The other day I was talking to a student about DID and how it seems like people claiming to have DID seem really common in certain online communities, far more common than DID really is.
That got me thinking about my own experience with masking and thinking I have DID. To be clear: I am writing about my own experience, and I am not evaluating anyone else’s brain.
I have a little girl inside of me that tends to hide a lot. The Maddy and Tae song “These Tears” resonates with her quite a bit. If I’d grown up in another times and another culture, I may have allowed her out more often, and sooner. Instead, I grew up in an era that didn’t understand transgender people except in very absolutist ways, and in an environment that was highly judgmental.
One of the sources of conflict was at home. My mother had wanted a girl, and so she treated me as much like one as she could: She taught me handicrafts, and I learned to cook. I wasn’t very tidy, so that was one source of frustration for her: My room was always a mess, and rather than allowing me to have my own space in whatever state it was, she cleaned it and complained.
My father, meanwhile, had traditional views on gender: Boys were boys, girls were girls. Later in his life, he did start engaging in some handicrafts (including a latch hook rug he designed himself, after my parents divorced), as well as cooking. Indeed, after my parents’ divorce, my father changed enough to lead me wonder how much he’d been masking himself as the Proper American Man during the marriage.
So, back to me: My home environment was hostile to my existence, as was my school environment. Classmates ostracized me as “weird”, and for many of them their primary engagement with me was to see if they could force a meltdown, so they could stand around and laugh. Their abuse was verbal, rarely physical, and so of course the adults in school reminded me about sticks and stones and harmless words.
So I developed masks, as many Autistic people do. And I layered them on as a defense mechanism. As an adult, as I was trying to untangle my mind, I decided that these masks were actually personalities.
Except, in my case, they weren’t. They were defense mechanisms. They were there to protect my inner self from mockery.
I want to be comfortable in my weirdness, but I talk myself out of it.
I was also thinking the other day, separate-but-related, about how I’ve learned that it’s not good enough to “want” something. To justify it, I need to justify it as “need”. Which is poppycock: It’s okay to want weird things. It’s okay to be a little girl in the body of an adult man. And if I let that little girl thrive, she’ll become an adult woman. It just may take longer than it would have if I’d started this journey when I was younger.
These are rough thoughts. I will continue to polish them up, because there are diamonds in this coal.