These words were written, longhand with an old, cheap Bic ballpoint pen in just over an hour the day before a therapy appointment at a specialist psychology centre to help with difficulties arising from a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder in 2018. Words written because no matter how much of myself I gave to homework asking questions to each of the dissociative parts or alters I had not been able to write or dream or hear a word in response.
My mind is silent.
So very silent.
Well, not silent exactly. There are still thoughts, conscious decisions with focus, unconscious or subconscious thoughts and impressions, and feelings that arise and say hello with joy or fear, comfort or catastrophe. There are intrusions too that may lead to speech, to the continuation of habit, to vocalisations of “I want to die,” or “I want to live,” to “I cannot do this,” or “I can and I will.”
Silence perhaps is a myth, at least in continuity, even to those who write wise books about it perhaps spoiling their own silence in the process or to those who have meditated and contemplated for decades and exude serenity.
When I claim my mind is silent I know it’s not a lie, merely a truth of a certain kind of silence. There are still thoughts that “I” as ego or controller don’t think. How could it now be so? That’s human, especially for those of us with internal monologues, dialogues, conversations. This is the Buddhist monkey mind. It’s the waterfall of Teresa of Avila. This is just how it is and I believe without deep study that it’s increased by our screens, our scrolls and even our knowledge of what’s happening beyond our comparatively small, simple circles.
Again, how could it not be so when a Prime Minister attacks the disabled, when genocide is unacknowledged, when US senators threaten reprisals against any allies who obey international law, when Russian TV explains to the people exactly where the nuclear targets will be. Or when we see poverty on our own streets, meet refugees who took a five year journey from Afghanistan with their young children, when we watch global temperatures and weather patterns or spend fifteen months waiting for DWP decisions that are almost random depending which assessor a dice roll dictates.
To let go of all these worries while still being of some use is a difficult balance. Some choose ignorance as bliss, to refuse to notice what is happening in their world, but that helps nobody. Even the blissed out person with blocked ears and blindfolds eventually becomes an empty ghost.
The silence I speak of holds its place within the meaning of human and the meanings of western, industrialised, neo-liberal capitalist, complicated social media society. It’s a loud silence but even this is quieter for me than it most usually is. I have a degree of peace that’s unfamiliar.
Peace within chaos. I accept that.
But peace nonetheless and level of uncalled intrusions in emotions or words or sounds is low. Low for me. Compared to the maelstroms I’ve often known it’s almost sedate.
The silence I speak of is the silence that proceeds from a unity.
I have been told for six years that I and we, we are plural, we have many names and that we, not I, are this way because, almost undoubtedly, the original I was subject to complex severe child abuse.
I cannot hear those others. I cannot sense them. There’s no Lucy, no Amy, no Jack or Alex or any of the others I heard – or believed I heard – for these years. They’re not standing ready to take over and act in my body independently of me. They’re not half-visible in the shadows of my mind as if waiting to teach me or for me to fall apart again.
There is only silence.
My mind is silent. So very silent.
I cannot claim this is forever with any low degree of certainty of even confidence. In six months or even a week my mind may be a menagerie again, a split apart sauce of conflicting voices, differing hopes and dreams, a resurgence of dissociation beyond the lesser ways of this time, ways that in truth are almost “normal.” In six months my mind may crash on the shore of the world with a dozen voices that don’t want to be seen by the creatures by the water’s edge. Or it may not. Silence may prevail. All I can say with certainty is that if Lucy and the rest are within my mind, a mind of mental distress for as long as I can remember, I cannot perceive them. Not in this now.
I am alone. So very alone.
No fractured pieces. No hallucinated or imagined or even real voices from spirit worlds. Just me and sometimes crawling, sometimes walking, sometimes in excruciating pain subconscious. If I scrapped compassion and a desire to learn compassion maybe that pain would recede further than it already has at this time.
I refuse that path. To stifle compassion is a numbness, a little death, a hiding from reality. It’s a pretend world, a figment and ultimately life lived that way isn’t life at all. I will nurture compassion, nurture the shadows too, the aspects of this inner world I judge as light and those I judge as darkness. I may one day learn to let go of being judge and jury too and simply embrace all of myself with tenderness.
