“I was always afraid and felt a void where my heart should be.”

“Never forget what happened to you. Never forget.”

“But I have to, at least for a while.”

Sometime later Baby came up with a solution for her counterpart- 1991, the six-year-old who held the memories. 

“You can break yourself, cut yourself into two and hid yourself while I use your body to operate.”

“I can break myself?”

“You know you can, you’ve put those memories away before, you know how. You can go somewhere safe, like the beach. You can stay there and be happy while I live here and feel the pain of existence.”

“Thank you, Baby.”

I switched then into Baby for the first real open, known, remembered time. I walked slowly in with her, then became her, then walked away happily as her. Baby is tough, she is wild and free, and most importantly, happy no matter what happens to her. She is stronger than 1991, who was left behind and forgotten until my fortieth year. When I- as an ‘other’ who is existentially informed, namely Jude- meditated into a real-deal trance. More on that later.

At six years of age, I was sure I would survive, when before that, I never knew I would.

In fact, I had been walking with my brother and passed a Christmas berry bush. I asked about them because I was hungry, not being well fed. He said they were poisonous. I asked what that meant and he said it would kill me. I knew what death was. Intimately. I had so feared death because of what happened to me. No one died, at least I don’t think so. But the threat of death was close. In my own living room.

When we stepped into the house, I approached my brother, the oldest of us all- some fifteen years older than me. I asked him if heaven was real, if god was real and if kids went there when they die, like dogs do. Because they all do, right? They are innocent. This is the reason they gave when I asked about the whole dogs and heaven thing.

Later on, once everyone went back to ignoring me, I left. I left like I had since I was a baby. Crawling away to get away from my family.

I left to crawl under the bush, made a pile of berries and ate. I ate until I couldn’t hold my head up then I kept eating as I slipped into unconsciousness. There I was, laying soundly. I couldn’t move. I heard in the distance the sound of my family calling my name. I moaned, not able to lift my head or alert them nor did I want to. I wanted to go to heaven. I wanted to be with angels and be at peace. I was told at church that god loved you no matter what. That he always forgave you, and would welcome you if you would just be a good little girl.

As I listened to the people who were supposed to love me call my name, I slipped into unconsciousness. I woke in the dark. I thought I was in Heaven, then I was sure I was in Hell because of all the darkness and murmuring. Then my eyes adjusted and I realized it was my brothers talking in the living room. I wasn’t dead. Later on in life my mom told me my stomach had been pumped, otherwise I would’ve been a goner.

I rolled over and went to sleep and stay asleep for days. I never wanted to wake again. I became depressed and stopped asking for food or water or anything really. I became dead inside. Heaven didn’t want me. Hell didn’t want me. I had to live here and feel. Feel it all, damn it. I just knew there was a whole lot more feeling I was going to have to do. 

So I became numb. Dead. I pretended to respond and feel excitement and laugh when someone poked my belly. But now, when someone grabbed my arm and tried to tickle me, I fought back, I kicked them and screamed until they let go. I told them I hate them and looked with daggers in my eyes. How dare they touch me?

I knew, touching was wrong. I knew very well. It was painful enough for me to slip into parts, and that I did. By the time I was six I had a number of alters that had been comforting me throughout my ordeal. They would lay with me and talk to me whilst I was abused. I would look at the pillow next to me, where ‘they’ were and they would distract me from reality. They would tell stories of us playing together and being happy and well fed. 

After Baby became the front runner for what I thought was ‘for good’, I was able to play and laugh again. I realized that the thing I knew I was supposed to forget was held from me, beyond a door I couldn’t or wouldn’t open, not yet.

As Baby, at six years old, I started school. Not kindergarten, real school. First grade was supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be happy, a relief from my home life. A place to go to escape, and be around normal people who loved and laughed freely. It was anything but that. I lived in one of the most dangerous gang neighborhoods of that time.

