-
Do you have any advice on how to make friends whilst masking?
We don’t feel safe sharing that we have DID offline but we really struggle to hold onto any friendships coz people don’t understand why we’re so… inconsistent? That’s probably the best way I can word it. We do our best to mask but we’ve lost a lot of friends coz we “seem like we’ve changed” or “like we’re different people” and we can’t really explain the memory gaps…
-
4 Replies
-
I’d like to say that after all this time, we had this one worked out, but we don’t. It’s something we still struggle with. Probably the best thing we ever did was to “come out” as having DID on Facebook, which took a ton of guts, as it basically meant coming out to all our friends. Some of them were genuinely interested and understanding. Some of them have never mentioned it to this day, even though we’ve remained fairly open about it. That said, we still mask in public almost all the time, even around people who know about the DID. Old habits are hard to break.
-
I’m really glad you felt able to share the fact that you have DID on facebook, that must have been really scary to do but it must be really freeing to have it out in the open. I wish we could do that, but we’ve had 2 people take advantage of our condition before (they didn’t actually know we had DID, this was pre-diagnosis, but they knew we clearly had SOMETHING.) We’ve also known people who’ve pretended to have the disorder and have spread a lot of harmful stereotypes (about alters being violent and dangerous etc) so we’re scared we’d get a bad reaction from people if that’s what they think DID looks like.
I’m sorry you still struggle to unmask, it’s really hard to let the walls down sometimes. I hope it’ll get easier with time and that one day you’ll be able to only mask when it’s necessary.
I guess this is one of those questions that doesn’t have an easy or simple answer.
-
-
We got some bad physical health news a couple of years ago. The prospect of possibly dying put hiding our DID into a different perspective. That’s when we “came out” on facebook and started our t-e-c.org blog. We’ve just been a covert system for a long time, and the masking is programmed in there pretty deeply.
-
I’m sorry to hear about your bad health news. We have a reduced life expectancy and have a lot of anxiety around dying suddenly and leaving things unsaid so we can somewhat relate. I’m glad something positive was able to come out of your bad news and that it’s allowed you to be open and honest about who you all are!
-
Log in to reply.