DID and work

Do you have an alter who goes to work, or a few, or do you just hope for the best?

I do landscape maintenance (mow lawns), and usually I am the one who is doing the work. But sometimes Aidan will (I like it when he works for me, because he doesn't try too hard [stress] like I do, so does a more efficient job). Niva is too destracted to do a good job, and gets really frustrated at herself when she makes mistakes. Ninchen helped me once, but the equipment is heavy for her and she can't do it because she's usually really upset/triggered when she comes out. Sonja rarely works for me (it's not fun), but she's almost always in the truck between site to talk to our coworkers (Aidan doesn't bother, which works out well because our coworkers are introverted).The depressive can't.

Generally speaking, there can be chaos in my head, and I can still do manual labour (and being outside is grounding, helps me be in control). I have a much lower tolerance for emotional/mental/intellectual/psychological stress, so school is a very intimidating concept (though Aidan helped me get straight As). I can't be in a high stress environment (I used to wash dishes - that was not good). Physical burnout is so much easier to deal with than emotional/mental burnout - I just eat and rest!

Angel: Eh, it sort of depends...Alexa and I do the driving, and often it's just easier to stay out than to go back in. I do handle things relating to public speaking, and some of us are better with kids than others, but other than that, it doesn't really matter. It depends on the job if we want to have a specific alter out for the job or not. Otherwise we just wing it. Hehe.

Thalyssa does our job mainly, but today I got through my very first shift all by myself
She has tried training Amy, Birch and me for the job, but she seems to be able to do it the best.

Back when we still worked, we hoped for the best. We weren't really aware of our DID back then and of course a lot of stuff that wasn't so good happened. Everyone came out, children who were actively looking for a mother figure in co-workers, aggressive, asocial, and overtly flirtatious members, overachievers, underachievers; It was in short a disaster. There was, depending on the job we did, a few who would 'usually' do the job, but all the other ones were just a trigger away too. I didn't notice the triggers nor the identity changes. This left me with a lot of shame and fear over returning to the work-floor.
In regards to being able to control switching, not much has improved yet especially in the dangerous outside world with triggers all around, so I'm guessing it would still be more or less that way, if I were to return to work now. At this moment both school and work would be too much for me cause of triggers, energy-/pain-levels, big intelligence-/skill-fluctuations, shame/social anxiety, and learned hatred for 'work/duty'. My therapist agrees with my decision not to work, and said that not working helps keeping me stable just as I thought so. Some of us really would like to work or go to school though, but I know that I just can't handle it. I really hope that some day I can.

Sounds like how things were in the kitchen (as a dishwasher) for me: Chaos. We all showed up at work, but I wasn't aware of us/what was going on (I was not able to front for most of my life due to social anxiety). Ninchen would freeze up and get triggered and render the body mute or blind or deaf. niva would HATE the depressive, *TW* would burn her throughout the day. Sonja would cheerfully talk to our coworkers. Aidan would do much of the work (niva too, or she'd make the depressive do it for her)... It was not good. Know that I was also unable to work for a long time, and am still not able to go to school, but I am now ale to work full time .

Ever since my teens I have maintained two parallel and largely unrelated career paths. I always wondered why that was. Now I know. One is my own and one is Alter 2's. Doh. Now we are considering ways to integrate the two paths, rather than continue flip-flopping between them.

With our previous job in a store, Maya did most of the selling and Demi the other things. Now we have to do some public speaking once in a while, it is dependant of the subject but mostly Claire (psychological things) and Jeff (astronomical things) do it.

With the future job we have in mind (Psychological researcher), Claire will do the most I think.

We work in a highly-skilled role in a demanding, high-workload, killer deadlines, high-accuracy requirements, heavily regulated, ever changing but also friendly and supportive office environment. We are freaking lucky: No politics in our department. Our colleagues are pretty darn understanding. Though they don't know we are a System they understand that we have some "anxiety" issues. Our manager knows we get flashbacks and is very understanding as had traumatic childhood too. So we lucked out big time basically.

