As many of you may know, I, Maria, stepped away from this blog for a while. In that time, a lot of things in my/our life have changed, and our future looks much different than any of us thought it would. I stuck to the "contract of correction" I had outlined in my last article, changing it as needed. I had an entire system of organization centering around that particular document, as I had mentioned in that post, but when my hard drive crashed in September of this year, I lost everything related to it, as well as years of work in other areas that I will probably never get back. I am slowly recovering what I can, and thankfully I didn't lose much in the way of writings, but these events, as well as others I will be describing below, have ultimately caused me to question what I want for myself, and whether multiplicity will end up being part of that picture.
To make a very long and emotionally painful story short, I was in my second session of training at the center for the blind I've mentioned in previous articles, attending an event outside of instructional hours. During that event, I was triggered by an interaction between some of the other people who were there, and a child insider came out. I lost time with that switch, in effect unconsciously blocking out the rest of the event, and that time loss has continued to effect the majority of our switches since then. For the four and a half days between that moment and the one in which I had to walk out the center's door to go to the hospital, which is a story all its own, the frequency with which we switched went through the figurative roof. This increase in frequency, combined with the time loss that accompanied each switch, is also, in part, why we were sent back from the center before we thought we would have to go, the reasoning behind this being, as far as I understand, that the center, as a group entity, didn't feel like they could work with me while I was in that kind of state. There was also the factor of a scheduling conflict, however, which would have led to a lack of staff for the majority of the week that followed anyway, and if I would have stayed there in that time, there would have been problems regarding a policy that the center had, which did not allow people to stay there in the absence of someone specifically intended to be there 24/7 to monitor and provide assistance if it was needed or wanted.
Regardless of the reasons behind why I was sent home, the impact of this change in our switching has been felt profoundly in every area of our life. Since returning from the center, it has led both myself and a psychologist connected with my state's department of vocational rehabilitation, more generally known as DVR, to the conclusion that until I get these two things truly stabilized on a long-term basis, seeking a job might not be in my best interest. That interaction with the psychologist has also led to us being diagnosed with a dissociative disorder for the second time, something which, as expected, has been the cause of a lot of sadness. Personally, I've taken the whole series of events hard, because as the so-called host, I wanted the experience at the center to be one in which I could keep building myself up, until I felt like I could say, "Yes, I am someone, and I have more to me than my function.
That's something I can say now, but it comes at a high cost, and the meaning behind that statement will make itself clear in the rest of this post. More to the point I was making above, when I was sent home early, it came as a complete surprise, because up until the day I was informed of the change, I was under the impression that despite what was happening with me/us, things would continue as normal. Though I can understand the reasoning for sending me back early, and I know that it was not entirely related to either switching or time loss, I can't ignore the fact that it also was related in some ways as well, especially when the word liability was used by at least one person involved in the goings on as I was being told I would be going home early. It was said from a place of concern, both for the center as a group entity and for me, and I can see where the person was coming from when they used that particular word, but it doesn't make it hurt any less, or seem any less like an insult, to those among us who were hurt or insulted by it. I was once one of that group myself, and it was only recent inner happenings that shifted my thinking on the matter, as well as my thinking about many other things. At the moment, I'm glad that shift took place... I only wish it hadn't taken me so long to see the truth.
That truth isn't one about trauma; I knew that things had happened that were anything but good, and the periods of denial I experienced which were related to that were short-lived. I had evidence of time loss as well, and the events surrounding that as they related to being sent home in the way I was were enough to convince me that trying to pretend it wasn't happening, or that it didn't have the potential to happen again, was basically a useless effort. The things I was hiding from were the potential impacts of my actions, particularly the "contract of correction" I had posted here in April. I repeatedly underestimated, minimized and avoided looking at what could happen if I did manage to succeed in my ultimate goal, which was to let go of my control over insiders. No, I didn't, and don't, have the right to control another living being, but the right I do have is to question whether my investment in the concept of multiplicity has gone too far, and in the rest of this article, I plan to do that. Why? Because I should have listened to my friends when they were giving me warnings about what I was planning, before things got to this point. The situation is not beyond hope, because all I really have to do is figure out how to gain control over time loss again, and work through the things that led us to be us in the first place. Compared to what I was trying to use this blog for in the past few years, that will be, at least in some ways, easier.
"But you're dealing with trauma memories," you might be thinking, "and those aren't easy to deal with without professional help."
I would agree with that statement, and if someone were to come to me and remind me that such memories were among the reasons I began to dissociate and ultimately became multiple in the first place, I would not believe them to be wrong. But dealing with memories, even if they are of things that were traumatic, would at least help me feel like I was doing something with my life that got me somewhere in it, instead of sitting on my butt and stressing over what I've finally concluded is needless elaboration of a world that nobody else but me is really invested in. It may have taken me four years to realize this, but maybe being multiple isn't the best course of action for me. Maybe, instead of "rebuilding our lives as a blind multiple," this blog's tagline should be "rebuilding a life worth living."
