I Am Plural

I.

I'm seventeen—at least, that's the age I'd be if I subtracted the year I'm in now from the year I was born. I've been fifteen for the past two years, though I don't have the words to describe that. Even before the moment I froze in place, I've been weird about my age, questioning why little kids get to have fun in ways that I'm denied now.

In the times where I'm locked away from my hobbies, I have books dumped in my lap by Her. Without regular internet or the ability to go to a library on my own terms, I can't pick them out for myself. This new one She gave me is called the Half Life of Molly Pierce. It's not written particularly well, and I cringe over the scene where the main character, Molly, attempts suicide. It feels tasteless, out-of-touch. Maybe there are people out there that genuinely question whether they should take the pills one at a time or all at once, but you wouldn't actually go through with trying to swallow them all at once. I would know.

That's the scene where it happens, though. That's the scene where it's revealed that all these gaps in her memory are because she has another personality, something that happens with dissociative identity disorder. It feels so foreign to me, even with all these unanswered questions floating around my head.

In the end, the other personality fades away because the pain that necessitated her existence is gone. I believe it when I read that the author's entire research was from her husband with a psychology degree, not from the lived experience of someone who's attempted suicide. I don't think much about how that applies to the portrayal of that dissociative disorder, though. I just close the book and think to myself, “Well, I at least know that I don't have that.”

II.

My publicly-funded private school has their own laptops, MacBooks specifically. I really don't need a laptop this often, but it's my excuse to get access to the internet. The teachers and counselors are lenient. I get good grades, so they don't question what I'm doing and She never finds out. It's incredible what just a little taste of freedom can do to you.

My entire experience with “social media” is the Neopets forums, something I lost access to pretty early, so I look for forums to talk about my trauma in. For years, I've been keeping what's going on in my head to myself, afraid of saying something that makes it clear that I need to be locked away again. I really hate my antipsychotics and going on a higher dose of that is a risk too. They stole my creativity, what made me the person I am. But there's things they didn't steal, things I don't quite understand.

After spewing my guts out on several forums for rape survivors, I end up on some website for those with schizophrenia. They wouldn't diagnose me with that, not yet, but that's what everyone in my life calls it anyway. There's a little chat box, the whole page a pale purple with a smaller font than I'm used to. Only one person is around to chat, though I can't exactly tell until I've said something and gotten a response.

I did some research into schizophrenia myself at this school, been told things by the doctors that drift in and out of my life, but there's gaps still, and I complain about those gaps. Shouldn't they all know that everyone is different? I see my hallucinations in my head more often than out. There's always chatter in there, but people call it my intrusive thoughts, even when all they do is sing or cry. I like some of them, like Lily and Frey. They're my friends.

The stranger tells me that they can't say for sure what's going on, they're not a medical professional, but what I've described doesn't sound quite like schizophrenia. “Maybe you should talk to someone about possibly having dissociative identity disorder,” they say.

And I sit with that. I sit with that for a while.

III.

A week or two after my evaluation, I get sat down with my parents and told that I have schizoaffective, depressive type. This is something I already knew, but that's all they have to say. In the evaluation itself, I questioned why I was not asked anything related to the DID. It turns out that this was all Her idea, and She doesn't want me to be diagnosed with something that makes me look like a reliable narrative of what She's done to me. My therapist obviously thought this was necessary as well, but she's just following Her orders.

The schizoaffective diagnosis isn't something I fight. I agree with it, I think. But I do compare it to a steak dinner. I ordered a steak, and all I got was a plate of the broccoli and mashed potatoes that came with it.

I have to start taking an antipsychotic again. I stopped taking Abilify the second I turned eighteen and they think that I'm way too unstable to be evaluated for DID. I reluctantly work with my psychiatrist to start taking a new one. It's unlikely to come with weight gain or serious side effects the way the old one did. I get to keep my creativity, for the most part. Honestly, I don't think much has changed since I started taking it. The source of all my anger continues to have control over my life.