The school was filled with other kids who, like me, had the very best families. Sarcasm. We were all messed up, everyone, even the teachers, who didn’t believe in us or help us. I even told a few of my abuse. “I don’t want trouble,” was always their reply. And later, after my brother sustained a head injury, he changed for the worse. He became violent and joined a gang. Gang affiliation did nothing to help me get help.

He began to beat me when he got home from school. He would bang my head on concrete. The concussions were numerous over the next four years, before he went to jail. I blacked out for hours sometimes. I sometimes crawled to the field next to the house and dropped into the tall grass and lay unconscious for days. No one ever looked for me. Sometimes I just retched, nothing coming out because nothing ever went in. was hungry but that was the least of my worries.

I became violent too, after so many beatings, after so many times my brother told me that my mom didn’t care. I believed him and began to resent her for not seeing it all on her own. For never even looking.

We’d moved around a lot when I became aware of the second biggest alter. The one I call the psychopath, who recently took the name of Kalev after a character in a book he wrote with our hand. A very poorly written book. He needed to write it, I suppose. He wanted to explore his darker side.

He wanted to kill, but like the popular show on TV in recent years, he wanted to kill bad people. Namely those who hurt children and innocent. What adult is innocent? He decided that anyone who tried to be a good person was innocent. All you had to do was try to be. But everyone else, including the disenchanted and apathetic were not innocent and therefore able to end up in one of the cells he imagined having. An evil man who wanted to hurt and punish the guilty.

School was hard when tired, hungry, concussed, scared and angry. The psychopath began jolting out of me to run and beat up anyone they saw bullying. And there always was someone being an asshole. These kids weren’t innocent. They were monsters, like me.

The kids all shunned me so I took to hiding in the window inserts. I hid alone, and watched, and waited. The psychopath would inevitably come out. I tried to stop him by detaching from all kids, from all play, from relationships. From people who I deemed not evil, I deemed myself evil. I knew I was.

During this time Old Man came into being. I was talking and talking, and he answered one day. After that we talked everyday about the facts of life, about the deep intricacies of people and their internal workings. I asked him if it was alright if I call him Einstein because that as who he reminded me of. As a child we are taught that he was the smarted person who ever lived. Who is it? Einstein, of course. He chuckled and said yes. He was my father figure.

Around this time, on visits to the in-laws pool, I became a mermaid. I thought it prudent to learn to hold my breath so that when my brother smothered me again, I wouldn’t always pass out, never sure when he was going to hold that pillow down for just too long. I felt at peace there at the bottom of the pool. One day, as I sat at the bottom, I simply didn’t come up for air and as I began convulsing I cried, and as I died, I cried at the loss.

Suddenly I woke next to the pool, having being given mouth to mouth. I was alive. Again I had been saved from leaving this world. I thought to myself, what can I do to make the best of it? To make the best of the life I kept being given back?

I thought to myself that I would get married. I would fall in love and have a family of my own. For two years I thought about this, what it would be like. I went to a good school and had friends and a magician for my birthday. I stopped fighting. I behaved and did my school work and strived to be normal. Strived with all my dark little heart, but I was still too weird to become anyone’s real friend. They came for the magician. They didn’t know my story.

After this life fell apart. I was always afraid and felt a void where my heart should be. A numbness at it all. I had to be numb. I had to not feel. To detach.

At the age of six, I had I learned to draw in such a way that adults told me I was lying about drawing the things I drew. And so I stopped drawing when I became too full of anger to do so. After six, when I came back, I learned of the one I later called L. At the time demons spoke to me. Said my mother had sold me to the Devil and they would always be there. I felt them close, always. And at night, I lay in bed like a pretzel to cover all vulnerable spots, causing my joints to grow strange. I lay in bed like this and listened to the scratching about my headboard. Scratching on the walls that I heard for years until I moved. This continued until I turned to god years later.

