i don't know anymore. it doesn't really matter.
![a diagram of my fursonas. starling is labeled 'male, upbeat, chatty, gets sad instead of angry, not easily embarrassed or self-conscious, easy for him to see and understand whitewood.' whitewood is labeled, 'agender, bitter, jealous, and embarrassed. first reaction is always anger. extremely depressive and apathetic when he should be happy. it's hard for him to see and understand starling.' white is labeled, 'he's just an angel on my shoulder. literally an imaginary friend who used to be a fursona.' a blurb under the images goes on to explain, 'these are my comedy and tragedy masks, but i can't control which i'm wearing. i don't really know why i have always chosen to cope with who i am by personifying my happiness and sadness as two separate entities, but i have been doing it my entire life, since i was a child. it does feel like being two different people in the sense of how huge the gulf is between them, but they're both simply me in that they are not separate and autonomous [from me].'](https://i.imgur.com/ewgBBQG.jpeg)
august 25, 2025
i'm more confused about this crap than i've ever been, and i have reached a point where i've grown tired of trying to understand it and would like to give up and move on. i've been trying to figure out what this is, and the only leads i had were BPD and bipolar. but when i look at the diagnostic criteria for those conditions, i have almost none of the listed symptoms. so it's definitely neither of those. but that leaves me at an impasse.
when i look at symptoms of stuff like OSDD, i can relate to most of it, except the "parts" of me (which would be alters in someone with OSDD or DID), are simply not autonomous. they do feel different from me, but they don't feel like they're actively alive and moving around doing their own thing. i'm the same guy all the time, but i shift into different moods that have consistent thought patterns and feelings which are different enough from each other to feel like different people, but i believe that's a fairly common experience for people with trauma. when you sink back into those old feelings, it can feel like a loss of identity, or a shift into a more monstrous version of yourself. for me, it seems to happen at random and be mostly up to luck. i've had days where i could feel the shifts between moods happening, but most of the time i don't notice. and when i say "mood," i don't mean "i go from being happy to being sad." i MEAN, "i go from reacting to [x] situation in a specific way, to reacting to that exact same situation in a different way." like my personality is different. suddenly something i could brush off easily before makes me seethe with rage. things like that. you see what i mean by how this is so confusing?
but that doesn't mean you have DID, you know? it very likely means you have CPTSD, but you don't have entire other fully-realized people living in your head just because your personality is unstable. but then i keep asking over and over, "then what the fuck is wrong with me?"
what doesn't help is that i depersonalize pretty often. it would be easy to simply say, "this is a product of complex PTSD that has been a part of my life since childhood," except it never feels that simple. my brain doesn't let it feel that simple. and the reason is because i constantly feel like i'm not a real person, and the line between what's real and isn't is constantly being blurred for me. it's so fucking hard to know what's real. so it bothers me.
it probably is as simple as i think it is when i just chalk it up to CPSTD, though. it's the most likely thing, anyway. y'know, occam's razor and all that.