*this post is rambly, again. I’m really sorry about that, but this was a 1-day job, and I wanted to get it up before I changed my mind.
Content warnings: spirituality.
In recent months, I signed us up for talk therapy in addition to the deep feeling work I’d been doing for my own reasons. I added traditional therapy for the comfort of the rest of us, who, with notable acceptions, did not want to take part in the intensity of the deep feeling process and who, I slowly learned, were hoping to treat much more than pieces of this life they’d happened to have experienced and been harmed by. Last week, I began to get an idea of what some of those other things were as a series of sensory impressions played out while I did things around the house. I won’t describe them, but I will say that the sequence of events they painted was something I could only accept in the context of another person’s history and memories, which, as it turns out, was exactly what they were. A particular community member had taken it upon herself to share a bit of her childhood with me, because I’d been expressing, for the entirety of this month, that I was open to that sort of knowledge.
On one hand, I welcomed it. This was what I had always wanted, I told myself, and for the most part that was true. But that sharing of information, as vivid as it was, gave me slight cause for concern. This wasn’t the first time someone had needed to grab my attention in a profound way so that I would live up to my promise of listening to them; a fiew days before this, I had once had the experience of my thoughts refusing to follow a clear path until I turned on a recording app and started to ramble into my phone’s microphone, a ramble whose content quickly evolved into a message from someone I had been refusing to acknowledge for years, at the completion of which I could once again think logically. But the intensity of the more recent sharing of information startled me, and its content besides. I had been willing to allow the verbal sharing of memories from community member to talk therapist, but, as often happens when it comes to plurality-related matters, I hadn’t expected that sharing to require me to also be aware of them. I should have, though. They’ve been reminding me of that self-imposed condition for years.
Let me explain.
In 2015, my ideas about plurality were simple: I’d have a cast of characters in my head who I would slip over various parts of me, so that I could act out those aspects of myself without having to own them. That arrangement didn’t last long, but my attitudes toward them couldn’t keep up with changing times, and I had to be sharply brought up to date by Cooperland in 2019. Even when I was aware of this disconnect within myself, though, he missed an aspect of it that I only recognized when I was allowed to explore it through talking. I didn’t just have a habit of controlling the others, I feared the idea of not doing so, and resented their demands when trying to go against that fear and let go anyway. Some of this, I’ve come to understand, is self-preservation at work; remember, I split aspects of myself off into their own people while also maintaining a connection to them, and in that case it would make sense that some deeper wisdom would give me ample reason not to want to give up my control over those community members, especially since the parts of myself I had used to spark their lives had not been regrown or replaced. In those cases, the people were still taking the places they had always had before they were people. This explains why comments like “Rozaya is a green screen” were so frequently made, though they seemed to be slightly inaccurate as metaphors, given that a green screen, as I understand it, is a prop that takes the place of backgrounds in films, not something onto which images are projected, as such comments were trying to describe me.
As far as those community members who talk about having spiritual origins, and/or having been born from other causes, I believe them, and also know why I struggled as hard as I did to allow them to have their say; I didn’t want to deal with it, plain and simple. I’m running into this again as memories of childhoods I know I haven’t experienced start to make themselves known to me under the direction of this community’s most vulnerable, and have, as of today, reached a breaking point. As someone who is connected to what I know as the astral realm myself, and who understands that there are those who can also access it physically, without having to leave their bodies, as someone who is well aware of the rest of this community’s presence in said realm, I’ve asked them in writing, and will ask them again, to find other places to have their traumas addressed, because I cannot handle the task, and I’m sorry I gave false hope and the impression that I could. Thankfully, there are people in the astral realm who can guide those who reside there, and also call themselves members of this community, to other places where they won’t have to fight for time, struggle to be heard and hope for treatment I’m not sure exists in this world.
I was content to be plural, until S pushed the trauma framework. I was content with the trauma framework, until we started getting flooded with names I couldn’t keep up with. I was content with being flooded with names, until I learned that they were, more than likely, those of people who needed help and hadn’t been able to find it. I was content to provide them help, or at least to try to, until I started physically paying the price for that willingness through periods of detachment from reality, consistent overwhelm, calls for additional therapy at my financial expense and the beginning of yet another period of dreading being plural. I’m greatful that people are around who can guide those in need to places that I couldn’t find, and with that knowledge, let me also say that I’m tired, and I refuse to do this anymore. I highly admire those who can handle this work, and it’s clear to me that I’m not one of them.
In the course of this morning’s conversation, I learned that at some point, I was involved in the creation of the gateway between the astral realm and this community. I don’t remember this consciously, but one thing those who have come from that realm are good at is telling me the truth when I need to hear it. When I communicated to them about my increasing struggle to provide them with what they needed and expressed discontent with continuing to try, they understood, and started making arrangements for that responsibility to no longer rest with me. I can only hope things will work themselves out in the end. At the moment, I don’t know what to do accept to rest in that area for a while.
Thank you for reading.