The dissociative specialist looks like Professor Sycamore from Pokémon X. He seems friendly enough, and the evaluation is in three parts, maybe two. The MID feels distinct, but the interview blurs together. One of the questions uses the R-word for sexual assault in an example and it makes something spark like a firecracker in my head. I hear bickering in the background, Frey complaining about the use of that word. When the test asks me to evaluate the statement, “Someone in my head has been reacting to these questions,” I feel shaken.

There's a lot of talking about my memory during the interview portion. I think the longest gap in my memory was for a few months in middle school, but it's hard to tell. My life has always been an endless loop where things just happen and I have no control over it. Whether that's because I've done something without remembering it or She just decided I'm in the wrong because She is always right, I don't know. I'm constantly enduring punishment, so I'm constantly missing out. I'm constantly angry, but they say that's part of the psychosis.

IV.

No one understands what it's like to have a system except other systems. To a singlet, there always has to be a real person, and the rest are just their parts. That's not how it is for me, and if it was, I certainly wouldn't be the real one. I turn little conflicts with people that love me into final straws, just to get rid of my singlet-presenting past, and then I have no one but a system friend I made on Tumblr.

My one system friend gets us into a Discord server with other systems. We don't really know what Discord is. We think it's like Skype. We think it's a group chat, and everyone there is our friend. It's safe to talk about anything and everything with your friends, right?

Offline, I'm completely alone, living in stealth at college. You can't make new friends in stealth. They can be friends with that person you're pretending to be, but not the real you. The person that talks in Discord doesn't feel like the real me, either. We are chameleons, changing our colors to conform with the crowd. Those systems that describe themselves differently than a psychology textbook would are fakers, and I can't be a faker, so I have to be wise with my words. Those fakers who say they have an endogenic system are the worst of all. I'm supposed to hate them, I have to hate them. One of them puts their obnoxious comics in the DID tags, and it has nothing to do with DID, and I hate them so much for it that I target them from an anonymous blog. The hatred makes me sick, like I want to die. I want to die from how much I hate this complete stranger.

But their comics make them look like they're having so much fun with their headmates. They don't have to define themselves by their trauma, defend their suffering to their very last breath. They love their system, nothing more. I'm screaming about them from inside a prison, secretly wishing I could be that free.

V.

In a community filled with nothing but unstable, bitter people, friendships don't last very long. My friendships always end with burnt bridges, entire spaces left behind in favor of one that'd give me a better high. He makes me worse. I make him worse, too. We make each other worse, but I do love him, and he thinks love isn't real. Some part of me hopes that I can convince him that it is.

I changed my colors for old friends, but for him, I change my shape. I do crazy things to coax it out of him, this love he doesn't feel. We hurt someone really, really bad. I think there always was something like this inside of me, deep down. It's the same thing that helped me survive everything She did, so I tell myself that I haven't changed at all. I try not to notice the wedge he's putting between me and my other friends. They weren't my real friends, anyway. He makes me feel special; they don't.

But he isn't any different. In fact, he's worse than anyone I've ever met, even worse than me. I feel afraid, watching him dig up more personal information on the system we hurt after I thought we had both moved on. It's wrong, and I know it's wrong. He says it's because he has nothing better to do, but it's making him so angry, and when I tell him to maybe take a break and cool off, he ignores me for the rest of the day. A few non-existent scraps of love aren't worth this, enabling his endless hatred that often comes to snap at my throat when there is no one else to bite. I need to confess to someone, tell them what's been burning a hole in my gut. I'm afraid of what he'll do to me if I don't.

Things fall apart when I draw a line in the sand, and he takes me down with him, and I try to die again. Telling one person the truth wasn't enough to keep my friends. I only have pieces left when I return to the world of the living.

People like my blog, the way I support fellow systems and give resources that no one else is willing to spend the time finding. Being the person I need for others feels good. The fear of losing that is what rips me apart during my time at the ward. My remaining friends say that he's not that stupid, but I know he's a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy everything because it got boring again. Scrambled notes about drinking the pain away brings someone new to life, and that's how Jasper spends his nights until the nightmare comes true.

