by TheGangsAllHere » Fri Nov 25, 2022 6:38 pm
We don't have anyone anywhere close to the body's age. We've started telling people that "I don't identify with my chronological age," because if people's gender preference and pronouns can be respected, I think how young or old you feel can be respected also.
For us, it feels like we were hiding by being in school and then being a mom. We were always scared of the choices and life decisions you have to make and so we just avoided making them (but then life happens anyway and you keep getting older, regardless).
But a few years ago when we started taking community college classes, we started feeling like we could finally handle being in our 20s (now, decades later...). All those things that seemed impossible then, like getting an apartment, having roommates, figuring out what we wanted to do with our life--we finally felt emotionally stable and secure enough that we could imagine that. It's too late to actually do that--we have a house, and a husband, and grown children. But we enjoy and get along with people who are in their late teens and 20s.
We can also get along with people in their 50s and 60s and relate to some of the things they talk about, but more about situations in their lives--not things having to do with age; just things having to do with having been alive for a certain amount of time. There's a big difference.
I think our oldest alters are in their 20s. It's kind of murky and undefined. I think we have an ageless information bank kind of alter, and we know things from the 1960s, 70s, 80s etc because we were around then, but that alter isn't a specific age.
I don't know if it's a DID thing. We've been wondering if we also have autism recently. I know our emotional and social development was very delayed. And we skipped a grade in school, which made things even harder for us. We're also more fit and active than most people our age, on average, although we live in a city where a lot of people like that seem to live.
We took a community college class about a year ago, when some in-person classes resumed. It was a movement class where we learned and practiced a lot of different kinds of dance and other kinds of movement like karate kata and other focused sequences like that. There were about a dozen people in the class and our body was more than 30 years older than the other students and a few years older than the teacher, but energy and ability-wise, we fit right in and had a lot of fun. It felt like where we were meant to be.
Just a couple of days ago we went on a hike, and instead of being with the two people who were about our chronological age, we walked with the people who were 22-30 years old. We had more in common with them, and could relate to the topics they were talking about.
Anyway, I've seen other systems post about having alters that are all much younger than the chronological age, so I don't think it's very unusual. And I agree with Dwelt that it's probably analogous to things that singletons go through, but of course with DID everything is more complicated and things that are more fluid and more easily changed and shifted for a singleton are more separated and rigid for someone with DID, I think.