30 Days of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Day 01
We found an ask meme on Wordpress by CatalyticConvergence, and decided that's what we want to use! Because we're so busy, however, 30 days is going to be more like 30 weeks. Oopsie! Anyway.
Describe your system. What kind of system, how big, anything you feel is a good introduction.
Our system is an autistic DID system of almost 50 alters, the staggering majority of them based on fictional characters. Our original parts are based on three main facets of our life, being connection to nature, knowledge, and trauma.
The way our system functions is that for a sizeable amount of time, our system has a host and their "posse" of co-hosts or other alters that split during that time. After a while, the host cannot take it anymore, and our system switches to another host, more often than not being a new split. Our current theory is that our system switches hosts to mitigate burnout, something that is unfortunately all too common when it comes to autism, especially with lower support needs and the expectation of basically pretending to be allistic and not letting any symptoms of autism burden allistic people whatsoever.
We have a variety of alters fulfilling many roles in our life, from chores and classes to knowing how to play a musical instrument and participating in track and field (when we used to do that in high school, long distance peeps say hello!).
We don't use internal role labels of symptom holders, instead noting that some parts are more prone to things like depression and anxiety (which comes territory with being a trauma holder imo). This is especially true for autism, as it is a developmental disability caused by the way a person's brain is wired. This means that if one alter is autistic, all of our alters are autistic. Instead, for alters who act neurotypical or are in denial, we use the term "masker." Masking is something autistic people do to compensate for their autism, and in our system, maskers make that their entire identity.
Internally there are times when it can feel very utopic to be in a system. But knowing that every utopia is a dystopia in disguise, since we discovered our system, we've realized that being a system is not all fun and games. Within a few months of discovery, symptoms of PTSD started slipping through the cracks. We receive treatment for this aspect of DID with our alters in mind. Who we tell about our system is very selective, especially since some people are very weird about it.
That's kinda all I have to say about our system. I can't reveal too much outside of that, it's personal.