Looking back through old system notebooks-

Handwriting

WTF our handwritings were so different?!?! It’s like in integrating we’ve evened things out mostly to be all equidistant from an average point but apparently as of this time two years ago we had a WILDLY vast array of handwritings. I literally saw one and went “What the hell Angela? No one would believe that was our writing if you passed that in to a professor.” Luckily she did NOT at any point attempt to pass anything in that she’d written out herself.

Also some of the littles had handwriting that looked straight up like an elementary school kid’s. I know for a fact that Jessi’s no longer looks like that when she is small. I have no idea about Julian’s handwriting when he is small— his hand writing when he’s a teenager is pretty neat and at body age or higher (which almost never happens) it’s freaking calligraphy level.

Now we still have our differences but it’s not like “physically how the hell did this all come from the same hand though” anymore.

-Octavian (15)

P.S. omg Lestat’s handwriting looked like legit fucking CALLIGRAPHY. Can I have it? Like I almost never use cursive, but if I did, can I dig that out of my brain somewhere and claim dibs?? Because it looks freaking AWESOME.

I am reading back through our blog to see changes in our functioning (like the not listed as consciously problematic or good in the system journal, just…. on average) over time as we have healed and Omfg I just…..

So many of these posts (from when our system had over 200 parts) are signed by or tagged as around five people at once?!?! Not even from the same couple of micro-subsystems!! And like all the main fronters fronted almost every day. We often switched after a number (a single digit number!) of minutes. And I don’t mean…. a bunch of people wandering near the front and negotiating who is going to take a turn and then all but one or two wander back off again and those one or two properly switch into the front. I mean SWITCH. Like not on purpose. And I don’t mean five people blurring and nobody being able to take front properly. I mean Five People Freaking Co-Conscious At Once. As a common occurrence. How- just- How were we OKAY with that?!? Sure, we didn’t remember any better (beyond “wow life didn’t used to be THIS confusing when the system was like 100 parts or less”) but also….. Okay no, no. The REAL thing that has me flabbergasted is that like….. We FUNCTIONED?! Somehow?!?! We went to work everyday like that. We went to school like that. We got shit done like that and appeared fine to most people. I don’t think we had ANY idea How the Fuck Impressive we were. Like at all. We were just like “whelp guess I have no choice”, but we did. We did have a choice. We could have given up - and I don’t even mean die. I mean we could have just resigned ourselves to the fate of never having a normal life and given in to the pressures from certain parts of the community to obsess over our disorder or to build our life around being sick. But we did not. We built our life around getting better. And we are so many miles away from that state of being that was the hell we lived in when we first started this blog. I just am so stunned to look back and see how far we’ve come. I am proud of us.

-Octavian (15) co-Julian (14)

Important Post About Inner Worlds

by Octavian & Belle

Hey guys, it’s ya boy, here to write another educational post that will probably piss off all the drama focused people in the DID community (both real systems and fake)! But I’ve been reflecting on this and realized just how unwell a lot of people I have known on here were about the topic and because of it so….. here it is.

The inner world is not like the headspace- it’s not a place you can GO. There is no being conscious within it. It’s a metaphor. A narrative meant to help you contextualize your individual experiences within the context of a group existence so that you can make some sense of the ways in which what you go through affects you and the ways in which what each of you do independently affects the rest of the system. It basically doesn’t exist for you unless you’re fronting. When you stop fronting you don’t go “into” your inner world. You go into your headspace and usually if you’re not partially co-conscious you just “go to sleep”. The inner world is a story. Not a mental location. Not in the way people talk about it on here so often. Yeah you can sometimes see events from your inner world while you’re fronting happening semi simultaneously- that’s because at that moment your brain needs to give you a way to use that metaphor to understand something. It doesn’t happen just the fuck because, at random. And you shouldn’t be experiencing it as just as real as, or in a way that distracts from, your external life.

It’s incredibly helpful to unravel the meaning of the narrative and extremely nuanced details can communicate more information than you might guess. BUT you should not be obsessing over it, trying to immerse yourself in it, or viewing it as some bizarre sort of alternate universe where your system gets to be separate people. That’s called maladaptive daydreaming, and not only can it be a maladaptive coping mechanism people use to enable their desire to detach from their life….. it can actually seriously impede your ability to even recognize on a real emotional level that you’re all parts of one whole mind.

So, please, when you see people here on tumblr or elsewhere online obsessing over their inner world and being super vivid about it in a way that isn’t focused on trying to untangle the meaning behind the narrative….. please don’t imitate them. Don’t think your legitimacy as a system or your awareness of your own mind depends on being like those people. They are the ones who aren’t dealing with it in a healthy way - whether they realize it yet or not (or would even be willing to accept it if you told them). Take care of yourselves. Stay grounded in your healing process. Always work toward increased sense of interconnectedness. Be safe.

Question for Followers

by Octavian (18) co-John

So I don’t know why this didn’t occur to us before, but I feel like it might be very productive to ask if there is anything you guys would be especially interested to see covered in upcoming posts— any topics of information you’re curious about but have not had much luck finding discussion of in the wider community. This can be just academic information that appears in some of those really costly books you’d love to have but can’t afford at the moment (for example Coping With Trauma Related Dissociation, a really extensive combination textbook/workbook for people coming to terms with a diagnosis of DID or OSDD-1 by Suzette Boone, Kathy Steele, and Onno Van der Hart). Or it could be experience-based insight on topics related to recovery and healing from trauma and fragmentation that we, as someone at the end stage of treatment for DID, can provide in a verified way that is not usually on offer in the online community.

