The Secret Third Something Something

But recently, I've noticed a shift in my thought patterns. A version of me was being happy and sociable with one of our coworkers and even asked, boldly, if they could be friends outside of work. And I thought... wow, I'm so glad I have a part of me who's able to make friends so easily. And I paused and examined that thought, because it's true, and also, in that moment, that version of me didn't feel like a different person or a different alter or part or headmate or whathaveyou. That just felt like... an aspect of myself that I was able to express in that moment.

It's so wonderful to be able to actually feel connected to myself to the point all of the things that make up "me" and "us" feels like a part of me. Sure, I'm able to pinpoint which exact alter was likely most prominently interacting with that coworker at that moment. But also, I'm able to feel that the words and actions and intentions were my own.

Additionally, you are of no obligation to announce it to your audience like it was a sin, failure, or form of deception to your place in healing.

However, I was able to ask my partner, who's been with me since the beginning of this journey, to tell me what's changed in their perspective. They tell me that my day to day amnesia is significantly better: I'm much better at keeping track of things that I have done and things that I need to do, relying less on my notetaking apps and my alarms and calendars. And my moment to moment amnesia is a lot better, too. In the past, I would often "lose my train of thought" mid-conversation or mid-sentence and have to ask people to repeat for me what they just said or what the conversation was even about. I rarely have to ask people to repeat things for me now, unless my audio processing or my hearing loss gets in the way, but even then that's more about asking them to repeat a sentence instead of recapping a conversation we were in the middle of having.

It's been especially interesting comparing where I'm at in my healing journey to my partner who has only just recently hit system discovery. I see a lot of my own familiar past behaviors in them, how they space out mid-conversation and ask me what we were talkikg about, how they actively avoid thinking about difficult topics by distracting themselves, how they struggle recalling even basic things about their childhood or college days. College days that we shared together, that I can remember with clarity and nuance. And of course not everything about our experiences are the same, but... it's definitely a nice reminder to myself to see an example of where I was even just a few years ago, and where I am now.

1. 30s isn't that old

2. If I don't do it now, I'll still be doing it at 50

is it similar to how functional multiplicity is generally understood? is it more being able to work in harmony, while maintaining an individual identity? something else entirely?

thank you!

So historically, I've used the term "functional multiplicity" to encompass a pretty wide spectrum of my own experiences, from "I'm definitely still experiencing a lot of daily dissociation and my system is still very divided but I have strong coping skills and resources to manage it that I no longer am struggling and in fact am thriving despite all that" to "I am so incredibly fully integrated with every single part of me that I'm more or less a single identity, but I can still identify and even interface with the world as specific individual parts". And that latter one is more or less what I'd also call final fusion.

When I'm in a fully fused state, I feel connected to and in sync with all the other parts of me. It doesn't even really feel like "working together" because that implies we're putting in effort to communicate, it's more like we're all of the same mind and everything is automatic. I've used an analogy of comparing my experiences to individual atoms of water connected to each other all flowing together in the same direction without interruption, and that's still pretty akin to how I feel.

However, if I dig in deeper, I can definitely still see the individual parts of me, and I like being able to still notice these parts of me and honor their existence. Sometimes the me who interacts with the world is more Green-coded, so I'll tell everyone "hey guys I'm Green", while also knowing that just because I'm acting very Green-like doesn't mean I'm not also Cyan and Purple and Gray and everyone at the same time. Sometimes I will purposefully dig into my psyche to interact with the various versions of me internally to better understand myself.

I guess for me, once I hit a certain point of "functional multiplicity", the jump to "final fusion" was really more of a perspective shift than necessarily doing any more further integration. Do I see myself as various alters working together? Are these things that I'm experiencing something from another alter or do I accept that it's all me? And I regularly will go from one perspective to the other that FM and FF basically are two sides of the same coin for me and it's why I actually kind of hate using those terms for my own experiences. People often talk about FM and FF as if they're wholey separate end goals that you cannot possibly achieve at the same time, and that's likely due to the strict ISSTD guidelines for how FF is defined (which, in turn, is due to how narrowly Kluft defines Final Fusion). I honestly find this framework limiting as it doesn't allow for or encompass all the possible ways integration in DID can look. For me, I prefer to call it "full integration" - because at the end of the day, the divide between FM and FF feels so arbitrary to me that trying to pin myself as one or the other would actually do my experiences a disservice, and I feel like "full integration" encompasses both FF and FM experiences while also filling in that nebulous ill-defined middle area.