harmonyfriends | on bridging the gap between worlds

NOTE: Originally posted March 13, 2023.

An idea that's been massively influential recently on how we live our life as a plural system is that, more than anything, DID/OSDD is a disorder of living in parallel realities. This incredible Twitter thread by @documense puts it perfectly, better than I can, so I'll just quote it directly.

(CW for quoted material below the cut: parental emotional and medical abuse)

osdd and did are disorders of reality to survive - in order to survive at school you live in the reality in which you are not abused at home. in order to survive your abuser, you live in the reality where they are right. in order to survive, certain things can't be true.

any abuse survivor will tell you that they've learned that 'truth' is subjective and is as real as the person who believes it needs it to be. your reality as a trauma survivor will sometimes disappear - but it's your central nervous system that still remembers.

at 14, our mother tells us to not waste the doctors time by bringing up our 'mental health' issues, and to get in and out. our reality splits into 'i am lying and trying to get attention' and 'i need to tell them everything so adult knows something is wrong.'

she was selling our medication, by the way. we don't find this out until years later but those two truths continue on long past then. both truths struggle to exist at the same time. both truths are founded in survival.

part of me lives in the reality where nothing is wrong. anything I say that counters this then must be a lie, because in that reality, it's not true.

If you're taking me in good enough faith to read a post about this stuff, there's a good chance you're aware that DID/OSDD (and CPTSD, and honestly most mental health conditions to at least some degree) are… "controversial" conditions, ones where it's common for people to be accused of presenting the disorder facticiously.

For better or worse, there is a part of this system that has internalized all that noise, and lives in a reality where we're making this all up and faking this for attention… and as we transition into living more and more openly as a dissociative plural system, it is becoming more isolated and miserable. That is an alternate reality borne out of necessity for survival through many traumatizing situations, so it's not as simple as just telling the part of my mind that lives there to join us in "the real world" — that is its "real world", as difficult as that is for me to wrap my head around.

Originally, I thought it could be that simple, so I kept trying to coax it to do so, and each time I thought it worked, that I'd saved it… but really I just would end up having pulled out some small part of that (in the form of a new alter; there are four of them in the "starter pack" in our readme alone, but there's a whole gaggle of them, many of which don't have their own names). The rest of what lives there on the other side of that barrier, meanwhile, continues to exist, and live, and bear hate, sorrow and loneliness that continue to fester. Each time I think I've managed to bring it into "the real world", it feels a little more left behind, and its resentment grows that little bit heavier.

I want to help it so much. It's me, and I love me; as Melody, loving me is my job and my passion. But that particular me lives in a world where this is all a bunch of attention-seeking bullshit, where I'm just made up, not real, and do not exist. How can something be helped by something that doesn't exist? How can I give it my love when the rules of its world are that my love can never be true?

I love you. All I know how to say is that I love you, and that I'm not going to give up on you. Please hold on. I'm working on it.

—🎀Melody