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harmonyfriendsNOTE: Originally posted March 15, 2023.
Because of the strictness of the diagnostic criteria for DID, whether or not one has amnesia is a common sticking point in the disordered plural community. The problem with that is that amnesia, by its nature, is really good at obscuring itself.
Typically amnesia is discussed first in terms of blackouts and time loss — and that's because they're more or less the most severe symptoms of people with DID — but there's so many ways your brain can fuck with your memories. We spent a while thinking we didn't experience amnesia because we can typically "remember" experiences of our alters. But if you simply know what happened without actually being able to feel what the experience felt like… is that really remembering?
We used to not really think about it at all, of course, and even after realizing we were plural, our answer to that question for a while was "no, of course we don't have any amnesia". But time and time again throughout our life, we would get stuck, unable to make personal progress in our life or work on shit we needed to work on, because one day we'd be having some sort of epiphany or clarification or feeling of direction in our life, and the next day we would be like "what was I smoking? I'm so fucking stupid" or something like that, not realizing that our consciousness had shifted into someone else with different priorities and different influences.
That we can remember what the sentiments of yesterday were… that completely obscured the fact that we often can't remember how they felt and why we felt them. Even in our post-discovery era, this continues to manifest a lot in the form of some random piece of us suddenly going "what the fuck? I'm not plural. What kind of insane bullshit have I convinced myself of?" and basically having an anxiety attack out of the blue.
Two straight years of self-discovery, trials and tribulations, coming to new understandings and finally making mental health breakthroughs decades in the making, and parts of us still can't help but dismiss it all as having been meaningless?
That's amnesia, baby.
(And recognizing it as such helps keep us on track a lot. 😊)
—👻Fate
(EDIT: For more on subtle presentations of amnesia, check out this tweet — it was a big influence on us figuring this out.)
