No One Stops

I used to think that we were just ditzy and dumb.

But the more that I remember.

The more I realize how conscious the effort was towards hiding some of our alters from our abusers. We hid them so well that we’re still successfully fooling ourselves and working to untangle the confusion.

We aren’t stupid.

We aren’t weak.

We’re actually pretty smart.

We knew our limits and we did what we needed to do to preserve our future and our lives. Because at the point we stopped fighting, we were a hair’s breadth away from suicide.

The most effective way to fool somebody into thinking you believe their bullshit is to fool yourself as well.

It’s not an approach that I would recommend, as you’re basically leaning into the gaslighting, and once you do this it becomes extremely difficult to escape and regain your memories. But we are alive now because of it. 

As our subsystems integrate, alters are emerging in forms that I haven’t seen in years. Intact, safe, and nothing like the illusion that we let our abusers see.

We need to give certain particular alters more credit for their acting skills. Even if some of our abusers knew that we were acting – and I suspect that some of them did – they still didn’t succeed in their goals.

We came very close to losing some of the things that are dear to us, but at the end of the day we made it out with everything that matters. Everything, at least, that we had any control over.

It’s taking time to heal and to create things, but that is because we are giving our alters space, and in turn they are giving space to the stories that they are writing.

Stories are alive in the sense that they know what they want to say before you write them. If you listen to a story that wants to be written, it will tell you how it wants to be written. And you can’t control the pace of a conversation by talking over your conversation partner. 

Maybe that has something to do with having DID and amnesia. Maybe “having a conversation with a story as you write it” is just alters telling us how to represent them. But doesn’t that mean that writing is going to help us heal as well? 

No matter what angle I look at it from, I see no reason to stop moving forward.