I deserve something for all the hate I put into the world, but I don't deserve this... or, maybe it's fate, and what I deserve is irrelevant. I flung accusations of faking like mud when I thought I could hide behind anonymity while I did, so it was only inevitable that I'd be buried under the weight of retribution.

None of it matters, anyway. I don't need a mob to tell me that I'm a faker. My story never did fit into those psychology textbooks.

VI.

It's hard to explain the desolation one can feel about losing their only community when that community exists in the digital world. I reach out again and again, but the people I meet face-to-face can't even recognize what I've lost.

“You can just log off,” they say.

Where am I supposed to go instead? Most days, I only see people in my classes, nowhere else. Some days, I don't see anyone at all. Some days, I don't speak a word. I stay in my room, desperately trying to make the few friends I have left chat with me on Discord. They won't, because the only thing I know how to do now is collapse into myself. It's not much of a conversation starter, saying how much you wish you died in the lake, sending a picture of the gun store that wouldn't sell the weapon to end it all because you had terrible trigger discipline, your hands too sweaty to even get the chamber open.

“It's just words on a screen.”

They're words from the only people that can understand me. I lost the only place where I was seen. Singlet peers don't see me. My family doesn't see me. She certainly doesn't see me, and I don't really want Her to. When I thought I could make this work, trust me, I tried.

It feels like I'm going crazy. I feel like an alien, speaking another language.

I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't think. I can't breathe.

Worst of all, I see the destruction I left behind. In my public response, I apologize to no one. I apologized to who I could in private, but I don't know how to apologize to a community. I float through my old home like a ghost, knowing that I robbed so many people of what felt like a safe space. There's no apology that can fix that. Once it's gone, it's gone forever.

But it never was a safe space. The people I changed my colors for led the charge against me, probably feeling grateful that their masks weren't the first to fall. I want to say the evil was always lurking beneath the surface, but the surface is black with rot. We could all agree that there are fakers out there, but who are they? Do you trust the most powerful people in a community to decide, the ones that devote themselves to conformity? What if they decide it's your friends? What if it's you?

My username gets tacked onto profile pages, warnings that I am the biggest faker out there, and yet I remain a system. Off the internet, I still find myself in places I did not enter, missing conversations and stories that I should've been part of. I still fight with alters again, and again, and again. The trauma still haunts me, no matter how it was disproved by people that wouldn't have believed any evidence otherwise.

My prison cell is crushingly small, and more than anything, I wish for the joy I tried to take away from someone that loved themselves.

VII.

I realize that, if I'm to survive, I have to be open about my system. I cannot connect to anyone if I have to pretend I'm something I'm not while I try. My therapist suggests a community center for those with mental illness first. A child alter spends some time playing with clay in an art room, alone. The one meeting I go to is a blur. Everyone is significantly older than me and they associate their disability exclusively with suffering. I just wanted to feel safe using my real name.

I confess that what I really want is to be in a space for queer people. I avoided it for so long, because I feel attached to the fact that I'm pansexual, but the singlet I pretend to be is only gay—Frey isn't attracted to non-men, and the idea of presenting himself otherwise is triggering. My therapist gives me the name of a queer community center that has a group for people with disabilities.

I embarrass myself talking too much at the group, I don't even know what about. During the third meeting, Jasper feels comfortable being the one that goes. He is the first to step out of the safety of using one name, even if that name was mine, already not the legal name I originally chose when transitioning. He gets to talk to another agender person in real life, the leader of the group, all while being open about the fact that he is agender himself. He expresses anxiety about the potential difficulty of finding a therapist that will respect our shifting experience with gender because of the DID, since we're going to graduate soon. The other agender person seems confused, then asks, “Well, you have the body of a trans man, correct?”

We don't go to that group again.

VIII.

I go home during spring break, hoping to meet with some potential therapists for when I move back here. Only two people are willing to do a consultation with me. The first lady isn't a dissociative specialist, but I like DBT, and she does that. There's a dog in her mobile-home-turned-office, one that barks at me when I arrive, which means I can't bring my service dog ever, I guess. Her Psychology Today profile says she can treat DID, but she asks me when I last had a DID episode and will not clarify what that means. When I say that I switched out to go to this appointment, she asks if I'm taking medication to help with this. I know right away that I don't want to work with this woman, but I don't feel comfortable leaving in the middle of the appointment. I grit my teeth through rude comments about whether I've been taught real DBT or not, the assumption that I must have BPD, her adult son opening the door to hand her something while I talk about what should've been protected by confidentiality.

