listen, if you want to be with someone that has ADHD and doesn’t / can’t take medicine for it, you have to understand that we just forget. Yes, we know you had us write it down and put it somewhere obvious, we still forgot. Yes, you just said it 10 times, we still forgot. Yes, you literally, to our face, seconds before, told us in detail, we turned around and forgot immediately. we forget, everything, immediately, most of the time.

You are not doing anything "wrong" for continuing to struggle or not being where you'd like to be in your healing journey. Healing has no moral value and neither does struggling. Continuing to struggle is not a sign of "failing" in any way.

hi hows thigs ?

I'll be honest things could be better. I've been processing through a lot of my trauma this past week and while that's great in the long term, right now it fucking sucks balls. But I'm hanging in there.

The adults in my system have been struggling a lot recently and that makes me really sad :( I've been seeking out our partners for comfort and cuddles to help the adults feel better, I try to get us our favorite foods, and huddle under our blankets. Because these things help me and make me feel better! And I'm hoping it also helps them.

They've been dealing with a lot of our trauma memories that have been coming up, not anything new but things we're starting to finally process through. They seem scared that I'm gonna get hurt while they're processing. But... for me, those things were just my life. I was just living my life. I don't feel like this processing thing is hurting me any more because I know what I went through.

But I think for the adults, it's something different. Like they're realizing how fucked up the things we went through were. And the fact we were children when it happened. I don't know, they seem to have a different perspective and context and understanding from what I have and I don't know why things are so different between me and the adults of my system. Why do they need to process but for me it just feels like it was... I guess it was just my everyday life? How do they have these different perspectives of our childhood from me?

I don't know, I wish I understood what makes me a little and what makes them grown ups. Why I haven't grown up, even though I'm biologically 20+ years old and even have the memories and experiences to back it up, while the adults, who are missing way more of their memories, are the grown up ones. And why they feel so horrified by our past but I just nod along and say, yep that happened.

I dunno. I think I just wish we weren't so different from each other. I wish we were more integrated so that I can understand them as well as they understand each other.

hello! i hope you are doing well.

i was wondering if you could explain double bookkeeping? and add some examples maybe?

my searches have come up very complicated.

i may be psychotic and i am trying to learn.

thank you in advance! (your blog is deeply appreciated)

Hi there! Double bookkeeping is when you hold two opposing things to be true at the same time, for psychosis we use it to talk about a specific type of insight that many people experience.

Insight is when you are aware on some level that your delusions might be the result of illness, and insight can exist at various levels and in various ways. Often there's an internal fight related to insight, so one day you might feel like "I think that my beliefs might not hold up with reality and that I might have a problem" and then another day maybe you think "oh no, I nearly fell for the conspiracy by thinking I was suffering with delusions". And there can be many in between states and more extreme states as well. It's not either or, it's a spectrum.

Double bookkeeping is when you at the same time do feel convinced of the delusional content, but you are also aware that you have a disorder that causes delusions and that your thoughts might be the result of that. Often this allows you to act in a way so as not to "arouse suspicion" about your delusions, bc you are still aware how it looks to people around you.

So you could say that you are keeping two "books" on reality at once, and they can't both be simultaneously true but you feel rather convinced that they are.

As an example I used to have a long-standing delusion that I somehow personally was the cause of the suffering experienced by living beings on this earth, it caused me a lot of guilt and self-hatred because I did believe it, but at the same time I didn't go ahead and "save the earth" by committing suicide, because I was aware that my beliefs didn't make sense in consensus reality and that if I was wrong, I would simply cause more suffering to my loved ones.

I hope this was helpful!

thank the alter who did the homework. tell the alter who cooked how much you liked the food. tell the alters who shower and clean your room and work out and drive home how much you appreciate them keeping things together, and tell them more when they mess up, because it's all about being there for each other.