(Side note: for those of you who are still wondering what I was talking about when I said that my ability to see myself as more than my function came at a high price, the following section should have answers.)
"So does this mean you're goal is integration?"
In a word, yes. The more I look hard at the evidence life presents to me, the more I recognize my own part in not only the story I've told above, but also in the stories I've told in other posts on this blog. This entire website is a reflection of me, and I say that while knowing full well that posts like "Revoking The Disorder Label" still exist, and clash with that statement in a lot of ways. I described the theory and a potential mechanism behind my current conclusions in the article called "I Started This, And I Understand That Now," going on to discover that not only was I right in my thoughts, but that I had come to similar conclusions from other angles in the past, as shown in a piece posted here called "The Masks I Wear."
What convinces me more than ever that integration is the answer, though, is looking back on posts like "Something Bad, Which Became Something Good," or "Actions, Communication, And The Lengths We Went To Protect," and realizing that yes, multiplicity, as it was structured then, was causing us distress. That distress didn't end with Vivien's integration, my returning, or even with my holding true to the "contract of correction," even as shifts in our structure as a system took place. That distress was relieved, at least in part, by me realizing how far out of hand the things that created the need for those efforts in the first place had gotten. That distress was relieved by confirmation of the idea that despite what I wanted to think, the insiders were, and have always been, parts of me, even if they felt like they weren't, which was something that I'd been obsessing over for the past several months, particularly when I started trying to figure out where I ended and they began.
That confirmation came slowly. I began to write daily, expanding that effort beyond a "goals and projects" list and letting myself ramble and be messy about it. Through this I was able to see that there was more depth and complexity to myself than I first realized, which, along with consistent interaction with a group of people I see as friends, helped me better handle my life in general. Over the past two weeks in particular, a lot of realizations about myself have come to me, and when I watched a documentary involving twins who were separated at birth, the first waves of grief hit. Ever faithful to my plan to write about everything I saw as being important in a given day, I went to the computer and typed out the experience. Over the next few days, other things began to happen, such as odd blending, and I wrote about them as well, forcing myself to be completely honest about how it felt rather than using terms that I wished I could truly understand through experience. When, for example, Abigail, a part of me, which identified as a 13-year-old nonverbal and autistic person, blended with the part of me I most closely identify with, I described the experience as it was, rather than saying that I had switched, as I would have stated in the past. I pulled as much detail as I could out of that memory, and as I was writing about it, I realized, for the first of what would become many times, that Abigail was part of me.
That realization, along with the work I had been doing to rebuild myself, quickly led to a second event, in the form of a panic attack. During that time, I blamed myself, thinking that I was worse than a neglectful parent because I had done what is known in the tulpamancy community as "shard-seeding," and had then failed to take proper care of the beings that resulted from my actions. That night, I finally said out loud that my separation of aspects of myself, and subsequent personification of said aspects, had left me with a profoundly unstable identity. When I communicated it in that way, something shifted, and though I was eventually calmed by music and the company of people I felt safe and cared for by, the effect was too powerful to stop. The next day, I woke up and firmly took control of my life, to the degree that I could. I had been communicating with insiders gently before this, particularly about how I could not practice the things connected to primality, which Yalluk had written about in posts like "The Obvious," because of social expectations of the current time and place. In that communication, I made it clear that insiders who did not want to witness activities of things like showering, for one reason or another, had places in which they could hide, and that anyone who wanted to could also decide to be co-conscious with me while said activities took place, but, unlike many other times in the past, I did not back down when I felt panic or disgust coming from what felt like someone else, reminding myself that both the feelings and the insiders were part of me, and that even though I was afraid and felt like throwing up, I had to keep myself clean.
As I took ownership of things previously associated with insiders, showers became almost a non-issue. Yalluk's final integration, which had taken place before I had watched the documentary that started this part of my journey, began to make complete sense. I still have a long way to go, and there are still many, many more parts of me who retain their own names, ages, genders, etcetera, but for once, I'm proud of myself, because in as little as two weeks, I reduced the anxiety I dealt with around identity confusion and being unsure of who was at front to almost nothing. In addition to this, I don't feel as broken and hollow, and I'm no longer obsessing about whether or not I'm unintentionally controlling insiders, or more accurately, other parts of me. This thanks giving, that is what I am grateful for. Maybe it won't last, and maybe this mentality toward multiplicity is only an adaptation to an environment in which such a way of being is discouraged, or at least very poorly understood, but quite frankly, I don't care. I feel hopeful, which I haven't experienced since I went back to the center for that second session of training that ended so poorly.