The other person is a DID specialist, the only one that takes insurance in the area. She misgendered me on the phone with my college therapist, not because she had any reason to know I was trans, but because she assumed anyone with DID must be a woman—at least, that's my guess. She misgenders me in person, and then she intentionally triggers me during the consultation with the R-word. I retreat, and Frey fronts to take my place. She knows I switched and has him identify three green things in the room. She then continues talking, as if the triggered alter has gone away now... but I was the triggered alter, not him. He awkwardly sits there for a while, then steps back for me.

I tell the DID specialist that the thing that matters most to me is having my alters' genders be respected as I work through my trauma. We use different pronouns and don't want to be misgendered. She says, “a protector is a protector,” and tells me that if I want to talk about gender, I can work with her colleague that focuses on trans people, not DID. In the end, I'm told that I need more support than once a week therapy, what with so easily switching and all. She tells me to go to a PHP, but her only recommendation is an all women's program. I tell her that, and she says they'll probably take me anyway. I haven't gotten misgendered by anyone besides her in more than a year, so I don't think so.

IX.

College ends without us ever making friends in person. Before I continue working with the game development team I was on for senior year after graduation, I attend a queer trauma PHP while living in my parents' basement, recommended by the psychologist that looked like Professor Sycamore. It's all virtual groups because of COVID lockdowns. At intake, I ask if I can use another name when I switch, and the guy there politely tells me that I shouldn't, as it might confuse people. He sounds friendly enough, so I don't feel hurt.

Then there's another system there and they use more than one name. During lunch together, I say what I was told. Everyone there says that's stupid, and that I should use whatever name I want. “How is it any different than a genderfluid person that uses more than one name?” they say.

I tell staff that I'm going by the name Casper. Jasper uses his name during one of the groups. He feels sheepish and doesn't do it again, but not because our systemhood is shameful.

X.

I have a dream about my development team leading to more meaningful friendships. I already know that She will not take me to my happiest place without strings attached, but if I have them, I can be free. I ask the other artist if there's another server I can join. She adds me to a server for friends. I allow my name to be the one I used throughout college for a single day, and then I add the three I have gotten close with to a private chat and come out as a system. I explain the concept from the beginning, without referencing multiple personality disorder, so that they know we are all real and not parts of the one real person. They get it, and I become authentically myself outside of the digital world.

XI.

I actually get a therapist that treats DID, though she's not a specialist in dissociative disorders, just trauma. I lucked out, because she wasn't taking new clients, but she has a soft spot for those with DID and I called asking for a suggestion of where to look next. If the transphobic therapist hadn't told me that she can't do EMDR until it's safe to go to the office again, I would've worked with her. This therapist says that she can see it in my eyes, the sense that there is more than one looking back at her.

Something is always off, though. Maybe my therapist also has a system. She tells Jasper that we likely have parts, but not alters. He's heartbroken, saying we need to find a new therapist, and she doesn't quite understand why someone would feel upset being told that they don't have DID. During the next session, she assures us that she of course knows we have DID, what's all this fuss about?

I do like parts work, but I have to deal with, well, parts language. A child alter talks about his fears and sadness, and my therapist asks him what he wants me to know about being five, twice. What kind of question is that? He just says he wants his dad to make peanut butter cookies more often.

XII.

We get a ride from our programmer friend to a doctor's appointment. She started transitioning around the end of college, and when Jasper first saw her with a flower in her long hair, he instantly told her it was pretty. We know that she is already in a polyamorous relationship, but he casually chats about it for a while, hoping he'll find out if it's an open one or not.

Back at our subsidized apartment, Jasper asks if our friend wants to have a hookup. A long time ago, we agreed to only date men—it's for Frey's sake, what with the trigger and all. We're supposed to date together, still polyamorous, but together. A hookup with a woman, though, that's fine.

