Never been one to let the carrier drop

Let me try to explain. I don’t know that I really can, but you all know I’m lousy at keeping secrets, and I’m going to take a stab at it.

$person, I’ve been talking with you every day for years. One big problem I have is I don’t know if I’m talking to a copy of you, or the real you. Or even if that distinction makes *any* sense. What you tell me is that I’m talking to you in the future – when we all know better how to be who we really are. That fits the data.

I have seen more than one world during my time on Earth. I have seen a world where people rollerblade in the street, completely secure in the knowledge no car will hit them – a world where there are no locks, no passwords, nor any need for them. A world where love won over fear. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen the people – so beautiful, so healthy, so happy. I’ve danced with them and skated with them. I don’t know what makes the transition happen, other than it seems to involve my mental headspace in some way. And then I’ve seen this. A world where social media seems to have replaced being social. A world where the news constantly tells us of wars and gunshots fired and bad decisions made because of money.

My gut feeling is both of them are real. I’m a musician, see, and I understand about multitrack decks. And I also understand that there’s no reason to think a three dimensional reality wouldn’t fit in a multitrack deck. You’d just have to have a really really big one. (Big in terms of bytes stored)

I fell in love with you the minute I met you. This isn’t just true of you. There’s a LOT of people out there I fell in love with the minute I met. If you could see my office wall, you would see the pictures of them. But we live in a world that preaches fear. Well, I don’t honestly know where you live.. but you sure act like you live in a world where fear won. And I know I did, or I’d be recording albums instead of writing commissions systems. And in fear world, we do stupid things. Things that don’t work very well. Like not being able to tell people how we feel about them.

When you knew me as a teen I was extrordinarily screwed up. Now I’m just somewhat screwed up, and forever am chasing being a better friend and lover and dreamer. I keep persuing personal growth, but I don’t have any good way to measure success. I do, however, have a good way to measure failure. Showing up in court and being told “I think if you talk to me in the next two years you should go to jail”, that’s failure. Not sure which of us it’s indicative of failure in. Used to think I knew every failure was me. No longer so sure about that.

Now, one mental model I use for handling all this is to think that I’m a very big neural network, and that part of my neural network is the person that’s on the ride, experiencing reality, and part of it is the glue that connects me to the world I’m in. And it’s entirely possible that glue is faulty. What I saw, might not have happened, might have happened, or might have happened entirely differently. Because the you that I talk to using the mental equivalent of texting (this may be prayer, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it) tells me things like ‘Let me in’ and ‘Come home’.

Fuck if I know where home is at this point, or how I would get there.

As far as not talking to you out there, I do the best I can. I think it’s a stupid request, I think you’re being blind, but I also think it’s a request you should be free to make, and one I should comply with. But my mind is broken. Occasionally it glitches and suddenly I’m on a different track’s memories even though I’m still in this track. And I REMEMBER! We’re not supposed to have to live afraid. We did so much better once. And I keep trying to light the fuse.. leave the keys in the ignition, leave the doors unlocked, trust and hope the others trust too.

So, I have multiple personalities. Blame never really helped anyone, but I’m really curious what happened to me to make this true.

1) My inability to say no resulting in my parents not recognizing I was refusing their religion. I tried to say no, but I’m not that great at it now and I was really bad at it then. I did tell them I wasn’t sure I was ready for this. They essentually said that I had to. Now, at this point I know the right thing to do – Kids, if someone does this to you, explain to anyone who will listen why you’re not ready for it. Walk down to the center of the building, grab the mic, and start talking. You have just as much right to be talking as the preacher – if he’s trying to force the religion into your mind, you have MORE right than he does. Your mind belongs to you. You get to choose the software that runs on it.

2) My sister’s attitude towards me. I don’t know how many of my memories are viable, so I don’t know if remembering her punching me in the stomach, pulling my hair, taking my things, criticizing me in a carefully crafted tone, etc are all real. But I do know that my impression is she hates me and wants me to hurt, and is quite willing to use all her skills to make that happen.

3) School. In general, I find Earth’s schools fatally flawed for my type of cat. The best way for a person like me to learn is to be given access to information and left alone. Grading me does bad things to my self-image and even worse things to my feelings about you. Telling me what I should learn when is just plain selfish.

