When I first started working with a therapist, I was struggling to explain my own inner dynamics. My feelings were in flux and I constantly felt like I was being split into several different perspectives and directions. I found out later, that there was a reason for this – I was suffering from dissociative identity disorder.

Even before that diagnosis, I sensed a deep feeling of unrest between different parts of myself. I struggled to explain or to draw a single image or create a painting that described what I was going through. So I didn’t. I created a narrative in the form of a comic. In fact, I created two over the course of my early work with my therapist.

The first was called: The Workshop. It takes the audience through a kind of tour of the imagined home or space I retreat to when I’m inside my head. This is a place I’m allowed to be myself. It’s a place to be creative or where I’m allowed to feel my feelings. Things like, longing, grief, or depression. Things I felt I wasn’t allowed to show the world.

The comic depicts, what I recognize, as two distinct parts of myself. A daily living part, called Jesi and another part who remains somewhat shrouded in mystery. We don’t learn her name in the comic apart from being another “Jess”, but over time I came to learn that her preferred name is Silent.

Silent represents a deeply repressed part of me. A part of me that never spoke about her pain, her suffering, her truth about the abuse she experienced out of fear. Her only acceptable method of expressing her emotions was through self-harm. Anything to prevent becoming “an issue” to other people. Not so much as a burden, although that was part of it, more out of fear of being punished for crying or having visible feelings. Silent’s only tools in this world are a pencil and a blade. She rarely speaks preferring to stay silent, even today.

The other part in this story, is named Host. Is the narrator of the tale. She is a part that regards Silent, not with malice, but not with kindness either. Sort of a casual disregard and a bit of anxiety around sharing Silent’s story with the rest of the world.

The narrator part of me recognizes that Silent’s feelings may be too intense for the audience and so she tries to hide her. She attempts to divert your attention from the truth about what lies beneath the workshop despite rumbles and snaps from below the floorboards.

At this point in my journey, I only recognized a few parts and so the home I illustrate feels largely empty. Much later, the house will be filled with different rooms and aspects of myself. I have yet to depict the breadth of the entire house but perhaps that’ll be another project some day.

We also learn a little about the the courtyard just outside of our hobbit-like home. The courtyard is wide and contains the magic well, a shed (which we don’t look at in this particular story, suffice to say it’s another place to store thoughts and memories), and a graveyard that slopes up the side of a small hill.

The graveyard is filled with painful or impactful memories marked by gravestones. Each headstone glows with a soft light illuminating the darkness. The narrator explains that the glow comes from what’s buried beneath: magical orbs of memories.

In the center of the courtyard lies the well. If you have ever seen the horror movie “The Ring”, the US version with Elizabeth Shue, you’ll recall a deep well in the middle of a vast field. It’s where the young haunted girl Sumatra perished; her bones remaining at the bottom of the well after her death. Sumatra haunts Elizabeth and her son appearing in a dirty white hospital gown distorted and bloated as if she’d been floating in water for decades, but never quite decaying. This is the inspiration for Silent’s clothing and the well itself.

From the courtyard if you peer down into the glossy water of the well, you can actually see right down through the bottom of it. Which makes no logical sense, but this is no ordinary well. If you focus, you may notice something moving – it’s Silent. She’s sitting in her alcove drawing quietly. From her perspective, the bottom of the well sits at the top of her dungeon like room (which is underground). The bottom of the well forms an oculus in the ceiling of her room. The light from outdoor sky passes through the well water and into Silent’s domain, creating soft shimmery rays of sunlight.

You can view the first comic below or click the download button to view in your own PDF viewer if. At some point I’d love to re draw these and re-work the narrative structure but I kind of like them as they are for now. In their raw state that I created several years ago at a time I was just learning about my internal world.

Silent continues to scrawl incomprehensible lines by the narrow light unaware of any other presence or observation. And though you may physically sit on the edges of that well looking down, it’s a well that doesn’t actually exist in just one space or time. And that idea is explored in the second comic, The Magic Well.

In this story, I take a deep dive into the waters of the well and discover memories that I had long forgotten. If you weren’t aware, that kind of convenient forgetfulness of the past (amnesia) is often associated with DID. Suffice to say, we often forget these kinds of memories for a reason. They’re not the most pleasant, and often were so traumatic our young brain was unable to process what was happening anyway.

Inside the magic well is that watery dream-like world that takes us back to memories we had long since forgotten. I can only absorb moments at a time. Any more would likely trigger some nasty side effects. But eventually I find something more valuable than just memories. I find another part of myself buried deep at the bottom of the well.

This explorer is a version of myself diving into the waters of the well inside my own mind. And also is a representation of the “well”, and the emotional waters, inside all of us. One that counselors and therapists often traverse with their clients.

In the comic, I curiously, and with some anxiety, decide to dive down and return up for air, over and over, going deeper each time. Until I discover a long forgotten child part of myself. She sleeps quietly inside that bubble as it hovers in cold dark waters, unmoving. I have to wonder if she’s even alive.

I also explored that visual in another piece of artwork I eventually gifted my therapist. A piece called: The Part in the Well. That’s the featured piece in this post.

In the comic, I eventually rescue this part of me and bring her to the surface. I wish I could tell you that this part lives happily ever after. But while this new part now exists more clearly in my mind, she does not speak, much like Silent but with even less movement. The most I have interpreted from her is a dull sensation of longing, loneliness, and fatigue, but no verbal communication.

I have a single photo of myself at the age of this same part from the bottom of the well. I was around two or three years old. I’m sitting next to my brother who was about nine or ten. My tiny hands wrapped around his thigh and pulling myself closer to him. We’re surrounded by other family and cousins squished onto a sofa. But it’s clear, I’m uncomfortable and I want to be near no one else but him.

This is a very young part of me that deeply loved my brother and felt protected by him. And now that he’s gone – there is no one she trusts. And so she remains primarily, asleep, disconnected.

Maybe one day she will wake and speak to me, but for now, she rests quietly in the arms of another part of mine. One that nurtures and wishes for her own child one day. A part called Elle.

If you’re lost in all of this parts talk, than you’ve gotten an accurate glimpse of what it’s like to have DID. And what it’s like to discover one-by-one, parts of oneself. Deep hidden parts with a lot to communicate, if they only knew how.