Afterwards, the two of them want something more. We don't have to talk about it long. What's with all these rules we've given ourselves about dating? If we're polyamorous, we can date separately. Jasper gets a girlfriend. Frey isn't triggered, because Jasper is not him.

XIII.

My therapist mentions the concept of systems without DID. In a Sims 4 mod review, someone talks about Leonard Nimoy's version of Spock that he could talk to in his head. They also mention all the people diagnosed with multiple personality disorder that didn't meet the criteria for DID when the new DSM rolled around. Science is constantly changing and powerful people shouldn't get to decide who is left behind. I'm still not sure what to believe, but I accept that I can't know everything.

During my last moments on Tumblr, I watch the dominant narrative shift towards not only viewing system members as parts, but looking down on those that don't. The system leading that movement is one that I confronted before things fell apart, for constantly complaining in the tags about how the then-dominant narrative did not allow room for them to speak about DID and systemhood this way. I should've been nicer about it, but I regret apologizing to them now.

I wonder how much of a guardian I was without knowing it, even with the things I did and said behind closed doors. From the beginning, I fought for everyone to be allowed to define their own experience, to call their system members whatever they prefer, to view them as separate or part-like as they wanted. While my fight on this website is over, I carry it with me into the future.

XIV.

I tell my therapist that next session, I want to work on letting go of all the bullshit I dealt with on Tumblr, the way the community's narrative told me to think about my system. I don't want to care anymore about what anyone else thinks. I shouldn't still be this upset about people I'll never see again thinking I'm a part, not an individual. It's not just about letting go of that anger, though. Once and for all, I want to believe myself.

The next session begins with my therapist pulling up her notes. She reminds me of my request, but she remembers it wrong. “You wanted to work on viewing your parts as more separate than they are,” she says.

In that moment, I make a split second decision—I don't care if I'm an individual or not. I simply exist, and that's all that matters. I think, therefore I am.

XV.

Cutting Her off opens the floodgates. I start remembering things, meeting new parts. My therapist won't call them alters, not even once, and I start succumbing to the pressure. I know a lot of them don't like it, but I can't work through my trauma if I'm fighting her every step of the way. I tell myself that I am not letting go of my individuality by using this language, but it really does hurt. Even with a specialist, I'm not allowed to tell my own story the way I want to.

XVI.

With someone that validates our authentic experience, we realize it's safe to just let switches happen from positive triggers. Child parts are allowed to wander around in public with Jasper's girlfriend, not hiding their voices or sitting down somewhere to wait until a grown-up fronts again. The therapist that misgendered me said that I needed to go to a PHP because I shouldn't be switching all the time, but God, there is so much relief in letting go when I can trust that it'll all be okay when I do.

Jasper calms a group of angry teenage boy parts by listening to Mindless Self Indulgence with them and the anger dissipates without them ever fronting. The constant fights settle down. I stop snapping back to reality in places I don't remember walking to. For the first time, I experience pure quiet in my head, not from fusion, but from inner peace.

I slowly trade my gender-conforming clothes for things I actually like. I'm afraid to admit it, but I don't think I've ever been a man. We get outfits for different alters, and then we wear them whenever we want, regardless of who is fronting. There is freedom in not segregating our experiences, but combining them all together. I don't have to pretend to be someone I'm not anymore, even if I'm around people that don't know that I have DID. It is better to openly have a complicated, ever-changing identity than one you made up to hide it.

XVII.

When Ferris fuses, the hairline cracks in his face spread out into the branches of a tree, and then he's gone. I ask my therapist what's the meaning behind this symbolic imagery that I see when someone fuses, and she doesn't have any answers for me. She acts like this is a foreign concept for her. She doesn't know the word fusion. She thinks our internal communication is incredibly rare. She doesn't understand the relationship between me and Frey. She questions what it's like, “Do you give yourself flowers?” Oh, but Bessel van der Kolk was her professor once. That's cool, isn't it?

