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An introduction to me.
Dec. 1st, 2013 01:51 pmHi, folks. This is my first entry. I'm relocating here from LiveJournal (where my username was noodledoctor). The reason I'm doing so is because 1. I was advised that, while LiveJournal isn't such a great site anymore, Dreamwidth is pretty good if one likes the format of LiveJournal, and 2. a bunch of things happened to me between the last time I was really active on LiveJournal and now. I feel like starting anew, with a new blog, a new site, a new name.
Before explaining what happened, I suppose I ought to give a little bit of explanation as to myself. Hello. I have a lot of names but I like the moniker of "Smithy", especially on the internet. I'm nineteen, I'm a student at a community college. I do writing (fiction and poetry; most of the fiction is speculative and most of the poetry is experimental). I'm a Christian and I guess you could say I'm "devout" (without being...well, extreme, I think is the word one might be looking for that describes what I'm not?) I'm in a lot of fandoms. I play ukulele rather badly and sing rather badly as well and write songs not quite as badly. I'm obsessed with helping people and doing things that benefit others. I have a bunch of mental illnesses/instances of not being neurotypical, but the main things that give me the most trouble are bipolar disorder and general anxiety disorder. I am really good at academics, to the point where it's the only thing I think I'm good at that matters. My mind is really messed up.
Alright. Now onto what happened.
This whole nonsense started in March of 2013, when my mother suffered a sudden brain aneurysm and died. No one expected this. It just happened. I was rather close to my mother (I live at home, with my immediate family, and I regularly see my extended family). I've heard other members of my family describe the event as "traumatic", and maybe I was traumatized, too, but I'm not really sure, because I experience emotions really really differently than a lot of people and things that ought to affect most people hugely don't really affect me.
My family structure changed radically after that, to the point where it feels like I practically have a different family. This isn't a bad thing, but it's really hard to get used to, even now in December, and there are a number of challenges involved here, not to mention some thoughts I've been having about my mother and some things I've been re-examining in regards to our interactions - things that are easier now that she's not in my life anymore.
Another thing that happened was the addition - or perhaps the discovery? - of a feature of my psychological landscape. For almost all my life, I've claimed to have "people in my head" - not in a "crazy person" way or even a "dissociative identity disorder" way. It's just that I've always had the feeling that there were other presences in my mind, like having your own fictional characters come to life or internalizing an idea in the form of a person, something like that.
However, this phenomenon (after a period of about a year where it wasn't really the case for me) resurfaced during the summer following my mother's death. I started wondering whether or not this was a case of multiplicity (that is, the phenomenon of having numerous people in one body or having numerous people in one's mind, where said people are actual people and not just ideas or presences or fragments of a person). I did a fair deal of research, and I decided that my situation wasn't that of actual multiplicity (because I didn't think the "people in my head" were actual people). Rather, they were more like personas and fictional characters I'd absorbed into my own personality. I called them "facets" because they had latched onto facets of my own thinking or behavior.
Most of them were fictional characters (I refer to them as "fictives", which is the term for one who identifies as a fictional character - maybe this isn't a good term, as it suggests a degree of personhood that I'm not sure they have, but it makes sense for me to use). Some of them were original. Some of them came about because I wanted behavior to emulate until it became my own (and it did become my own, when one of these facets were out); some of them came about because the character in question had had some experience that I identified with and I wanted to deal with the situation by becoming a character who had dealt with it themself; some of them came about because it was easier to express certain thoughts and behaviors in terms of someone else; some of them came about for no identifiable reason.
I went along, calling them my facets, and observing a limited degree of agency and autonomy in their actions and thoughts. (I can have mental conversations with them, although sometimes I have to direct their words and thoughts - because it is my mind they're using, and if I'm having a bit of difficulty with putting words together in my head, they'll have the same difficulty. My thoughts and words are a resource, and they use that resource.) A few of them have even shown up in conversation with other people (although I seldom pointed out that it was them, and most people didn't realize that anything about my conversation was different).