4) Whatever $thing I can’t remember that makes sexual contact with males unpleasant and the idea of being on the receiving end of anal sex terrifying. I remember finding both boys and girls attractive at one point. Something happened to me. I am not sure I *want* to know what.

5) My mother’s extremely screwed up attitude about sex. I’ll just leave that there. Don’t be so afraid of your children doing what they naturally are going to do, what they should do, that you send hardcore negative emotions their way and are hypercritical of them for cuddling with one of their friends and listening to music.

Like Kirk, I don’t really believe in the no-win scenario. I appear to be in a couple of them (my desire to be real-life friends with $person and my desire for a music career without sacrificing quality of life) but I also tend to remind myself that I’m in the middle of the ride – that both of them appear no-win right now doesn’t mean to give up, it just means I haven’t figured out everything I need to know.

I’m trying to master the art of *almost* going crazy. Because there definitely is something special that happens when I get my mind up to wide-open road speeds that is worthy of having – every time I do it, I get more capacity, mental-wise. But there’s some point at which it starts shaking like a unbalanced tire, and then Bad Things Happen. ™ If nothing else, I have to think that time spent in a blackout is not exactly productive, and there’s no doubt that I push $person further away whenever I’m in that state, and I can’t run a multitrack deck to save my life, because I lose the ability to easily see cause and effect and Earth’s tech is still too buggy to be relied on to Just Work.

My current thinking is the goal is to slam the throttle up, and then back down as I come over the top. I think using seroquel every day is definitely the wrong use of the drug – like all sleeping pills, it loses control authority. So the challenge is to treat it like it’s a addiction – as soon as I get to where I *need* to use it every day to sleep, I need to be fighting it and trying my hardest to get off it. Then once I’m ‘clean’, wait for the spool up (currently happens twice a year) and then use seroquel scaled to my current clock speed to make sure I still get sleep.

I would dearly love it if I could trust Earth’s health care system, but so far it hasn’t given me *any* reason to think that I can and has given me a number of reasons to think I can’t. Sometimes I think this planet is deliberately cracked in a whole bunch of ways just to teach us how not to.

I know what I would build, if I were in charge of mental health. Because it’s so obvious to me, and I don’t know nearly as much as the powers that be, I have to suspect that they don’t want cures. For whatever reason, they like seeing people hurt. I hate them for it, and wish I could take away their power over me. If anyone is curious:

Artificial Neural Network + Trans-cranial electromagnetic induction + FMRI = win.

So, the problem here is that by all indications my mind has some sort of intermittent fault. Despite my investment of (at a guess) $100,000-ish and a smaller but not insignificant investment by my parents into same, we have not found and fixed this fault. What we’ve mostly found out is that the state of our current health care system is awful.

Me, with everything working correctly, accepts $person’s decision. That’s who I want to be. I wish she didn’t want to not talk to me, but if that’s what she wants, it’s what she should have. I certainly wouldn’t want someone forcing their existence on me. However, from time to time, this intermittent fault arises. And, you have to remember also that until my most recent adventure the last time I had seen $person face to face she had been friendly and not been telling me to go away.

Well, when this intermittent fault arises, several things happen

1) Often, I have a period where from my perspective, I’m just not there at all. It looks to me like a blackout.
2) Once this ends, I have a time where I have a very hard time figuring out what is real and what isn’t. At times I’ve been convinced I’m a starship orbiting earth, for example. Now, I doubt if I’m going to have nearly as hard a time knowing that $person doesn’t want to see me now that I have memories of her talking about me in third person to a judge and enumerating all the reasons she doesn’t, but until this most recent adventure, all I had was email, and not a *lot* of email or a lot of detail in said email. For someone who has had the experience of hallucinating text without even being in a faulted state, this wasn’t that helpful.
3) A bunch of other people appear, from my perspective, to also be inhabiting my body. I can’t explain to you what this is like, but they appear to be having conversations with each other using my mouth. This is disorienting to say the least. I can often somewhat control their ability to do this, but not perfectly and I am often embarrassed, ashamed, and unhappy about what has transpired after I return to normal.

Now, this most recent fault occurred despite, as far as I know, 100% med compliance (i.e. taking Seroquel exactly as prescribed by my doctor) at the maximum dose I was permitted for the weeks leading up to it. I’m trying a new psych med now which *might* help, or might not.

