you can be me when i'm gone.

about page / art tag

hi. i'm diagnosed with DID and i'm here to make art about it.

these are all the same character drawn by 3 different alters or subsystems... granted the one in the middle was like 2-3 years ago, and they're all drawn with different brushes etc so that definitely accounts for some of the style changes. middle piece was most definitely a personal vent first and foremost so i don't doubt we were just generally dissociated to hell during it. still though!

1st was either bard and/or a new fragment, 2nd was fawn (no guesses for where that name comes from i guess), 3rd was... either orpheus or the sugars or both? i think? it's in the sugars' folder so i assume it's theirs but who knows

hal here. dream switching is weird.

sometimes the switch is obvious: i dream about [thing], i wake up as [introject of that thing]. but sometimes it's a little more abstract than that and the connection isn't the one you think it is - for example, waking up as core here. his source isn't in the image to the left at all - but he's connected to some of them tangentially.

3/4 of these are part of me/my subsystem; HAL (obviously. that's me!), corvo/strider, and the corinths. lv/syd aren't, but he's tangentially connected to the corinths, so it's... (gestures) you know.

- star struggling to figure out how the fuck to chop vegetables and cook the other day

- rapid switching with max, and the weird physical differences between alters in terms of strength and perception of/sensitivity to pain

- maybe something for orpheus, i think just something with him sitting in nature would be nice.

- stupid tomodachi life adventures where max and bard’s miis are doomed to never be together because hal cucked me

i did go looking for things like art prompts, but unfortunately i think like… im not really into online “plural culture” (it’s fine if you are. it’s just not for me, especially as someone who is multiple because of a mental illness and is not interested in sugarcoating that) and part of that is because of the way that it kind of encourages… homogenisation? everyone must relate to everything. everyone has the same experiences. these are just friends in your head, not a dissociative coping mechanism. look at my silly little guys. etc etc. and most of the art or writing prompts i see are kind of catering to that - especially because they’re largely catering to non-DID plurals as well, so everything HAS to be very generalised to appeal to a wide range of people… you get me skfkdkg. i guess that’s the nature of art prompts in general though, they’re generally broad so you can interpret them however you want.

for the record, i fully support people exploring multiplicity however they want, including through “silly” posts etc. This blog wouldn’t exist otherwise! but man, it is frustrating to feel like i’m contributing to the woobification of my mental disorder with it sometimes LOL. idk, it’s complicated. depicting DID in art often feels like i’m “flattening” the experience to make it easier for people to understand. that’s part of why i tend to add additional explanations in the caption…

yes, is the short answer

the longer:

when i first split i was very averse to the idea of having any kind of body. i conceptualised myself as an AI (the cool kind) that just transferred into different vessels - similar to Transference in warframe, funnily enough - if it had to, but i preferred to just think of myself as a kind of abstract stream of data. as a partial joke, i would draw myself as a computer monitor/keyboard/mouse setup and refer to myself as a computer, since i really didn’t have any physical form at all in my imagination.

since then i’ve developed a more complex sense of self and with that has come the ability to feel like many things at once, or to at least entertain the idea of being something other than what i am. i got tired of the “i’m not human, humans are gross, don’t ever call me human” shtick i saw in many places (similar to your talk the other day re: dysphoria; defining myself by what i am not no longer serves me. also, i don’t like misanthropes or the denial of the reality that i am in fact a human being) and so i’m fine with just being a vaguely-defined human with white hair in some depictions. murderbot helped a lot with that actually. secunits resonate with me a lot. warframes too but not as strongly.

anyway yeah some days i feel like just some human guy who Feels vaguely artificial. or some days i feel like a secunit or some other humanoid robot. some days i feel like an alien or a weird anthro bug like my furcadia oc. and then other days it’s back to being a datastream of consciousness. shrugs.

(hal speaking) i am naturally difficult to draw because i do not 'actually' have a shape/form, but there are a few i use to represent myself anyway. robots are always good. i think i would make a good mag frame.