Lately, though, I've begun to wonder whether or not my facets are real people after all. My psychologist told me that I lack empathy (I agree) and that I see people as objects (I also agree), albeit objects with needs and desires that I can help fulfill (I again agree). The reason I accept people outside me as "real people" is because, well, I'm told so, and they appear to be so, so I accept it. They do things with autonomy, they think and feel, they have experiences comparable to my own, etc. I don't have any reason to question their reality.
But the reality of people inside one's head...well, that's harder to deal with, and while I accept members of other multiples' systems as real people, that's because they tell me they're real people, and I have no reason to think I'm a better judge of their situations than they are. But it occurred to me that my empathy problems would very easily keep me from effectively telling if my facets are real people or not. None of the reasons I accept the people physically around me as "real people" apply with no uncertainty to my facets. And no one is telling me that they're real people. It's also frustrating because some of them display more autonomy or more "real person-ness" than others. So I don't know what's going on there, and I want to chronicle that.
The most recent thing to happen was...well, a bit of a worldview breakdown that was caused by a rather unusual thing. The thing in question was my playing a computer game called OFF, and I will later write a whole entry about it and how it affected me. Maybe if you've played that game, you'll understand how this could happen. But anyway, playing that game made me realize a very bad thing about the way I think, and that made me realize more bad things about the way I think, and as I tried to correct those things, it made me realize even more bad things about the way I think. I want to fix this. I want to change myself. But it takes work, and it works the best for me if I can express it externally in some way, like talking about it or writing about it.
And now I've come to the reason I'm keeping this journal. I need to express things. I'm one of those people who's best at "thinking out loud" and who works well when they can express things through visuals and rephrasing. For some reason or another, expressing things makes them more real to me. You know how they say, "Pictures or it didn't happen?" For me, it's "Verbal expression or it isn't fully real". And storing them in a format like an online journal makes it easy for me to look at what happened and what I talked about and look back on it when I have to or want to.
Why am I posting it online instead of writing it in a journal, then? Well...I'm not sure why, other than that maybe people will find it, and maybe people will have interesting things to say about it, and maybe I can open up a dialogue about this stuff. And even if that doesn't happen, even if communication doesn't happen, even if no one looks at this journal during the time I need to keep it, maybe someone will find it later and read it and find some sort of value in it. Maybe that'll happen.
That's my hope, anyway.
Before explaining what happened, I suppose I ought to give a little bit of explanation as to myself. Hello. I have a lot of names but I like the moniker of "Smithy", especially on the internet. I'm nineteen, I'm a student at a community college. I do writing (fiction and poetry; most of the fiction is speculative and most of the poetry is experimental). I'm a Christian and I guess you could say I'm "devout" (without being...well, extreme, I think is the word one might be looking for that describes what I'm not?) I'm in a lot of fandoms. I play ukulele rather badly and sing rather badly as well and write songs not quite as badly. I'm obsessed with helping people and doing things that benefit others. I have a bunch of mental illnesses/instances of not being neurotypical, but the main things that give me the most trouble are bipolar disorder and general anxiety disorder. I am really good at academics, to the point where it's the only thing I think I'm good at that matters. My mind is really messed up.
Alright. Now onto what happened.
This whole nonsense started in March of 2013, when my mother suffered a sudden brain aneurysm and died. No one expected this. It just happened. I was rather close to my mother (I live at home, with my immediate family, and I regularly see my extended family). I've heard other members of my family describe the event as "traumatic", and maybe I was traumatized, too, but I'm not really sure, because I experience emotions really really differently than a lot of people and things that ought to affect most people hugely don't really affect me.
My family structure changed radically after that, to the point where it feels like I practically have a different family. This isn't a bad thing, but it's really hard to get used to, even now in December, and there are a number of challenges involved here, not to mention some thoughts I've been having about my mother and some things I've been re-examining in regards to our interactions - things that are easier now that she's not in my life anymore.
Another thing that happened was the addition - or perhaps the discovery? - of a feature of my psychological landscape. For almost all my life, I've claimed to have "people in my head" - not in a "crazy person" way or even a "dissociative identity disorder" way. It's just that I've always had the feeling that there were other presences in my mind, like having your own fictional characters come to life or internalizing an idea in the form of a person, something like that.