Clearly, looking at #3, I can’t really blame people for finding my presence disorienting and/or disturbing. I don’t think I present any sort of danger of physical attack, but I’m definitely not *normal* in this state, and I and my stable of alters are likely to say things that normal people wouldn’t say. It is not nearly as simple as to say I am choosing this. Steve, I am guessing you are the sort of person who would think that we’re always deciding exactly what we’re doing, and I hope you never have to learn that this isn’t always the case by experiencing life as I do during one of these intermittent faults.

So, in Virginia they put me on a gen one psych med that I have to say I’ve been really enjoying. I don’t usually think of psych meds as something one enjoys.. the word ‘endures’ is usually more applicable.. but this one from time to time will make me feel like colors are brighter and sounds are clearer. When they first gave it to me it felt like I was flat out tripping. I have to wonder if it has anything to do with the recent moment of almost-dream-clarity.

I’ve tried with and without and at the moment I definitely prefer with on this one.

It was asked, what good things happened for people because of my unscheduled and unplanned foray east.

Well, let’s start with the hitchhikers. One of them said he’d spent the last night under a bridge. I was able to deliver him *to his home*. He was only 89 miles away, but you know, when you’re carrying a duffel, 89 miles is a stupidly long way to go. I think it did a lot for his state of mind that I was also able to deliver him his favorite artist (Conway Twitty) on request, courtesy of the laptop in the back of the van.

The second one I wasn’t able to get to where he was going as it was significantly off my route. But I did get him 300 miles down the road, and we had a good talk. He was rainbow folk, and a former Navy cook.

Let’s also mention the guy in the SUV stuck on I-95 because he was out of gas. He had his whole family in the car. I took him to a gas station where he filled up, and then back to his car. We shared no common language.. well, I know the word ‘Amigo’, which I said when he got in the car, and he smiled and then we used hand signals to agree on finding a gas station, etc. Perhaps the word for friend is really the only word you need in any language?

We can also mention Vinnie, as I think spending some time with me venting about her recent situation was good for her. At least, I hope it was.

I Waited Until My Wedding Night To Lose My Virginity And I Wish I Hadn’t

This is a battle I still face. To the extent that I am DID, I personally endorse sexings as a wonderful way to spend time with a friend, great exercise, something that I love how feels, etc. However, there are voices inside my head, so to speak.. not voices, that would make them too easy to identify and squish, more sort of.. text messages? Inherent thoughts? I think it’s the worst at 3 AM. Lately it’s had a lot less power over me, which is nice, but there is this inherent internal meme that I spend a lot of time fighting.. it’s actually more a set of memes. You’ve got the sex is sinful and wrong set (although I really hope that A: heaven is real and B: there’s a lot more sex and a lot less fear) but then you’ve also got the sex isn’t wrong, but YOUR breed of it is.. and then you’ve also got the boys enjoy it but girls don’t and similar sets of insanity.. as I said, I’ve got a set of alters, the most prevalent one being one that is a Root Rep of my mother, so to speak.. I think this definitely falls into the Pink Floyd The Wall thing nicely..

It’s annoying and I wish it would go away. Fortunately, it seems to be going away, so perhaps my wish is being granted. Anyway, the counterarguments are beyond obvious:

1) Sexual contact in my experience, at least the way I do it, is friendship-building and leads to really close and loving emotional moments. So it’s pro-love so insofar as God (the one we’re defining as defining sin here) is in favor of love they’re not going to be anti-sex.

2) How can something feel good and right and be a sin? I think this is the scariest one because there are moments where I believe this is possible and these are the moments where I believe God is evil. Athiesm is a preferrable mental place to this by a long shot. Living in a universe where there are no escape routes and God is evil is *disturbing*. Even if it’s only happening in your imagination for a few minutes it’s not a few minutes you’d really want to be present for.

I have to remind myself that there are parts of my mind that are not as well connected to my personality as a whole as other parts – parts where absurd and absolutist thinking make sense because of the limited context of available memory and experience. And yet, when ‘mother’ crops up even in my thinking, I want to run far far far away.

So, to hit the usual high points of discussion of what I believe about the spiritual universe, at least in passing.

