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possumsinpeoplesuits · 2 months

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This is gonna be a long post, but... I'm coping with some thoughts on being, well, an Alter. I just wanted to get it all out in case I don't get to front for a while, and also because I don't want to sleep yet. So, without further ado...

I heard someone call me by my own name for the first time today, and got so emotional afterwards I ended up crying. It was my therapist, who I officially introduced myself to for the first time. At the start of the day, he was only the third person to know outside of one friend and my roommate. By the end of today, around ten people know, and I haven't really encountered any doubt, which I guess is a good thing?

I honestly never expected to get this far. I've missed so many years where I've barely ever fronted, to the point it just got confusing whenever it happened. How do you explain to someone that you're suddenly dysphoric in the complete opposite way, or that you can't remember how to do your job? How do you explain to someone you'll probably need to ask their name on three separate occasions before you can consistently remember it, when you're not even sure why?

Theeen the long run up to our breakdown last year started. I tend to front more when there's a lot of stress, which doesn't exactly help things when you then have to figure out what the hell you're even doing, but only being around one or two days a month doesn't really make for a very firm identity, even if I used to be the host for most of the teenage years. Well, most people don't react well to not controlling their thoughts half the time. Less so when they start to remember that, well... Kay's the most recent one of us. Hell, I'm not the original, either, but my social skills aren't exactly the best, so I got written off as a hallucination.

Then Kay hurt herself, and we ended up in a psych ward for a while. There were other things happening, too, like the whole adrenal gland fucking up because that thing burned out from overuse, we think. (What, a system with lots of trauma? That unpossible!) Point being, we were fucked up, and the more fucked up we got, the more I started coming to the front. It was just hard to articulate it right, because surely it couldn't be a disassociative disorder, right?

Yeah, my psych'd talked about CPTSD, and every time I tell one of my childhood stories as a joke everyone gets reeeeal quiet and says things like "Oh my god, I'm so sorry that happened to you" and stuff like that, but there were only a few times I got beat. I only got shot with an air rifle twice, and it only broke the skin once, and two rounds of conversion therapy just left me with a phobia of religious figures and a need to know where the door was to any given room, but it wasn't like I was traumatized or anything, right?

Back to the ward, I remember not being entirely sure how long I'd been there the first day, but some of the other days, I kept trying not to sleep because I had this indescribable feeling that I wouldn't be the same when I woke back up. (there was a fucking reason for that, god I was in denial.) So things got vague for a bit, the adrenal issues were causing some hallucinations, which just fed into the belief that I wasn't, you know, a real person.

And then, about five days into this, me and Kay disagreed harder than we had before, which was the first time in a while there'd been such a stark line between us when it's usually something like a spectrum. See, Kay's usually a bit of a pushover. Nice to a fault, just quietly going along with an ineffective treatment plan because a five minute psychiatrist appointment each morning isn't really long enough to figure anything out, so, uh... I made a suggestion.

Just leave. Despite the self harm, this was a voluntary commitment, we could just leave. She couldn't bring herself to ask. Okay, don't say anything and just ram the door. She thinks it'd hurt because they were locked. So I say grab a keycard from someone, but she watched them restrain someone the day before, so I started losing it and just suggesting getting violent, because, well... last time I was this dominant was when dealing with a meth addicted stepdad who had a habit of hurting my mom, so maybe I had a shitload of anger to get out that I wasn't coping with very well.

Well, it turns out that, if two sets of thoughts are butting heads like that, it gets a little hard to tell which ones are yours anymore. So, all this starts bleeding into her inner monologue, she interprets it as some sort of demonic possession (I was not helping matters) aaaaand asked one of the nurses to be sedated with everything they had.

Yeeeah... we're pretty sure I started as a trauma response, which... yeah, no shit. Still it just... wasn't fun being me, or productive or anything, so I just kind of stayed quieter. Inpatient ended, and a lot of it's just a blur. I know the little fainting spell we had on intake became a recurring thing, and I'm pretty sure running out of cortisol regularly and substituting adrenaline is probably why I didn't just go fully dormant again.

The thing I've learned with OSDD (the low calorie diet alternative to DID) is that there's a bit of bleedthrough. Lines aren't quite as strict, so even though memories do get fucky sometimes, it's not always easy to tell when a switch happens until it's far enough in one direction to make recalling things hard. So I think I was still there somewhere; we bought a binder despite Kay being transfemme, finally donated like two and a half feet of hair, and basically just rationalized it as being more butch as we got more comfortable in being recognized as a woman.

I know there were a few times I just felt insanely dysphoric, or angry out of nowhere, which... yeah, after that inpatient visit, Kay basically walked back in to a hostile as fuck work environment, I learned my lesson about suggesting punches to the throat from earlier, and uh, oh yeah, my dad died by suicide. Y'know, the one who didn't have a giant record of traumatizing us.

