skylar taylor-barrickshe/they

On Being Multiple

I've spent the last few months attempting to embrace my DID as a 'normal' part of my life – something benign and worth keeping and working on. I'm fully aware it's a trauma response to all the awful things I experienced in my childhood – sexual assault, parental alienation, undiagnosed disability, physical and verbal bullying at school, emotional incest, constant rejection – but it felt like there was a way to heal and remain multiple and enjoy the potential benefits of a life with complexity of personality most don't have.

I don't think that's the path forward for me now. Attempting to untangle what parts of me come from where has been more distressing than healing, and it's isolated me from friends and loved ones in a way that has been deeply destabilizing. I also only have two sessions with my brand new DID therapist before I move somewhere with worse mental healthcare access than where I am now, which is saying a lot.

So I'm reframing how I look at it – DID is, to me, a mental illness that once protected me, but is now holding me back. In my OCD therapy we talked a lot about how compulsive behaviors often once served a purpose to keep us legitimately safe or comfortable, but we've grown past them to a point they're harmful. Increasingly, I take this view of my plurality.

I had a tough conversation with some of the alters this past weekend, where we acknowledged that their fronting and having distinctly different needs about interaction with our loved ones, presentation, and expressing their varying ages is holding us back and causing active harm in our daily life. They agreed largely, and decided to step back. I haven't switched since that I can tell. Headspace is empty and quiet. I am back to only dissociating occasionally into nothing, rather than it being the precursor to someone else fronting.

Realistically, I don't know how long this will last, how long suppressing things will work. I pretty firmly feel like it's the correct path right now, until this move is settled, until I have a more concrete understanding of what my life will look. I'll likely have to confront this work again – but hopefully I'll be safer, more stable, and have the space to actually explore things without losing everyone around me.

So, let me reintroduce myself again: I'm Skylar. A person with a lot of complexity in my head, but a single person, nonetheless.

I hope it stays that way.

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Mental Health Personal Life