We have so much we feel like we’ve got a duty to share the wealth of information for, but it’s really difficult to narrow it down because it’s been collected over, at this point, nearly two DECADES of research, study, and introspection. So whenever we sit down to write something up to share with you all, we have the tendency to almost start planning a whole damn text book. Which will be super useful when we have the time and opportunity to literally author one, but in the meantime causes a sort of indecision overload when it comes to making educational posts. Basically we end up only writing one if it’s come up a lot lately among our circle of friends, or if we’ve been contemplating the way our thoughts or awareness of it have evolved over the years for our own sake.

While that strategy is fine for us, in terms of our own intellectual expression, we’d like to really be serving the needs of the community as much as we can— that’s what we really made this blog for after all. So if there is anything that you guys are curious about or are in need of insight on from somebody who’s a step ahead of you in the recovery process - or HECK, even just a secondary perspective from somebody you’re at a similar point in recovery to….- we’d like to invite you to either reblog this with your questions/topic requests, or send us asks listing them, whichever one is more comfortable for you. We’re aware some people can’t be open about having DID/OSDD-1 on their blogs, so the reblog option may not be available to you. But we still want to give everyone who might read this blog regularly the same opportunity to contribute to the requests for content. (If you reblog, feel free to repeat topics others have already mentioned, so that we can get a sense of whether it’s something there’s a really wide interest in.)

These requests can apply to DID/OSDD-1, PTSD/C-PTSD, or dissociation and recovery generally. There’s no time frame on the offer to take content requests, because it isn’t for our own sake that we’re making this offer - so whether you come up with something in a day or a week or a month, or whenever feel free to use either of the methods above to send yours in. We can’t promise that we will always write and post an article the next day after receiving a request, but we definitely would use them as a way to inform our choices on the content we do create as well as to inspire us to produce more content, and we absolutely want to contribute to meeting the needs of the community as much as we can.

DID/OSDD-1 Is NotMultiplicity

I don’t know who the fuck came up with calling it that, but it’s not multiplicity. Calling it such dramatically distorts matters and aids the anti-recovery agenda. It creates the impression that anyone who is a system [not HAS, nobody “HAS {implication: person doing having is not same as persons being had} a system”] has been multiplied from the normal amount a human brain can contain. That is a lie. It’s just as much a lie as endogenics believing THEY can be “multiplied” by spirits from imaginary universes jumping into their heads. But it has the ability to hurt the people who believe it instead of just everyone around them, as the endos’ ‘belief’ [which they don’t really believe but want you to think they do so that you cannot question their sanity without questioning your own].

Plurality is still fucking wrong too, though it is wrong in differently emphasized ways. First problem? Nobody refers to fractions as having been made plural. Where multiplicity implies multiplication from an original whole to many wholes, plurality implies to the average human mind two things. 1. That, again,there are multiple whole numbers involved. 2. This plurality existed from the beginning [vs. having multiplied from some original starting point]. See problems with word above, plus addition of implication that it could be naturally occurring and minus the absolute implication that it is a deviation from the original blueprint of one whole human.

There is only one number/calculatory term that has ever been used for DID/OSDD-1 that doesn’t obscure the nature of the disorder(s). That is fragmentation.You are not plural [multiple complete people in one body, possibly naturally occurring]. You are not multiple [multiple complete people in one body, somehow having made more human souls from the raw material found in originally only one].You are [multiple fractional people— still only people despite being less than a person because ‘person’ is still what their made of — having been prevented from ever assembling and then being thus susceptible to being further] FRAGMENTED.

THAT —Not just the implication from the second word that it was part of the set of PDs— is why the name of the disorder was changed from Multiple Personality Disorder. Once it was identified that this was NOT a personality disorder it became clear that there were not multiple anythings involved. If that weren’t the case, then it would have been called Multiple Identity Disorder. It’s not. Dissociate means to disconnect from. Dissociative Identity Disorder means The Disorder of Being Cut Off From Yourself. The disorder of having been cut apart.

What User Names Can Tell You About A Person’s State of Acceptance of DID/OSDD-1:

• Anybody who uses Plurality in their user name is probably endo [fake, and not even trying to hide it] or at least ‘pretendo’ [fake, either not trying to hide it or trying to say they have DID/OSDD-1], or has been strongly influenced by them. These people tend otherwise be in denial of the fact there was or ought ever be one person to have one body.
• Anybody who uses Multiplicity in their user name does not accept that their system makes one person and they are parts of the same psyche. This type of person is either somebody has been taken in by the massive anti-integration, anti-recovery campaign of propaganda….. or directly one of the people perpetrating it.
• Anybody who uses Fragmentation in their name probably: 1. Accepts that they are parts of one person that has been fractured. 2. Knows a bit about DID/OSDD-1 that did not come from the internet. 3. Actively supports recovery.

In honor of that, and in light of the fact the term system, which is the medically correct term and should be clearly only referring to people with DID/OSDD-1, has been stolen, hijacked, and then co-opted by people who would not know what being a dissociative Identity was like if you hit them in the face with all your memories….. We will be taking a stand against these trends and changing our blog URL from cosmos-system to fragmented-cosmos. I also am starting a tag for all of those who would like to be able to read about DID/OSDD-1 things without having to sift through a bunch of people denying or having been prevented from learning what the disorder actually is. This is #actuallyfragmented. Because we actuallyarefragmented. Have a nice day.

-Storm