't know what things are like for someone else. especially when we live in a class-conflict society which has an intense interest in imposing a status quo from the haves upon the have-nots - built upon multiple intersecting pecking orders like class, race, indigeneity, gender, ability, body size - and we are heavily rewarded for buying into its logics (money, a comfortable life, social stability); this supercharges the judgement-and-shutdown mechanism, so it works like an immune response for capitalism. like a dissociated part denying the nature of her existence to keep the illusion of a traumaless reality alive.

this is partly why i have DID. this is why people are so terrified of weakness, and questions about the status quo. some people face it head-on, but many have learned to survive by leaving the mirrors intact and laughing at the illusions. turns out, most people are suffering for real reasons and are already doing their best to mitigate it (including kids).

funny how sometimes my current thoughts get reflected in the broader discourse - in the couple weeks i was working on this post, a writer from a niche queer political space published an article about a supposed scourge of vulnerable people who rely on those around them for various practical or emotional matters (specifically talking about domestic living), causing a lot of grief for those who do depend on someone in this way. the post drew particular backlash for (among a lot of things) attempting to calculate the number of labour-hours that these people extract from those around them, in the most normal application of marxism i've ever seen. it's so obviously an attempt to just scrutinize the vulnerable and... for why? i agree supporting others is difficult. and it's true that sometimes, people can be manipulative or just plain self-interested and take advantage of your support. but the one with the income stream and a car and the name on the lease has the means to leave - someone who struggles with these things does not.⁹ so it goes again: the one whose current setup is "working" (even if they're cutting into bone to do so), who is pressing "A" and getting the response they need from the world, asks for those who it is not working to stop talking and stop struggling. because they're afraid of being dependent, too. people have different limits at different times, different ways of responding to and internalizing friction with reality - some responses will look like weakness to observers. it doesn't matter; you just can't know what someone's internal world is like. the real problem is we're being forced to wring autonomy from each other that will never be enough to go around, as long as we have to sell our time to survive.¹⁰

i don't mean to sound bitter, but i guess it's inevitable when i'm in the process of realizing how much this has affected the way i go about life. i'm only just now beginning to fully comprehend it. i don't think mean-spirited ways of relating to suffering and vulnerability can stop until reality is acknowledged without caveats or platitudes: we live in an unfair society. you can do everything perfect and still be the scapegoat, the one left behind, the one to be shut down. there's no "but things usually work out so there's no sense complaining" or "people make a big deal out of nothing". no "skill issues" or easy individual solutions to be found here. there's no virtuous way out of the discomfort that brings. it's just true.

as a kid, i received what i knew was a subpar existence. i asked "why this?", and was split into pieces for daring to think there should be anything else. i wrote this for you, cerb. you were right. the world is unfair. no "but" or "and". the pain alone is truth enough. you don't have to prove it to anyone.

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#life #politics #trauma #untagged