thearrowteam:

Alter Diversity

When I joined the DID community I thought that people would judge me because my system’s not “diverse enough” or call us fake cause we’re all somewhat alike. And I’m not talking about just “alters of color” and that whole discourse. I’m talking about how most of us have brown or blonde hair and brown eyes with nerdy looking glasses. I’m talking about most of us vaguely have the same fashion sense and hair style and pattern of speech. I’m talking about how most of us listen to the same music, like the same characters, have the same favorite colors.

I thought we weren’t different enough.

The first time I showed someone a picture of all of us they made a comment of lots of brown eyes, blonde hair and glasses. It made me feel weird then. Because I was already self conscious that we were faking because I we were so similar.

But I realized something. The body has dirty blonde hair, brown eyes, and nerdy black thick framed glasses.

It makes sense that most of us take form of that with slight variations. Because all together we make up this boy, I’m going to call him Arrow for convenience sake. Together we make up Arrow.

The differences that we do have in appearance all come from different aspects of our life (this is of course excluding introjects who got their appearance from source). We all need glasses to see so why wouldn’t we have glasses in the innerworld? Those of us with red hair split off more recently because the host died his hair red (with the exception of one alter who has red hair because the host used to be fascinated by red hair). We have blue haired alters because once Arrow died his hair blue. Our alters appearances are a relfection of our reality.

We don’t need to be diverse. We are one boy. Together we are Arrow. We don’t need alters who are diverse. We need alters that reflect our reality, because they are the ones who are best equip for it. After all that’s what alters are. Alters are a reflection of your reality that work together to cope with stress and trauma.

Your system doesn’t have to be diverse. Your system just has to be you.

PS. I’m not saying that having alters that look very different from the body isn’t valid. What your system had to split is what your system had to split to survive. It’s different for every system. This is about our system and why our system is the way it is.

- The Arrow Team