30 Days of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Day 02
Continuing our series about Dissociative Identity Disorder from CatalyticConvergence, we discuss people knowing we're a system.
Who knows about your system? Who do you want to know? What do you feel it's like coming out as multiple?
Luigi here to answer questions about this part!
In real life, we are very selective about who we're comfortable with knowing we are a system. In our early system discovery days, we were very fortunate to have some folks in our first semester of our first college who were very kind and understanding towards our experiences, even though we didn't fully understand that our system was in fact caused by trauma1. This was very nice for us, as we were still trying to sort ourselves out and figure out how to function as a system.
Online was a can of worms. We discovered our system in August 2021, a time when people were still largely chronically online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They would treat some of our alters like their blorbos or like playthings, and it was very irritating. I also don't like the infighting and disinformation that occurs on all social media websites, Tumblr included. (I say "disinfo" as opposed to "misinfo" because it feels intentional at this point.)
There were a few odd eggs in real life that I couldn't help but get the ick from when we talked about being a system. All of them either misunderstood the nature of the disorder or immediately took my moment of vulnerability as an opportunity to talk about a system friend they had that was abusive. The fact that their abusive "friend" allegedly having DID became a huge part of the narrative tells me that their "friend" probably didn't have DID and was using it as a "devil made me do it" bullshit. It's very frustrating because I'm simply trying to explain what happens in our life, and another person interrupts it with something that should've been discussed with a specialized therapist. Your grievances with someone using multiplicity as an excuse to be an abusive person is not a burden that other systems are responsible for carrying.
Because of all this, I only tell people that I really trust about being a system. I can usually deduce this from the way they talk about things. People that demand I have no life outside of them or people who act like they know everything when they really don't, I tend not to tell them about this kind of stuff. Some people also just have this sort of vibe where I know that telling them could spur a rant that would take what I'm saying and put themself at the center of it instead.
So yeah, I don't really tell anyone nowadays.
We discovered this after I got frontstuck and subsequently started hosting in October 2021, halfway through the Fall 2021 semester. I hadn't realized that I was a trauma holder, though the initial anxiety of suddenly fronting with no idea where I was and the subsequent PTSD symptoms afterwards were very telling.↩