How did I get here? ~ Sam

Our story starts in May of 2017… I was 14 and school had just let out for the summer and I was going over to my dad’s house. I got home and went into my room, where I saw a note sitting in my lilac, foldable papasan chair that sat in the corner of the room. I picked up the note and read it. It was from my stepmom, saying that she hoped that we would become closer that summer. I never hated or disliked her, despite what she thought, but I just never knew how exactly to talk to her and always felt really awkward around her despite knowing her for years. So I was hopeful, and honestly delighted, that she wanted to try to build a relationship with me.

But that was when I heard a voice… “Don’t trust it…” It said. The voice wasn’t my internal dialogue and wasn’t even spoken in my voice. It just came out of the blue! I questioned who might’ve spoken it, having an idea, but not entirely sure if I was right. I called out to the person in question, but to no avail. Later on, maybe about a week later, he finally started talking to me again. And I was right. It was exactly who I thought it might’ve been. It was my current comfort character, Bendy, from the video game Bendy and the Ink Machine.

I tried to wrap my head around it. How? How was he here? Why could I hear him but not see him? Was he real or was I crazy? Eventually, my mind came up with a reason that had made the most sense to me at the time. He must be real! But he comes from an alternate universe and chose to communicate with me! Why can’t I see him? Because we can’t see things from alternate universes, right? But they can telepathically communicate with us if they so choose! How come he can take control of my body? Because he’s a demon and can possess things, right?… It all sounds so silly now, looking back at it, but I couldn’t wrap my head around it any other way…

While aware of the concept of being a multiple, I thought that it had been made up for fiction, up until I discovered that it was actually a real thing at the age of either 15 or 16. So that alternate universe thing seemed more likely at first since scientists have suggested that such a thing might exist and since I didn’t realize that multiplicity was a real thing. But even when I finally discovered DID, I still kept to my belief that it was a matter of alternate universes being real for the longest time. Although, I did have many times where I thought that maybe I had schizophrenia or psychosis for believing what I did, but I just thought that there was no way that I could have DID… 

Years passed, alters came and went dormant, still believing the whole alternate universe thing, up until one alter decided to show me otherwise…

Wally showed up just last year and had been around for about a month or two when he decided to show me what was really going on. I had been getting frustrated over something on my computer when he became active. Our mood immediately switched from frustrated and irritable to calm and collected. Even thought other alters had been active in the past, this one felt different…

I’ve never blacked out whenever an alter switches out with me, but rather, just feel like I get pushed to the side, but even then, it always felt like I was nudged to the side as a way for my alters to hide what they are without actually hiding from me. But Wally decided to actually push me aside, not just nudge. It truly felt like either I was a whole other person or that someone was really taking over. I was immediately curious and had a suspicion that maybe I did actually have DID… or something close, at least.

I tried talking to Wally, but he didn’t talk for a little while, but I eventually got him to start talking to me in this “new form.” He adjusted to being a bit more overt, and months later, others followed. I also managed to get dormant alters to wake back up, Bendy in particular being shocked by all the changes that had happened in the three years he had been asleep.

So slowly, over the past year, I’ve grown more confident that, yes, I might just have DID or OSDD. A few more alters have joined our ranks since then and now there’s currently 9 of us! Tomorrow, we get to go to therapy for the first time in over a decade and hope that we’ll be able to eventually get an answer on what we have. We are a traumagenic system, definitely. But, do we even have DID or OSDD?

I’ve heard from an experienced child therapist that sometimes kids will develop something very similar to DID but with one key difference… The condition isn’t distressing nor disordered. DID requires the condition to cause distress as one of it’s criteria, but we don’t have any distress with our condition. Maybe it’s because my alters are based on comfort characters and aren’t complete strangers to me, or maybe it’s because once I finally started thinking it might be DID, I was pretty knowledgeable on DID by then and knew what was happening. Or maybe it’s that fact that I don’t black out… But either way, hopefully we’ll get an answer sometime soon!

Hope you’ve had a good cycle and thanks for reading our long story! – The Saros System