The part I'm still figuring out
This is the page I put off writing the longest, because it's the one thing about me that doesn't come with a tidy answer at the end. It's about dissociation, about experiencing yourself as more than one thing, and about what it looks like to be somewhere in the middle of working that out with professionals. I'm not at the end of it. I don't know when I'll be.
Read this bit first. I'm not going to tell you I have a specific diagnosis, because I don't have a settled one, and I'd rather be accurate than certain. What I can describe is what I experience, what the current working frameworks are, and what my providers and I are still sorting through. If you came here hoping for a label, this page will disappoint you on purpose.
What I actually experience
The plainest version I can give: I don't experience myself as one continuous, uniform person the way most people seem to describe it. There are distinct modes, and they're consistent enough that they have names, preferences, ways of speaking, and opinions about each other. They aren't costumes I put on. They arrive. Some of them arrive whether or not I planned for it.
Sometimes that shift is obvious to me while it's happening. Sometimes I only notice afterwards, from the evidence: a conversation I half remember, a decision that doesn't sound like something I'd choose, a tone in a message I wrote that I wouldn't have picked. The gap in the middle is the part I have the hardest time explaining to someone who has never had one. How do you describe a thing that's defined by not being there?
It's also, most days, unremarkable. I work, I look after my dog, I write code, I answer messages. This is a thing about how my head is organized, not a story about chaos. I keep saying that because the version of this most people have seen is a thriller plot, and the real thing is much more boring and much more ordinary than that.
Three examples, since abstractions are useless
I'm using three, because three is enough to show what I mean without turning this page into a directory. These are the ones I'm comfortable naming publicly. There's more to it than what's here, and that's where I'm drawing the line.
Ashlyn
- The one running most days: work, planning, decisions, admin
- Handles the boring competent adult end of things
- Closest to what people mean when they say "you"
- Tends to notice a problem before she notices a feeling
Lexi
- Direct, confident, considerably less patient
- Turns up when a boundary needs holding and nobody's holding it
- Says the thing the rest of us were being polite about
- Not anger, though it gets read that way from outside
Harper
- Young. Somewhere around four to six
- Soft, easily overwhelmed, comforted by very simple things
- Turns up when everything has been too much for too long
- The one I chose to name myself after
That last point deserves saying properly, because it's the part of all this I care most about getting right. Harper is my name. It's what I go by, what my friends call me, what I'd introduce myself as. I chose it, and I chose it to honour her: the youngest part of me, and the purest version of my soul. She was there first, and naming myself after her wasn't a compromise or an accident of vocabulary. It was the point. Plenty of trans women pick a name they simply like the sound of, and that's a perfectly good reason. Mine is that I wanted to carry forward the part of me that never got hardened by any of this, and the most direct way to do that was to answer to her name for the rest of my life.
Why I won't put a single name on it
I've read a lot about this, probably more than is good for me, and the thing that surprised me most is how much the frameworks overlap. The internet makes them sound like rival teams. Ego state theory treats a mind as made of parts as a matter of course, and doesn't consider that pathological at all. Dissociative identity disorder and OSDD, which stands for other specified dissociative disorder, are the two clinical labels that come up most often for experiences shaped like mine. The practical difference between those two is mostly about how separate the parts are and how much memory goes missing, and even clinicians disagree about where the line sits.
If I had to guess, and it's a guess, I'd say OSDD or DID is where this most likely lands. That's the honest answer and it's as far as I'll go. It isn't false modesty. I've watched people online collect a diagnosis like a trading card, and I've watched other people get talked out of a real experience by someone who decided it was attention-seeking, and I don't want to be either of those. So I sit in the middle and wait, which I'm terrible at.
The other reason for the caution is that brains are complicated in ways I keep underestimating. Trauma, ADHD, autism, anxiety, sleep, medication, and things going on physically can all produce experiences that look like each other from the inside. I've had reason to go back and re-examine things I was previously confident about, and that keeps happening. It's part of the process, not a footnote to it. Being willing to revisit your own conclusions isn't the same as not trusting yourself.
Worth saying plainly: none of this belongs to the adult or kink sections of this site, and it isn't related to them. Dissociation is a mental health thing that I didn't choose and can't switch off. It's not a dynamic, not a preference, and not part of anything I do recreationally. I keep those subjects on separate pages for exactly this reason, and I'd ask you to keep them separate too.