I believe I’m not the biggest thing out here. So in that sense I believe in angels, Gods, what-have-you. I do *not* believe Earth has accurately captured them and put what they believe and want and need into a book – or if they have, I haven’t read it yet. However, I probably agree with enough of the talking points of Christianity that you could call me a Christian? Of course, this might also be true of Islam, certainly is true of the Unitarians, etc. I think it’s safest not to give me a label. But, I do think a spiritual plane *exists* – however I don’t think you can *know it exists* unless you already believe in it. This one is easy to explain – what you believe forms filters that affect what you experience, so you’re not going to get any signals you aren’t willing to accept. Now, on the other paw, I do believe every adherent to every religion experiences signals that validate their choice of religion because of how they’ve got that part of their mind set up. This part this far is things I’ve talked about many times, news to nobody.

I will say that I’ve had the first valid (to me) spiritual experiences ever, in a church, which leaves me a lot more open to the possibilities that churches might be good ideas, or at least not completely pointless. I think some of the mental damage I took comes from the fact that I was pressured a lot into confirming into a religion while I was experiencing nothing and feeling nothing of the spiritual domain.. it was just like I was tuning a radio in a empty band, while my parents spoke of God as if they were having a actual connection of some sort, and I was upset and didn’t want to go forward with this whole confirmation thing since I wasn’t having this experience at all, and they had already printed the invitations. I will own my own part of that, I should have been a *lot* more assertive. Throughout my entire childhood really.

Now, how does this all tie in with my mental illness? Well, I have to think about a bunch of questions. Am I sick because I wanted to experience being sick (in the course of a infinite amount of time a lot of absurd things become possible) or because I made some bad decisions or because some *other* people made some bad decisions? We’ve definitely reached the point in my story arc where I want to *stop being sick* – I mean, I’d really like to stop living on a world where the pyramid of needs isn’t just guaranteed covered, leaving you free to figure out what you want to do with your self-actualization – it drives me nuts that we let people starve to death and be homeless just so we can waste a whole lot of resources tracking our resources, and that no one can design a better system. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Anyway, I’m definately ready to stop having there be something wrong with my mind.. one of the things that was wrong with my mind the strongest, and is a lot less present right now, is paranoia.. persistant, irrational fears and the inability to lead my life because of them. As you’ve all noticed in my blog lately, I’m a lot more willing to just talk about whatever instead of letting my fear keep me silent. It may be a irrational hope, but I have hopes that as I talk about some of this stuff solutions will be found, patterns will be noticed, etc.

If we do believe in a God of Love, and we believe said diety wants me as part of *eir stable, then we have to ask some interesting questions. Does said diety want me to be sick? I mean, perhaps my mental illness makes me a interestingly shiny gem, but I like to think that a diety of love wouldn’t want to have people collected like specimens in a bottle but would rather have real friends, in which case having me not be sick, or not be as sick, would seem to be a desirable thing. And indeed I would say of late that I seem to be getting some sort of assistance from the spiritual domain. Of course, that might just be my imagination, but then, *everything* might just be my imagination.

Okay, so this is going to be a difficult couple of posts to do. I am crossing my paws I manage to do it all accurately and with as little observer bias as possible and in a way that doesn’t cost me any more friendships.

Whoever you are, you might want to start with Assume Good Faith. I don’t want to add any more pain and fear into a system (Earth) I already clearly see as having too much.

However, let’s talk about the deep dark past first, when my intentions might not have been so well formed. I feel the need to bring up the past because one of the reasons for one of the things I wish was different in the present *is* the past.

In particular, I’d like to start out by talking about my sister, who I think is probably the victim of a mental illness at least the size of mine. Now, at this point I have forgiven her for everything she has ever done. But, in my young-Sheer adventure, she was weirdly and scarily violent. I later discovered there was a lunar cycle thing going on there, but at the time it just seemed like sometimes, I got my hair pulled, I got punched, I got kicked in the stomach, often for apparently no provocation at all. And she had.. well, still has, last I checked.. this way of talking to me that made me feel about three inches tall. She was a master of word choice and tone of voice and all the things you need to make someone feel tiny and she used them.