The job is demanding to say the least but equally rewarding. It's varied enough so there is an aspect suited to each of the ANPs. Though some of us do miss manual and customer facing work. Generally Mal, Odessa and Rae go to work. Sometimes one of us will come Out for a specific task, sometimes one of us will stay Out all day.

We are also lucky in that we lose very little time outright (a few minutes here and there.. whateva) and share many skills. Generally we have a vague sense of what others have done, we just haven't got much detail.

We keep calendar reminders galore - leave each other notes and step by step guides for tasks others might not be familiar with. Some simple tasks we save up for days when we are capable of nothing else. Luckily our manager is very understanding of the concept of "off days" where complex tasks are not an option and does not mistake this for laziness.

Now that we are in closer contact with our younger System members, we carry small toys we can hold in our hand without garnering too much attention from colleagues for when we get overwhelmed and the Small ones are close to the Front. Luckily we haven't really had the kids come Out unsupervised. I say "not really" because before we were fully aware of being a System we have had a couple of close calls, angry outbursts, over-reactions.. not since the very beginning of the year though. So fingers crossed. No written warnings yet - I have worked in this role for a few years and we have messed up - but these outbursts and "out of character" behaviour is infrequent enough to be put down to stress and thus far.. forgiven :S

They do come out though, the Littles. But we are lucky (once again) that there is always at least one adult close-by who is able to take over if the $#%^ hits the fan. Generally though we are able to ride it out rather than push the kid back inside. They don't come out unless they are feeling absolutely terrible as they know how important our job is. So I just leave them to hold on to their favourite toy until they are ready to go back Inside.

We have two System members who think of themselves as adults some days but are, for the most part, children (Inside you can watch them grow and shrink depending on their emotional state.. it's intriguing). So they may come out for short periods at work and actually perform simple tasks all the while holding on to a toy. Of course this is also where we get emotionally volatile and the Part "riding shotgun" has to be really careful we don't end up getting ourselves in trouble. This only becomes a problem nowadays if we are unaware of the Switchover and don't notice Idris or Mara are Fronting until they go into meltdown mode.

Funsies.

The job we have now is done by me, the host, though we wish we could spread out the responsibility. Now I know who I am as an alter and what my experiences were as a kid (like losing time, which I forgot), I am shocked at how quintessentially me my current career is. It doesn't really work for any of the other alters and I question it for myself now that I know how I was pulled towards this particular work because of what it represented to me: safety and sanity. Jonathan has stepped in a few times as an experiment and when I've gotten emotionally overwhelmed. Unfortunately, my performance and relationships with others at work has depended to a large degree on my personality and Jonathan can't and doesn't want to do all the schmoozing and joking. Nobody does. Dan and Quato freakin' hate this job and the fact that we keep doing it. So it really has to be mostly me at work, whether any of us like it or not.

Jonathan appreciates the fact we're in academia but doesn't love the job. Years ago, he drove me/us to get a job on Wall Street. Shortly after he went into hibernation, I thought "why was I so driven to move to NYC and do all this" and I moved away. We know Jonathan could manage a job of his own but nobody has the life experience I do. He'd definitely make us more money because that's a key focus for him. What we need to do is integrate and then figure out if we can make this job work or do something else. Several of us wish we would go into farming; they truly love plants, soil and farm animals. I myself once took a career affinity test and agriculture ranked absolute last as I recall.

Aaron and Marc are adults but two of our least experienced alters. They would need a LOT more time in the body to carry off a job and that's been given mostly to our many littles so they can heal -- and have fun that can balance the drudgery part of work, since I apparently don't know how to do that.

This is actually a big problem facing my SO at the moment. One of his main alters wants to stay in the career path he's in now, the others pretty much all want out. He's got the two main that mostly make decisions and they have different opinions right now on what to do. But none of them have any sort of long term plan or desires, other than a house and a dog. And a cat, apparently. And the desire for space of his own, albeit in a shared house/apartment. Very much not... detailed, I guess. Not definite enough. I want to help him get this, and there's vague plans for us to be moving together when I'm resettled in a few months, but in the meantime he's hit essentially a crisis point in terms of his career and future plans. And I've not got much of any idea how to help him