Perpetual f*cking identity crises

I don’t know how to articulate my irritation. On any given day, I mostly know who I am. I just…don’t really feel like myself. Nearly every time I figure out an adequate name to blog under, some months go by and shit changes within the system. The dissociative identity disorder system. Because I am one.

It gives me a migraine trying to put this experience into words, with all the sensory input around me. My fridge won’t stop fucking humming. I could call for the maintenance guy to finally replace it, but my apartment is a wreck and I’m going to move soon — I just don’t care to deal with it anymore. When I get pissed enough, I don’t explode — I just stop caring.

Brainstormed blog name ideas didn’t give me much to work with, since the ones I really want are taken and used by abandoned blogs.

Jane Lively is the name we’ll change the body to, but it’s not a nickname. Blogging under a different name creates confusion. It’s so frustrating living in a world where, by default, singlets are the norm and we are a multiplicity. Everyone gets tired of their names, and that’s fine — so obviously it’s staying as the legal name change to-be, but long-term it would be nice to use a nickname.

Except…every fucking nickname has always been an alter. I want to illustrate more of this, tell this part of my fucking story that I’ve held in for so long. I told people I have DID, but it’s like they did not actually grasp what it meant, what dissociative identity disorder meant. It’s not a fucking personality disorder.

We will be Jane Lively legally when we can change our legal name, but ultimately do not want to build a personal brand of ourselves under Jane.

There are all these expectations that follow you when you’re using your name for whatever you do, in a singlet-dominant world. Your family will follow you, even. I think it would be easier if family didn’t follow my online whereabouts, even if it’s to feel more connected to me, because they are seeking to connect with a different identity associated with this body — not the one I, or any of us really, identify with — and seldom are they interested in actually reading the lengthy tell-all informational posts we publish on our blog about our experience living life as we live it; they much more interested in the ableist requirement of verbal storytelling so they have more opportunity to interrupt our train of thought and discredit us.

As a singlet, you have the ability to reinvent yourself on a whim should you wish. Your inner voice is one, not a few; you don’t have legitimate, unique conversations with yourself where a voice will argue back if they disagree. Your “conscience” doesn’t reply back to you.

As a DID system, we have to collectively agree whether we’re going to dye our hair ombre pink (sighhh, it’s a deep want), what color we’re going to paint our nails, and whether we’re going to let a certain person into our lives.

So, with this…our blog name will soon change again. The fact of the matter is…if you’ve been in touch with us for a while, you’ve gotten to know bits and pieces of us here and there. I’m the integrated product of a secondary trauma holder and our gatekeeper, and now just the gatekeeper. In our system, the gatekeeper co-cons with all but one alter.

We did consider alternatives:

• Keeping this blog, making individual alter blogs (too much $$ and time-consuming)
• Flat-out starting over (my, that would be refreshing!) either by
  • disappearing off the face of the planet
  • abandoning this blog

Izzy Out is the new blog name. The new domain is lemonandlively.com, for versatility and because Google’s prone to choose the shortest domain anyways when they have two domains displaying the exact same content. It kinda fits better, especially since Izzy’s nearly always out. It’s the nickname we’re collectively aiming for, since “Jane” feels a bit hard and “Izzy” is softer in comparison — but by no means does it lessen any badassery.

Naming a blog after yourself, using your name in your blog URL, you have to figure out what you’re going to name your blog and whether you’ll register the dot-com of whatever non-matching blog name you choose to avoid comparison.

We will start using “we” on the blog as is comfortable for us, though it will be rocky even for us to transition from being explicitly covert. The whole point of dissociative identity disorder is to remain hidden so as to prevent the individual identities from knowing all of their trauma.

There will still be Jane references, and going by Jane is not completely going away.

I’ve a unique childhood experience as a result of my DID, and the fact that so many people outside the systems community cannot fathom living with DID while they themselves live a life my system cannot begin to understand is not the reason we’re doing this.

Rather, it’s suffocating to live in a world dominated by singlets who think I am one of the “crazy” ones, just because my brain developed an extraordinary coping mechanism for the insurmountable trauma I had to endure as a child — and then have to keep all of that to ourselves, for my system to have to shrink themselves just so non-systems can comprehend how our trauma affected us.

When you don’t have the full picture, or a little more to work with, you’re going to walk away from a situation making your own assumptions about a person whether you intend to or not.

If you’re neurotypical, your brain is going to think shit like, I cannot imagine this in my own perceived reality, therefore, it did not happen, because that is how neurotypical brains tend to work. If they cannot imagine something existing within their own perception of reality, they perceive it as a lie and completely dismiss the experience of whomever experienced it. (Paraphrasing A Field Guide to Earthlings.)

This is how non-systems, both neurotypical and neurodivergent, often perceive the experience of DID systems. Not all of them, but definitely enough.

Because ignorance, because their brain cannot perceive experiences outside its perception of reality as anything other than lies.

And ND people are the weird ones. 🙄

I digress.

Izzy out.~