My multiple personality disorder
By Simon Barget
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I have suffered for years from multiple personality disorder, for as long as I can remember. It is just so hard. I’m sure you can imagine how hard it is. I see so many faces and voices, I hardly know mine. I cannot remember a time when I was whole, when there wasn’t a schism. My case was diagnosed long ago. It is particularly virulent. Current medical wisdom defines the disorder as the experiencing of up to three different persona; more than that is unheard of. I told the doctors there were millions. It wasn’t even a matter of a handful. I told them that, and I had to repeat it so so so many times in so many consulting rooms. I wasn’t exaggerating. I might not literally see a million people all at once, but I know those people are there, I can hear them in the background, I know this because the voices tell me. The voices never go away. It is a hell.
The number of people I actually see a day varies. It really depends. It’s hard to put a number on it. Sometimes I’ll inhabit a persona for the briefest of moments it hardly even registers. Sometimes there can be numerous in one go before you could even blink. Imagine being in an airport and having to say how many people there were or how many you saw, you could only really hazard a guess. That’s how many I might see if I go out. Or I might be quite calm and not see anything or anyone really. It all depends on what state of mind I’m in.
But it also very much depends on whether or not I go out of the house. If I stay home it can be better, I might experience a few voices nothing more and things tend to hold up. But if I go out, the premonitions really start, my synapses explode and my brain goes on overtime. I have visions, crazy inexplicable visions. I see things that aren’t there, I see objects and people, and there is really nothing to stop me going up to these imaginary people and interacting with them. That’s inevitably what I do. I waste a lot of my time in my spurious fantasies. It might seem innocuous but it’s just odd and a bit wrong. I can say this without seeming callous because I’m judging myself. I can understand why it freaks people out. It would freak me out too. I dread to think what people think of me, it must look completely crazy. I dread to think. But what I see is real to me, as real as anything is to you. But I just can’t abide the thought of people thinking I’m crazy. That’s the thing that eats away at me the most when I get back home, the havoc I’ve wrought during the day, all the times people have seen me burbling and muttering, and yet while I’m caught up in it I have absolutely no idea I’m doing it and I just think all the visions are real.
You have to understand that me walking up and down the street talking to myself is exactly the same as you talking to a friend. Imagine you’re walking down the street talking to a friend. It would be totally normal for you to be talking and if I came along and watched you for a while, well I wouldn’t think you were mad for one second, I’d see your friend and wouldn’t remotely start to question it. And that’s what it’s like for me, except, supposedly, the people I walk down the road with don’t exist. They exist only for me. Someone taps me on the shoulder from nowhere and makes me start. Someone calls the police. Someone calls my parents though they passed away ages ago. It’s only after that I realise what I’ve done.
It is a totally bewildering and haphazard existence. There is no limit to my visions and auditory hallucinations. It is scary. I can see anything at any time. I don’t know what’s going to come next, what type of person I’ll inhabit, what type of skin they’ll have, what type of body, whether they’ll walk straight or hunch ever so slightly, will they be young or old, will they have hair, and if so will it be grey brown or black, or will they be bald or shaven? The possibilities are endless. I have interacted with all types of people, I have seen the lot.
And so I tend to stay at home, that’s if I’m not in a secure unit. When I’m at home it just so happens that the visions die down, it just so happens that I tend to see the same things, the voices repeat, the same personalities say the same things to me, it feels as if I have the slightest bit of control over what I see and what I don’t, who I’m going to come into contact with, it feels as if I have more of a capacity to shut things out and to stop them from getting from me. That’s not to say I’m not affected, it’s just that the frequency is reduced.
But being at home isn’t a solution. I actually need the visions, I thrive on them. Take away my outlet and reduce the impact, but I don’t feel any sense of fulfilment at all. At least these visions give me a sort of interaction, however false, however invented. They are my way of recreating myself.
There is nothing they can do for me except lock me up and I really don’t want that. They can’t decide if I’m a danger to society. Maybe I’m a nuisance, I can see that, a bit of an annoyance. But there is no drug they can give me because they don’t work for a case as chronic and drastic as mine. I have tried all sorts of drugs, and the difference between hearing millions of voices to hearing, say ten to fifteen less than a million is unnoticeable. It’s trivial. And then they tried upping the dosage but the amount I’d need to ingest would not be physically possible, one psychiatrist worked out that I would have to eat literally an elephant’s body weight in drugs every hour just to reduce the instances to the order of hundreds of thousands. There is no other remedy. There is no known case like it.
I wish I could experience the self-contained life that you experience. I cannot imagine how simple it must be to know where you begin and the other person ends. I cannot make the distinction and somehow take myself to be everyone else too. It’s as if one person was never enough for me, one persona, it was as if I had been destined to reject the one-person-paradigm right from the off. Why am I so different to everyone else? I cannot begin to say, but it is just so hard, it is so very hard.
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Comments
Makes me think of the movie
Makes me think of the movie "Split". You could be forgiven for thinking that this isn't fiction it's so lurid in detail.
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