Circular Lines

Hello! I'm Sonnet, or Circ, or whatever you end up calling me. It's nice to meet you!

Basics:

Fully trauma-based Mixed Origin DID system

Adult

Teacher and Writer

Collectively Queer

Collectively they/them pronouns

Married to @circulars-singlet

We use sign offs on our posts to help us keep track of who's fronting. We won't share whose tag is whose, but we're happy to provide this list of tags in case people want to see specific posts! More tags may be added at any time.

Armageddon Comes While I'm Sleeping

Diamonds Are A Boy's Best Friend

Kitty Caught The Rabbit

Vessel On A Calming Sea

I Think The World Is So Wonderful

Keeping Up With Nerd Shit

Lilac Bound Hauntings

Pop Pop Bubblegum Bop

Adoration For The Modest

Shadows In The Petunia Garden

Butterfly Kisses And Sunbeam Dreams

Beauty And Poison Go Hand In Hand

This Is Your Captain Speaking

Ruby Red, Sterling Blue

UwU The Cutest [REDACTED] School-Girl

Other Notes:

We consider ourselves a DID Multiple, and utilize parts language for our system. We're seeking Thriving Multiplicity, a form of functional multiplicity where our multiplicity actively helps me thrive in this life we have.

We do not use the terms headmate, collective, plural, or any -genic labels. We also request people respect our collective pronouns -- they/them -- and do not use ampersand pronouns (you&) for us.

We have two created parts who use that label and two parts who use custom origin labels -- Dreamway and Desirecept -- to describe how they split and why.

Thank you for joining me!

(Note: this user does not use the term plural for themselves!)

This story always amuses us.

We learned we were a system twice. Once in Sophomore year of High School and again in Freshman Year of College. We always mix up these ages when telling this story, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve been 15 or 16 for the first time and 19 for the second. Both of these instances were before any diagnosis, which happened when I was… er… maybe 23? 24?

Look, expecting a person with DID to recall dates and times is ableist (/silly).

In high school, I had a pretty abusive “relationship” — it wasn’t quite that, but I’ll call it that for ease right now. During said relationship, I began to have some severe dissociative spells. One day in English, I started writing in my journal, and just let my brain wander. I knew there was something in there begging to be let out, so I just let myself. Keep going. I drew a picture of our innerworld and others wrote notes.

It scared the fucking hell out of me. I went to the abusive chick I was with and asked her, and. She reassured me it was completely normal and she experienced it too. =_=

So, I never told anyone. I reached out and began switching in a way I could recognize. Not perfectly, but we knew Numb and Sie and Sierra and Wade. We knew there was someone locked away. (We didn’t know Curtis existed, but we repressed the hell out of him.) We saw switching as “such a cool life hack” that people hadn’t figured out — like, how come folks hadn’t clued in that roleplaying being a Perfect Student at school and a Great Daughter at home made things so much easier??? Wow!!

Hint: it did not make things easier. It just made my familial abuse easier to deal with.

Then, though, we fell into a severe depression. With it came the creation of Debra, our persecutor. Numb ended up killing her, causing her to go to dormancy, and our entire system to just… stop existing. We have almost no memories of those two years due to the severe destabilization we faced. I know there was a lot of trauma during that time. So much bad shit went down.

We jump ahead to college. I’ve forgotten entirely that my alternate selves were, yknow, selves. I just figured I’d roleplayed VERY HARD that Sonnet and Sonnet and Sonnet and another version of Sonnet had done things. I had gone by “Sierra” as a silly online name, nothing real.

It was in my intro to lit class that someone gave an analysis of a character stating the character could be read through the lens of DID. I laughed to myself because, uh, they made a diagnosis for the shit everyone experiences?

Turns out they don’t all experience it. Cue a 4am switch to Sierra crying, opening her eyes and seeing the DID-Research page and a lot of tumblr blogs open on our screen.

Discovering our system for what it was was genuinely terrifying. It scared us and I never would’ve survived if not for the sacrifice of a friend’s mental health — I still am so so grateful for all the help he gave me in college, shoutout to you.

lol. Being farther in recovery always makes these questions awkward.

We’re a system of 15 parts, who occasionally join together to form new parts. Not sure if those would count? They’re just as real as me.

We all know each other. We all love each other. We’re all Sonnet, and Sonnet is 15 people.

Not much we can say on this, honestly. Our multiplicity is simultaneously the best part of our disorder, and the most mundane. We are just a singlet with a little bonus; we come as a combo pack.

When I first joined system spaces, I didn’t even realize what I’d experienced was truly “trauma.” I mean, I hadn’t experienced [insert traumas here]. Sure, my parents were overbearing, but that wasn’t traumatic. Right?