However, this phenomenon (after a period of about a year where it wasn't really the case for me) resurfaced during the summer following my mother's death. I started wondering whether or not this was a case of multiplicity (that is, the phenomenon of having numerous people in one body or having numerous people in one's mind, where said people are actual people and not just ideas or presences or fragments of a person). I did a fair deal of research, and I decided that my situation wasn't that of actual multiplicity (because I didn't think the "people in my head" were actual people). Rather, they were more like personas and fictional characters I'd absorbed into my own personality. I called them "facets" because they had latched onto facets of my own thinking or behavior.
Most of them were fictional characters (I refer to them as "fictives", which is the term for one who identifies as a fictional character - maybe this isn't a good term, as it suggests a degree of personhood that I'm not sure they have, but it makes sense for me to use). Some of them were original. Some of them came about because I wanted behavior to emulate until it became my own (and it did become my own, when one of these facets were out); some of them came about because the character in question had had some experience that I identified with and I wanted to deal with the situation by becoming a character who had dealt with it themself; some of them came about because it was easier to express certain thoughts and behaviors in terms of someone else; some of them came about for no identifiable reason.
I went along, calling them my facets, and observing a limited degree of agency and autonomy in their actions and thoughts. (I can have mental conversations with them, although sometimes I have to direct their words and thoughts - because it is my mind they're using, and if I'm having a bit of difficulty with putting words together in my head, they'll have the same difficulty. My thoughts and words are a resource, and they use that resource.) A few of them have even shown up in conversation with other people (although I seldom pointed out that it was them, and most people didn't realize that anything about my conversation was different).
Lately, though, I've begun to wonder whether or not my facets are real people after all. My psychologist told me that I lack empathy (I agree) and that I see people as objects (I also agree), albeit objects with needs and desires that I can help fulfill (I again agree). The reason I accept people outside me as "real people" is because, well, I'm told so, and they appear to be so, so I accept it. They do things with autonomy, they think and feel, they have experiences comparable to my own, etc. I don't have any reason to question their reality.
But the reality of people inside one's head...well, that's harder to deal with, and while I accept members of other multiples' systems as real people, that's because they tell me they're real people, and I have no reason to think I'm a better judge of their situations than they are. But it occurred to me that my empathy problems would very easily keep me from effectively telling if my facets are real people or not. None of the reasons I accept the people physically around me as "real people" apply with no uncertainty to my facets. And no one is telling me that they're real people. It's also frustrating because some of them display more autonomy or more "real person-ness" than others. So I don't know what's going on there, and I want to chronicle that.
The most recent thing to happen was...well, a bit of a worldview breakdown that was caused by a rather unusual thing. The thing in question was my playing a computer game called OFF, and I will later write a whole entry about it and how it affected me. Maybe if you've played that game, you'll understand how this could happen. But anyway, playing that game made me realize a very bad thing about the way I think, and that made me realize more bad things about the way I think, and as I tried to correct those things, it made me realize even more bad things about the way I think. I want to fix this. I want to change myself. But it takes work, and it works the best for me if I can express it externally in some way, like talking about it or writing about it.
And now I've come to the reason I'm keeping this journal. I need to express things. I'm one of those people who's best at "thinking out loud" and who works well when they can express things through visuals and rephrasing. For some reason or another, expressing things makes them more real to me. You know how they say, "Pictures or it didn't happen?" For me, it's "Verbal expression or it isn't fully real". And storing them in a format like an online journal makes it easy for me to look at what happened and what I talked about and look back on it when I have to or want to.
Why am I posting it online instead of writing it in a journal, then? Well...I'm not sure why, other than that maybe people will find it, and maybe people will have interesting things to say about it, and maybe I can open up a dialogue about this stuff. And even if that doesn't happen, even if communication doesn't happen, even if no one looks at this journal during the time I need to keep it, maybe someone will find it later and read it and find some sort of value in it. Maybe that'll happen.
That's my hope, anyway.
