It was October, or maybe November of 2022. I don’t know what it was, maybe the quietness of my life and being out of school for long enough, but I woke up with the memory, the flashback of being molested in school, at about 15 or 16 years old. That day was pretty rough. I spent the next 36 hours or so in a panic attack, shaking, unable to really think. The next month or two was pretty rough. I’d get really dissociated, like I didn’t really have a physical body, or exist in the world. I’d freak out at my body going into “autopilot” for a few seconds at a time. I knew something was wrong, and in the process of trying to figure it out, ended up unburying trauma after trauma that just kept bringing me suffering.
One night, I was in my room trying to relax after a pretty stressful day of dealing with this. Mindlessly scrolling on YouTube and all that. I click on a random video. The cheerful, innocent, and excited energy of it hits me in the face. A switch is flicked inside me. My body starts jumping up and down excitedly, giggling and laughing. As I watch it happen, i feel the joy, the life that I haven’t felt since i was a small child. “I should put some music on for him”, I think as we get up to the computer. All of a sudden, the child is gone, and I’m me again. I feel the happiness and the life leave me, and I’m standing there, feeling empty and dead inside again.
He ended up being called “[NAME REDACTED]”, although I didn’t know it at the time. I think he stole it from an original character I was working on at the time. Some time before (or was it after?) that incident, he pulled the body away from and rejected a romantic advance from my partner. Just cockblocked me. Even though I already knew a few systems, and had a rough idea what plurality was, it still took me months to grasp and accept the reality of what was happening here.
A short time after that, I was having another rough night. I guess I must’ve freaked out too much because I suddenly felt a “switch flicking” again. This time, it wasn’t so nice. I was absolutely aware that I was “locked away” from my body and had a real “pounding on the glass begging to be let back in” moment. This time, the person that “shoved me out” told me I was freaking out, and he wasn’t going to let me back in until I’d calmed down. He went to the kitchen to get us a snack, and the only thing I could do was watch in sheer horror as he used my body for what he wanted to do. I think I did accept his premise that I was too freaked out, and by the time we woke up the next morning, he was gone.
That guy, I figured later, was Max. Another stolen name from an OC. We really aren’t very original, just in general.
After that I’d meet a few more headmates. And I’d get some questions in my mind., about my own existence. We spent our teenage years thinking we were a transgirl. Was that me? Was that the “original”? Or someone else entirely? How long have I been here? Were some of these childhood experiences explainable as plurality? I have a clearer picture now than I did before, but it still isn’t easy.
Ash
Last Updated: 14 May 2023