Discovering my DID

I walk in the door of our apartment, our home that we began building five years ago. She is sitting on the couch, arms crossed over her chest staring down at her phone. The pictures that hold memories of our wedding, our trips, our life together are gone. The gravity of this creates a weight in my chest that causes the air in the room to struggle to fill my lungs.

I don’t understand. I knew she was angry, knew she was upset, but I had no idea she was at this point. I had no idea that she was almost gone.

“I can’t do this anymore.” Her voice feels cold, but its slight shakiness tells me she has done her crying already. That the cool tone is not because she is cold and uncaring, but because she has nothing left. I don’t know how we got here. “I need to tell you something. I read your emails to your therapist. I know it was wrong, and that I shouldn’t have, but you stopped talking to me and I just wanted to understand. I just wanted to know what was going on. I know that you don’t really love me, and I know that you canceled your sessions with her.”

The knot in my chest tightens. I have no idea what she is talking about. I didn’t cancel sessions, and I certainly never told my therapist that I don’t love her.

“What are you talking about?” My voice is anything but cool. It is as shaky as my hands and it chokes on tears as it struggles to leave my body.

She rises from the couch and walks towards me as she looks at her phone. “I took a picture of it. I took a picture because I knew this would be hard, and I wanted to have a reminder of what you said if I started to feel like I couldn’t leave you.” She hands her phone to me. There is a photo of an email on a laptop screen. It is from my email to my therapist. The words in it are harsh, unfeeling, and words that I did not write.

Tears composed of a mixture of confusion and sadness spill down my cheeks as my body shakes. “I didn’t write that.” The words barely escape from my mouth.

She grabs my trembling hands and looks into my eyes; searching them for a sign that I am telling her the truth. She has proof in her phone that I am lying, but there is something that just doesn’t feel right. Something that doesn’t quite fit.

It was only two weeks ago that I had told her my diagnosis, one that neither of us fully understood until this moment, and the understanding of it forces the tears to swell in her eyes for the first time since I walked through our apartment door. I am telling her the truth, and despite the evidence to the contrary, evidence she saw with her own eyes, she knows it. In this moment, my dissociative identity disorder is now more than just a diagnosis. It is somehow more real, and although it had already been affecting our lives, we are just now realizing how. These parts of myself that helped me survive my abusive parents could no longer keep themselves hidden from me. They are no longer lurking in the shadows of my mind but making themselves known in the outside world. She pulls me close to her as we both cry. “It’s going to be okay. We are going to figure this out.”

It was at this point that I started working more intensively in therapy. I started meeting with my wonderful therapist on a daily basis, as she began to help me gain a better understanding of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). She explained to me that my brain developed different “parts” of myself, each of whom has their own job or role, but all of whom were formed to help me survive the trauma I endured as a child. She also works with my parts, trying to help them realize that I am no longer a child, no longer unsafe, no longer in need of their protection, and that it is time for all of us to communicate and work together.

I am still in the early stages of my healing. I still grapple with the confusion of seeing notes written in a child’s handwriting that came from my hands, and emails composed by a stranger that are sent from my email address to me, but for the first time in my life, I understand. I understand why I sometimes cannot remember conversations that people claim to have had with me. I understand why so many memories are hazy or feel as though they belong to someone else. I understand why there are periods of time in my life that I have absolutely no memory of. Those things are no longer unknowns that make me feel insane. They have a name, and with that name comes the realization that I am not alone. The road in front of me is a very long dirt road that will inevitably be filled with potholes, but I am on it, and I am not the first person to have traveled down it. There are others like me, and they have healed. They have survived, and they are happy. I will survive and I will be happy.