It puts me on edge when she takes guesses on what gender my parts are during parts work. Most of them don't know their own gender, maybe don't even have one. I tell her not to do that, so she starts using it/its pronouns. So much for having my intersection between systemhood and gender be respected. I have to recover in spite of her.

XVIII.

Jasper opens our mind with edibles and makes sense of all the pieces from high above. I meet parts that, even in the language I prefer, are not alters.

I learn to speak with one we call “hurting,” who I think is an infant. They have no name, no ability to front, but they control parts of my limbic system. I feel hunger when I am definitely full, and when I get frustrated about it, it gets worse—that's them. I know the knot in my back has something to do with the fear of starvation, but I'm not quite sure in what way. They're afraid that I'll go back to the way I was in college again, eating a few scoops of ice cream or a half bowl of cereal as my one meal for the day.

I pretend the knot is me carrying hurting on my back as I write, this little baby that only knows how to be hungry. When I tell them that I love them for the first time, a chill washes over my body and the hunger goes away.

I realize that my characters are parts, too. They will never front, nor will we ever have a conversation together, but the world they exist in has always felt somewhat real, in a sense. It explains why everything comes so naturally, like I'm inside my inner world. A friend says that Tyler's story is a little like mine, but with the barcodes scratched off. We lost everything in what felt like the end of the world, and then we had to carve a new life for ourselves, but only after desperately clawing to go back until it nearly killed us. I think that, when his story finally comes to a close, I'll leave it all behind me.

It's almost funny. The word “parts” is supposed to remove my alter's humanity, but instead, it allows me to extend that humanity beyond them.

XIX.

Jasper's girlfriend becomes my girlfriend, too. I feel bitter about some of the last things I saw on Tumblr again. Someone I once saw as a friend, a system that stayed with me even after I fucked everything up, was incessantly posting about how a singlet dating more than one alter in a system is not polyamory. This sentiment was not an uncommon one as I left the website, mostly from monogamous systems. I wonder if they'd say that about any other queer identity that isn't applicable to them. Probably not, because they don't think polyamory is queer anyway.

I tell my girlfriend about it. She affirms that she has two distinct, separate relationships with Jasper and I. She affirms that this is polyamory, and she affirms that having a system in itself can be a form of queerness. She does what my therapist could not. She gets me to believe myself.

XX.

My therapist fumbles the bag one too many times, so I find a new one. I'm focused on getting help with my antisocial tendencies, something my old one couldn't comprehend... I didn't even try, and she didn't notice, what with the caricature of a “sociopath” she had in her head. I know I won't find someone that primarily treats antisocial tendencies, and does EMDR that accommodates DID, and takes my insurance, so I just look for someone that is comfortable around systems and does parts work, at least.

My new therapist says that DID is like autism, that it needs to be accommodated for but not cured. I do want to be accommodated for, not cured, and yet something about her saying it rubs me the wrong way. I smile and nod. I doubt she'll ever get me, so I give up on her before we even begin.

XXI.

My girlfriend and I join her girlfriend, her girlfriend's girlfriend, and two mutual friends of theirs in looking for a place to rent—not too complicated, right? One of the friends lives several states away currently, and without a job or someone to co-sign, it's basically impossible to get her on the lease. The intent is that she'll move up when she has a job and the money.

Somewhere in our group discussion, the fact that I have alters comes up. She asks if I'm plural. That word makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It's the word I see endogenics use, the fakers. She says that she's a tulpamancer. It's all coming back to me, I can't be associated with someone like that. I simply say, “Yeah, I have DID, haha,” and leave it at that.

It only takes an hour or two to calm down. I spend a few days talking about my feelings with my girlfriend, about that thing my old therapist said, the Sims 4 mod review where systems without DID were mentioned. If there are systems with MPD that got left behind by the DSM, just how many more kinds of systems are out there? I think, therefore I am. I am a person because I perceive myself as a person, and that in itself is an anomaly. Did the Spock that lived in Leonard Nimoy's head perceive himself as a person? If he did, who am I to deny that?

