I have learned that I have DID. There’s like 52+ personalities in this skull apparently. Some dudes, some chicks, some who don’t care to gender themselves. The main issue is - I don’t have cohesive memories. And I act a lot of different ways and don’t know it. DID is believed to be caused by early childhood trauma, and it is not in the realm of psychosis but more of a neurodevelopmental thing as a result of trauma. It’s sort of like a partitioned hard drive - each of us has our own operating system. A lot of memories are shared, but we have a lot of dissociative amnesia as well.
Anyway, the main reason we are making this post is because something brought us back here today (I don’t remember what - see above for why I don’t.) and there were a lot of nostalgia feels and I just felt like maybe those of you who remember me - if I did or said things that didn’t seem to track, this is probably why. If I forgot you, it’s not because you were unimportant to us.
This community and the dash site were so crucial (and at times painful) in helping us understand so much about ourselves, queerness, transness, racism, classism, ableism, including many very difficult conversations here and on the dash site. Conversations I still am seeing echoes of in the current reality where big hate seems to be the name of the game a lot of the time.
Even though the discourse is traumatizing sometimes, I’m so glad for getting to have those conversations in butch-femme space back then just so I’m not as dumb now as I was.
I was 27 years old when I came out as a femme lesbian and found the dash site. Now I’m 47 years old, transmasc, somewhat butch-appearing - our femmes stopped being primary fronters around 2016.
I went through a breakup of an 8 year long relationship at the end of 2023, which was around the time I began to realize we have DID. I’m possibly slow-pacedly romantically pursuing someone currently, but overall I no longer care about dating, looking for a partner, sex, flirting, interpersonal drama, or anything that’s not my business.
I think it’s kinda funny how orientation became such an organizing principle for me in my twenties, and now I think I’m likely to prefer hermit-hood anyway, despite my orientation. I don’t even know what to call my orientation these days other than queer.
My current love interest is a bisexual femme as was my last ltr, and the last two lovers I’ve had were transmasc and nonbinary. They are/were all great.
I’m glad we have had a fair amount of wonderful lovers - we don’t always have access to our memories of them, but when one shows up on the big screen of the mind, we appreciate having those memories.
We have loved so hard, and been loved so hard and nothing lasted - but for those of us who carry significant childhood trauma and attachment wounds, I think sometimes relating is this wonderful thing that happens in the small partitions of time we have before the trauma takes it away again. Kinda like how the ocean will leave new gifts on the shore when the tide goes out but may take them back when the tide comes back in. It’s just a world of waves and and tides and shifting sands for those of us who have never been able to stabilize. Lots of fond memories of people we’ve loved who were prolly in as much pain as we were as well. Everyone in their private hells taking a break to connect and enjoy each other.
We have come to like our life alone with our pets and starting to get to know and understand each other on the inside (as we are able to.) There was a time when we always wanted to know the tea and here was the first place we came to every morning and the last clicks of the night as well - y’all kept me company during some of the hardest, saddest, most despairing, loneliest times in my younger life and we really appreciate the folks here who made it just a little easier to get through the day.
I don’t know if I will be back (but this isn’t a flounce at all - I just don’t know if my mind will bring me back here). I don’t know if I will remember writing this. But if we ever hurt you, it probably wasn’t intentional - we absolutely hate hurting people. But our forgetfulness and sudden changes were often things that harmed the bonds we formed here as well as the rest of the world. I hope I will be back though at least from time to time to check in on folks.
Also I’m still so sad about Juney. And also impressed with her bravery.
- Nat/e