So Wishes Must Cry

Beginning To Feel The Burn

Hello everyone my name is Ash, I'm a gay trans guy and I'm also polyamorous. By the time you'll be reading this I'll already be 19 years old and still struggling everyday to deal with my or should i say our mundane life. That's right i form part of a DID system where we have over 100 alters (an alter is a fragmented piece of yourself). For those who don't know, DID aka dissociative identity disorder previously known as multiple personality disorder happens when an infant goes through repetitive trauma and this causes them to fragment into several parts that is the alters.

According to google:
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a rare and complex psychological condition where a person experiences two or more distinct identities called 'alters'. It is usually a long-term condition that occurs in response to extreme trauma. DID was called multiple personality disorder until 1994, when the name was changed to reflect a better understanding of the condition.

Thing is there is such a stigma around this disorder and teenagers around the world are faking it that doctors no longer believe us but luckily we have an understanding eldest sister that believes us shout out to you . I wish sometimes that we could get a real diagnosis. To be honest we did have one when we were looked after by Doctor sookha a psychotherapist who was our carer for one year after her no one believed us to this day but we know that what we're experiencing is hundred percent true. Although our symptoms differ slightly to what the DSM-5 may say, it doesn't matter since no one can fit in such a box.

Along with my DID i experienced derealization and depersonalization as symptoms. Derealization and depersonalization themselves can be mental illnesses but for us they were symptoms. Derealization is when you feel as if the world you're living in is fake to us it felt as if we were seeing the world throught a fog and depersonalization is when you feel as if you yourself are fake which to us presented in a way that when we looked in the mirror all we could see was a stranger it's still this way since no one has found a reason as to why we're so confused about our identity. Thinking that the world you live in is fake is a horrible feeling because you start to believe that you don't need to do anything good for yourself and just end up ruining your life little by little.

Sometimes DID can be fun when alters crack jokes during serious situations and people think that you're mocking them but it's just the "voices" inside my head that are being cheeky. Now some boring terminology I'm not going to go in detail for that cause like i said it can be pretty uninteresting. Like you've seen so far I've been referring to us using the pronoun "I" since I am the the host of the system basically the host is just someone who fronts the most and a system can have several hosts during its lifetime and for now it's me (Ash). Other important terms are persecutors, primary protectors, caregivers, littles, gatekeepers and sexual protectors.

You might be wondering what acute trauma must have caused this, well to be fair trauma is such a subjective matter so what i found traumatizing could be nothing to you. I'm not going to expose my whole life on this platform but I'm just going to slightly touch whatever made us develop DID. As far as we remember, our parents who are now separated (and our dad doesn't talk to us) were always quarreling so much that at age 10 we developed psychosomatic pains and had to see our first therapist. Magically after only one session we were cured of our pains but we kept on being subjected to trauma such as daily fights. Our well being had not only affected us but also our mother who thought that she would lose us to some form of cancer. It was so traumatic that we had lost half a year of school without even noticing which could also have been the memory loss that is associated with DID but who knows?