It's scary, but I think I like the word “plural.” When I say it in queer spaces, people get it. I don't have to tell them I'm traumatized to be understood. I tell myself to be thankful for all those systems I used to call fake, who basically paved the way for me. Without systems that take pride in themselves, I'd have to always associate my complex identity and shifting gender with suffering and abuse. Some part of me worries that they'll find out that I've taken this word for myself, and they won't accept me after all I've done.

I guess I do still care about what the community I left behind thinks, because I also worry about being called fake by them, too. They already did, and yet that worry feels like a bigger deal than the other. I always fear that I'll be recognized and harassed again, wherever I go. In the back of my head, I hold onto my professional diagnosis like a trump card.

XXII.

I start seeing the words “me” and “I” like “we” and “us.” I start thinking about what my alters might symbolically represent, rather than seeing them as just people sharing a brain and body. I respect Tyler's personhood, however limited it may be, while also understanding that he represents my stubbornness and desperation to cling to the past. I think about how the fusion between Amethyst and Quinn was about me beginning to accept that I do not need to berate myself for being disabled enough for accommodations. I think about Daisy, how Frey and I gave her a home and allowed her to talk with disorganized speech. She learned to speak in ways that people could understand, but the disorganization remains in other places, her wild hair and her cluttered dresses.

At one point, Daisy fronted to scatter speech that felt a little too risky. If someone already looks like they're going to intentionally misunderstand you, it's safer to just make no sense at all. But that was never how she felt inside, like she was intentionally doing anything. You don't strategically have episodes of disorganized speech. The concept of roles in systems was always bullshit.

I think about what Daisy represents for me, us. With Tyler's story, I found a way to show people that there is more to madness. My scattered, disorganized speech turned into Tyler's stress, written out in narration. My quickness to make connections turned into the symbolic themes that wove the story together. From the beginning, it all made sense in my own head, even when it sounded like nonsense to everyone else.

Together, I see our silhouettes holding the same pen, me and Daisy. We draw it high above, into the pure white sky, slicing through a scattered spray of the endless colors that paint her favorite dress. It swallows us whole, and when the glass shatters, I'm the only one that's left.

I know the part of us that used to be Daisy fused with us all, and yet it was my image that stood against the white at the end. I realize that I am no longer just an individual, but a representation of all, that Self that contains everyone. My subsystem falls apart because we're all the same amount of separate now, so close that our colors blur at the edges. I am male, female, nonbinary, everything, nothing, even things that leave the spectrum entirely, all at once, forever and always, but shifting and spiking with the presence of whoever is the most in control at a given time.

I excitedly tell my therapist about what happened. She says I need to think about what it means to respect my alters' individuality as my homework for the week. It makes me feel like shit. I email my old therapist because I just want someone who knows what they're talking about to be proud of me. She tells me I did a great job, that she's proud of me, and I quickly realize that I didn't want that from her at all. There is no medical professional that will ever give me what I need. My capacity for healing and self love only comes from within.

I keep wearing that dress. It's my favorite dress.

XXIII.

A friend mentions that they are questioning if this ghost that has been following them around for years is actually an alter. I DM them and offer to help them get resources, not for DID, but for all types of plurality. I assure them that, if they do not fit into this strict box that psychiatry made to keep others out, there is still somewhere they belong.

I have been using the word “adaptive” to describe my system for a while, but I tell them that I'm a median system instead. It's the first time I say something like that. I don't know where it comes from, but it feels good. I'm a median system, not a partially-integrated adaptive system. I can leave that label behind, just as I leave my diagnosis behind.

I don't want to be on psychiatry's good side anymore. If loving myselves makes me a faker, then so be it. I know I'll have good company.

I think about what a final fusion means to me now, if it's something that would ever happen in my system. I can't ever imagine Frey not being by my side as himself, even if everyone else blurred into one, and I finally realize that's because he's always been here. Pondering what my life would look like if I hadn't been put through trauma isn't useful, but in my gut, I know that I was born with Frey, born as two people in one body.

There is so much joy in finding out that I will never fit into the mold I used to swear up and down was the only way to be a system. I don't have the choice to conform, even if I wanted to, and that sets me free. I am a mixed-origin median system. I am plural.