Fuzzy Days: The Purgatory of Dissociative Identity Disorder

I had to reschedule the last part of one of my root canals today because today is a fuzzy day. What’s a fuzzy day, you ask? In my world, it’s a very fragile sort of day. Let me take you on a journey through one part of what makes Dissociative Identity Disorder a disabling life condition.

(For those that don’t know, Dissociative Identity Disorder was formerly known as multiple personality disorder or split personality disorder)

You see, living with DID is a lot like being a gambler. Every day I wake up, and I roll the dice that nothing will happen to me or near me that will cause me to dissociate and someone else to “drive the car,” as it were.

Continuing the car metaphor, there are so many hazards in life from nails in the road to poor maintenance of the body, etc., that you can never truly guarantee nothing will happen. My life is filled with coping strategies that help me minimize the chance that those things happen: fans, popsicles, sodas, rubber bands or hair ties, and more. Each of these tools is aimed at either preventing a trigger or minimizing the effect of a trigger. Using those tools means knowing that the car’s instruments are reporting correctly.

On fuzzy days, I can tell the instruments are malfunctioning. I can choose to go somewhere in the car, but the temperature gauge, speedometer, and tire gauges are all clearly messed up. How do I know?

Welcome to my Crib

It took me over an hour this morning to realize I was awake. I couldn’t feel my body, not the pressure of my head on the pillow nor the texture of the blankets against my skin. If I didn’t keep my eyes moving around, I could feel myself slip into another time vacuum and another half hour or so would go missing. I had the vague sense that my body needed to pee, somewhere around 8AM, but no urgency to act on that information as though it wasn’t my problem. In the metaphor, I was not in the car, but standing next to it. Anyone could rush past me and jump into the driver’s seat and there’d be nothing I could do.

These feelings persisted long past me getting out of bed and going through the motions to take care of myself. Even know, staring at my own writing for too long isn’t enough to keep me fully present, so I start to fade away into the grey fog of my own mind.

Today I was supposed to go have a root canal finished. I’m a victim of repeated, years long, practices of sexual assault and abuse and the man doing my root canal is, well, a man.

Do the math with me: would you pay for the Uber to take you there for a man to hold you down with his fingers in your mouth while he hurts you with sharp tools?

Would you do it if there was a chance that your body would get so overloaded that it would summon an eight year old to take your place? Would you do it if you didn’t know if that eight year old could remember how to get home? Does she even know how to get an Uber? You’ve never had to consider these questions quite like this before.

No, of course not. That would be irresponsible, right? I’d need someone with me and right now nobody is available on such short notice.

Like storm clouds gathered on the horizon of your mind, this blurred relationship with being alive is a warning to make myself safe, comfortable, and reschedule plans.

Most people with my condition, according to my therapist, are not trained Buddhists who have the sort of self analytical awareness that I have and she’d never met someone who could put this thing to words quite like this or even realize when its’ happening. We agreed it might make a good post to help people understand what it’s like in my skin with all the others.

I have no clue if I’m communicating this successfully with you. My head isn’t on right.

Right now, I can only watch the words work their way out of the fingertips that I can’t feel.

Any small thing could take control of the car from me and the best I can do is prepare to lose the rest of my day and then feel bad about it if I sat around “doing nothing,” instead.

Disability with these sorts of disorders can take a lot of different forms, including this one. On a day like today I’d be taking a massive risk stepping out my door let alone going to a job or dentist. If someone else showed up, would they be violently trying to defend me from my own doctor? Terrified? Try to seduce the man to keep herself safe? These are the calculations I have to make about things on Fuzzy Days and in all the media I’ve ever seen about this disorder, have you ever seen someone trying to navigate this struggle?

This is a big part of my experience with DID and most media leaves it out entirely.

Thanks For Hearing Me

If this content was provoking, helpful, or entertaining to you I hope you’ll subscribe and consider a paid subscription as those do help pay for my medical needs and healing after what was done to me as a child. All my content is available for free, but paid subscriptions give you the ability to comment and get access to some exclusive invitations and benefits as well as credit on my streams and otherwise for supporting my work.