empty room
november 17, 2024
for some time, i have felt like i exist in a state of some sort of duality. like i live inside someone i hate, and these two sides of me are always at each other's throats, or sniping, or whatever. or, that was how i felt for a long time until i started getting better. looking back, i don't really know what that means. probably nothing very significant?
notably, i used to have an internal monologue that was constantly rambling about something in the background of my mind, utterly undeterred by anything going on around me or how badly i wanted it to shut up. it was really fucking annoying. i could not make it stop. but, a while ago, it stopped. i don't even know when, just one day i thought to listen and couldn't hear it anymore.
i was reading about how people with cptsd can often feel like a different person from who they used to be, and that their previous "self" or identity is dead. that's definitely how i've been feeling lately. no matter how much i would like it to not be the case, the teenaged girl i used to be is very much dead and gone, and the adult man left behind with no inner child to nuture is left to ponder her absense.
though sometimes i do get thoughts or feelings that feel like they don't come from *me* appearing in my head. this has been happening for a pretty long time, but i think that's probably normal? it's not really a "voice," like an auditory hallucination. i guess as an example, one time i was drawing ixis (a neopet), and suddenly i got an overpowering feeling like "holy shit, you're so boring, can you PLEASE draw anything else?!" like some part of me was getting frustrated at my fixation even though *i* don't feel that way. i don't know if that's just a normal type of intrusive thought, but probably, right? i dunno.
when i tried explaining that thought on social media, people took it to mean that i was getting down on myself, but i wasn't. it was a totally separate thought from me. it felt like someone else telepathically put the thought into my head. it made me feel really bad, and self-conscious, like someone had just insulted me unprompted. i have all kinds of other intrusive thoughts, but not usually stuff so distinct like that. thinking back, there have been similar occasions where i would decide something for myself, and i would get feelings coming from some other part of myself contradicting those feelings and doubling down in some way. it felt like having an argument with myself where one part of me was trying to put its foot down (me), but something at the core of me, while being distcint from "me," would lash out and make me miserable as punishment for it.
an example of that is the time i tried to be a binary trans guy. i tried to insist to myself that my gender is completely binary, and it felt like something inside me started thrashing around and bubbling up emotions i didn't even know i had until i rescinded that label. and then it took me several years to figure out what would make that part of me happy and stop making me miserable, and since then i've been doing fine with the label "non-binary man," even though i don't really think of myself as non-binary. writing that sentence triggered a feeling of crestfallen disappointment for some reason? this is what i'm talking about. i don't know where those feelings come from. it's just weird.
the only thing that makes me skeptical about even considering the possibility that i could be plural or something similar is that i have all of my memories and there's never been a time i can remember where i felt like i had "switched" into another person. if i suffered a severe enough trauma to cause DID when i was young enough to develop it, i have no memory of it, and my earliest memory is from when i was 2 years old. all of my worst trauma started happening to me well after i was older than 9. and beside that, no one else has ever informed me of such a thing, or noticed personality changes. i know that in the past i've lost time because rox told me that there have been times where he spoke to me, but i don't remember those times. i have a pretty good memory despite trauma fucking up my brain and putting holes in my deep memory. i'm capable of remembering things from my childhood, but there's tons of stuff buried under 10 layers of dissociation. i dissociated A LOT, but i don't think i ever developed separate personalities. i've never felt like i was more than one person, at least not until i was fully an adult. it was in my early 20s that i started to feel like i had two distinct sides to myself, and started personifying the other half of me by using a second fursona (my two self-representing fursonas being whitewood and white). like, i named myself *after* my fursona after coming out as trans, not the other way around.
there is a feeling of who i am now being very distinct from who i was as a child, but that's always been true. i always feel like who i am in the present tense is incredibly different from who i was even a year or two ago. i think probably what's happening to me is more that i just have a completely unstable sense of identity as a baseline state of being, rather than the very unlikely situation of being several people at once.
for one thing, i've tried asking. i've dug around and looked for evidence of more people living in my head, but what i found was either inconclusive (proving nothing), or nothing at all.
i don't know why it sometimes feels as if something is missing and i'm alone when i shouldn't be. but that is how i feel a lot of the time. who can say? brains are weird.
i think i just miss who i used to be, and wish i could feel the way i used to. i wish i could be so easy and carefree, trusting and gullible. there are many features of my personality that have remained the same throughout my life, and many that are very, very different compared to how they used to be. if something happened to me as a child, and i became more than one person, then the only thing that makes sense is that i became that person a long, long time ago, and whoever else was in here with me is long gone. but i seriously doubt that's the case.
nov. 22 edit:
i spoke to rox about all this, and asked him how much of this is normal for intrusive thoughts and cptsd and the like. he told me that, yeah, this is all normal, and intrusive thoughts can feel like they come from outside of the self for a lot of people (though in my case it's pretty rare). i'm pretty good at identifying where my feelings are coming from (the "why" is harder), so taking notice of the feelings i was having that i couldn't trace back to an origin point was odd.
rox also told me about "synthesis," which is a thing that can happen psychologically when healing from trauma. to put it simply, synthesis is when you solve a problem you have by applying new information. that was what happened to me. taking medication (cymbalta) and doing deep self-reflection helped me figure out what was wrong, and by doing so, helped me overcome it. i lost my unending rambling inner voice because that was a byproduct of anxiety. since i'm no longer constantly anxious, that voice has quieted down. i feel alone because i used to keep myself company, but now it's quiet and i don't always have my own voice breathing down my neck about whatever's fucking with my head (or random garbage babbling about nothing).
i'd probably be able to more easily figure all this out if i talked to a decent therapist lmao. it's just lucky that rox knows a lot of stuff about these things.