The Road Goes Ever, Ever On (Theta's Journey)

Thank you. There are days it seems overwhelming, and the traumas are hard to process sometimes.

We had something positive show up in our life today, though. A friend we haven't really talked to in a long time said something that bordered on flirtation. She lives across the country now and we haven't talked to her fully in a long time. However, all of our memories about her are positive even if the time around it was not great. Thing is, she knows us from before we transitioned and she is a kind and sweet person still.

We've decided to contact her to talk to her more. Who knows what will happen. Thing is...six months ago, we wouldn't have even considered this.

This is Vi and being very separate from everyone else in this comment...

I've been feeling like, over the last six months, I'm actually trying to and being overwhelmed by trying to rebuild my life.

I feel like I've come home from a long stint away only to have to try and rebuild. I have access to a lot of memories over the last couple years, but I start looking for things that I wanted to get and realize they're gone. Then I get a message from Beth about how 'oh, that was useless, so I got rid of it'. I had to rescue stuff from the 'donation' piles because Beth put them there then the world went sideways and we coudln't donate anything.

I realize now that I have been away from the front for a long time. It's only been within the last two years that I returned to being host. I have access to some memories and I was out while doing college work (which involved writing).

I see that I've started to have to accept that the DID was a lot more prevalent than I expected and that switches were happening a lot more than I knew about. I'm also the 'new' host. Bri and Beth have both hosted in the past, I know that much.

We crashed today...we realized that we'd been so stressed out over the last few days that our body became really wound up. Worse, we confirmed that we switched repeatedly over the last four days, and not just me or Vi, but over the course of four days half our system co-fronted. We're used to three or four of us switching in over the course of a week. Vi didn't even want to eat dinner today.

I don't think we've appreciated how ragged switching so often makes us.

Pippa.

IMO it's not directly the rapid switching that is exhausting. IMO the rapid switching is just the last and most visible link of a chain of events which are all exhausting.

Dissociation tends to hide a lot of things. Especially the stressful things. They are painful to face/feel so dissociation hides them to protect us. So we see them only when they reach the "unbearable" level and they cannot be hidden anymore.

Lately I have become aware of a LOT of things that dissociation kept hidden because it was too overwhelming to manage all of these little things together with the rest of my life. My brain decided they were not a priority and kept them hidden. Now that I am more able to juggle many things, the smaller ones become visible. (A completely random example: one of my fave cosmetic shops is very very expensive for average to low quality products, but I could not see it because the layout of the shop and designs of the packagings is so satisfying for my autistic and ADHD brain, + other commercial things they do right like "permanent sales".) ("permanent sales" in reality means they label the real price as "sales" price, and write double the price on the side with "old price" written across it - it tricks the brain into thinking everything is cheap while in fact, it is not, the real price I pay every time is double the one of other shops of the same quality)

Okay my example is a bit long. It is a very very small detail compared to the other, big, trauma related things I have to manage everyday. So, why waste energy on thinking about this shop's commercial strategy when I have bigger fishes to catch/fight with? Dissociation hid this shop's issues so that I can have more brain power to focus on bigger things.

I feel like something similar is happening to you with the rapid switching. There is a lot of small things that are piling up, but your brain hides them because, bigger things to think about - but all the small things piling up lead to very lots of stress and rapid switching and exhaustion. But the only thing you see of this big pile is the rapid switching on the top of it.

This was Theia speaking. Long time not putting my nose in the lives of others outside! Hope you are doing well!

And now back to the studio!

Thank you Theia,

There were a lot of stressors that came from outside where we live and it just caused havoc. You're right that the switches can be a part of the symptoms of the stress and anxiety, but it just seems to add in a little more stress since not all of us are capable of handling the outside world very well but as things overwhelmed Pippa and I, others came out to front to try and relieve the pressure. It's going to take days for the body to recover from what happened and some of us are currently sleeping because of what this did.

Last night, I spent somewhere close to half an hour getting Marcie to calm down and rest because this sent her into a massive panic attack. She hates it when the body is ill in any way because of what happened to her. Once she was calm, I fell asleep and didn't get up until the cats said "wake up and feed us".

At least the worst of the stress is now passed and I've reconnected with my friend.

Vi.

Today's subject is 'gaps'...

I realized today that, other than simple foods, I (Vi) don't really know how to cook very well. I keep getting told about how I used to watch tonnes of TV shows about cooking and was an excellent cook and now? I can't access any of it. I don't even remember doing it. If I try to do anything more complex than cooking simple faire, i just screw up royally. Like, I have tried making stew twice and just couldn't get it right. I tried doing stir fries and screwed them up too.

I keep finding gaps not just in my memories, but in my skill sets. I have started to wonder if the reason I can't find them any more is that, after coming to terms with having DID my entire system stopped trying to be covert and it caused a 'reset' with some of us getting lost again. I've read about how systems can, sometimes, realign and restructure, and I'm starting to think that when this happened to us, some parts got temporarily misplaced.

Another hypothesis is: now that you are more aware of DID, you no longer hide the screw ups under amnesia.

In the past I have had people compliment me for picking up skills real fast or go all drama queen about me "loosing" a skill real fast. In both situations I just stared blankly at them and answered "but I always had this level of skills". (Which in turn confused them even more - or lead them to deduce that I was always making fun of them.)

It took me "becoming aware of DID" to be able to become aware of my on-and-off skills too.

That's part of it. I did discover that one of our alters does have slightly better knowledge about cooking than I do, but mostly because she has a keen interest in herbs and spices. Mostly what she knows is 'if you have X issue eat Y herb/spice'. You are right that it may just be I was blanking the problems I used to have. There's a lot of gaps still that I keep finding in my memory up until recently. I'm more aware of the dissociation episodes now and work to ground myself so that I don't blank things out entirely.

On a different note...I've been fielding a lot of questions about DID from friends. There's curiosity and I've been willing to answer. One of the questions force me to realize that the music hall where we all live inside the inner world has five stories and excluding the 'public' area, there are four apartments behind each level. It hasn't changed any in seven months. That leaves four apartments unoccupied. One is permanently unoccupied until Marcus is willing to rejoin the system peacefully. One is unoccupied until Keira is no longer needed to separate Marcus from the system. That leaves two more. I'm not going to worry about whether or not there are alters who should live there.

Things are returning to normal physically and within the system itself.

Sometimes it feels hard to be strong and I'm scared.

Vi's here, but she can't really help. And I should put up a trigger warning.

Trigger warning for sexual stuff

Vi tried to talk to Marcus. I don't want her to try. I don't want anyone to try. He liked to torment me, and the things he did were awful.

It's been so very, very long since I was raped, but Marcus took glee in recreating it for me. Time and time again. The others became aware of it finally and knew it wasn't a 'dream', but I am scared of him being set free. He'll hurt me again.

I'm sorry to write this. I need to.

Pippa.

I'm sorry for the meltdown last night. We've worked things out and are better.

I guess I still have more work to do with my own traumas before I'm better too.

Pippa.