Dear readers,
Though some of you may know that there are other beings who use the body I live in on this planet to write on the blog and interact with the world in which they find themselves, not all of you know that I myself do not identify with the body’s name either, and am not called by it in all areas of life. In daily tasks, at school and to family who don’t know of the spiritual aspect of our life, I am Maria, and to some people within that group, the community is a sign of a mental illness that is in desperate need of curing. To people who see me as more than just physical, however, Maria is not who I am, and the community is anything but a sign that something is wrong with me. I am known by this second group as Rozaya, and this is the name that I identify with. This has been the situation for months, and as eager as I was to tell the truth about that fact, I first had to come to the realization that the spirituality associated with that name was more than just my own creativity contributing to elaborate fantasies of fictional events. I had to understand on an emotional level that the memories I was recalling in association with that name were in fact mine, from lives that I had lived before being born into this one, and piece together my own story alongside the stories of those within the community. When I remembered my own name, who I was and who I am, things about all of us began to make sense. This remembering is also why I allowed Cristeenna to write what she has written on the subject of our beginnings as individuals and how we came into this life and body.
Once I realized that I do not identify with the body’s name, and in fact never truly felt that it was mine to begin with, many other things started shifting and changing. If I was not Maria, if that was not who I truly was, then did such a person exist at all? Was that person an act, a presenting face to the outside world, behind which groups of the community sheltered so that they could all have time and experience in this life? The answers to these questions are complex and shocking, even to me. Before I discovered who I truly was, before I realized that I was not alone even when I was the only physical body in the room, I would say that I was Maria, and that was that. When the dissociation and multiplicity were discovered and revealed to me by various insiders of the community, I would have said that I was Maria, with great reluctance to make such an exclusionary statement. Since the beginning of 2017, I have discovered who I am, and now would say, “I am Maria,” but I would always know that I was telling a lie as much as the others here would be, and are, when they identify themselves by that name. The real shock came, however, not when I realized what I had in regards to the name dishonesty issue, but when I realized what was happening to our collective memory and functioning.
\ Just last week, we were involved in a therapy session to address the time loss we sometimes have when switching. The therapist asked us, thinking that they were only talking to me, and using the body’s name, how much I remembered of any given day in school. I responded to that name, unwilling to tell them of the facts as they were, but unaware until that moment how little I actually remembered for myself. I distinctly recall saying that, though I remembered my classes and daily activities, it felt as though I was pulling the memories from another’s life. I remember even more vividly how, from that day on, I began to notice that, besides the members of the community who I already knew of, there were groups of insiders who were still using elusions to pretend to be parts of me or those members who were not hiding in that way. It has only been a week since I discovered this, but already I have realized that Maria, the person who I thought I was even while I had doubts about that same idea, the person who I thought lived the physical outside life and only had insiders because of trauma, was no more. I’m not sure when it began to happen, but I’ve finally become aware of the fact that I, Rozaya, am not the host as I once believed. The real hosts, the ones who actually have the skills needed to get through school and daily life, have hidden behind me, blending with me just as the rest of the community had before 2015, and this had worked well until I discovered my actual name. With my discovery, however, the truth was revealed, and one of my greatest desires had become a reality, even before I realized that it had.
We are living life just as we have always dreamed, now that I do not have to hold within myself the doubt of whether or not someone who goes by the body’s name actually exists. I have slowly begun discovering who is learning in each class we have, and building communication with each insider as they come to me. I am not sure that these individuals were once parts of me who later split, because the memories of day to day things have never felt like my own, despite my use of a singular pronoun when discussing even the recent past. There was a time, after all, that I clamed everything that the body had ever experienced as having happened to me, not realizing that some of the things that were coming out of our mouth weren’t things that I could remember in my own right after the verbal description was given. We once had, and are now rebuilding, a shared memory space, which is the only thing that will allow us to both maintain our individuality and give one another access to vital information. During our discoveries, I was so eager to own and disown various things, and the pressure within the community to individualize completely was so strong, that we abandoned the idea of a shared memory. This time, as these true hosts reveal themselves, I won’t make that mistake. All I will ask of them is that they tell me when they are out, and seek the emotional support that they need as they come out to themselves.
Together, we all formed Maria, under a demand that we lie to ourselves, even about our internal states, while powerful elusions bound our perceptions to an integrated yet conflicting singularity. It was no wonder, then, that I never fully identified with that name, and always felt as though the past, even the recent past, was only mine from the prospective of one who has heard its stories told to me from the lips of another. Maria is the body’s name, not mine, or anyone else’s within this community. The writings we have done under that name were either mine, or the words of several others who also made up the facade. I won’t remove them, or even change them, because that would erase the things that show our progress in discovering the truth. The only reason I ever felt that I was anyone other than Rozaya was because of the elusion of unity that was cast over all of us out of a need to not be detected when survival was dependent on conforming to standards which many of us find outright abhorrent. There have been times where, without realizing the fact, I have acted as a mouthpiece for one or more insiders who bolstered the idea to the outside world of Maria’s existence. I hope I don’t have to do that on this blog anymore, because it’s not healthy for anyone involved, and quite frankly, I’m tired of living a lie.
Maria was the one we were made to be through trauma and pain that we would not wish on anyone. That is why we are thinking of changing the body’s name in the near future, to something all of us are comfortable responding to, something that won’t bring back memories of our past or be a reminder of the all too common idea from the outside world that we are playing a game or faking what we know to be our truth. When 2020 comes, or maybe even 2019, our hope is that we will have found a name that properly fits everyone who lives this life, not just some person who is thought to exist while having a mental disorder causing her to believe that she is more than one of such a being. We were not demanded into separation by our abusers; we did that on our own, using the resources and ideas that we could access at the time. Maria is an excuse for outside people to brush off what we are telling them about our life, an excuse used by people who we should never have trusted with the sacredness of our discoveries to play favorites and pathologize our experience into a neat box which can be closed with the lid of integration and a return to identifying with that name. It is a reminder that people of the outside, with some rare exceptions, want us to lose our freedom through a so-called unification process that would only strip us of our individuality and ability to enjoy life in the way that would best help in our healing and self-development. It is something we will tolerate, until the day comes when we can leave behind everything that first drove this blog to its creation, everything that has caused us the pain that we have felt over the years, and everything that is connected to the area we are living in now, the same area where all these things took place. The people here, where this body lives, can call us by that name, because that is the only one they will probably ever believe is the real person.
Our time of liberation is coming. We’ve waited this long. We can wait a little longer. After all, we can always reach for further fragmentation if things don’t quite work. No one will need to know. We won’t tell them. After all, in their minds, and their statements to us, Maria is the only one here, and she needs to act like it.
We smile to ourselves, murmuring, “we can give you that impression, and we will, since that is what you ask of us.”