A Little Milestone

I was thinking about this blog, pondering what to write about, and then realized that I may as well talk a little about what's going on with me/us this week. Which means discussing mental health stuff. And, while I don't want to turn this into a mental health blog, I think it went that direction years ago because...what else do you talk about on your personal blog while having a slow motion mental breakdown?  

In summary. To recap (briefly) the last several years: in mid/late 2019 I/we hit rock bottom and soon after realized "oh hey there's someone in my head who isn't me." Cue finally getting the kind of mental health care I need, and then 2020 was the best year of my life mental health wise. 

Fast forward to this week.

Some headmates finally shared about our hallucinations with our therapist. 

Honestly, one of the strangest things about DID (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) is the denial and dissociation. Formerly denial about even having headmates. And then once we'd (mostly) accepted our DID situation, refusal to acknowledge that some headmates see things that aren't there. I have to wonder what else we/I are still in denial about.

It's kinda hard to keep in denial about something that's been discussed with our therapist, though, which is a fact probably related to why it took so long to properly discuss the hallucinations with our therapist in the first place. (Or anyways, I think that's how it works for us. I admit I could totally be wrong.) 

Someday I'll probably write more about the experience of having hallucinations. Other headmates will likely write on the topic, too, and we might share their writings here. But for now, while various individual headmates are trying to engage with the world again, just sharing the little milestone of telling our therapist "hey...hallucinations are a fact of life for us" is enough. 

Headmates (take II)

Imagine suddenly realizing that you're not the only one in your head.

Hi, we go by Collective, and we seem to have a slight case of dissociative identity disorder.

I know some headmates already wrote a "hey it turns out we've apparently got DID" post, but...that was another headmate. So it still feels like I (the one currently typing) still have that as a thing on my mental to do list. Because yeah this blog has been sorely neglected, but some of us are wanting to get back into the swing of writing again. This may or may not involve various headmates writing about the same topic from slightly different angles. Maybe. We'll see.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to say here. The topics I'd like to eventually talk about are still too new, too fresh, too personal, to put on a blog quite yet. Which is a change, because we used to put so much on this blog. At the time we weren't receiving the mental health care we needed, we didn't understand what was happening to us, and we were screaming at the world in a desperate hope that someone would hear and be able to make sense of us. But it turns out that, now we're getting the help we've always needed, we don't feel that need anymore. 

Not to say that we have nothing to talk about! And we'll still discuss mental health I'm sure, but at least we won't (or, we'll be less likely to) be writing from a place of terror because we don't know what's happening with ourself.

ps. I finally figured out that years ago a headmate had switched comments over to being manually moderated, so that each comment needs approval before it goes on the blog. I guess that explains why no comments were appearing...and here we'd thought no one was reading this blog anymore.

Headmates

Imagine being assigned some random people to share a house with. You might get along great with one of them, another you barely see, and for some reason you have the feeling that there are more you don’t know about. But you share a house, and you’ve got to make it work. 

That’d be something of a challenge. 

Now imagine that it isn’t a house you share, but a brain and body. And you don’t realize that you have roommates (headmates), which leads to some very confusing experiences. 

And then, think about what it might be like to finally realize: you aren’t alone in your brain. 

This is my reality, and I started seeing a specialist about my multiple personality situation last summer. Figuring out what’s going on has been such a relief, I’ve actually been able to start making meaningful improvements for my mental health. 

Now that more of us are “waking up” (individual headmates can go “dormant” due to trauma/stress) we’re rediscovering old loves, which is blogging in my case. That means either reviving this blog, or starting a new one. Not quite sure which it’ll be yet. Will keep you posted. ;)