It didn’t help that so many people around me reiterated that I wasn’t traumatized. I would vent about something, and the word “abuse” would slip in, somewhere — probably from Numb who tried desperately to get us to understand while trying desperately to make sure we never understood the full implications — and then someone would chime in that, while it sucked, it wasn’t traumatic enough to form DID.

Then, one day, I ran across a post from a user called furiousgoldfish (though I know I’d never be able to find it now). It was telling users to bold any of the things on the list that they’d experienced; anything that was bolded was something that could be traumatic. I rolled my eyes at the concept, but was curious. I ended up with half the list fitting me at the time.

Now that I’ve been in therapy awhile, I’ve since learned far more than half that list fit. There was so much trauma I just… couldn’t remember. So much I blocked out.

Had it not been for that post, I never would’ve known. Okay, no, that’s an exaggeration — but it would’ve taken a much longer time to figure it out.

So when presented with the opportunity to discuss my trauma on this blog — and beyond that, how it’s changed my thinking, how I manage my responses, etc — I realized I could be that person for others. In a community so torn apart by discourse and trauma and medicalization, I wanted to give even one person some sort of realization. “You’re not alone; yes, it was real, and it did hurt, and that’s valid; here are methods I’ve used that helped me move through it.”

I enjoy sharing with a community. Though recent events have made me more nervous to, I still want to give that safe space to others. I want to share my thoughts about ACEs, and covert CSA, and how comorbidities such as OCD can impact thinking. I want to help.

We tend to switch now around once a week. We’ve been working on scheduling it out some, but genuinely, I think it might be better to just go based on distress; “I don’t want to front, so someone else come in!” It’s almost never due to forced switching, due to triggers or something. It’s 99.99% of the time a conscious choice on our parts to let someone else take the reins.

Losing time is… difficult to pinpoint? For one thing, we don’t as much lose time between switches. It’s moreso that we lose context for events in our life, regardless of the parts aspect.

Like, for instance, if I think about tonight:

Vaguely, I know I did things tonight.

Thinking more, I made dinner, watched a video, went upstairs and RPed, then I’m on my way to bed soon.

Thinking hard, I made Pasta and Biscuits and burnt myself quite a few times. I watched a video but had a minor medical issue requiring my inhaler during the process. My spouse, exhausted by everything and also dealing with the storm currently, wanted to go upstairs. We did a tarot reading, RPed, and went to bed.

I have to actively think to remember the details of the night. They just… kinda went away. And I know they’re going to become background noise shortly soon, because they’re not needed anymore. Within a day or so I am not going to remember this unless I am actively purposefully thinking hard about it.

and that’s fine! I think that’s honestly pretty normal. It’s more than I think non-dissociative individuals experience, but I can still function. Just a bit harder.

We do have individual relationships innerworld. These have shifted over time, but they’re just as important and real to us as our external relationships. We like to view inner relationships the same way a singlet ought to view it — do you love yourself? Do you want to protect yourself? God forbid, do you find yourself sexy? If yes, it’s no different from us!

Curtis and Numb are the big one, considering themselves married innerworld; our little, Sie, officiated. However, we have SO MANY more relationships! Such as:

At one point, Sierra and Wade viewed each other as “sisters.” This went away after we worked through trauma.

Sierra is dating Debra.

Debra is in a QPR with Wade.

Numb has a thing with Roy, which is reciprocated, but it’s not really love or queer platonic. We’re not sure what it is.

So much of our system fucks. It’s wild how many of us have been intimate with another.

Sie and LED both view Curtis and Numb as a sort of fatherly stand in.

Octavian and Wisteria have SOMETHING queer going on? But no idea what.

And those are all just off the top of my head! We have so many connections. Plus, the friendships we have are bursting. I genuinely don’t think any of us dislike any of the others anymore.

But that’s all just innerworld. Externally? There’s Mush.

@circulars-singlet has been the best thing to ever happen to us. They’re the one who finally pushed me to get therapy. They’re the one who researched “how to love someone who’s traumatized.” They’re the one who’s encouraged me time and time again to cut off people who hurt me.

My favorite fact to share about them, in context to my multiplicity, is that they didn’t believe in DID when I first explained I was self-diagnosed as a system. They thought it was completely fake. And they looked at me and went “Okay, cool.” They kept that opinion to themselves, went and researched it, and changed their opinion over time. They’re one of my fiercest defenders.

Mush and I have been together for over 10 years now. We got married in 2024, though we haven’t had our ceremony yet. And through it all, we’ve taken a very fitting outlook on the whole “are you dating Us, or Me?” lens of relationships.

