Echo

I think some of it is dissociation, but I am hard of hearing and have ADHD, so maybe auditory processing problems.

I get auditory hallucinations. I can’t hear. People cofronting with me can make the connection to our residual hearing better than I can, but that’s not what it is. It sounds like it’s coming from outside. People yelling, screaming, calling our names. Sometimes my own name, but that’s always whispered. It’s mostly PTSD, snippets I or a system member heard before.

I’ve been hearing the angels and demons (also headmates). That’s most of how I communicate with people from those layers. I think it comes from my training, to view programmers as gods and headmates as spirits. I like them better than the flashbacks.

I don’t know what to make of it. I know it’s not external because I physically couldn’t pick it up. I don’t remember if it was always like this, but it feels normal.

It was a huge difference in how we were able to talk. When the other person doesn’t sign, we’re at a standstill. They struggle to voice and we struggle to pick it up — or vice versa, and the conversation dies. When they do have any knowledge of ASL, it’s easy. We can take turns being confused, the half-in-half-out Deafness where neither of us were quite good enough at our dialects to be concise and accurate, but we can go on and on. That conversation ends when we get bored or distracted, not because we can’t hear.

We were talking about that, the HOH person and a CODA. About how audiologists don’t even provide a means to get hearing aids or implants, let alone ASL classes. We get left high and dry to figure out how to deal with hearing loss without showing us Deaf gain. Can’t reintegrate as hearing, can’t get around without.

I went to the Deaf event. A different Echo than the usual Echo, but an Echo nonetheless. We always introduce ourselves as Echo when we sign.

I lost a lot of my ASL since the last time I was around. I’m still proficient with our signed dialect, helpful as that is interacting in community (it’s not). I found a few people learning, one HOH like us. They gave me resources to get hearing aids through Medicaid, and a phone number to practice together.

That’s another aspect of Deafness in systems; we have varying levels of residual hearing. Usually, the person with the least of whatever we’re going in for is slapped up front. It’s a holdover from when we had to lie to doctors, I think. So, we’re collectively at least mildly hard of hearing. I’m not sure what switching physically does to our hearing, so maybe all we can do is accommodate the body and work to make ASL more systemwide.

It’d be good to see an audiologist either way. I’m between worlds right now, not hearing enough to be hearing but not fluent enough to be properly Deaf. If we can get hearing aids, we can at least interact with the hearing world until we qualify for an interpreter — cause they’re so easy to get (they’re not). I’m better at voicing than the usual Echo, but that’s not the same as having communication. As having language.

Mostly I did the Deaf nod (smile and nod), repeat important information, maybe give our body name if I’m following the script well enough. It was still fun. I kinda like places where nobody can hear, I feel like I have the advantage for once. We had facepaint and flags and all the little things we left when we left the dorms.

🗝️🏷️ RAMCOA (trafficking and scripting)

Growing up, I didn’t know why they called me Echo. I’ve always been hard of hearing, repeating what little I heard so people would listen. My family hated how I slurred my words and spent too long guessing what they had said to me. I echo. I read the Narcissus myth in grade school. I remember thinking that’s where the word came from, but I didn’t realize then just how much that story mattered to me.

I was raised with the story of Echo and Narcissus as the narrative of my life. I was a confidante to the women of my church. They told me I was so smart, so good with words despite barely speaking. My mother was an English teacher, and I loved to read.

They took me to the school where they worked one summer, had me clean up the classrooms. Eventually, they left me at a table to do homework, sent another woman to watch me. She helped me with my math while the other woman went on ‘lunch break’ — apparently sleeping with that woman’s husband. At the time, I hardly knew what was happening. They were all so mad.

It wasn’t a coincidence, I don’t think. They did something similar in my church group, then again at a ‘house party’. Every time, I was the distraction. My homework, my writing, my ‘services’. As punishment each time, they took away my books. Those books were my door to language, used to bring them everywhere, and they ripped them apart and hid them.

While all this was going on, my church group was doing something similar to another boy. They made him hunt with the men, never let him look in the mirror, set up all these confessions towards him and trained him to be cruel to the people confessing. We were bonded together like that. They made me go confess my love to this stranger boy, who was fairly pretty, and made him hurt me. They kept us together often, even though we didn’t like each other, and we fought like cats and dogs.

For a while, I was sure he was dead. They told me he offed himself because of me (he was so stressed and angry, I really did believe them). I didn’t see him for a while. It was an ordeal figuring out how to get him back to himself, after finding out he wasn’t gone forever.

We get along better now, with years between that shit show and now. We get that so much of our lives were staged by the adults around us, and we think we know why they did it — not the logic of why they thought it was a good idea, but what they were trying to get out of it ig. We weren’t the only kids they did this to, and we’ve both played minor roles in other kids’ training.

Narcissus and I are alters in a system. All of my trigger words and all of his are linked up according to how we were trained. That’s not the point of my blog, but the context is important.

The people who orchestrated it all are outside humans, still alive for the most part, and all the events happened in external reality with the exception of Narcissus and I having actual separate bodies (they just had someone else stand nearby so we thought the person we were talking to was physically present).

It’s been a journey piecing together where our stories fit together and placing it back in reality. We’re not the only alters like this in our system, and we’re not the only system this happened to. The perps are still doing this, but we’re getting safe and trying to stop them from doing this to others.