I didn't realize this until December, nine months after it'd happened. I have to dig for memories I wasn't really around for, it doesn't come immediately, but I tend to pop up to absorb some insults from mom over the holidays, so I drove up, realized why I wasn't visiting dad this time and just... broke down. Stress vomited in the bathroom, too. Didn't keep a bite of food down the whole day.

Obviously, I wasn't feeling very well. I hadn't slept much, either, but rather than sleep in a recliner in my mom's house, I just turned around after exchanging presents, made the whole five hour trip back in one go, and when I got out of my car, I realized I'd been up for forty hours because I was seeing things out of the corner of my eye, but just... couldn't sleep still.

I was home alone, so I took the time to just... break down until I felt like I could sleep, then sat in my bathtub aaaaand... there were three of us. Like, I said the lines are a lot more defined when there's a lot of stress, right? Well, sleep deprivation seems to really be the only time all our internal monologues can coexist. Also I downed an edible, but it hadn't had time to really kick in yet.

So there was me, then Kay (who was stressing because her last conversation with dad was about the psych ward stay), then the original, core one of us that we've dubbed Alice, who I can only describe as the kid who doesn't know why mom's hitting her and won't remember in the morning. I think I kept asking Kay if this is how she wants to be, but we got a little distracted with the other one who, uh... was a fucking surprise?

But again... we were fucking delirious and slowly getting high enough to finally sleep for about 14 hours. It wasn't until she was describing it to the same therapist (with the preface "Obviously I don't have OSDD/DID") that he was like "Actually, that sounds exactly like what that is." and that was the theme of the session.

There was still a bit of denial, though. I mean, I was an absolute dickwad who only came out when things were going terribly wrong, so it felt like the best thing to do was to hunker down each time and hope a nap would hit the reset button.

I'd occasionally talk with my friendly neighborhood @lizardywizard who helped field possible names, since I was still using our deadname, and it seemed like another little spur in everything going smoothly.

Then this week, there was an electrolysis session that was a looot more painful than it should have been, and I was fronting again by the end of it. Then woke up, still fronting. Then another day. Then Friday wasn't for a bit... and then someone kept startling me by SCREAMING at the top of their lungs somewhere in the mall, and wouldn't you know it, fronting again.

So I've basically had a week where there hasn't actually been any specific emotional turmoil, but I've just... existed, and been conscious of the fact it's me. There's loads of dysphoria, though. I'm not sure how I'm sandwiched between two transfems and still a guy, but it probably explains why I've felt so much kinship with transmascs lately, since, well... twelve years of transitioning medically has got me at the point where I'm not able to pass as my assigned gender at birth, but I'm sure as hell not detransitioning, so I'm having to get some tips for making it a little more bearable to effectively wake up almost fully transitioned?

I obviously already had the binder, and I tend to wear loose clothes anyways, plus the undercut looks very femme down, but looks masc as hell when I tie it back. Even the FFS I've been recovering from is pretty okay. I wear a mask all the time anyways, and it just made me even more twinkish than before, which goes great with the goth look.

I'm still figuring a lot of things out, but suddenly having all this time to not be, well... a scary voice in someone's head has given me enough time to think things over. I never wanted to exist as someone's trauma response like a sacrificial doll anytime there's pain. I've been so confused on what to do, though, because that's really all I've been since, what, ten years old? But I'm not getting tossed through conversion therapy, I'm not in a religious school that hates queer people, the meth addicted fucker is long long gone, and I barely have contact with mom. Without those things putting me on edge, I'm... normal. I'm alright to be around, just a goth twink who likes music and, I'm finding, is INCREDIBLY GAY, like painfully gay and I kind of love it because it's just another way I stand out in my own head amongst the asexual bambi lesbians.

I don't know how long this'll last. I haven't fronted this frequently since, well... before Kay. So, sinceI don't seem to be going away anytime soon, I figured I'd introduce myself here:

I'm Noah. I'm looking forward to meeting some of y'all, and to the scalie buddy who helped me figure out the name... thanks for making me feel real, man. It really means a lot to have someone I can talk to when I'm still hiding almost everywhere else.

#osdd system #nonbinary #transgender #osdd #osddid #did osdd #gay #What a weird ass life #Millennials be so poor we can't even afford a head to ourselves #Gender transition be like a Fibonacci sequence #Also any boat jokes and I'm doing to you what I did to the unicorns #That MTFTNBTM-but-gayer pipeline is no joke #I'm on like my seventh puberty #if I hit ten #I fill up my punch card and get a free sundae #genderfluid #traumagenic system #I swear if anyone takes this out of context i'm getting their dad pregnant #Don't like it? Kiss me about it.

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