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echosinthedesert · 29 days

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Why I’m Echo

🗝️🏷️ RAMCOA (trafficking and scripting)

Growing up, I didn’t know why they called me Echo. I’ve always been hard of hearing, repeating what little I heard so people would listen. My family hated how I slurred my words and spent too long guessing what they had said to me. I echo. I read the Narcissus myth in grade school. I remember thinking that’s where the word came from, but I didn’t realize then just how much that story mattered to me.

I was raised with the story of Echo and Narcissus as the narrative of my life. I was a confidante to the women of my church. They told me I was so smart, so good with words despite barely speaking. My mother was an English teacher, and I loved to read.

They took me to the school where they worked one summer, had me clean up the classrooms. Eventually, they left me at a table to do homework, sent another woman to watch me. She helped me with my math while the other woman went on ‘lunch break’ — apparently sleeping with that woman’s husband. At the time, I hardly knew what was happening. They were all so mad.

It wasn’t a coincidence, I don’t think. They did something similar in my church group, then again at a ‘house party’. Every time, I was the distraction. My homework, my writing, my ‘services’. As punishment each time, they took away my books. Those books were my door to language, used to bring them everywhere, and they ripped them apart and hid them.

While all this was going on, my church group was doing something similar to another boy. They made him hunt with the men, never let him look in the mirror, set up all these confessions towards him and trained him to be cruel to the people confessing. We were bonded together like that. They made me go confess my love to this stranger boy, who was fairly pretty, and made him hurt me. They kept us together often, even though we didn’t like each other, and we fought like cats and dogs.

For a while, I was sure he was dead. They told me he offed himself because of me (he was so stressed and angry, I really did believe them). I didn’t see him for a while. It was an ordeal figuring out how to get him back to himself, after finding out he wasn’t gone forever.

We get along better now, with years between that shit show and now. We get that so much of our lives were staged by the adults around us, and we think we know why they did it — not the logic of why they thought it was a good idea, but what they were trying to get out of it ig. We weren’t the only kids they did this to, and we’ve both played minor roles in other kids’ training.

Narcissus and I are alters in a system. All of my trigger words and all of his are linked up according to how we were trained. That’s not the point of my blog, but the context is important.

The people who orchestrated it all are outside humans, still alive for the most part, and all the events happened in external reality with the exception of Narcissus and I having actual separate bodies (they just had someone else stand nearby so we thought the person we were talking to was physically present).

It’s been a journey piecing together where our stories fit together and placing it back in reality. We’re not the only alters like this in our system, and we’re not the only system this happened to. The perps are still doing this, but we’re getting safe and trying to stop them from doing this to others.

So. My name is Echo, like the Greek myth, and I’m just a Deaf girl. This is my blog about being Deaf and living with the fucked up childhood I had because of it. I’m one of three Echos who came out of that fiasco, using this blog with every other ASL native alter in the system. The worst is passed, and I’m excited to make a life for myself in the present. Nice to meet you!

#ramcoa survivor #ramcoa #pluralgang #osddid #cds system #deafpride #deaf

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