I gave in to the constant call of those demons that told me to do horrible things. They never left my mind, but put the most disgusting images in my head constantly. Evil, murderous, torturous thoughts. I began worshipping the devil. I pricked my fingers to draw blood so do art in. To make pentagrams in. To light candles next to and chant and meditate into a trance. I sat for hours on my knees in this trance. I pledged myself as the Antichrist and believed I was. I became delusional.

When I met my partner, I told her these things and it became her mission to ‘save’ me. I went to bible camp and threw away my silver snake ring in pledge to God. That ring was a reminder on my sins, of my promise to the darkest one of us all.

I developed a form of OCD related to scrupulosity OCD. I already had traditionally-recognised OCD, which made my working life miserable as it was. I began listening to classical music to calm the mania and psychosis I was experiencing. I never slept. Not until the sun came up and I was on the bus to school, safe. I slept for the forty minutes to school, and sometimes I slept in the fields. Sleep and food had always been a rare thing, though not always a treat. Sleep brought the faces of those demons.

I was told in those early years how much of a lost cause I was, how ugly and how, “We don’t need more people like you”. I hated them. I brought a gun to school. I thought of using it on the teachers for their words. For the hope of being saved that they took from me every day. School was supposed to be a relief. Instead it was institutionalized racism and general apathy. I began to hate apathy at this point. 

So, here I was. Religious, obsessively so. I went to a therapist who diagnosed me with OCD and Bipolar Type 1. I didn’t believe the bipolar. Not until a few years ago. It all became too hard to deal with, the bipolar, the OCD, the DID, the rest that was not understood to me as of yet. I quit talking for a year.

God gave me hope. A friend that was beautiful and pure gave me hope. She was dealing with her own issues. She was volatile and only god kept her straight. I thought it would work for me too.

It didn’t. My problems, the voices, the delusions were still strong and my mom and oldest brother kept trying their best to convince me out of them. “Can’t you be good without threat of hell?” I wasn’t doing it for fear of hell, I told them. I needed the hope it provided. They scoffed at this and gave me a hard time until I put it aside. It couldn’t save me from my family. And so I abandoned it.

After I started regular school I realized I could start afresh in high school. I knew men liked me, they showed it. Boys and girls both liked me. It was girls, though, that I gravitated towards.

I became despondent. I hadn’t been being ‘good’ for god for some time. I wanted to be normal. I became popular but knew that I was being made fun of for being awkward eh my back.

I was put on Lithium which took away my ability to do art, which I was doing for fourteen obsessive hours a day, not finishing anything to completion. Not really believing in my talent. Once I wasn’t doing that to manage my mania and OCD, I threw myself into learning how to socialize. I couldn’t hold a conversation before this. I gave one word answers or didn’t respond at all.

I made a few friends in high school but again, my despondency struck hard. I grew depressed again. My mania had subsided and I was dark again. I actually went to my doctor for help this time since she was responsive when I had asked for help mentally. She referred me to a place for intellectual disabilities, something that embarrassed me.  After Lithium didn’t help, I accused my therapist of not having the ability to help without meds. I left.

This time when I asked for help, I was really needing it. I had been leaving home every few weeks to go find someone to kill. Someone who would try to hurt me on the streets. I went looking for trouble. When I was raped I felt I could do nothing. I couldn’t kill. This actually made me happy- there was hope. I went to live with a relative for a short time afterwards, but my religious OCD returned.

When I went back home my mom was really disappointed in me being religious again and so harped on me constantly until I consciously told her I would put it aside. Once again I was left alone with my darkness. I left home for good. I lived on the streets for about six months before meeting a man who got me pregnant, but I went on to lose the baby. I was just 18. I split with the father and began working at a strip club. I began drinking and then quit when I felt I would die from it.

I married my husband at twenty and had a child within the first six months. This gave me hope. I told myself I would change, I would live beautifully like Mary Poppins, I would sing and be merry. And I did. For a few years. Sometime during being pregnant with my son, I became depressed. I became delusional again and developed relationship OCD. I hid my fears.

