Diagnosis

we hope everyone is doing good (or at least decently, since we sometimes read posts and know not everyone is doing too well unfortunately...) and want to apologize in advance for the length of this post, because we know it's going to be long. we just had a couple things to say since we just got out a pretty important therapy session.
I'm going to talk from my (Mi) point of view on the situation, but I know others are feeling the same way, too. that's why I mostly use we instead of I.

***TW: mention of suic*dal thoughts and ideation for pretty much the whole post***
we've been in therapy non-stop since we were 13 (and not 14 like we had always thought. thanks brain for having no sense of time at all). we're 20 now, almost 21, and we have, in total, seen 5 different therapists. thanks to one of our old social media, we found out we have had suicidal thoughts and ideation from when we were 12, and that we would explicitly hate our mom and would have liked for her not to exist anymore (no thoughts on our dad since he was always out of the picture).
we've been extremely depressed, but forced to be functional by her and by the fact that not being functional would have meant more abuse. same goes with anxiety: the more anxiety we'd show, the more we were either mocked, or forced into situations because of it. then, there was the dissociation: not knowing who I was, feeling like I was constantly in a dream, feeling like other people were not real, feeling like everything was just behind a thick fog that would just never go away. we would cry ourselves to sleep every night for years because the more we asked for help, the more doctors would either dismiss it as adolescence, or as lack of iron, or therapists would just label us as "too high functioning" to even consider what we were saying. then, it came the simil-psychotic episodes (which now I know weren't psychotic): I would feel people following me behind my shoulders like ghosts, I would feel like my hands were someone else's, I would "contact" people from higher dimensions to talk to me and write down stuff with my hand, allowing them to "possess" me.
therapists knew about all of this. they knew and they didn't do anything about it for years, leaving us to deal with it ourselves and pretend like nothing wrong was happening when we would feel like ending it every day, and sometimes came very close to doing it, so much that one of them had told our mom to hide the sleeping pills somewhere were we wouldn't find them, but still didn't do anything to tackle the problem and help us understand.
fast forward to 18, we're moving out to another country because simply being home has become a burden.

at the start of 2018 we found out about DID/OSDD and a new world opened up for us. some more obscure parts came to light and we found ourselves struggling to understand anything about it, because it had become overwhelming keeping track of everyone's needs, problems, and personalities. still, we managed to live through that year in isolation, filled with depression, anxiety, dissociation and suicidal ideation. we almost tried once, but gave up soon after hoping there could still be something that could be done to heal.
we start working with another (our actual) therapist, get diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and finally had the courage to talk to her about us and the possibility that we were multiple. for the first time, she listend and worked with us towards understanding the situation. we still couldn't shake off the depression and anxiety, but at least we knew that someone was finally on our side.

summer of 2019 happens, and I wake up from being dormant and become the host. I don't suffer from depression, so that one was gone (at least for me and some of the others) the same day I woke up in the body. anxiety subsided bit by bit, and even though we still suffer from it now, it is bearable. dissociation also subsided, and it's not at all present like it was before. we don't have major amnesia episodes anymore, even though we're still forgetful (probably not connected to dissociation, maybe sometimes to switching). we're "sane", we're healthy, we're functional. we're also kind of happy (I am, at least; others are way better than they were before, too). we MADE this happiness for ourselves, trying and trying to see what worked and what not. acceptance of us gave us so much power over our mental states that we're not scared of falling into stressful situations anymore. it gave us identity, purpose, and reason for everything we have/are experiencing.

now, we finally decide to do the SCID-D with out therapist. being the new host, I remember little of the past years, and also remember little of our childhood, even though I was present. also, we're all aware of each other and are functional, so obviously it's weird replying to some questions and always tie them back to before we knew about us. ending the SCID-D, our T rightfully tells us that we probably don't meet the criteria for the disorder right now, but that we could have surely been diagnosed with OSDD/DID the year before I woke up.
we expected that, and she knew we expected that, and she also knows we don't need a diagnosis for her to treat us like we are multiple.
but that made us so angry at all the people who were supposed to help us, but didn't. if it weren't for some people in our lives and our logical thinking even in the worst times, we wouldn't be here today. we would have made everyone around us suffer, and we wouldn't have known happiness until now. we wouldn't have continued out studies and met some of the best people we know. our life would have ended miserably, because even though we spent every single day asking for help, we kept on being dismissed. people kept telling us that nothing was wrong, making excuses like "you're a melancholic personality" "you have brief psychotic episodes" "every teenager feels that way sometimes", and so on. bombarding us with the message that it wasn't bad enough for them to pay attention to us, which is the same exact message our parents would give us when we would tell them we weren't feeling well, and they would play it off like we were exaggerating. we would always try to justify them because they were authorities, educated people there to help me. and I'm sure they did try: they just did it in the worst possible ways.

and now we're here, not "bad enough" again to be diagnosed, but we're completely okay with it because at least someone finally recognized that what we were going through was real. we weren't just a moody teenager that "just" needed more intimacy in their life. it's so good to know that now.
so, we don't think we'll get the diagnosis because me and Xavier both don't experience that much dissociation at all, and we're pretty trauma-free parts and don't switch that frequently at all with the others except for Angelo, who's got his problems but is stable enough. we're happy and we have accepted who we are, so it's not really a disorder at the moment, since the only trauma responses we get are from things that we really try to avoid: we don't get intimate with people at all, we don't remember any of the abuse that went on if not conceptually, and our mother has changed for the better. but at least we know who we are.

thank you for reading, just wanted to put it out there.

Thank you for writing it! If you wrote it, it must have needed to really come out, and um, 'enjoyed' isn't the right word because that would sound wrong, but we were very interested in reading it and we're sorry for all the bad you had to go thru but you all sound like you're in a way better place now and that sounds like things are really good atm.

The fogs and the hands being controlled by someone else and stuff that all really spoke to us OMG we would sometimes just go months and months of walking around like we like used to say like our brain was wrapped in cotton. It's like yeah, everything is a dream. You brought back a lot of memories of feeling the ways that you described. You sure aren't alone in that.

Glad you didn't kill yourself! We think that a lot of times when there's lots of anxiety that people will um, want to run away from their anxiety and it's like it's not really like we want to kill ourselves but there's parts of us that think about suicide a lot. It's not like, it's serious or nothing (so people don't be reporting us I mean it ) it's just like when you feel trapped in fear and there's no where to go it's like the brain just tries to think of a way to escape and that's all it comes up with. We got used to it and we don't like, let it bother us. I mean like yesterday our host was out and he did something that's really just silly (he scratched some paint, I told you it was silly) and he kept thinking about killing himself over it. Retarded stuff like that.

But that's what anxiety does to you. Not saying that was what you were going thru but it might have been part of it, people who are super anxious do that, I mean a lot of people over in the OCD forum will say they just want to kill themselves and we're like naw Boo you're just scared is all just try to hang in there and it will get better, 'cause it's like you're trying to run away from yourself, and that's all the brain can think of. 'Cause we can't really run away from ourself wherever you go, there you are.

I mean with our anxious part it happens so much it's like we're all yeah whatever you'll get over it. And he does. It's like static when you're trying to listen to the radio it annoys the hell out of you but you get used to it if you have to hear it long enough. And then it's not a big deal anymore 'cause you know it's just so much noise in your head.

But we're glad the noise doesn't bother you as much any more.