The long process of realising.

Hi you. Not sure who I am today or what to do with myself. I'm sitting about looking at all of the blogs I follow, pages I like to read, topics I usually like to research, but I can't focus my brain on any one thing for long enough. It's flitting about and I keep disappearing too. Just for short amounts of time I think. I don't know that anybody else is coming out to replace me, I think I'm just going blank and missing bits of my day. I freaked myself out while driving because my windscreen wipers suddenly appeared to be on but I couldn't remember having put them on for the life of me. It's only little things like that but happening all day long.

I'm home now from my jollies. Adam was ill for the entire duration which put a dampener on things a bit but I still had a good time for my standards. The only problem really was that neither of us could sleep and so we're both exhausted now. The good news is, a thing I had to go to for work has been cancelled so I am going to take the rest of the week off. In theory, I would like to spend the time sorting out some of my house, doing some Christmas shopping and putting up some decorations and the tree etc. In practice, it's more likely to mirror my evening today: staring blankly at the laptop, not being able to focus for more than a minute and having no energy to move.

Shall I tell you about my new diagnosis? I'm ambivalent to talk about exactly what it is on here for one reason only: DID is rare, Northern Ireland is a VERY small country. I already feel worried that friends or family members will stumble onto my blog and recognise me from the description, especially knowing that my mum works in mental health. The disorder I have been diagnosed with is also rare and so I don't want to increase the chances of my being recognised on here... which is a pity because I want to be able to talk about everything on my blog. Am I just being paranoid? Well until I am sure, it shall remain nameless but I can tell you that the main symptoms of it are also some of the symptoms that you will see on any list of symptoms of DID. So I will be very curious to see how much improvement I notice once I start getting treated for it. How much of my symptoms are just because of DID and how much are because of this genetic disorder? The treatment may not be starting for quite some time and is going to involve me having to attend hospital to get stuff done to my blood every week or every other week for possibly the first year. After that it will be visits every few months. It's a good job I don't have a needle phobia!

I'm still getting my head around the diagnosis. I have actually had a lot of trouble believing it, despite it being diagnosed by a gene test which either shows up that you have the genes for it or you don't. It's very black and white, yet I still find myself thinking it couldn't be possible. It makes me feel incredulous towards myself and it's no wonder I have trouble accepting that I have dissociative identity disorder then, when I can't even accept something I can see evidenced on paper.

The DID battle goes on inside. It's a joke really. The fact that my views about it change so often is evidence enough that there are big shifts in my mind, yet I see the changing views as a reason to doubt that I have DID. I have been trying not to go over things too much in my head in this regard in recent months. My psychologist, T, offered that maybe it's not about asking if I have DID or not, but accepting that if DID gives me a useful framework for understanding how I am and what's happening internally and if it fits, then it is useful for us. And it does that. It does give me a useful framework for understanding myself. And when I read about DID it fits with what happens inside me. When I do the tests for DID, it comes up positive: that doesn't convince me at all. So I need to stop seeking confirmation and accept that things are in 'parts' and that's how I understand myself, so that's as much as I need to get on with.

I am making progress in therapy, although at times it doesn't feel as though I am. In fact, on another day I might tell you I feel further back than when I started. Despite being still so separate from the other alters (something that happened during the summer: I have just stopped being able to communicate well internally. It felt like I had been left alone) my tolerance of thinking about difficult topics has increased. 'Despite' might not be the word: it could be 'because of' actually. Maybe having that distance means I can tolerate talking about difficult things more without feeling how the other alters react to it, or switching. It's not like I've been talking a lot with T about anything traumatic (far from it), but I have been very slowly coming through a process of putting the pieces of information I have together and acknowledging with T that bad things really did happen when I was a child. You know... it's hard to say it... sexual abuse. This acknowledgement is not universal in Candycan. It is still limited to specific parts