At the end of the day, clinging to multiplicity as an identity was the thing that made my school experience turn out worse than it could have been otherwise. It has now begun to hold me back as far as finding work, and my refusal to acknowledge that it was, in fact, a disorder because it was basically making me experience myself as a fragmented, incomplete person, and then experience panic as a result of such incompleteness, didn't help matters. I've spent years being able to be dragged around and hurt by people in spiritual groups, because I clung so tightly to something that could be so easy to destabilize, believing it to be my only reason for existing as a human being. Not everyone in the spiritual groups I was hurt by performed the acts of harm, of course, but those who did perform them could have been stopped if I had seen multiplicity, at least in my case, as what it was, and not as what I wanted it to be. It was, and has always been, a way of dealing with things that happened in my life when all other ways, for one reason or another, were not options. I didn't want to look at that part; I wanted it to be an identity, something to be proud of, something to be embraced, but it isn't. It can't be, when without my control, it turned into a nightmare and a half, when it kept me practically housebound for roughly two months because of the time loss it caused, and when, because of it, my life was set on a path I never thought it would be on.
I don't know that I'll be able to look at being multiple in the same way I used to after everything that has gone on. I don't know that I will be able to look at much of anything in the same ways I once did, as a consequence of that shift, because being multiple was so interwoven with all of the rest of my life. If I do manage to integrate, and, by some major change in thinking similar to the one which brought me to the point of being comfortable with that concept, become open to the idea of living with others in my mind and body again, I will never let it run away with me like I have. If I have to write up a multi-page document to keep myself to that statement, then I will, but frankly, if I have to do that in the first place, I'm not fit to share my mind or body with anyone, least of all someone who has no other option than to make their home there. Granted, I don't know beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone I create truly doesn't have the option of going elsewhere through some means or other, but I'd rather be safe than sorry, and looking too deeply into that idea, in my current state, could cause more problems than it would solve. As of now, the simple fact is that I'm not comfortable being multiple, because it's in the process of potentially negatively impacting my life, more than it has already. I'm done treating it like it's some kind of wonderful thing, because feeling fragmented within myself, experiencing anxiety about not knowing if something comes from me or from someone else in my body, and being unable to create characters or engage in fantasies of any kind without the people I imagine taking on lives of their own, which eventually extend beyond those fantasies, are all things that suck and that I wouldn't wish on anyone.
I used to write a lot. I used to be able to create stories with very little struggle, and I used to take that for granted. I used to be able to have rich, stimulating experiences without ever turning on the TV. I used to be able to imagine entire lives, if I put in a little effort. I used to be able to learn about subjects, and study them for months at a time without getting tired of them. Sometimes I'd even be able to do that for years. Now, I can't do any of those things, because the characters wander off, and do their own thing, or the information I learn gets compartmentalized, and eventually breaks off into an insider, the end result of which is that I may as well have never put in the effort to learn about whatever it was that I had learned about, or create whatever it was that I had created. That needs to change, because I'm sick of living life like that.
I know that it will take intense mental discipline to reverse the damage, regardless of what caused said damage in the first place. I know, as I've stated above, that reversing that damage will require professional help, and I am getting that help. I plan to put as much effort into integrating all of the parts of me as I put into insisting that they were their own people, not because I hate them, but because I realize that the quality of life for us if we continue to stay this way will not be much better than it is now. I don't know if I will be able to achieve full integration of all of my parts into one person. I don't know that my view of what integration is will remain in agreement with that particular outcome over the course of time. All I know is that, for right now, as has been the case over the past several days, the idea of striving for such unification feels right, and that the practices involved in doing so have each helped me get my health back, to one degree or another.
For the sake of organization, I would like to say one final thing. Not all of me is in agreement about this choice. There is a part of me who goes by my name, and it is still under the impression that multiplicity is something to be loved and embraced. I will be using behavioral correction methods on this part of me if needed, because it can be co-conscious with me, and frequently blends with me, which results in the loss of my perspective as I become unsure of myself. This is not the only part who feels this way, and I understand that in order to integrate I will need to help each part of me address their conflicting views on this, and many other, subjects. But right now, in this moment, my current environment will not allow me to do anything else but suppress everyone else, and suppress the emotions that result from that. I can feel myself slipping further and further from the rest of me as a direct result of that suppression, a feeling that only grows more and more intense by the day, and I know that it is for a good reason, but I am dismayed that I am splitting...again.
But no matter. I will ignore it, as I have many other things before this. I am Maria, and I am here to say that multiplicity is no longer working for us, for all of the reasons described above.