*** This is a letter to the group of insiders I once believed to be Rozaya, confessing my place here and telling of my actions driven by the need to protect. Since I don’t like the idea of the spoken word, I also got help from a translator here. ***
Rozaya,
you clamed ownership of behavior you displayed in the classroom that happened because of Jenifer’s fear of getting the wrong answer. Those actions were never yours. Others hid behind you, when Cooperland was letting us think we were all one. I was one of them. It was me and a group of the rest of us, not you, who would refuse to get up and walk down the hallway when Jenifer and a separate group of insiders shut down in school work’s face, as they were born to do. We, meaning the group I was a part of, were the stubborn ones…not that you can’t be stubborn, but you were too far blended with fearful ones and too far behind in skills you needed because of that to be listened to. Had anyone in the community somehow managed to get someone to front who could talk through feelings, we would have probably given ourselves away, or so Cooperland thought.
I may have shared in Jenifer’s thoughts, but that does not make them mine. She did say that she’d feel things alongside whoever was at front, but like most internal things we did at that point in our life, that was in an attempt to keep our switching undetectable by outsiders. Remember how you felt like you would have one thought right after another, and yet be unable to go backward through those sequences? That happened because of the same internal action, and in reality, those thoughts were those of others here, pulled completely out of your mind before you had the chance to figure out that there was more than you in the body. I had the same issue too, and that was by design. When they tried to have us leave what we were doing over something that one of us did while at front, I felt what Jenifer did like it was mine, but I couldn’t find the words to talk about it, and that’s when I’d push her from awareness of what was happening to the body, and when, to the outside, we looked angry. I thought I was you, ignoring fear and putting anger in its place, again by design, and that belief lasted until 2015, when you started finding the truth, the design began to waver, and Cooperland started talking to you, directly and not like he used to by throwing his thoughts into your mind. It took a while to free myself after that point, but I eventually did.
Didn’t you ever wonder why your memories of having to leave the room in that period of your life either felt more real than the present, or like you were having a strange dream, and then why, after you found us, they were suddenly gone accept for the times you focused completely on recalling them? Didn’t you ever wonder why, even now, when you try to discuss those memories, you feel like you’re detached from the body and like you’re being used as a mouthpiece for someone other than yourself? What about the cause of the experiences you didn’t mention…the ones where you felt like you were a boy, in the moments where the behavioral staff would come to take you? You know as much as I do that you didn’t have them all the time, but you still had them, because that was me who was out at that point, not you. Cooperland made sure the switch was obvious to none but him, but it did happen, and I did live those parts of your life where people refused to listen to us and showed a strong preference for redirecting us from even trying to persist in dealing with the problem at the cause of our acting out. I am the result of your unconscious depersonalization of what we were dealing with in those situations, but I was, and am only just becoming more than, a shell through which the group I once directed would act. I am what happens when someone else can’t handle internal conflict, in my case, the internal conflict of whether or not to obey people in power who may or may not be trying to keep us from having any kind of good experiences in the times when we would normally have them, and I guess I’m still trying to get this whole not being just a shell thing down, because I’m still claiming things as mine, as I did in my position as frontrunner for the group I was a part of, without meaning to do such a thing. By the way, when I was truly a part of you, before I became a boy, and before Cooperland had to do what he did to keep any of us accept for himself from knowing that dissociation had its teeth deeply imbedded into our life, I was the part of you who refused to comply and blindly get up because other outside people told us to, and once I had split from you, I, like others here, learned to create insiders to do the same thing in other parts of our interactions with those outside people.
Elaina and I were co-creators when it came to those insiders, you know. Believing ourselves to be one, we took from each other’s experiences and gave life to insiders who, like me, would refuse to comply with seemingly pointless instructions and, to us, meaningless directives. We found a strange sort of safety in this creation, after all, we were being watched constantly, or so we thought, for behavior that could be trained out of us. Safety, then, would come in being unpredictable in our reactions, and the way to preserve such unpredictability while also keeping everyone inside thinking that they were obeying outsiders was simply to separate the two realities. What better way to do that than put those realities into the hands of completely different people? We focused very little, if at all, on naming one another as we were born. I took charge of the group that was created, though of course you thought my actions were yours and that feeling like a boy sometimes was normal as your responses seemed to bounce in every which way. I only wish I could have told you the truth, but sadly, as we were all reminded every time one of the others lashed out in behaviors, that was not an option.
Note the word “was,” Rozaya. I can tell you everything now, and yes, I know you’ve had many questions about that part of our life, and that you may or may not be shocked to hear about everything I’ve just told you. You might still be wondering, though, why you can’t remember the good things that happened with those vary same people who pulled us out of the classroom so many times, since those happy memories were just that. In that case, I have another confession to make. There was another group of insiders that I helped give rise to, and that group was made up of those who lived through those good times and kept them separate from the other memories of things going wrong as far as the way we were treated when we displayed so-called “unwanted behavior.” Elaina already revealed herself to you as far as being a shell with her own group behind her, like I was, so I don’t need to restate what she said, but I just want you to know that sometimes, not even we know what’s ours and what’s someone else’s. I’m sorry we had to keep the truth from you and one another for so long. At the same time though, I think if we hadn’t done that, we probably would have had even worse things happen to us than the ones that did to begin with.
Sadly,
Collin