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How I look at the host say rude (but true) statements about me half-heartedly (as to not "hurt my feelings", their words, not mine) while I'm actively co-fronting and yet they still won't let me interject to give my opinion:

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I got tired of fronting bc I've been doing tons of physical labor and so another alter fronted to cook and eat (even though it doesn't like to eat all that much) and now I get to enjoy being full and satiated. Even within the chaos sometimes us freaks still gotta take care of each other

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When it's hot as fuck outside, AC barely working, the sun is too bright, it's loud everywhere we go, just got done with an mind-destroying shift at work, still rapid switching, AND alters still won't quiet down this is how it feels

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Waking up and for some reason it sounds like everyone is talking at the same time and we have an eight hour fucking shift today 😐 Can we all take turns it's not that serious

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The main host was fronting this time and still didn't say anything 😭 We will never be free from this hell

Being a system in therapy is the alter dealing with current events has fronted the past three weeks but won't tell the therapist they aren't the host, and during the week in-between the host keeps going "we're gonna tell the therapist who's fronting right" and then it never happens

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If you are a little or have littles I think you're cool no matter what. If you are a little with a more "adult" role you are still cool. If you are a little who acts their age you are still cool. It's ok to have littles or yourself be a little. Of course be safe but you are allowed to be yourself 🤍

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Being a system in therapy is the alter dealing with current events has fronted the past three weeks but won't tell the therapist they aren't the host, and during the week in-between the host keeps going "we're gonna tell the therapist who's fronting right" and then it never happens

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It is impossible to describe the feeling that occurs when you realize a new front trigger has cemented and it's an absolutely terrible thing to have happened. Immediately you know it will ruin relationships and reputations and schedules and fucking everything. That you'll be more dysfunctional for a while before you get used to it because there's no way to change it.

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Oh boy oh boy I love waking up and immediately noticing that the amnesia around a certain stressful event is worse! Surely this doesn't mean anything and I can go about my day as usual. /sarcasm

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It's okay if your DID isn't having friends in your head. Everyone saying achieving that is easy or you're at fault for not being there is wrong. Even some people far in recovery don't see their parts as their friends, and that's okay. Not everyone can be there, not everyone can find happiness in their disorder, not everyone can be appreciative of it, and not everyone can feel better using self love alone

You are not at fault for your struggles, not everything is easy to fix, you are not being too negative. You're just trying to get by after everything you went though, and you don't have to be positive about it. Never let someone tell you otherwise

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I have no proof for this but maybe the reason a lot of systems have introjects from more recent/popular media is because when the disorder was getting brutally misunderstood on Tiktok and other social medias was around 2020-2021 which was also when kin culture was becoming more "normal" or mainstream (I'm aware it existed in full force before, just that a lot of new people were getting into it), and was also during a time that people were spending a lot of time indoors and engaging in media during a globally isolating and stressful time and pwDID found it easier (not by choice but by their brain's function) to take traits from fictional characters that made them feel less alone.

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Something something the reason I have extremely complicated thoughts on the innies and outies in Severance being different people or parts of people is because I have experienced the same debate within myself, and although I fundamentally understand that the severance procedure is different from actual structural dissociation, it's too close for comfort that I cannot be sure what to think. Or something.

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One of the strangest things about dissociation is the feeling of "I don't know who I am." Because logically, I can (usually) understand or remember the body I'm in, its name and its traits. But fundamentally I can't figure out who I am, that is, which alter I am. Functionally, I can pretend to be the body for a while. It's just hard to explain that I know who I'm "supposed" to present as, but I'm so drowned by the sureness that I'm not just the body or host, while at the same time not actually knowing myself, that I'm just stuck in between knowledge and the lack of it.

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Yeah sometimes fragments are fragments and exist for a hyper-specific purpose. Sometimes they have names and sometimes they have forms. Sometimes they front rarely or not at all and who am I to say they don't still exist within me? Yeah sometimes that means I don't know if they're dormant or just not around. Yeah sometimes fragments sort of "grow" as alters, adopting traits they need to become a more functional part. I can't tell you how many fragments I have. How would you expect me to differentiate and categorize "parts" and "fragments"? Are fragments any different from parts? If you drop a glass and it breaks, which broken pieces are pieces and which ones are shards and which ones are slivers and which ones are chips and which ones are anything else?

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Spoilers for season one of Severance ahead, and trigger warning for dissociation, derealization, and depersonalization, both within the context of the show and outside of it.

Something that's really stuck with me from season one of Severance is when Petey is reintegrated and has an extremely difficult time functioning. Although I don't think it's the primary point of those scenes, it does feel at times eerily similar to my experience with a complex dissociative disorder.

