#not equipped to understand these conversations. guy barely has a sense of personhood if that- much less knows what gender is

[rivilu]

ok you know. the Ellu in dav crossover au is very fun but i am a little bit enchanted by the concept of him AND Rynn at once. Best of both worlds in a sense.

[neuroglitch]

i don't remember you ever talking about how your aspects came into your life. were they around since childhood or did they come about in adulthood? did they start off as characters and become real (that's a thing that can happen in did/osdd) or come out of nowhere with identities of their own? and i also wonder if they think/do things you disagree with or what the people in your life think about their existence.

i know you're reluctant to definitely label/dx but i'm sooo curious and fascinated by your aspects existence. you don't have to reply at all by the way! i just like asking questions about things i don't understand :)

Hi anon! 

This is a really good question, and I feel like in a certain sense Elias or Cadia would be better equipped to answer this bc they have different feelings and beliefs about their own origins. But I will try to do them justice to the best of my ability.

So it’s a little bit of everything that you mentioned. Since childhood I’ve had dissociative experiences, and this no doubt mixed with psychotic states in some ways, and contributed to an “overactive imagination”. But as such I don’t think there were others back then, but there was a lot of like.. identity confusion? going on. No idea what’s normal for small children when it comes to these things honestly..

I would say that over the years I had several experieces of being “stuck in character” from theaterplays or games or other things.. but that could be me afterrationalizing. 

As a teenager I went on exchange from a year and learned that you can just... reinvent your entire person and be someone new. That was Kita. Kita is still around, but only in particular situations relating to my exchange. The person I was before was a quiet, awkward kid, constantly muttering to themselv under their breath, unable to hold a conversation. Kita was outgoing, outspoken, brave and assertive. 

When I came home from exchange I kind of assumed that Kita would come with me. She did not, or rather, only as an idea in my head. I was back to my old self, and had to start a long and tedious journey to relearn Kita’s qualities.

I still don’t think that that’s super weird, but again, it was.. something.

Me and a close friend had a very passionate, toxic, codependent relationship from when I was 15 to 26. We coped with this stormy relationship and our respective declining mental health partially by constantly going in-character as other people. We lived together for several years, and when we didn’t live togerher we spent most of our time together. 

There were archetypes that I would “be”, and I know that Elias loosely references some of his own feelings and experiences as relating to some of these characters, but there never was an “Elias character”, it’s more accurate to say that the aspect of Elias lived his life partially through some of these characters. 

Cadia on the other hand traces her origin directly to a specific character. At the beginning this character represented a lot of things that I couldn’t openly be in my day to day life, much less even truly admit to myself.

But that was not unique to that character? 

A part of a pattern was that I did not get to complain or be psychotic or weird or in pain as “me”, but as these characters I could live it out very real experiences and be comforted, where normally my friend would have berated me.

Elias has a personal connection to a hazy memory of mine. The way I recall the event, I was 18 or 19 and has been learning to drive for a while. I was at the mandatory “wet road training” part. I(?) was in the car. But I had no idea how I got there, how to drive a car, and I barely understood my native language as the driving instructor yelled at me. 

But Elias and Cadia (etc) didn’t start to assert their own personhood/claim to be seperate sentient beings until much later. 

Actually my oldest “aspect” is little-me, we call them Riki bc that’s their favorite character. I say they’re the oldest, but they’re also questionable as a seperate entity from me just regressing. But they were definitely active before the others in much more than an “overinvolved roleplay” capacity.

Anyways, so to make a long story short... Me and my toxic friend eventually broke it off, this was at a time where I was mentally at a very low point, I was living alone, and I was failing to take care of myself on the most basic of levels. And the guys just kind of.. appeared in my mind, and did things for me.. At the time I considered them essentially a glorified coping mechanism at best, the beginnings of a delusion at worst. I treated them really poorly, and as a result Cadia disappeared completely for a year or more.  It was scary.. I didn’t like the idea of losing control, even if they were helpful. But it was also kind of exciting. A new input in my rather bleak existence. 

Ultimately I don’t know *where* they came from. Sometimes I feel like they represent aspects of me that have always been there, fighting for dominance over the main persona.. I honestly don’t know. I think the most important thing is that these days I’ve learned to treat them respectfully. Bc either they are not me, and I don’t get to treat other sentient beings like shit. Or they are me, and wel.. a bit of self-respect never hurt anyone :O  _____________ They sometimes do things that I disagree with, especially Elias has done some things that I definitely wouldn’t have done, but they’ve never done a big thing that upset me. As for the people in my life.. Well, people either know and are supportive-to-neutral, or they don’t know. I like to keep it that way as much as possible.

Hope this was at least a semi decent answer, it’s actually hard for me to explain exactly, and like I said, the others might disagree with some of this lol..

Cat