Our writing experiment seems to be going well. We have multiple novels in progress, supervised by multiple groups of alters, and we are excited about the direction they’re going. Well, excited and nervous. They are very personal. But that is what fantasy is for! Disguises.
The one is definitely more magic realism than fantasy, and magic realism makes things even MORE obviously personal, imo. But that’s what pennames are for.
Let’s just tell ourselves that for now.
But that’s not what I came here to talk about.
In our system, most of our subsystems kind of present like our alters have one of the types of OSDD. The memory barriers are there, but the identity barriers are not. Alters generally consider themselves to be “the same person” as the other alters in their subsystem. They just can’t access all of their memories yet.
And then there’s my weird, enormous subsystem.
It’s sort of like a subsystem made up of multiple subsystems. There’s still the aspect of alters sharing an identity with those within their subsystem. But then there are stronger barriers between specific parts of us. Namely myself, James, and somebody who is still trying to figure out his name.
We definitely see ourselves as parts of the same alter, still. We just don’t WANT to be parts of the same alter. Because the memories that we have are the Extremely Heavy emotional things that we would rather didn’t exist at all.
As mentioned before, we grew up seeing a lot of younger kids around us abused. But that, while still an emotional can of worms, doesn’t even qualify as the Extremely Heavy emotional things. Yes, my subsystem does hold a lot of the trauma associated with that. But when you are living in that situation, you HAVE to be logical. You have to put up a certain distance of cold logic between yourself and the situation, otherwise you would be in a constant state of emotional breakdown. And then you can’t be of use to anybody.
So, yes, that situation was heavy and painful and deeply scarring, but I have to acknowledge that this is a constant, worldwide issue. I am going to do everything I can in my lifetime to stop it, by telling as much of my story as I am able and in the way and with the timing that is most effective. But at the end of the day, it is a societal problem. I can only do so much on my own.
The Extremely Heavy emotional stuff are things that I am mostly unwilling to talk about. Except for the one that our system has already brought up. The time when one of our abusers told us that our now-spouse had killed themselves.
I say “one” of our abusers, but we had to have gotten confirmation of this from other people. We never would have believed it otherwise. I think I know exactly who else was involved, but I still want to wait for the memories to come up to be sure. I have gotten some confirmation of my suspicions, but it is still too vague by my standards.
This one is really weird for me. My spouse is obviously not dead – we are married and they have been regularly blogging on this site. So you’d think that my brain would automatically un-do all of the fucked-up-ness that convinced Jennifer to put me in pseudo-dormancy so that I didn’t kill myself and everybody else in our system. You’d think that everything would be fine.
Hahaha.
Nope.
Apparently, if you experience the emotional effects of something – even something that didn’t actually happen – and don’t deal with said emotional effects when they first appear, you are going to have to process through everything you felt as though the situation had been real.
This might explain why I am stuck as an 18-year-old kid with a penchant for symphonic metal and gothic literature in a thirty-year-old body.
I think the best processing tool that I have is writing. I can’t finish the book I’ve been re-writing for the last 15 years – I now understand exactly what it’s about, and James will probably murder me if I try to open that up before he is ready. Which would explain the depressing number of re-writes.
But, being in the same subsystem (weird structure though it may have), I should probably talk with him and this other yet-unnamed person and figure out a story we can write that we are all comfortable with.
-Lothair (Meet the System: https://www.dissociative.cafe/2024/01/meet-the-system/)