#make a community for autistic people to be bitter about how youll never be allistic and you hate being autistic? not great! youll stay sad.

[cosmossystem]

on separate spaces

(long post bc im a yapper & idk how to be brief)

this is just my opinion, but as someone in an osdd system, i feel like theres no real way to go "this only applies to disordered systems and non-disordered systems could never hope to understand it so get out of here because this is not by/about/for you" etc.

on a base level, i get why you would want to have different spaces to discuss your experience with the disorder and its symptoms. and i agree that we need those spaces. i WANT to talk about those things, and i do! but the "didosdd community"... does not do that. if they did, i dont think wed be having this conversation.

instead, its like theyre trying to make a space for themselves, but instead of founding it on shared experiences like they should (for instance: general plurality or how to deal with dissociation and the like), theyre founding it on the distress they go through (caused by their symptoms) and then acting like plurality is the reason for those symptoms, instead of just... treating it like separate issues. like sure, you might be plural because of your trauma, but your didosdd is your trauma response and why you have those symptoms, not the plurality in and of itself. there are non-systems who dissociate or who have amnesia, and the inverse is true. its a gray area.

but truthfully, they dont care for any of that. all they know is that theyre miserable, and they want to stay miserable.

not counting the autism (cuz its a special case), ive got two other major Big Bad disorders that make my life hell: ocd and avpd. and in all of these communities, i see the same exact thing every time. we never talk about how we can live life happily with these disorders or heal. i dont hear about ocd successes, or how someone overcame their avpd and carved a life out for themself. i hear about the struggles, and how it sucks, and the way it ruins your life.

because when you are REALLY deep into these disorders, you are pretty hopeless. i know and ive been there. the didosdd community likes to bond on their suffering, because suffering people attract other suffering people. its a cycle: the more you talk about suffering the worse you feel, and you look for comfort in other suffering people but no healing actually happens. they (didosdd) cant imagine a life without suffering-- and, important distinction: they mistake their plurality for the reason they suffer.

which, yes. you can suffer with plurality. it isnt all sunshine and rainbows. its hard! youre allowed to not like it or hate it even! but what im trying to say is that the point of therapy, generally, is to learn to live with your symptoms. mental illness cannot ever be fully healed, it is a product of your brain being abnormal, and no, even integration wont cure you. but they dont seem to get that? they think of themselves as fractured/broken/wrong somehow, their plurality is "proof" of that, and then cry about how awful didosdd is and 'why would someone ever want this?'

look, i get it. i HAVE didosdd. i know it sucks. i know its hard. its awful and i hate it. but i dont hate being plural. i dont hate my alters. we are more functional this way than we would be if we were a singlet. and, most importantly, being a system outside of your didosdd symptoms is important and valuable. your symptoms are just... the disorder itself. not the plurality. they just coexist.

because there will come a day very soon where our system no longer suffers from our symptoms to a degree that we will no longer fit under the didosdd criteria. because you can truly minimize those symptoms, function as a unit, and you wont need the label anymore. because didosdd is not "youre plural and it sucks". its "everything sucks, and youre plural in addition to it sucking". youll most likely still be plural, but it wont suck anymore.

and in all of my experiences with osdd/did/whatever we have--dissociation, a little amnesia, distress, all the works-- these are all things that non-disordered systems can have experience with. theres a ton of overlap. i dont feel like, on a fundamental level, theres really any huge difference between us (disordered) and them (non-).

yet the didosdd community seems to like to gatekeep those symptoms? which doesnt make sense either. ive never met a non-disordered system that didnt struggle in some way with a different mental illness, and those things i mentioned above are all really common symptoms of other disorders, like autism, adhd, personality disorders, (c)ptsd......

but most of all, i think a lot of didosdd systems tend to think of non-disordered systems --whether they (claim to) support them or not-- as this like, Magical Separate Thing with No Common Ground to them...?

like, you dont think endos had to go through a discovery period? you dont think theyve been judged or abused or outcast for their plurality? you dont think theyve ever struggled with switching, or communication, or headspace, or alter roles? you dont think theyve never felt invalid or unreal or like they were broken? hell, they probably feel that MORE than we (didosdd) do because of how you guys treat them!

and if the goal of having separate spaces was to talk about your symptoms and help each other cope with your stigmatized disorder (again: a very valid thing to do) like they claim to do... well, you certainly dont do that.

yall are too busy fighting over whos faking, and basing your existence on a disorder. and speaking from years of experience: basing your existence on a disorder makes for a very miserable life.

because, put it this way-- ive never met an endo/supporter that i didnt generally agree with and feel respected by. sure, i dont understand most of them, but the more they talk about their experiences the more i go "oh hey, we do that too! we arent so different after all." they listen to me. i listen to them. we help each other, and share advice on how to become functional units. we share the good and the bad. we understand we are more than a disorder. we are a community!

but on the other hand, i have met a lot of sysmeds who (as the name implies) think our existence is purely medical, reduce us down to our symptoms, and treat us like broken fragments instead of like actual living breathing people.

that isnt getting over your disorder, or learning to cope with it. thats forming an identity around your pain. and ive tried that and i nearly died from it, and im gonna tell you this: it doesnt fucking fix you. it doesnt make your symptoms better, it doesnt make you happy, it doesnt make you functional. it only makes you sad and bitter and suicidal. if you genuinely believe youre broken, then you are. and you will stay broken until you heal, which you cant do if youre surrounded by other miserable broken people.

respectability politics 101: society thinks youre broken for being plural. if you agree with them, there is no way to challenge the stigma of your disorder. you wont improve, or find people who accept you. they have no reason to-- after all, youre a freak, right? and youll stay the same. sad, bitter, broken.