What the process actually looks like
Less dramatic than television, and slower. Mostly it's appointments. It's trying to describe something to a professional in a fifty-minute window when the thing itself is hard to put into words and refuses to perform on command. Between appointments I notice patterns and write them down so I don't lose them. And every so often there's a stretch where a new explanation seems to fit everything, right up until I find the bit it doesn't explain.
A few things I've learned that might be useful to someone else in the middle of this:
Write it down when it happens
Memory is the exact faculty in question here, so relying on it to report on itself goes badly. Notes made at the time are worth more than a confident summary made later.
Describe, don't diagnose
Bringing a label to an appointment tends to start an argument about the label. Bringing a description of what actually happened tends to start an assessment.
It takes ages, and that's normal
Dissociative presentations are known for taking years to identify properly. A slow process isn't evidence that nothing is there, and it isn't evidence that something is.
Cooperation over elimination
The framing that has helped me most is that these parts aren't intruders to be removed. They showed up doing a job. Working with them beats fighting them.
For the practical shape of it, since I found the vagueness around this maddening when I was looking: assessment here's not one conversation. It's a stack of structured instruments, administered over months, with names you can go and read about yourself. The ones in my file include the DES-II as an initial screen, the MID as a much longer follow-up, and the SCID-D, a structured clinical interview and not a questionnaire. Alongside those, formal opinions from more than one clinician, and a specialist who works in this specific area, not a generalist.
The differential itself is worth describing, without landing on it. The candidates are several closely related presentations that overlap heavily, and they're told apart largely by how visible the switching is from outside and how much of it the person can report. That's a hard thing to measure, because the more covert it is, the less there is for the person experiencing it to notice and hand over. I found out I had more of it than I thought only after a test asked the right questions.
The results aren't unanimous, and that's exactly why this page refuses to name a thing. Most of what I have points clearly at a dissociative condition. A smaller number of results point at a specific one within that family. That gap isn't a technicality I'm hiding behind, it's the actual state of the evidence, and the last step is a psychiatric assessment that hasn't happened yet. When people describe getting diagnosed as a single moment, I think they're compressing something that took a year and is still going.
What actually helps, day to day
Most of it is the same unglamorous scaffolding that helps with the ADHD side of my life, and that overlap isn't a coincidence: external structure carries load that my memory and attention can't be relied on to carry. Written things instead of remembered things. Routines that don't need a decision. Reminders that arrive whether or not I thought to set them that morning.
The rest is softer. Knowing what settles each state instead of treating them all the same. Not forcing a switch, and not fighting one either. Having people around me who take it in stride instead of treating it as an event. That one matters more than it sounds like it should. And a stuffed wolf, which I'm not going to be embarrassed about, because it works.
I've written more about the practical scaffolding side of this, and the tools I built for it, on the ADHD and Hazel page. Different subject, overlapping solutions.
If any of this sounds familiar
Two resources, both picked because they're careful and not sensational. I'm linking professional and educational sources instead of communities, because when I was first trying to understand this, the community spaces were the part that made it harder.
If you're in the middle of this yourself: you're allowed to not know yet. You're allowed to describe your experience without having earned a diagnosis first. And you're allowed to take up a professional's time with something you're not certain about, because working out whether it's there's literally their job and not yours.
What I'm not going to answer
I'm open about most things on here, and that's most of the point of this website. This is the one page with a fence around it, so this is where the fence is.
- I'm not going to list everyone. Three examples is what this page gets.
- I'm not going to discuss where any of this came from. That's between me and people with the training to hear it.
- I'm not going to prove it to you, perform it on request, or answer questions designed to test whether it's real.
- I'm not going to debate whether these conditions exist. That conversation has never once been in good faith when it's arrived in my inbox.
None of that's aimed at anyone reading this in good faith, and most people are. It's here so that the small number of people who aren't already know the answer before they ask.
Why put this on the internet at all
Because the honest, boring, in-progress version is almost impossible to find. What's easy to find is either a horror film or somebody very certain about something very complicated. When I was first trying to understand my own head, what would have helped most was one person saying "here's what it's like, here's what I don't know yet, and I'm still doing fine." So that's what this is.
I'll update this page as things become clearer. If they become clearer. Either way it stays honest about which parts are settled and which parts aren't, the same as everything else here.