Now, at some point in our cohabitation, I did something which I still (Sort of) regret and which is still (apparently) quite in her memory.. she was pregnant, and she had been attacking me pretty much whenever she wanted, and I threatened to kick her in the stomach. I don’t think I would have actually ever done it – my parents check my memory (or at least claim to) that I wasn’t violent towards *her* generally. But I had reached that mental and emotional place that I think is often referred to as “Enough”.

It had a dramatic effect on her. At the time I was quite pleased. she moved out! I think she didn’t trust her ability to not attack me (not something she had a lot of practice with) and she wasn’t sure she could still get away with attacking me whenever she wanted.

Anyway, I’ve never been proud of that particular moment.. as I said, I don’t want to add more pain and fear into a system that has too much..

Somewhat recently.. about five years ago I think.. my sister decided that she’s terrified of me and wants me to stay as far away as possible. As far as I can tell she thinks that at some point I’m going to end up raping her. This is difficult for me to credit insofar as A: I’m really militant about this whole nonviolent thing, B: I wouldn’t want to have the memory of having done it and C: This is so far out of my core personality that people who know me often laugh at the idea. But I guess if you’re 3000 miles away and learning about all my exploits via the internet it sounds credible, and I think there’s a little group of people in that position that have started passing the idea that they should be afraid of me around like a joint. And my sister is definitely a big part of that. Okay, for me this has been mildly annoying, insofar as she can’t be present at any family gatherings that I’m present at.. at some point I started realizing that it is yet another way for my sister to bully me, which resulted in me rolling my eyes a bit and sighing and wondering if she’s ever going to get over her Issues.

But lets move to nearer times for a minute. As most of you know, I have this repeating issue I’ve been having where every six months or so I go manic, black out, and end up in jail or a mental hospital after sending a bunch of emails to one person who wishes at this point I would go away.

Now, let’s get a few things out on record. If I had one wish without wishing for more, at this point, it would be to have my friendship with this person back. And I undoubtedly in these emails say a few things which are inappropriate insofar as a lot of my internal censors are not working correctly. They’re never threatening (because that’s not the person I am) or graphic, but clearly they make her unhappy and my inability to just stop has been upsetting everyone, myself included. Now, it’s possible if my sister wasn’t ostensibly afraid of me, this person would be willing to just talk to me and everything could come down from defcon 1, but that is not to be.

Obviously something inside me is not working right. For a long time, I went through the motions of going to shrinks and doctors and taking pills and surely this will fix me. Of very late (the last few days) I’ve started to ponder whether I need to take a somewhat more self-directed and aggressive approach insofar as I do have this sinking feeling that nothing is getting any better and it has been not just years at this point but a solid decade.

Anyway, so, it’s gotten to where friends can tell when one of these events is about to strike me.. I recently came from SoCal wound tighter than a clock spring and decided, if such a word really describes how things happen in this state (I think maybe the words “it eventiated” ) that I was going to go, not for the first time, to Virginia.

Now, there were some signs from the beginning that this trip was going to be different. Normally, I don’t actually get there, and I think that my mom has a good time calling the person who lives in Virginia and gossiping / winding her up about how afraid she should be of me. (If it sounds like I don’t have a lot of trust in my family, well A: I’m paranoid, we know that B: I don’t C: I have DID. That doesn’t happen because you come from a great family situation). However, first of all, the ‘Blackout’ phase of this trip was a good deal longer than usual.. over a day is completely missing, and the resulting jump looks to me like a teleport from the west coast to the east coast.. second of all, I spent so much time with crosstalk among alters that I ended up with a blister on my tongue.. I was present for some of that, and it was delightfully weird, as crosstalk among alters generally is. Third of all, none of the usual thing stopped me. I got a ticket in Minnesota, that didn’t stop me. I got stuck in St Louis because of the usual confusion of why we bother to do resource allocation tracking for food. That didn’t stop me although it did get me a three day hold. I finally got to $CITY and carefully did *not* go to person’s house (I was really hoping person would come out and talk to me on neutral ground, and either give me a Last Goodbye or, there was a bit of me still holding out hope, return to being my face to face friend)

What I did do was go to a bar and sing “Little Pink Houses” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” – I actually got invited up on stage with the singer, which fit my energy just fine. I talked to some old timers about being patriotic. I went to a church.. twice.. and both times had some pretty authentic (not to mention awesome) spiritual experiences that I have yet to fully grok but make me think I should go back to some churches. The church service was in Spanish. I think that helped *a lot* because the words didn’t make me mad.. and recently at a class I learned that only 7% of human communication is the words.. so I was a lot more aware of the tone of the experience etc. The second time I went to the church (a day later) they had live music and I think they were expecting me and ultimately I cried my eyes out about the whole situation, which has probably been something that has been needing to happen for several years now.