Once he was born, I remained depressed. But all of my attention was on the delayed development of my son. Where my daughter talked at six months, said her ABC, counted to twenty, said her first word at four months, walked early- my son wouldn’t even roll over or look at me. He wouldn’t respond to his name being called, or anything at all. No matter what I put in front of him, he just wouldn’t look at it. I knew something was wrong and when he was almost two, took him in to be looked at. He was diagnosed with autism. Then my daughter was diagnosed with what used to be called Asperger’s (now ASD).

At this I began questioning my own autistic traits. I wondered if this could be the thing, not bipolar. I knew OCD was right, but didn’t understand OCD of the mind. I thought it was all like the traditional kind. I began to pull away from my family, hiding in my craft room all day. I didn’t want to harm them. My innocent family. My awesome husband and children.

It was at this time that I told my mom of all I could remember of the abuse in my childhood. She didn’t respond well. She wasn’t sorry about what I went through, she just told me I was messed up and needed help. She felt she had done nothing wrong. I told her not to contact me again. The rest of my family also distanced themselves from me.

I became unglued to my family. I argued and yelled and was mean to my husband for working in strip clubs. A thing Jude, the scrupulous one, the ascetic, hated. 

I fell apart for years until I almost died from not eating for months, I ended up in the hospital from not drinking anymore and not having slept in two and a half weeks. I had been delusional for years and when I went to the hospital, they sent people to check our home to make sure my delusions weren’t real.

I remained on a delusional rollercoaster for the next few years, going on and off meds. I was hospitalized 18 times in ten years, the last one being in 2023. After this I switched from Jude to myself. I am the host. And I was back, finally.

My emotional parts hold trauma. I hate to trigger a switch, because they came come out during vulnerable times. Switching is a vulnerable time. Talking about it is a vulnerable time. Seeing something on TV. Any reliving is, even more so at certain times of the year, especially in December. It is only recently that I began experiencing switches without fear. I feel more in control. I am exerting extreme control over my mind at all times.

During the few months I was Jude last, she contacted the Vatican about exorcism as well as a few priests to no avail. She studied religions of the world and through time, and connected all things (in her mind). She became an avid meditator to the point of seeing colors, seeing green first, then light purple. When I gave myself over to wanting to be good person no matter what was true, whilst in deep trance, a white light came out of space and hit me in the head, sending me flailing backwards. Later, during a true trance, I saw a red door with yellow stairs leading up to the wall in front in me, so I sent my spirit forward up the stairs and through the door. There I found a beach. I walked along for some time, passing little sections that were fenced off and in the distance one with young girl playing about as the water flowed about her feet, and laughing as it ebbed. 

I went to her and she saw me, she said, “You’re not…”. I couldn’t hear the name. I thought I would be caught and so I said, “Yes I am. Who are you?”

“I’m nineteen ninety-one!” She said happily. My mouth gasped and I was sucked back out and into my body. I opened my eyes, hands still raised. I wondered what it meant, then when I told my brother, he retold me the things he had told an alter, but not me. It all came flooding back, and I made it into the hospital for hopefully the last time.

It was about my tenth hospitalization that I told my usual psychologist about the other people that live within me. It was interesting. The next few visits were me not knowing if I had bipolar or DID or autism. It took the truth of my life biting me all at once, and seeing my history clearly, to realize that I have all three. Five disorders in total: ASD, OCD, C-PTSD, BD, and DID.

I have confused enough therapists and have found that they don’t know what to do with me. Most just ask me what I want to talk about. I figured I would give you my history all in one reading to make it easier. I find it hard to talk. I have alexithymia and don’t ever know what to say when asked outright to speak. I speak at a normal pace, but the conversation is slow to unravel. I have to think as I speak. It’s the autism. I need space to speak this way, or it’ll be a bunch of you talking and me spitting out a small thing at a time.