“Soon after the awakening
I flew up in the air
I was a snowflake floating
Through my heavenland
As light as a feather
An ash
Like a grain of sand
From the white desert
And the misplaced time
I really need to find”

Lunatic Soul, ‘Suspended In Whiteness‘

I find myself crying tonight as I think I understand what is going on in me. I wish I could see my psychologist, but she won’t see me while I’m in hospital. The other day I went missing and lost up to three hours. I then reappeared in my bedroom. I thought I had been in there the entire time, but the nurses said they were looking everywhere for me and couldn’t find me. They had left messages on my phone, and were relieved I was ok. I had been suicidal that day, so I understand their concern.

I am not an idiot. I know about trauma, about dissociation and about mental health. This is the kind of thing people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) experience. Dissociation has been a way of coping for me ever since I was a child. As a child and teenager I escaped into fantasy and video games. I have little awareness of my surroundings. I disappear behind the computer screen. I have shut downs. I live inside my head in my own little world. I am very prone to derealisation (feeling like nothing around us is real) and depersonalisation (feeling detached from ourselves and our body), and have also experienced another unusual kind of dissociative experience called Solipsism Syndrome where I felt I was completely alone in the universe and no one else really existed, they were just a hallucination, an extension of my own mind. I frequently have lapses in my memory on a micro scale, mindlessly moving things and losing things. I don’t remember it ever happening on this scale though.

My psychologist uses the Internal Family Systems model. We talk about how it is the nature of the mind to be subdivided into different parts, or subpersonalities. Each part wants the best for us, but often has a different way of going about this. The more trauma we experience in life (particularly when we are young), the more fragmented we become. At the extreme end of this spectrum is DID.

DID is at the extreme end of the dissociation scale, usually caused by horrific, unimaginable trauma which the person cannot escape from and which starts in childhood. In DID each part is incredibly nuanced and operate independently from one another. They can even have different physiological traits (e.g. eyesight, blood pressure etc.). We often experience amnesia when other “parts” come out and we lose time. We can also be “co-conscious” where another personality has taken over our behaviour but we are still “there” to some degree. We haven’t completely blacked out and we can remember what happened.

I cry because all the evidence is pointing towards me having DID or something like it. I think everything got too much on Wednesday, and another “part” or “personality” took over. I don’t know who, all I know is there is at least two “people” using this body. I am a multiple.

What does it feel like when you are no longer the one out? It feels like the time I overdosed on drugs and alcohol and was knocked unconscious. I just ceased to exist for a bit, kind of like going offline. In some ways it is nice. It is like being given a rest from a very stressful job. In other ways it is scary. It scares me that I’m not the one in control. I don’t know who is on stage and running the show and what they’re going to do. But whoever they were, they got us back to our bedroom in one piece. I was not exactly doing a great job at managing myself anyway as I wanted to die, so probably it was for the better.

I don’t know if I am going to have another black out. This is the first time I am aware of something like this happening. But as a friend pointed out, maybe it has happened before but I just never had anyone there to point it out. Or perhaps my parts are less distinct, so my switches are not as noticeable to others.

These are my thoughts tonight. I hope I can keep my level of distress down and better manage this shitshow. I am looking forward to talking with my psychologist, but I haven’t yet got a discharge date from the hospital. Tomorrow I am going to message my friend who also experiences black outs, and they are much more severe than mine. He goes missing for days sometimes, and also loses his hearing and voice. His wife is constantly calling emergency services.