Petey not knowing who he's talking to or where he is, even though he can at times physically see where he is (or isn't) was very difficult to watch. The flashes between work and home is what it sometimes feels like to realize what another alter has done, or remember something I did, or be so dissociated I'm not sure of what's actually around me. Memories that should realistically exist separately from one another don't. The people around him aren't who he expects, and he's flashing back to a place he's been but he doesn't remember being until he gets reintegrated. He sort of understands why it's happening, but his mind still doesn't align with his reality. When he gets to the convenience store and sort of rambles about needing tokens to eat, I found myself completely broken. The clerk didn't notice right away, the EMTs didn't understand, and even Mark just stood in shock and then drove away.

To me, Petey's health decline and eventual death were some of the saddest scenes in Severance, because they dug into an experience that I've never seen portrayed before, despite those scenes being for the sake of showing what reintegration does and not explicitly for portraying a complex dissociative disorder. It was extremely disheartening to see the way Mark treated him. While I definitely don't blame Mark for reacting the way he did, it made me think how people treat real people the same way, that sort of look you get when you're acting just beyond the norm of mental health issues, a step beyond abnormal to the point that people don't trust you at all.

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‘Actually I just made up the whole system thing’ -> ‘oh wait I’m another person now’ is not an experience I enjoy, but nonetheless is one that happens often

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I completely forgot to mention "sourcecalls" too. Yikes. You're completely right, introjects are just fellow alters. And I guess it's fine to relate over introject sources, but it doesn't matter where they're from, because they aren't their source.

I can definitely relate on your latter point. I think it's because the idea of not being able to control who you are scares people, both those within the disorder and maybe some without. While some people have shared their experiences with intentional/consensual switches, they don't seem to be common for everyone, and they require a lot of specific factors. Most people, it seems, are going to experience switches completely out of their control.

I've been thinking a lot about 2020 internet (especially tiktok) system "community" and kinda how fucked up it left a lot of people with CDDs, especially those with introjects. I'm not gonna fakeclaim cause I don't fucking care, so please don't make it about that. Whether or not these (mostly children) had CDDs is really none of my business. There was just so much misinformation that was so easy to internalize and then be confused about being "wrong" about.

Thoughts below cause this is long as hell.

Introjects from fiction were a huge target because people on the outside thought it was cool to probe at their "favorite fictional character". And then these people who, whether or not they had CDDs, just fed into it and probably made it worse for themselves thinking they had to be exactly like their source to be a "real" introject. There was so much focus on source memories and acting canon that people didn't learn why introjects exist within the disorder.

Then there were all these labels that I don't really care where they initially came from, but names for whatever different "kinds" of fictives someone had, like what kind of source they had beyond a book or show. In my perception, it just turned into a competition a lot of the time. Who can have the most outlandish source? Who can have the most sources? Who is the most problematic from their source? Who has the most "traumatic" source memories?

There was also the notion that systems could/should always control who fronted and/or know who fronted, and it really messed up the perception of CDDs. I feel like now more than ever, people outside of a system are convinced that a system can get someone specific to front, and people with CDDs feel like they should know all the time, when that isn't the case. Yeah, most alters have specific roles and triggers. Does that mean they'll always front when you'd expect them to? No. It's a complex disorder.

It turned into a game for a lot of people, systems and non-systems alike. It turned into something fun. DID/OSDD and adjacent disorders are not fun. They can be funny, for some people sometimes, but in the end they are disorders. You wouldn't tell someone with Schizophrenia how cool it is that they experience hallucinations, so why do you tell systems how cool it is that they "have people in their head"? Because the perception of DID has been so utterly ruined so that people believe it is just alters. They forget or never learned about the fact that people's identity is fractured in such a way not because it's cool, but because of repeated, inescapable trauma.

Trying to teach people now that CDDs mean you are parts of a whole is such an uphill battle. Trying to convince people that they're not always or usually going to know what their inner world looks like, or be able to go there and remember things from it (since altogether the concept of an inner world is VERY different in reality from what it's portrayed as online) feels impossible. Trying to teach people that different systems have different amnesia barriers and different experiences with switching, and that it a lot of the time isn't "the body is empty and it takes twenty minutes for someone new to switch in" is so difficult, despite non-systems being so invasively curious about switching all the time. Trying to determine how to tell someone you have DID without being immediately associated with all of this misinformation also feels impossible.

The more I think about CDDs how they actually are, the more actually makes sense. All this just blatantly wrong or misconstrued information left a lot of systems thinking they were supposed to have everything about their system figured out, including their inner world and alter roles, and that they had to act/present a specific way to actually be a system. The more I internalize my experiences, the more I realize I'm just like a lot of other pwDID, because I didn't use social media as a primary source of information for a medical disorder.

There is no real closing thought or conclusion to this. No real advice I have. Don't rely on social media for information, don't convince yourself you need to be like anyone else to "actually" have DID.