#general malarkey
Lessons Learned from a Year Listening to the Fictional Octopus in My Head
I think this article is relevant to a lot of the very stupid, wanky debate that I keep seeing going around my dash about TEENS SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH DID. It is a funny quirky article written by a literary fiction author about how one of her characters got into her head during the pandemic and started dispensing Wry Life Advice, disappearing as soon as the stressful situation ended.
there’s this bit that I think@pervocracy wrote, about how if your culture only had two words for ‘fear’, and one of them was “mild nervousness about passing a test” and the other was “the bone-chilling horror of being chased by zombies in a graveyard”, that keeps you from talking about a whole range of human experiences. if you have crippling social anxiety, or you have an uncommon phobia, or anykind of fear that isn’t 'mild nerves’ or 'IMPENDING PHYSICAL DOOM’? you’re stuck choosing between two words that do not suit your experience to describe what’s going on.
I think “the experience of having an entity in your head that is Not You” is actually remarkablycommon-waymore than 1%- especially among writers/artists/actors/fandom folks, and especially among anyone who’s going through a severe physical or mental stress. an entity like this can exist in varying degrees of independence-from-you and interest-in-the-outside-world. Sometimes this entity is a comforting presence, other times it’s a malevolent one. some disappear as quickly as they appear, and others stick with you for your whole life.
A lot of historical cultures had a framework to explain this kind of thing. “This is your daemon.” “This is your guardian angel.” “You’re hearing spirits; you’re possessed.” Mainstream Western culture rejected these explanations, and in some cases, rightfully fucking so. But we don’t really have a framework to replacethem.
So if you areexperiencing this phenomenon, because of how our society has decided to handle it, you really only have two words for it- “imaginary friend”, or “DID alter”. in the vast majority of cases neither of these words are appropriate, in the same way that severe social anxiety isn’t Test Jitters or IMMINENT FEAR OF YOUR LIFE.*
there is a widerange of human experiences here being collapsed into 2 points. but people who are having that experience are going to need the words to describe it. if you’re a published litfic author and the experience is over, you can write an article about it and just come off as a Little Quirky. if you’re a teenager on TikTok, the experience is ongoing, and the only word you’re being offered is DID? you’re gonna take that word.
we need more words for this range of experiences. we need more people to be able to talk about this range of experiences- including DID, which is a very differentexperience from Brain Octopus up there- without getting tarred as Bad Psycho Crazy. we need to stop arguing whether or not you can onlyhave this state of being from Severe Enough Trauma; we need to be able to accept it as a natural part of how humans are without judgement or shame.
*(Notsaying that having alters is the same thing as ZOMBIES IN A GRAVEYARD; it’s the Wide Range Of Intensity And Experiences that I’m comparing.)
I get really mad when people yell at me because they think I’m implying… the thing I explicitly said.
why yes, random angry discourser, I dothink that it’s possible to have a brain that works differently from other people’s brains in a way that is healthy, and the words that we use as a society to describe that are artificially limited.
please read my post beyond looking for angry-making buzzwords, and try again.
