I don’t consider myself a DID system… but I can’t deny, I do find myself personifying parts of my own mind, a LOT

like when I talk about getting possessed by a “writing daemon.” Or having a debate with my “Pattern Recognizer”

and it’s not a joke (although of course the conversations themselves can be funny). these things really do feel very much like interaction between distinct entities inside my brain, with neither having total control of things

but they don’t happen exactly as I portray it, most of the time. Like, the “conversation” doesn’t happen fully in language, because I don’t usually think in words. It happens in a mishmash of abstract concepts, vague images, and occasional snippets of language, that is very hard to describe to anyone outside my brain

so I translate it into language when I post about it, but that’s not how it literally looks in here

…my former partner has been on a complex journey of self-discovery which has included coming out as a trans woman, and also discovering that she is a system of maybe 4 or 5 alters

which I don’t fully understand, but I can’t deny that when there’s a shift in fronting I definitely see a striking change in how she/they communicate

and also I can’t deny that describing herself as a system makes a whole lot of things suddenly make sense– about contradictory behaviors from when we were living together, things that my theory of mind absolutely could not explain at the time

so I accept how she describes it, without question.

but she also has been saying that there are things in how I act, that seem to her like I might also be trans and/or a system.

and I …I see some of what she’s talking about? but I still don’t exactly see any path from there to finding any valuable insights about living my life. There may very well be a path, but nothing jumps out at me yet, when I try to see myself through the lens of being trans or being a system.

like, when I try and imagine any of the steps of gender transition, most of it doesn’t seem appealing to me at all. Nor any other change I can imagine making to my body or how I present my appearance. If I do have dysphoria of any kind, I haven’t found what sort of changes might alleviate it.

and when I tried to think of myself as a system, I ended up asking her what she feels the difference is? between having separate personalities, and just having different aspects of the same personality.

and she started talking about how the line is very clear and obvious to her– how the different members of her system have clearly different skills, and there are things only certain ones are able to do.

and I tried to imagine that,…and I said okay yes, there are things I definitely feel I can only do when I am in a certain mindset. but whether those mindsets count as different people? how would I define that?

and she said that for her, she realized it because they speak in “different voices.”

and I was like. okay then I’m screwed I guess. Because thoughts inside my head mostly don’t even happen in words, at all. And when they do, the words aren’t even spoken in a voice, really. or written in a font, or anything. It’s not auditory or visual, it’s more like… just the abstract concept of a word and its meaning.

so, if Pattern Recognizer and Writing Daemon are separate people in there? I dunno how to have a conversation, really. At least, beyond the “conversations” we already have. If there’s another kind of communication that needs to happen, I do not know how to start it.