And I sat in my car and I waited. When it became clear person was not wiling to come to me, I decided.. partially as a matter of a way to make myself even less threatening and partially because I had reached the point where I did not trust myself at all to be myself after trying to operate a car while peaking on seroquel.. to check myself into a hospital and see if *that* would get me some kind of something.

Well, it did. Last Goodbye was apparently the answer, but instead of showing up to deliver it in person, I got a court summons and a protective order. This was both good and bad, and I still feel like I should have done things a bit differently here. It gave me a chance to hear person talk (and I *love* hearing person talk.. the way she uses her voice and her hands when talking just pets my brain somehow) and it also gave me something I had been really badly needing, a 3d memory that wasn’t text of rejection. See, the last time I saw her face to face she was behaving as a friend to me. And knowing as much as I do about information theory.. not to mention having *had the experience* – I know it is trivially easy to hallucinate text.

And I will say, she wasn’t actively mean about it. If my sister were ever to take out a protective order, she’d take advantage of the time to also make me actively wish that suicide is something that woudl work. (Repeated testing has told me, at least in my case, there’s a hypervisor, suicide doesn’t work. Not that there aren’t times lately where I wish it would). I can actually sort of imagine my sister describing how sick, perverted, useless, stupid, ugly, weak, and other undesirable behaviors I am.. I guess I have a alter who is a software model of my sister. Now there’s something I could use to lose.

Anyway, protective order… initially my response was “Well, if that’s what she wants, she shoudl have it” since I’ve never been of the position that if person wants distance from me she should have anything *but* that.. it’s just the alters that come up during a mania that, I honestly forget, have no memory of the times between. But, it occurs to me, this is giving said alters a tool to hurt me a lot a lot since person can now have me thrown in jail for sending her a email. I wonder if person has ever worn handcuffs the way cops put them on, which always hurts you paws, or been in a cold room of cinderblocks designed by idiot humans who think punishing is a good idea to send the message “You’re a bad person. You deserve to hurt.”. I also wonder if person really does think I deserve to hurt because there’s something wrong with my mind. I doubt it a lot.

Anyway, I already do hurt because something’s wrong with my mind.

I’ve begged God for a early death.. like, now would be good.. bu that’s not the sort of wish apparently that we get. So I’m stuck here, wishing I wasn’t. Maybe if I had a better attitude you’d still want to be friends. I do have a lot of friends, and I’m grateful for them, and I’m loved, and I’m grateful for that, and sometimes it gets all the way into my core and that’s very nice, and sometimes it can’t and that’s not so nice.

So, I was talking about things I might have done right or wrong. I got a lawyer, which might or might not have been a good idea.. as I said, I didn’t really exacly want to win but I also was willing to admit that it would be a good idea for me not to lose. THe judge, not too suprisingly, sided with person – I can’t really conceive of the situation where the judge doesn’t, since person is there saying “I want this person not to talk to me”, which really is a reasonable request and something we should all be free to ask for. My position doesn’t look very reasonable at all, since it’s “If I forget and do talk to you, I want to not go to jail.. “. I keep hoping if I develop the habit of writing the things I would have put in the emails into blog posts instead, maybe the next time I go manic.. plus, of course, as I mentioned, I now have a very real, visceral, 3D memory of rejection. And the wish that I hadn’t dragged person through all the unhappiness in the spaces in between. Not to mention dragging me through all said unhappiness.

What I wish most is that none of the ‘be afraid of me’ club were convincing themselves of something that, as far as I can tell both from the way I’ve behaved my entire adult life and from the way my friends treat me, makes any sense at all. However, this is America, and fear is something we love to sell ourselves, so I guess I’m not surprised to find people convincing themselves that I’m a threat.

More later.

