Strange Loops, ad Infinitum

Hey followers -

I started this blog for two reasons - firstly to try to figure out what I thought was a distinct aspect of my head, and two, to represent my understanding of that issue in a clear and hopefully helpful way to both the community and the internet at large.

Since then, I have made a lot of progress understanding things, but also things have changed so much that all my progress seems tiny in comparison. I have also learned that this issue is about as far from "distinct" as possible. It is interconnected with my mood, my thought patterns, the way I was raised, and my neurotype in other ways. Trying to understand it in any kind of isolation is, ultimately, a flawed endeavor. I have learned a lot of things, some things through methods I would have preferred not to experience. I have learned what it like to lose all the structure your brain has built. I have learned what plurality did for me and what happens when that is taken away. I have gained a lot of insight into my own memories, thoughts and fears. 

But outside the confounds of this blog, I have also learned a lot, which makes me think that continuing to try to think about plurality in more of a vacuum is unwise. I've learned that my childhood and my parents were not as "normal" as I had previously believed, not by uncovering memories, but by speaking to people whose job it was to see unhealthy patterns. I have learned that the way my brain works, thinks, and functions, is abnormal, beyond just anxiety and mood - that I fall somewhere on the autism spectrum and that my mind has trouble with anything between abstraction and minutia on a testable, documentable level. I have learned that in relation to my moods, I am in stranger territory that I previously imagined, and I really do not know what all of this means to my mind, let alone what my plurality and dissociation are and were when I started this blog.

Recently, I found I may have more physical pain issues that I previously knew about which adds another layer to pretty much everything.

In terms of the latter goal, I have not been part of any multiplicity or dissociation community for about 2 years now. I have said what I wanted to say. I am not going to get rid of anything on here and I continue to encourage anyone to link back to any of the posts on here, to use my explanations and answers as you will, against trolls, but more importantly, against people who need them. When I tapped back into the community, I found that, if anything, it had gotten more resistant to scientific explorations, more unwelcoming to naturalistically minded members, and more confrontational in general towards anyone who disagrees with anything. So, all this said, I am letting this blog go quiet. I, however, am not leaving the site. I am taking all of my neurological and psychological strangeness and putting it together, as it probably should have been from the start, on one blog. I will be talking about multiplicity, about dissociation, but also about the rest of the strange deal that goes on in my brain. There will still be quotations and pictures - I will still answer asks - but I am going to try to put it all together. Like I said, this blog is not going away. If things change again, out here or in my head, it will be here if I feel the need to come back, and it will stay here for you to reread and link to. 

It's been a long time since I got one of these. I doubt anon will ever check the blog to even see if I replied, but hey, why not flex these old muscles.

It is clear to me, Anon, that you chose my blog at random to send this hate to, because I have explained many times that I understand multiplicity to be an entirely cognitive phenomenon - my brain compartmentalizing aspects of myself, thoughts, reactions, etc.

I cannot speak for other minds - no one can, it's a huge psychological and philosophical problem, actually, but for me, multiplicity came about because my brain is abnormal in other ways. Again, I have told this story on my blog before, but in summary, bipolar mixed episodes can get so bad that you start blanking out and losing control. Are you going to tell me that that is also a fantasy? Because that is what led to the fracturing, or controlled fracturing, of what I call the Median on this blog. When I was, in the same episode, about to hurt myself very badly, a character I had been using in my head as a way to cope, talking to, confessing to, even talking with, but at the time still understood as a fiction, exerted enough control to stop me from hurting myself.

Following this pseudo reification, if you will, my brain quickly did the same sort of thing for others. Because having someone internally to turn to when you are out of control is amazing. And having someone to tell you your depressive thoughts are irrational is helpful. And having someone who can actually reach out and take the harmful objects out of your hands is even better. And someone who can mentally sit next to you during a high anxiety situation or remind you of self care. Or pull you out of other kinds of dissociative spells, where you find yourself just staring at the running water in the sink, or more or less collapsed on the grass. Someone to go "hey, what are we doing exactly?"

And to be honest, anon, I still thought of them as a fiction. For years. And in a sense, still do. But I think of myself, this main personality of main personalities as an equal level of fiction, really. Any collection of traits and thoughts and ideas that we call a personality or a person in the brain, scientifically, is a crafted fiction. The fact that I think of myself, as Phi as the same from one moment to the next, as far as science can tell, is just as fictional as the fact that sometimes, there is another person or collection of traits and interests and thoughts who my brain thinks of as Erena from one moment to the next.

In closing, I just saw a new Psychologist/Psychiatrist this week. That's right anon, I am in treatment. Have been since kindergarten. And I told her all of this, more or less, about how I had these other people, about how they could help me at times, about how the different parts of myself were fragmented and sometimes would take over but also afforded me knowledge of which parts needed what for comfort. Not only was she not disgusted by this system I had in place, she seemed more concerned when I told her it had failed. She said it "made sense" and "sounded like it helped a lot." I told her that the medicine that I took 2 years ago bulldozed this whole system I had in place and that it was horrible. And you know what she called that medication change, in reference later? She called it "disastrous." Not even when talking to me, when talking to my mother who doesn't even know any of this.