So I’ve had a week or two of very busy days, causing me to slip back to almost barely-noticing anything of a DID nature, as I have done for most of my life. Then this past week I came back around to suddenly revisit it again, and am dismayed by the amount of backstepping I’ve done.
I was chatting with another friend with full diagnosed DID today, and I ended up hitting on a major point as I suddenly took off into a conversation direction I wasn’t necessarily planning to:
“It seems kind of ironic,” I said, “we are both dealing with similar concerns about handling everyone’s [internal] needs, yet we have opposite problems, as if on both sides of some window.”
“Oh?” was his response.
I continued:
“You guys can communicate and individually front to act on those needs, thus is seems like your efforts are on reigning that in to avoid social interaction problems.
I can identify differences in influences/feelings/thoughts, but get little to no coherent communication, causing potentially wild flip-flops in demeanor that are exceedingly internally schooled to make sure the outside stays as serene and consistent as possible. Without extreme effort on my part, I slide back into not knowing what I need until I’m suddenly a broken down mess because someone managed to break through enough to vent.
Because as far as I know, I’m normally happy with what I’m in… until I’m suddenly not. And it almost always comes out as feeling like “me” instead of “not Sokei”, thus leaving me open to attacking myself for not knowing what I want or for being inconsistent or for being crazy…
In retrospect, that may be part of the design on keeping us all “in line”, now that I think about it. Potentially continually self-persecuting to keep it all broken and controllable.”
The thing is, this isn’t new. I loop back through this over and over, I feel like I don’t make any progress and I’m just rediscovering the same thing in some stupid pattern that never ends. I could have sworn I’ve worked through this already. As I put it later in my conversation with my friend:
“I know I was doing better at trying to let everyone step out. I particularly remember a point where someone was out and for the first time I as whoever was front KNEW for certain that I was not Sokei. As opposed to whoever talking was still doing it within the bubble/mask/skin that was Sokei.
Working on all this has been so much better for me. The depression issues of my life have backed off, splintered, compartmentalized, become easier to identify and overcome when illogical.
I don’t like back stepping out of fear that I’m stepping away from a state that it sounds like many DID people fight to achieve (continual shared time with less loss).
Aren’t I where most people already want to be? Why am I trying to step away from that?
But I need to, and it’s so hard to argue against those questions..
Like I can’t even tell if those questions are in good faith or if it’s just another attempt to put myself down, trying to argue out that by trying to step further into individuality and split that I’m disrespecting everyone who’s fighting to to get where I already am. That I’m just being disrespectful by existing as such and should just shut up and keep going as is.”
This is, of course, copy-pasted from a text conversation, otherwise I’d have been able to only type about one paragraph of summary. And it’s been trimmed to just my part, because I kind of just kept going separate from what he said. But I wanted to capture it here too.
Additional capture: “I get the feeling I’ve forgotten a lot.
little things like discussing Catholic upbringing with Cyclohexane and realizing we learned almost opposite approaches (did I just conveniently internals & bury anything too downer?)
or when telling Darkmage about how mom would pick me up from [elementary] school and I’d cry the entire half hour drive home. every day. And when Darkmage then asked how did mom react… I don’t know. I can’t remember anything.”
I need to revisit the putting down part a bit back, I know I do. I’d planned to do that here now, but I can’t bring myself to do it at the moment. I can’t even go back to re-read it directly. But at least it’s captured here now.