Life with Parts
We are going to tell you a story that we don’t want you to know.
Some of us are embarrassed to tell the story, some of us don’t know it, some of us don’t believe it, and some of us are afraid to talk.
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However, I believe that sharing and retelling our stories is healing, and that is what I tell my inside parts so that everyone can feel more comfortable with what might be disclosed.
About Us
​I didn’t know I had Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I thought everyone’s brain worked like mine. Then I was diagnosed in 2017, at the age of sixty-three. So began our journey of discovery.
We didn’t know what DID was. We didn’t know about parts or where they lived or how they looked or sounded. And we were only beginning to consider the possibility of childhood sexual abuse. Eventually we were able to consider that our childhood was not a wonderful, pleasant, and happy time. It took me years to believe my inside parts knew things I didn’t.
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Sometimes that knowing came through writing. We write by ourselves, we write with our opposite hand, and we write with others - journals, dreams, poems, short stories. We write to remember, to not forget, and to make connections. And when we shared our writing, we discovered the magic of being witnessed, the power of knowing someone is listening.
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Life with Parts is a memoir. It is about us, and it is written by us. The fifty short stories describe our memories and our interactions with the outside world over the last six or seven years. We like the genre of creative non-fiction, which sounds like an oxymoron, but it is not. We stay true to the spirit of the story even though the writer may not have been present for all of it, or the ones present might not have had the words or the inclination to narrate at the time.
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We hope the reader finds meaning in a story, as the stories of others with lived experience have been meaningful to us. And we remind ourselves that this is our story. We created a picture in words to preserve these moments in our lives, a permanent marker of our existence. Sometimes when I think I don’t have DID anymore or I forget about my family of parts or I forget what happened to us, I just need to reread Life with Parts.
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Thank you for reading and holding space. We encourage you to write. Anything and often.
Excerpts
A Narrative
Some time ago I began to accept the notion that we didn't have words to describe the something we never knew, consequently, the something I never had to explain, the blurry something coming in the distance. Those with the words didn’t have the experiences and those with the experiences didn’t have the words.
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I needed to explain what I was slowly discovering had happened to me as a child. I needed a narrative to say, “This is what happened then, and this is who we are now,” and I needed to navigate the situations that seemed to me as if maybe I had made them up. I needed the green light from my inside family for a story we could all live with.
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I did some reading about DID. I went to meetings with members of the DID community and heard how others described their experiences. Slowly, I found a word here and an idea there that fit into my puzzle. Then I began to write around those words and maybe I got a sentence which felt right, and then maybe another.
One such sentence I use as part of my narrative to explain a nasty childhood episode in a general way is, “I saw something as a child that I never should have seen.”
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The other day I was in my doctor's waiting room. The TV was tuned to a home remodeling show which was neutral, nothing triggering. A contractor was giving instructions to a couple of workers who were doing the heavy lifting in a construction project. But then the workers came up against something they hadn't planned for, a situation which was going to stop the project. They were concerned about having to give the contractor bad news.
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So, a worker comes out of the house, approaches the contractor, and says to her, “There is something I don't want you to see.”
Immediately, I heard a young inside voice say, “Why didn't anyone tell me that?”
Torn Memory
It’s always the same torn memory.
A man without a face.
Janitor’s clothing.
Blue or was it green?
That’s all I know.
I should be sad,
But I’m empty.
I sense there’s more.
I claw at it
to get behind the memory,
to see what it’s made of.
I want to shake it
and smash it
and make it new.
I want it to finish.
But there’s no way in,
always the same smooth wall,
not even a wrinkled edge to pry.
It’s always the same torn memory.
A man without a face.
Janitor’s clothing.
Blue or was it green?
That’s all I know.
I should be sad.
It’s always the same torn memory.