So, I wanted to talk some about what this is like for me. Most of the time.. I’d say 99% of the time.. I just experience being me. I make choices, I see the results of those choices, I appear to have normal free will and it appears to operate normally. During a period of my life that ended in 2009, I appeared from my perspective to have almost no free will at all.. I actively wanted to be doing one set of things, or would even try to do those things, and my experience would be of doing other things. This was extra difficult for me because I wanted to get as far away from a romantic entanglement I was in as possible, starting (let’s be honest) a few weeks after the entanglement started, but I couldn’t. So, that’s one form that whatever’s wrong with my head manifests as.

I don’t do scary things to other people.. I mean, I don’t have memories of my doing violent things or forcing people to do things or knocking over banks or anything. I guess that’s one thing to be grateful for as that would be a bit more nightmarish than what I do experience. I do experience blackouts.. about every six months, suddenly I feel amazingly good and then.. from my perspective.. its just a blackout, and suddenly I’m thousands of miles away from where I started. Recently I got to sit in court while someone talked about how I’m not doing a good job managing my mental illness.. I don’t think this person realizes that I take the medication I’m assigned, I talk to the people in my mental health teams, and nothing gets fixed because, to be honest, this particular problem is probably a bit beyond what we understand so far about how the human mind operates. It’s a intermittent fault, which means that there’s no way anyone can know whether the drugs I’m on and the things I’m doing are working until the fault conditions are met and we find out, no, they’re not. Intermittent faults are hell to debug even when you’re not trying to debug them from *inside the running system that’s got the fault*. I won’t even start on my impressions of the medical system that the U.S. has to offer the average citizen, which appears to be way, way, way more concerned with privacy, not to mention who pays for what, than fixing *anything*.

Okay. This wasn’t supposed to be a whinefest and certainly I shouldn’t be whining at the person who’s life I’m degrading by constantly wanting to talk to her every time this intermittent fault activates because she certainly deserves it even less than I do. I was explaining what it’s like for me. (There is a part of me who thinks, *very strongly*, that this person should really talk to me *while I’m sane* because it could simplify everyone’s life a little bit, but this might just be because as everyone knows I want my friendship with this person back – although at this point that seems improbable – or even because even when she’s in court describing me as a potential rapist hearing her talk in her unique way of talking was making parts of me feel happy as other parts of me were feeling, wow, you really think THAT’S me? )

There are periods where I feel like I’m not the only one driving the bus. Like, I’m getting to add my *influence* but I’m not the only person around. That’s easier to deal with than total blackouts. I’ve been assured by various people who talked to me in (to me) total blackouts that during total blackouts numerous personalities are present. I keep hoping some of these people will guest on my blog to talk about what that’s like for them because I, for one, am interested. Sometimes I feel like my influence is very limited, like in the start of manic periods, and other times I feel like I have a fair amount but not enough, like in the periods where I didn’t want to be getting hooked up with a particular young lady but wasn’t able to say no in force of her very aggressive personality. I don’t, by the way, think that was in any way her fault. I think it was mine, in that I was somewhere to the left of submissive. See earlier posts.

I assume, after reading various things, that something hit my mind like a hammer back when I was a few months old. I have all sorts of guesses as to what that might have been, my most popular one being that my parents perhaps had a fight they don’t even remember having while they were moving from germany to the U.S..

It’s interesting to me, given the blackouts I have and the out of character behavior that occurs during said blackouts, that it’s taken me this long to acknowledge I have DID. All I have to say is, it’s scary. I remember many times thinking “There’s more than one person in my body..” but .. I don’t know. For the longest time I was deeply afraid of what people would say, or think, or do, if they knew.

I keep reading more and more about it, and it seems like it’s difficult to fix. I mean, I’ve been going to shrinks for years, taking whatever pills they tell me to take (despite rumors to the contrary), and while my life has gotten noticably better, it hasn’t gotten, you know, really good. But it’s still.. I don’t know.. it’s like you just finished changing a head gasket only to discover a thrown rod. It’s discouraging. It’s even more discouraging to realize that I don’t really have any way of knowing

A: How *many* people are in me
B: What exactly they are thinking
C: What triggers them to suddenly get control of the body

I know aside from manic periods that happen twice a year on six month centers it’s incredibly rare that I lose any time, which is encouraging but also a little disenheartening.. I don’t know of any way to trigger them to come out of their hiding places.