In this aloneness, my inner human solitude, my conflicted and messy unity, two questions must be asked. I’ve asked them daily. Every day for the last three months.
Firstly, will those others return to me and if so, when? I find in some ways I miss them. I miss the joys and protections and companionships I’ve known sometimes. I miss the voices and laughter, even the tears, their encouraging bravery, their calls to childlikeness, a widening curiosity and denial of shame. Those things all helped me. So did creating a wall of art I still mostly believe myself incapable of creating. Even the part, and I can’t even remember his name now, who so firmly wanted a return to our old, certain Christianity has done me good and helped awaken a broad path of spirituality I’ve been taking determinedly, between gaps and stumbles.
It’s easy to say I want them all back because being plural does have its advantages especially when most times it’s more experienced within what diagnostic criteria would call OSDD than DID. Not always. Others did front in therapy and life. Apparently. Pieces broken off at an early age through that horrific abuse. Apparently.
In that word “apparently” lies my second question.
It’s a “What if?”
In simplest terms, “What if I was never plural at all?”
What if, in my trust of a psychologist and of the therapeutic process, of questionnaires, procedures and confirmation biases I became convinced of plurality simply because I was told it was the truth? What if the dissociation and apparent manifestation of other parts I experienced in EMDR was just me not coping with the level of distress in the focus on a single triggering phrase and so regressing and getting a bit lost? What if that’s all it was but I was told by the expert that it was much, much more. What if I just ran with his conclusions in a faith that was entirely misplaced, just as I’ve done with diagnoses before?
Simply, what if psychology and the psychological profession railroaded me at the age of forty-seven into a belief in a complex dissociative disorder that never really existed and then, as if following a new religion to explain all my history distress, my brain and mind adapted to it with imagination, creative responses, an almost spiritual fervour. What if it was belief that manifested and developed dissociative parts or alters that previously had no reality and fragment shard memories of abuse that were based on nothing that ever happened or on accidentally exploding small things into nuclear bomb size trauma? I came to remember pieces, images, strongest emotional pain, what it felt like to be raped as a child. At least I believed I came to remember but that doesn’t mean it was memory of a childhood so broken I couldn’t rationally understand how it could have been so.
What if psychology and my unintentional collaboration with a story provided by it has done a lot more to fuck me up for the last six years than to help me? What if my doubts in therapists’ offices had been listened to and my most extreme statements not been seen as stone engraved holy writ that I wasn’t meant to challenge?
Simply, simply, simply. What if “I am plural,” or “We are plural,” has merely been my dangerous delusion.
What if I cannot be healed because there is nothing to heal or work to hold a creative dissociative system in love because there is no system to hold?
Now I could sit longer with my therapeutic homework. I’ve sat with it. I’ve asked everyone, everyone I ever knew or believed existed in the system. I’ve asked the questions to anyone else who’s there or who wants to speak up.
Silence. Total silence.
I know I could conjure answers, give responses acceptable for therapy and for the story and I could do it even without the intention to do it. I could, without even choosing to, write answers as if Lucy, Amy and the rest were answering and writing. If the name of a spirit was at the top of the homework pages I could probably do that too just like I produced so many pages of automatic writing I believed were from the spirit world and many pages of a story and world I never completed that felt like someone else was writing.
I could do that. But I won’t and I won’t risk being in a place in which I manifest writing claimed to be from a dissociative part when in reality I wrote it in some kind of semi-trance state. I refused to because the plain simple truth is, as I said at the very beginning, my mind is silent. So very silent. To answer with anything more than silence would be an act of self rejection, self destruction. At least at this time.
I can answer neither question.
I cannot say whether they will all return, whether those alters and parts are missing and not just missed. I cannot say whether they existed at all except as tools I inadvertently and unexpectedly created to both help and hinder and attempt to explain the wide varieties of inner hell I’ve been through. I don’t know how to begin to answer the questions either but I have a suspicion, not shared at any point in the last six years by any of four specialist psychologists, that the answers are no and yes respectively.
For today all I know is silence. An inner solitude shared only by my own complex humanity in a difficult world.
All I know is at least in this present moment, in this naked now, I am alone.
