In “A Basic Explanation Of What We Are,” Maria made statements about the system as a whole that, at the time, she believed to be true based on the fact that she lacked the knowledge she now has about all of us. In that article, she says that all of us split from her, however many of us have memories that disprove this, at least in a subjective sense. It is this subjective sense of reality that we seek to capture on the blog, so I would hope that the statements made by Maria would not confuse our later readers or give them reason to doubt us. It may be that we have all fallen under a delusion of sorts, and that the memories we have seemingly made outside of this lifetime’s events have been created by us as a way to escape suffering, but I don’t feel that this is the case. I don’t see myself or anyone else in the system being harmed by the existence and belief in these memories as being past realities, and I don’t see this belief as being disruptive to our healing and working together. I think Bethiny-ann said it well when she wrote, “Often, there is no objective way to verify the memories of beings who aren’t even seen as people in the eyes of the law. Drawing on the points made earlier, however, and bringing into account the fact that many multiples have experienced trauma or have had other things happen in their lives that cannot be verified by anyone inside or outside of the system, one might come to the conclusion that it is wise to take the memories of an insider as valid realities unless the insider in question believes that they aren’t.”
It is not our job to present a medical mottle of dissociation, or to justify its existence to unbelieving professionals, or even to convince people of our existence with logical, scientific statements. We can leave that to anyone else who feels like they are able to take on the task, perhaps to someone whose only frame of reference for multiplicity is the dissociative spectrum. But it is not our place to judge our reality from a framework that is as set in stone as the ideas given in Maria’s article seem to be. Instead, let us present to the world another prospective on our system’s development, a prospective that freed us from the idea that we ourselves were a symptom of some disorder that needed to be cured and gave us the foundations upon which we could build our individuality and strengthen our collective’s unity. I think that after all the darkness we’ve posted here, we should at least change the subject to something a bit more neutral. Who knows, maybe when things like what we’re about to write get to the world, people won’t be as likely to judge and be critical of something they have no prior experience of.
I will be honest and admit that our story did raise some eyebrows, even for Maria and the rest of the system’s population when we first began to put it together. I won’t, however, cast doubt on my own experiences, or those of the others in the multiplicity community, by saying that what we understand to be true about ourselves is simply not possible. Anything is possible, so they say, and the pasts of some of us may be unbelievable to some, but we can’t stop them from their disbelief. Let those who doubt have their doubts. We can’t change them. All we can do is say what we feel is true, and that is, in this case, that some of us remember that we did not split from Maria when trauma happened, but walked into the body to protect her and others in the system from suffering. Some of us feel like we don’t belong on this planet because of that, and some of us know where in the universe we belong, where we originally came from, and so on. I personally don’t know how I came here, but I know what I do here now.
Was that as much of a shock as you thought it would be? No? What if I told you that some of us feel like we were who Maria was in past lives, or that some of us were created from her for the purpose of dealing with spiritually based hardship? What if I told you, the reader, or readers as the case may be, that some of us don’t identify as human? Would you turn around and tell us that we’re living a lie because our experiences didn’t match up with the medical mottle of dissociative disorders? Would you ignore what we’ve told you as though it meant nothing? Would you support us in our truth?
We feel no need to hide who we are, even among people who would, in fact, judge and turn away from us for our honesty. When one takes into account the fact that, even in the medical mottle of multiplicity, a child’s creativity can be attributed to some if not all of the unusual presentations of insiders in a given system, it becomes far more difficult to have reasonable doubt of anyone’s experiences, especially when they relate to something as subjective as one’s identity and sense of self. It is my opinion that those people who are willingly uneducated, and who are willing to look from the outside in at another’s experience of themselves and claim that because of the experience, the person is delusional, should have no place in our lives until they can either try to understand our prospective, or back up their claims of our delusions with solid, indisputable fact. I will say the same about people who look at our subjective experiences and claim that we are lying about them. They have no foundation on which to base their claims of untruth, because they are not in our heads, and there is always the possibility that the reality they see as the truth has, all along, been a well-crafted lie. We’ve refused to keep such a crafted story as our reality, even if telling things as they are will cause people to turn away from us. To maintain such an untruth would be to continue living in the past, with the idea that the truth would lead to harm that we could never recover from. Obviously, this is no longer the case, and such an idea would, itself, cause damage in the present, which is why we are actively working to undo its effects on our existence.
With this change in our stories now explained, there is room for those of us who have come from other places to be themselves, completely and without fear of doubt. We’ve let maria and those of us who really did split from her know about our backgrounds outside of the system for months, but not everyone was in agreement on posting an explanation to the public about what we’d learned and revealed to one another. This was, in part, because we were afraid of people’s reactions when they knew of our realizations. Maria only agreed to let some of us post our stories of pre-system life after an explanation like this had been published. Now that this condition has been met, we will all feel much better about our honesty here, and hopefully not come across as many accusations that we are lying as we would have without something like this. I hope that you all can keep an open mind as you read our upcoming stories, and understand that though it may not be real to you, what we post here, before and after these words you are reading at this moment, is real to us. This is what we seek to display, nothing more.