Mush is dating Sonnet. They’re married to Us, as a collective. But they love Us, individually, all the same, and they love each and every single one of us. Just like how someone who isn’t a multiple can be loved in different ways depending on the day, Mush loves us differently depending on who’s fronting.

For instance, the littles. Mush is still in love with us when the littles front. We’re still married; Sie and Mush are still very in love. But when Sie fronts, it’s more “oh hell yes today the love of my life would like to color with me and play Minecraft!” When Curtis fronts it’s… well, let’s be honest, mostly the same nowadays, but with kissing involved.

They see us fully as individuals while also seeing us as parts of one beautiful person. Which is… exactly how we like to be seen. They understand us fully. There was a time we pushed back — Wade and Roy in particular were uneasy about the idea of dating Mush — but it just didn’t make sense to us to not all love this wonderful, incredible, beautiful person who’s given us so, so much.

To preface: I am of the belief that integration and fusion are separate concepts. Integration is the lowering of dissociative barriers and raising of communication between parts; fusion is the fullest extent of this, to the degree that parts no longer have any barriers between them.

Back in the day, these two concepts went hand in hand. I’ve seen medical literature use the two terms interchangeably — however, in more recent publications, I’ve seen more prominence of the definitions above.

I feel that integration is necessary for my healing journey, and it’s hard to wrap my head around any other idea; when people (rarely) say they oppose integration, I automatically assume they mean fusion, because I can’t comprehend being against better system communication. However, I want to also say, integration is not a “one size fits all” kind of thing. It will look different for every system!

For instance: in our system, we are aiming for thriving multiplicity. This concept is that we want to be more than functional — we want our multiplicity to help us thrive. To actively make our life better. We have done a lot of integration work to help get closer to this goal; lots of communication practice, attempts at blending, and posts (just like these) to share our opinions.

And, then, we also have Ve. Ve is our system Autopilot. When she fronts, she can rarely hear the others. They are knocked out while she fronts and can’t function. She is the Burnout Alter — the one who fronts when nobody else can. When we come to again after she switches out, it’s incredibly hard to grasp the memories back. Our barriers are strong with her…

And. That’s helpful for us right now!! Where we’re at in life, we NEED that detachment. She’s literally there because we cannot physically handle any more, and yet we must persist. If we DID have full memory and awareness of it all happening, where we’re at currently in our life, we would collapse.

So, with where we are currently? We need those barriers to thrive. So it’s part of our healing goal to keep them — just as it is part of our healing goal to lower them and raise the window of tolerance.

Almost everyone in my life knows about my DID, with a smaller (but not insignificant) amount knowing my system, and a smaller still (but still not insignificant) amount knowing my system. I am open about my multiplicity at work, with my family, and with my friends. When I meet new people and they ask my name, it’s a 50/50 shot on whether I give our collective name, or if I say “it changes, but right now I’m so-and-so.”

I’ve become much more at ease with being known as having DID. It used to fill me with so much terror, genuinely — but being able to go to work and look at my coworker and say, “well, Wade decided to stay up until 3am playing Stardew again, so now I’m fucked” just to hear “Goddamn it Wade, he should let you exist! That’s just ableist right there” — that’s so much fun!!

It does have its downsides, of course. My workplace has also been frustratingly ableist about my system, and I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for every single accommodation I’ve received.

I wish there were better terminology than “coming out as multiple,” because genuinely, it’s been so different for me than coming out as queer. Being queer is an identity; being a DID system, while I view it as an identity as well, is moreso about how my disorder impacts me. I think that’s why it’s so much easier to discuss with friends than with coworkers — in the former case, it’s just having fun with identity! In the latter case, it’s explaining why I don’t recognize someone or why I forgot a meeting.

We’re a DID system — so, we experience dissociation, amnesia, and other quirks of being 15 different distinct identities rolled into one body. We may identify as mixed origin, due to some of the interesting aspects of how individual parts formed… but we simultaneously acknowledge our trauma based origins. No matter how we split — created, or in a dream, or through love and care — we also equally split due to our low tolerance for distress and traumatic upbringing leading to the ability to split in the first place. Without the trauma, those mixed-origin parts wouldn’t be here.

At this point in our healing, our dissociation and amnesia have decreased greatly — though recent events have definitely taken a toll. Most of the past year is vague and blurry for me. But even with that, we are so, so connected to one another. I consider myself very far in my recovery, and while there will always be further to go, it’s leagues better than where I started. Bumps in the road don’t set me back — they’re still moving forward.

I would say we’ve reached functional multiplicity. We function very well together, have very few barriers between us (and the barriers we do have are helpful), and we genuinely can handle a lot. Our tolerance levels have grown so much, and our other disabilities (autism and OCD in particular) disorder us far, far more. I have pride about my system.