This is a new version of an article that was originally published as “26,” about the early attempts to diagnose the cause of my chronic pain and other symptoms, and the many ways my access to medical treatment was blocked for years prior.
Category: Voices
A collection of personal stories and anecdotes showing the ways oppression affects us on a day to day basis, as well as our reactions to it.
Look for opportunities to submit your story to this segment in the near future.
What Does Dissociation Feel Like?
How did I spend ten years of receiving treatment from eight different therapists, as well as doing my own research on mental health, and never realize I was dissociating so much? Because I didn’t realize what I was feeling was dissociation!
Chronic Illness: Wait, Your Body Doesn’t Do This, Too?
A revamped version of my article “The Blue Book” about my discovery of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and early struggles with integrating chronic illness into my identity.
Early Signs That I Had Dissociative Identity Disorder
When I was first diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, I was pretty shocked. I didn’t exhibit a lot of the most obvious signs I had seen in media. To help reorient myself, I began carefully reviewing the chapters of my life and looking for the hidden signs of DID that I had previously missed. I ended up finding quite a few.
Who Am I Today? How My DID System and I Figure Out Who Is Fronting
We wanted to share with you the strategies that we use on a daily basis to figure out who is fronting at any given moment. If you are plural, we hope these strategies might be useful to you, and if you’re not, we hope this article will further illustrate what the experience of plurality and/or dissociative disorders is like.
What Is Plurality/Multiplicity?
In this post, I go over the meaning of plurality, otherwise known as multiplicity, and how the concept applies to me personally.
Coping with Covid: Learning to Find Comfort Amidst the Unknown
But what do you say to your community when you’re scared, don’t know what to do, and you still want to offer them some kind of comfort?
Recovering from Abuse: Was Everything My Fault?
I have a large number of friends who have been through at least one kind of abuse and I’ve noticed that if someone has gone through the process of recovering from abuse at least once, it becomes much more important to them to evaluate future behaviors as potentially abusive. But having the intense desire to avoid ever suffering abuse again, and actually identifying abuse are two very different things.
It Can’t Be That Bad: How the Medical System Let Me Fall Through the Cracks
As more and more stories of medical neglect as a result of marginalization are brought to light, I hope that we can collectively reduce that disconnect and bring understanding and accommodation of marginalized backgrounds into our medical system, rather than using the medical system to further enforce their oppression. Maya Strong’s guest post today is one of those stories.
I Don’t Have Interstitial Cystitis
As if I didn’t have enough health conditions already, this article is the story of how I thought I had interstitial cystitis… and then found out that I didn’t.