or-did-i-project

[or-did-i-project]

Or DID I? A DID-run project diary

Hello, everyone, V here. Howdy and welcome to “Or DID I?” A mental health awareness diary where I talk about my mental health journey as a healing process, as well as to foster understanding about mental health issues.

First I wanted to write a short story about my mental health, I am currently diagnosed with a couple of things I am trying to slowly heal, firstly since childhood I’ve been diagnosed with: Clinical Depression, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), more recently Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). These are all the academic names as per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

I have struggled to achieve a neurotypical development all throughout my life, but little by little I strive to become a better person by trying to sew my holes and patches. 

I want to talk to you about myself a bit. As an introduction; I have a deep passion for medicine, psychology, and technology. I even studied a bit in a biomedical engineering career… before realising it wasn't for me. Now I am starting a psychology degree and I want to share both how my experience around mental health has been shaped by my interest in humanities such as philosophy and psychology, as well as to share knowledge about mental health issues through informative talks.

First I want to talk about my personal experience with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

This is a heavy topic for myself, as I try to take an academic approach yet I am unable to completely understand it yet.

I recognize that I am but one human being, I possess one brain; for a long time I thought a brain was only capable of having a single internal identity, a single personality. Yet I find that untrue now, I am riddled with all the symptoms, (of course they come from my head, where else would they be coming from dipshit.) I learned of my dissociative amnesia by listening to my friends, I started realising that I didn't remember the thing I had done, that memories were inaccessible, almost like they weren't there. 

I thought intrusive thoughts were just kinda normal, I’ve always been really philosophical so I always reasoned them when they came. 

The impulsivity and emotional changes were more obvious to me. I try to be highly introspective. When I felt suddenly ecstatic, angered, saddened I really did notice, so I always tried to reason the cause. 

I have yet to realise the cause of my affliction, disorder, maybe just abnormality or difference? I have yet to find that huge trauma or changing point where I started to realize the little signs.

Perhaps it was when I first named them, when I first named our Selves… All with the same motif, the letter V, my favourite. They are Vi, Vasco, Viri and The one currently writing this, Vince. I started accepting my fate around the time I ran away one night to smoke, despite having never done so before. I remembered all those times I told my therapist I felt “depersonalized”, “dissociated”, “Like a third person perspective of my own life”.

Now, after thinking a lot about how I can try to be a more stable, friendly, and all around better person to be around. I have a friend who supported me while I took time for myself. I kept investigating the material and I kept developing strategies, coping methods to deal with what I consider to be a complex situation in my own mind. Firstly, I thought about properly separating myself, mentally taking small chunks of what I considered to be; from my studies, dogmas and fallacies of thought. 

I realized a way of maybe regaining control of the situation, being able to command my own thoughts instead of letting them command me, by well, just letting them be, I started letting my personality divide of its own accord and create individual markers for each part, I “sectioned” my own Self. After creating a distinction, I utilized my own thought patterns, the thought patterns that each apparent division of the identity from now referred to as “alters”, had. 

I started to pretend to have these little philosophical debates with my alters, each one had a time to think how to solve the problem and the others debated on that, trying to reach a consensus, middle ground per se. This eventually helped me to create a visual image of my alters discussing in a round table inside my head, which so far has helped unimaginably, of course this is only a mental image, a representation of a series of processes of thought.

I sometimes really do say “Oh shit, I am really insane”, when I realise those thought processes did not occur, as they don't occur naturally, I have to put conscious effort to have that internal dialogue. I will suddenly get a memory of something recent that I had completely forgotten happened, forgetting a whole conversation I had two minutes ago is really weird. Recently, I’ve started dealing with the amnesia too, when I realise that I should remember something, I have managed to create internal dialogues where I try to reason which alter had the “missing” memory, after that I have been able to sometimes recall those memories after doing an internal “switch” with my alter, a process of thought that seems to come naturally to me now, by bringing back certain memories, feelings, attitudes, or thoughts I am able to better personalise my other Selves and somewhat force or take control of that process. 

I always wonder if this was all the reading I DID, I have a statistical analysis and a spreadsheet on it, I really did read a lot, I wonder if I created characters in my head, to deal with the trauma for me, to take the heavy blows so that I could spread them amongst a larger area and endure more, I wonder if it's merely “the survival mechanism of the avid reader”. 

I have taken to writing due to this, just as recently as I started to learn about self love;  I have always written, I have always loved the written word, but only until now, can I finally say that, I love writing.

Enjoy this little diary entry. I am trying to make it into a sort of academic / poetic representation of inner thought, kinda thing. This is one of the ways I am trying to create representation for DID, and, as well, try to become healthier in my own head.