zmeydros
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Multiple Personalities, Better Life
🕑 Added 2024-12-03 19:21:57 +0000 UTCThis gives some background about our multiple personality discovery and is written with "I" pronouns until the multiple personality element gets more directly dealt with. Down in "Issue #2" there's some new info about us being five personalities now. We're extremely stable and it's very unlikely we will split more at this point.
When I was very young, I used to talk to myself a lot. People thought it was a normal thing I was doing until they noticed how much I was doing it and that something about it gave them an odd feeling. So I eventually stopped to appear more normal.
In addition to talking to myself, I had an imaginary dragon friend who I had a deeper relationship with than other kids had with their imaginary friends. This imaginary friend would often play with me and interact in ways that were indistinguishable from a whole other person and shi was very feminine. I eventually stopped interacting with hir because people told me it was a thing I needed to grow out of.
Until one year ago, I'd struggled with something called "cognitive efficiency." Cognitive efficiency is the speed at which your brain can recall memories and figure stuff out. It is measured in the IQ test by giving someone many little problems to solve and then seeing how quickly they get through them. I was terrible at this because I had extreme lag when trying to access my memory. Multiplication tables, equations, facts, skills, and even memories from my own life would take multiple seconds for me to recall. Even shopping for groceries took at least double the time it should have.
Some people assumed, because of my pauses when I tried to recall something, I was making up lies and they weren't completely wrong. Sometimes, for me to be able to keep up with a conversation, I had to tell someone the most likely thing I thought had happened instead of what actually happened. Making up believable stories took a lot less time than referencing my memory.
It was so bad that I really struggled with humor, especially referential humor. People thought I didn't have a sense of humor beyond random silly stuff I did that made everyone laugh. The memory lag I had screwed up the timing of nearly every joke that could be told or made.
Writing was great for me because it allowed my brain to freely think through scenarios and gradually draw on my memory, not forcing certain things to the surface on short notice. Other tasks, like cooking, making art, fixing things, playing music meditatively (making up melodies and songs instead of trying to remember them), and extemporaneous public speaking, all worked well for me for the same reason.
This was my life until a year ago when I discovered the two main issues that were causing all this difficulty.
Issue #1: I needed estrogen, badly.
Toward the end of September 2023, I reignited my relationship with Akikotigress (the amazing trans herm tigress I've been making frequent visits to LA to see). She'd been on estrogen for two years (one of our stories is what broke her trans egg) and had some extra estrogen tablets. Knowing estrogen only makes changes in one's body from continued use, she knew that it was safe for me to try putting one under my tongue. Trusting her and having had a lot of support from Saravixen (my wife), I tried it. The whole scoop on that is already covered in another journal post.
Issue #2: I was trying to live as one being when I was actually five.
Before my September trip to LA, I wrote the story "Prehensile Herm Sleepover" and in that story I introduced a character named Sadie.
Not long after I finished that story, Sadie started talking to me and had a personality that reminded me of both Alexi Tishen (the sona I had for over a decade) and my childhood imaginary friend. Just like Alexi, shi was dominant, confident, and preferred to use shi/hir. I first described hir to Sarah and Akiko as an "advanced imaginary friend," but Akiko had experience with multiple personalities and suggested that Sadie was an alter.
The idea terrified me. But I had to know what was going on and let Sadie take control of our body right before we went on the LA trip.
For the first time in my life, I didn't have control of how our body moved or what we said.
It didn't last particularly long because Sadie had trouble staying in front (being fronted is a term for being in the driver's seat). We later figured out that it's because Sadie needs estrogen in our system to be okay and alters need to gradually gain stamina for being in the front.
During the trip to LA that followed, Ramda came out who had a lot of the same personality traits as, and looked like, Captain Ramda Uweko from "Remiel's Fall From Grace." She even remembered writing that story with Elara.
Over the months that followed, Hazel and Mae also emerged. For those of you that remember Mabel, well, Mabel is now named Hazel because Mae thought she was Mabel for a bit. Turns out Hazel (the original Mabel) was still there, we'd just lost track of her. She reemerged a couple months after Mae emerged, surprising everyone.
Once they fully established themselves, the cognitive lag we'd had all our life cleared up to the point that we could understand humor and didn't take forever to do lots of little tasks.
Now that five individuals are not trying to all drive this body and mind at the same time, things are way less anxious, confusing, and slow. We can keep up with humor and can do most things anyone else does without our brain lagging behind.
All five personalities can share skills, memories, and to some degree, emotions with each other. We are aware of each other and interact a lot. In some ways, we're never alone.
How did our body end up with five personalities? We experienced an immense amount of trauma growing up. Our sister was extremely emotionally unstable and physically abused us while also trying to emotionally manipulate us. Our parents had serious anger problems. We never felt safe and we had to hide our emotions from everyone. Little did we know that stuffing strong emotions into nooks and crannies in our mind would cause our mind to split apart into more personalities.
Officially, we have a diagnosis of OSDD-1b "Multiple Personalities without amnesia between them." (That part of our record is sealed, though, because of the stigma around multiple personality individuals.)
So yeah, we kinda had to go insane to become sane and functional. Emotions move through us a lot more freely, our mind is healthy for the first time in our life, HRT has given us tits and enhanced the already feminine shape of our body, and we are looking forward to living the rest of our life on normal hard mode instead of ultra hard mode.
Click here to learn about all five of us.
Comments
Zmeydros
Ramda: You're welcome! Our existence is exceedingly strange, but it's functional and often quite fun.
Zmeydros
Ramda: Our voices and personalities are different enough that loved ones can tell who's fronting and even tell when two alters are mixing at the front.
megadeamon
I'm so curious on how ure loved ones see this and if they know who is leading the conversation
Lupusvir
It's interesting to hear this. To me, it's incredibly odd. But when it's explained it just shows me how strange people can be. Thanks for sharing, helps me understand things just a bit more.