Had a silly moment in therapy where our therapist asked me a question along the lines of "when did you start noticing these thought patterns?", and at first I responded with a vague non-answer like "I don't know, they've been there for a couple of months now but they've been kind of slowly building up", before I was rudely shoved aside and found myself saying "Actually yeah I do remember, it was when <insert very specific situation from earlier this week here>". Great way to remind myself that yes I have DID and that these other alters in my brain sometimes know and remember things that I don't. You'd think I'd be used to this by now but I'm still caught off guard regularly when another part knows stuff about my life that I don't.

thank the alter who did the homework. tell the alter who cooked how much you liked the food. tell the alters who shower and clean your room and work out and drive home how much you appreciate them keeping things together, and tell them more when they mess up, because it's all about being there for each other.

I rewatched Shang-Chi recently, as one of my partners hadn't seen it yet and it's one of my favorite movies to rewatch when I can. It's no Everything Everywhere All At Once, but it was still a piece of Asian-American (and more specifically, Chinese-American) film that impacted me and holds a lot of importance to me. There's so much in that movie that I could go on and on about in relation to myself: the feeling othered in both the US and in Asian countries, the specific Asian American culture which is neither White American nor is it "Homeland" Asia culture but something that's both and neither, the trauma of never being good enough, loving and resenting your sibling.......

One line that stuck out to me in this particular rewatch, however, was when Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh's character) looks at her nephew and says, "You are a product of all who came before you.... You are your mother. And whether you like it or not, you are also your father." And that's so powerful, for a movie written in the West but by those from the Asian diaspora. Many Western movies would have had a line about how you're not your parents, you're your own person with your own life and destiny that you get to define yourself. And Asian culture tends to focus on respecting and carrying on you family's legacy and tradition. But here... in the context of this movie, I see both having their place. Shang-Chi has to learn how to take that legacy from both of his parents and make it his own.

And I love that. He doesn't get to run away and leave his past behind. And I don't just mean his past and his life's history, I mean also that of his parents. Because family history and family culture absolutely colored his life and is an influence on who he is today. His father's traumas and history as a warlord, and his mother's past where she had to leave her village, are both things that affected him and shaped him even though they were things that happened before he was even born. And by acknowledging that these pieces of his family's history are a part of him and his own narrative about himself, he can truly finally accept himself and create something new and wonderful from that.

Just.... god. It's such a struggle, as an Asian-American who was hurt and abused and traumatized by my parents, to try to figure all that out. "I don't want to be like my parents", I tell myself. But I constantly see parts of them in me. I have my father's jaw and my mother's eyes. I love physics because my father nurtured that in me since I was a child, as he was a physics professor himself. I'm a musician because my mother's a singer and loves music herself. I have a tendency to avoid my problems and not get confrontational like my father. I yell and throw things around when I'm angered like my mother. I can't escape the influence both of them had in my life, even though I no longer live with them.

And even if could get rid of everything that reminds me of them, where does that leave me? What parts of my Asian heritage do I reject in the process? Do I change my last name to distance myself even more? What could I even change it to?

No... I think for me, the most empowering thing has been accepting that my parents' traumas, and their parents' traumas, and all the traumas that came before them, all have a place in the narrative I tell about my own life. Acknowledging that these things did happen and did and still do have an affect on my life has been so important in my healing journey. No, I'm not saying their individual traumas are my traumas. But... their traumas affected how they treated me, which in turn gave me my own traumas. And I can look at that part of my history, my family's histories, and make it my own.

therapy isn't enough i need to have a tea party with my 7 year old self and tell her she didn't deserve anything that happened to her

From Why be happy when you could be normal by Jeanette winterson

Definitely the more integrated I get and the less I dissociate from the other parts of me, weird little quirks have started cropping up due to the various different traits between the different parts of me interacting with each other. I think the biggest thing right now is our ADHD symptoms; before, they'd be pretty secluded from each other and certain alters would experience certain symptoms more severely. Purple got the worst of our hyperactivity, Green struggled the most with executive dysfunction, and I struggled a lot with staying organized and focused. Of course, this isn't to say we didn't experience the other symptoms. All of us struggled with every aspect of ADHD, but there was definitely a pattern for what each part seemed to have the most trouble with.

