This is part One of my DID diagnosis. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.
I was asked earlier about the first time I experienced a DID episode. That is difficult to pinpoint, but I can talk about when it became apparent enough that a psychiatrist finally diagnosed it and what life was like up to that point.
I was a “sensitive” child. Prone to stress easily and often on edge, usually for no reason. I would sit and stress out about everything to the point that I detached from myself. One of the few memories I still have from childhood are these vivid out-of-body experiences beginning at about 7 years old. At the time I thought I must be a super psychic or something. I would be sitting and literally feel like I floated out of myself and looked around the room from above it, once even seeing myself in the room. (I’m not sure how to explain that part unless it was my mind constructing what the room must look like). Things were foggy like there was a cloud around me and I couldn’t control myself anymore, so I just watched instead. It would fix itself eventually and I would soon forget about it. I never told anyone about it because even as a child I knew it sounded insane.
That happened a less as I aged and was replaced by amnesia or missing time as I called it. As I went into my adolescence, I started losing small chunks of time like entire school days for example. At that point I just thought I was good at daydreaming because I hated school. I felt that I didn’t fit in and I didn’t keep many friends. The amnesia was great during the day, but awful at night because I never got any work finished in class and after missing the lecture I didn’t understand the homework. I didn’t know how to explain it to my parents, so they thought I was just lazy or unmotivated to do my work. I even had a teacher tell me once that other teachers warned them about how I would sit and refuse to work in class, to which I was totally confused because I felt I was trying my best. I made decent grades and passed except for one year, but things only got worse as I aged.
By high school it got so bad that I transitioned to homeschooling due to a diagnosis of anxiety and depression by a psychiatrist. At home my head stayed clearer and I obsessively did school work, finishing all 4 years of high school in a year and a half, by myself other than some math tutoring, and finishing with a 4.9 GPA and proving that whatever my problem was, it was not academic.
Skipping ahead for a minute, this may seem like it has nothing to do with my DID diagnosis, but each of these problems that cropped up over the years was a different symptom of DID making itself known as it progressed. At first, they thought I was just too sensitive. As I aged, they assumed I became lazy and then it was assumed to be caused by depression.
During this time, I had at least one altar, Cid, that came out though I was unknown to everyone, even me. In later counseling sessions it was discovered that he first came to be when I was 5 years old. I don’t know why. It’s usually caused by something extremely traumatic, but if something happened, I can’t remember whatever it was. That’s what they’re for, to hide the bad things. He has never told what it was or why he came to be. He says he doesn’t want to talk about it; he just is and that’s good enough. He or another went to school for me all those times I couldn’t remember the day. He is good at pretending to be me when he needs to be, so if it was him at school the teachers assumed it was me. He still comes out when I’m stressed and is the most active other than myself, the host though as an adult he has more distinctive personality traits from me. It was he who finally told a counselor who he was and began the path to diagnosis, which I will talk about in the next post.
Definitive DID 