I have always been a night owl, a creative, a weirdo. I thought I was just artsy, and hell, as any creative will tell you – we are a wacky bunch! Many of us enjoy thinking out of the box, deep pensive moments, meaningful conversation, and can be incredibly sensitive. There’s some magic there that ties in introspection to creativity, but that’s a topic for another post. So, growing up, I thought, “I’m weird because I’m an artist”, not because my home life wasn’t super great.

Like most children, if you’ve got a roof over your head, food on the table, and your parents show you some measure of care, life is good, right? And in fact, that is what my brain convinced me for over thirty years. And that’s what it’s meant to do. So that I could keep going, keep living, keep surviving.

It wasn’t until many years later, after I had just turned 36 that I finally took a hard look and began to explore the truth about the experiences that I had survived. And even today, I’m still uncovering truths.

I lived in an abusive home. I both watched and endured domestic violence most of my childhood and before the age of six was subjected to sexual abuse. And even though, that is my reality, it was a difficult one for me to accept because it meant that bad things happened to me; things no one would want to endure. I’d spent most of my life in denial about these things; trying to move past them instead of processing them.

From the outside, I am a relatively successful thirty-something. I’m married, have a strong career, pets, an active social life – for all intents and purposes I look like an average individual. And yet, I am anything but an individual. I was diagnosed with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and CPTSD a few months after my brother passed away to Covid-19.

His death shattered the carefully constructed narrative I had accepted about myself. That my family had their problems, but deep down we loved each other, and that was all that mattered because one day, I was going to help them come together. We’d finally make amends for all the hurt, hug each other and maybe my dad would apologize for his behavior all these years. It was quite the childish fantasy. And after my brother died, the hope of that fantasy died with him. And to be clear, I don’t believe my folks are monsters. I just think they were broken, like me, and broken parents sometimes raise broken kids. I now know the word for it – intergenerational trauma.

So, I landed on a therapist’s couch, fidgeting uncomfortably, to work through my grief. Within a few months of working together and diving into the complexities of my family dynamics, my therapist started to notice some things about me. It wasn’t just that I would often dissociated badly in his office or that I struggled with forgetfulness. But I also wrote to my private blog (shared with only him) and it had many clues about what was going on internally. When my therapist read my posts, I’m sure he noticed wildly different tones and voices in the writing, even my art styles remain inconsistent and appear like they’re done from different artists. At one point I tried to explain to him, that I often felt like I had to switch personas for different scenarios and that I didn’t have one that perfectly fit the therapy setting. Sometimes I’d use my career persona, sometimes the friend, but often the child-like persona took over and I froze.

He asked me if I would find it fun to draw these personas and so I did. At this point in my life, I had no concept of DID. I knew the dated term, multiple personality disorder, but had no real understanding of what that meant other than the sensationalist examples on TV. And I certainly had no idea it had become a “popular” mental health disorder to self-diagnose amongst teenage TikTok-ers. When I finally shared the drawings and descriptions I had written up about my different “personas”, his interest was appropriately piqued. He was pretty awe-struck by the visualization, but he had long suspected, and so within the next few sessions we had “the talk”.

My therapist delicately explained the theory that the mind is naturally multiple (an IFS concept – “we all have parts”), how DID occurs, what it meant, and what it might mean for me. I took it in quietly, said little, and went home. Inside, I was numb. When I got home I chatted with my husband – small talk, had dinner like normal, went to bed and lay there staring at the ceiling unable to sleep.

Sometime after midnight, I got up, grabbed my phone, and tip toed downstairs as I often did when I was struggling. I sat in the dark with only the tiny glowing light of my phone to keep me warm and like any digital native, I looked up everything I could on DID. Swiping through countless articles, research papers, Reddit posts, blogs. I lost track of time. I started to feel exhausted and overwhelmed and my thoughts raced, “This can’t be true? But it makes sense doesn’t it? But why me? Fuck.” With my anxiety heightened I finally put my phone down, curled up into a ball on the sofa, and cried.

It took some time to accept the diagnosis. And it wasn’t until about 5 months later that I actually took the Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation or the MID with a trauma specialist. The MID is one of the ways psychologists/therapists are able to get a picture of the dissociative symptoms someone is experiencing. They can use it as a tool to identify whether that person’s symptoms align to the constellation of symptoms associated with DID/OSDD and PTSD. The specialist’s assessment was that my answers, in fact, lined up with other people with DID and PTSD. But, even after the results of the MID, I still had times where I questioned the validity of my diagnosis. Was I imagining the parts? Somehow faking it for attention? But who the fuck would want this? I just wanted to be stable and not have wild mood swings, feel suicidal every other week, stop self-harming, and just be a normal fucking person. But that wasn’t my reality, and I promised myself to stop running from the truth.

It took some time, two therapist’s professional opinions, and a more formal diagnosis, but mostly it took my own acceptance to move past this phase of my journey. Once I started to accept the fractured nature of my own mind, my parts, one by one, started to introduce themselves; sometimes in spectacular fashion. And the thing that took a while to learn was that they weren’t evil, or scary, or bad – there are no bad parts. I shouldn’t hide from them. They were all just versions of me trying to get the care and attention they deserved; the support they never received for the immense trauma they had individually endured. And so some of them acted out, some of them hid, some of them cried uncontrollably, some begged to die, some of them had an unanswered longing for love so deep in their hearts I could barely endure it. But little by little, I started to understand. They were all just hurt children who wanted to be heard; to have anyone give a fuck about their story instead of burying it. And like every human on earth, they needed to be loved, cared for, and supported for who they were, not what they’d been through or who they were expected to be. I had suddenly become a “mom” to at least 6-10+ distinct child-like Parts in my own mind.

And look, I know this might sound crazy to other people who don’t have this experience. Shit, writing about it still sounds insane to me. But I can tell you, that using this framework of “Parts” to better understand my own psychology has helped immensely in understanding my self. I have spent all of my life feeling like a chameleon, not knowing who I was, where I belonged, or why I always felt different in the deepest sense. And finally, now that I have a working understanding of how my mind functions, fragmented or not, I’m starting to feel more like me than I ever have in my entire life. I am working hard towards the best version of me that interconnects the wisdom and strength of all of my parts to form a stronger sense of self. And my hope, is that one day, that version of me will be the guide that takes me onto the next phase of my journey – to simply be at peace within myself and with my loved ones.