Except.... well, now that I have a fuller picture, sure, some of it was different parts struggling more with specific aspects of ADHD, but also a not-insignificant aspect of all this was that we weren't aware of how much we each struggled with the other symptoms. Sure, my hyperactive symptoms don't necessarily present the same way, but I'm still incredibly fidgety and need to get up and walk away from my desk pretty regularly. That's not the same as Purple running up and down hallways or speaking quickly or bouncing on our feet, but it's still very definitely hyperactivity. And I was honestly just completely blind to my own executive dysfunction because I believed I just needed enough pressure to start on a project, when in reality "needing enough pressure" is in itself an example of executive dysfunction at play. Similarly, Purple struggles with remembering what tasks need to be done each day, and Green has trouble planning things out even when he knows what needs to be done, both of these being examples of them having trouble getting organized.

I also think that, now that we're more integrated, there's a lot more bleed through where the aspects of our ADHD symptoms we'd each respectively dissociated away is now hitting each of us more. So not only am I dealing with my own lack of organization skills and whatnot, the other stuff is also starting to compound and thus I'm having trouble juggling these new or heightened symptoms that I haven’t really dealt with before.

It's not a bad thing, if anything integration has shown me that these symptoms have always existed inside of me and I've just dissociated them away or dealt with them in an otherwise unhealthy manner. I now have to find healthier and more productive ways to manage my ADHD, which is gonna take time and effort but should overall make my life feel less chaotic and out of control.

One thing I urge adults to unlearn is the stigma surrounding forgetfulness.

Perfect memory retention is rare. A faulty memory can be the result a host of mental illnesses, from ADHD to PTSD. It's not a sign that someone wasn't listening. I have a friend that has a four year gap in her memory due to trauma. I have another with poor short term memory retention because that's one of their autism symptoms.

Your brain can also trick you into misremembering things. I can't tell you how many times I've remembered putting my keys somewhere and unearthed them in a completely different place. I have to remind myself what my birth date is because I said it wrong once and now the wrong date is in my memory forever. I have to come up with mnemonics for birthdays, anniversaries, and events because my brain doesn't do numbers for some reason.

I see people bicker about forgetting a person's favorite food or what their mothers favorite color. I think it's important to forgive people who forget easily.

help girl i drifted out to sea [x]

Our Fray has to deal with the others' dumbass shenanigans in our WoL system.

hello, system who plays ffxiv. how's your alter fray doing

sometimes, things start getting bad or my thoughts get too loud or my chest gets too heavy and i am so sure that i am going to hurt forever, but it gets better every single time. i just never seem to remember.

You told me that you loved me. And I wanted to believe that, so much. I believed that, because I had nothing else to compare it to. I believed that, because I had to.

So when you witheld your love from me, I did anything I could to get it back. I chipped away at myself, boxed myself in. Changed what I could, hoping it would be enough. Hoping that there was some version of me that would be enough for you.

But nothing was enough, because who I am, what I am, was never the issue. You had a vision, an unobtainable ideal, of who I was supposed to be. And only if I met that idealized version of me in your head would I have received your love. I was "unworthy" of it otherwise. But the version of me you wanted to exist, no, that you believed existed underneath all that imperfection, was never there. After all, there's no way to turn lead into gold.

And so now, I don't even know who I am. I'm not the perfect version of me you envisioned. But I'm also no longer the me I was, stripped of all the things that make me "me". The bits of me I'd chipped away never went away, but instead collected in the bottom of my heart like fallen dust, filling me up until that's all that I was. A pile of dust, beating within me, wishing to break free and be loved.

And so I'll love these imperfect parts of me, the me that you'd rejected. I'll cherish the dust inside of me, because that's what I deserved. It's what I deserve. It's what all of me deserves.