Something that started with a point, but became a ramble/vent

Innerworld has been…a mess lately.

We are SO fragmented, it’s insane.

When get down to the size of fragments we have going for us, there is…next to nothing to them.

A brief flash of an emotion or memory.

Maybe a moniker of sorts, if they’ve been near front enough, or if we can tell what general area of the system they’re from.

They each feel distinct, in a way.

They are split apart from each other after all.

We’ve lived liked this for so long that we didn’t realize how bad it was to be fragmented to this degree.

Our therapist is not one to push alter integration/fusion, but has flat out said that in order for us to actually acquire functional multiplicity, there will definitely be integrations happening. Not forced, not even guided by them. Just…that it’s just going to happen for us as we go through EMDR and process things.

The problem most of us are experiencing…is that we still see these fragments as alters all on their own. None of us have much, if any, range of emotions…most of us are fragments. Which…unfortunately makes a lot of sense.

Sure, some of us are larger fragments than others.

But we’re still fragments all the same.

Fragments who are now merging/fusing rapidly all over the place.

The categories we had in place…well, we’ve had it quite clearly thrown in our face that those categories meant nothing.

We thought we knew what fragments went where.

We thought we could see and remember the multiple splitting patterns.

Ha! What fools we were with that whole farce

Almost nothing seems to be as we thought.

Everything now is…chaos.

Confusion.

A weird sense of loss.

Guilt at feeling this sense of loss and grief because everyone keeps telling us that there is “no true loss”. And I know there’s a large chance that a couple of those people are reading this now, so I want to say that we’re not angry or upset in any way at any of you. We just have a tendency to trust other people’s thoughts on things more than our own…so when our experience seems so different than what we’ve been told, we automatically think that we’re “wrong” or “broken” somehow (thanks parental-units. You fucked us up in so many senses, and it’s really hard to imagine that this is ever going to sort itself out, even with having therapy with someone who is AMAZING when it comes to D.I.D.)

I think the best way we can conceptualize why thinks feel so different for us (and this unfortunately is just a theory…there’s no way we can think of to “prove” any of it…it is just the best explanation our system can come to) is that we’re so fragmented that, as these fragments get pieced together into larger fragments, we’re realizing that we really can’t see the small pieces we began with anymore.

It’s like pointillism. Each “area” of our system has THOUSANDS of infinitesimal fragments. As each of those start to coalesce, they–like dots of pigment–come together to make a larger picture.

However, the more coalesced and larger these pieces (or pictures, for the analogy) get, it becomes increasingly harder to see, let alone recognize, the fragments (pigment dots) we began with.

And so, for us, there definitely is a strong feeling of loss and grief spreading in our system.

We know that this a healthy thing. No one in here is saying that it’s not. What we are saying is more along the lines of…

It’s…hard to be healthier. It’s difficult. Healing takes time, patience, changes. None of which we are exceptionally skilled with dealing with.

But it’s going to be worth it.

Even though, in the grand scheme of things, we have barely begun to fuse, we can already tell that it IS helping.

We’re already beginning to see alters who split within this past year or so start to reform. Yeah, they’re not the exact same as they were before…they’ve been through more. They’ve grown/shifted about some. But seeing some more familiar identities and faces around innerworld, and especially ones we have missed, has made it easier to accept those that are unfamiliar as well.

With some of these people reforming, it also had been driving home the fact of just how bad our last job was. We were splitting almost every shift…thankfully we typically only had one a week, but STILL

We…we’re splitting nearly every week.

I can’t even imagine what that had to be like for our wife/partner-system to see. Coming home each week, and not knowing how bad our shift had been then…who might have split. Hell…not even knowing how bad of a state (physically, emotionally, AND mentally) they were going to find us in when they came back home

With some of the stuff we have slowly been sharing with them…possibly even having to brace for the fact that our job could have very easily killed us that day.

But to us…splitting that much was normal. And with that much splitting, came amnesia and dissociation to hide how bad it really was from ourselves.

Yeesh.

Typing that up is…hard.

It’s hard to admit how bad it was.

It’s hard to admit that we ourselves couldn’t see how bad it was.

(I’m so sorry, partner-system. I know none of y’all blame us for the whole situation…but I’m still sorry it took us so long to pull away from that job. And I’m sorry that our financially-worried alters keep thinking about running back there whenever we have money scares, like with our water freezing…and worried about the upcoming tax season. I’m really glad that this should be the last tax year that we have to pay so much stupid “self employment” stuff from that stupid job. Once this hurdle is over, I know that everything else will be a LOT easier)

It’s hard to admit that this stage of healing, especially when we’re only really just now starting that process, is difficult for us.

We want to be healthy. We want to be “functional”. We’re definitely healthier than we’ve ever been before, so that’s a start…

But we actually feel less functional than we ever have.

Like, looking back, we keep being like “man, I miss the time prior to self-awareness…back when we actually could get stuff like household chores and errands and whatnot done without too many issue”.

It really feels like our functionality has plummeted since self awareness.

Though, our therapist doesn’t seem surprised by this.

Did y’all know that rapid-switching is something along the lines of having more than maybe about two alters switching into front within an hour? (I may have misunderstood our therapist a bit, but this at least seems to be how they qualify it)

We…switch more often than that within the average minute. Kinda part of the territory (iron so I assume) when you get down to the size of fragments we have.

Our brain, now that we no longer are masking as one person, has become a soup that relies heavily on improv and routine.

Routine that has been jumbled with getting a new job, and having an inconsistent schedule.

Improv that…increasingly fails as we find ourselves in non-routine situations and conversations.

Basically everything that once kept us alive and keeping up the pretense of a single entity is now actively causing problems for us…

Blah.

I don’t even remember if I had an actual point when I began writing this, or if I was just rambling/venting

Damn I’m tired.

I know we like commenting on other people’s blog posts here, even if just to let the authors know that people care about their thoughts, feelings, and their very selves. But we’ve been finding less and less energy…as well as the nagging anxiety about being annoying, or that our comments are weird, unhelpful, and/or unwanted.

We also might be sick, which doesn’t help with the energy problems, nor the financial worry. We had to report a couple of our symptoms this morning, and got told to stay home…yay (sarcasm). Even though we were stressed about going to work today, losing a shifts worth of pay is also stressful

I really hope our disability appeal goes well. It would be nice to not have to worry about working more than 1-2 times a week. We could actually feel like we’re doing more than just treading water

I know we should take the day and rest. Go out and get some sort of Pedialyte-thing…but otherwise take it easy.

But resting is hard.

Blah.

I’m tired and just want to sleep. (Good thing we’re supposed to be resting, right? 🤦‍♂️) I should check google and see if the Dollar General down the street is open yet. I do NOT want to deal with walmart…especially bc they just rearranged everything AGAIN, so things are in different places. (Not to mention that venturing into the baby section, where walmart keeps the pedialyte is a High Flashback Situation for the alters who remember our miscarriages)

Blah

Blah

Blah

It’s definitely turned into a ramble/vent now, if it hadn’t already. I can tell larger groups of alters/fragments are switching, which makes it hard to keep a trail of thought.

Dollar general doesn’t open for another hour. Fuck. Walmart it is, I guess. I don’t want to wait much longer for getting Pedialyte stuff, especially because we have a daily diuretic medication we have to take in about an hour, too…

Ugh

Here goes nothing