Dear Person With Dissociative Identity Disorder: You Are Beautiful

We are people made of people. We are like fractals. We are many within one. We open like a thousand books, write upon a thousand pages, dream a thousand dreams, within one. We glimpse the world with many eyes, infant and aged, woman and water. We speak to the sky, the soil and every living thing with that within us which was kept original.

When we sing, we can harmonize with ourselves unaided. We are as magical and contradictory as the music of a deaf composer, “Beethoven’s 9th.” When we paint, we are our own blended colors and clashing contrasts. Within us, we are our own opportunity to create, over time as all relationships unfold, loving families that are more or less accepting of one another. We carry our homes on our back, our many hearts within one body, like thousands of treasures.

When we write poetry, we use all the tabs, italics, pronouns and fonts to express our many perspectives. When we cry, we are the rain pouring, the fire raging, the ocean surging and the tall grass waving gracefully in the eye of the storm, all at once. When we feel these many things simultaneously, we are Picasso’s “Guernica.” When we dissolve, we are a Jason Pollock or a Vincent Van Gogh. When our smallest selves speak their voices, it is a Mark Rothko sunrise. When we reflect, we see Frida Kahlo, or simply the mandala within a kaleidoscope, creating an infinite number of designs with an ever shifting array of visible pieces and a mirror.

We are not the flower that opens in the winter snow. We are the oasis blooming in the desert, suddenly and with such tremendous vigor and diversity you would think it had been there for hundreds of years. It has, and the desert has taught those living things to grow quickly, spread widely and then to retract for months and years until water returns. Our leaves shelter lizards and wave to birds. Our vines crawl over rocks, which harbor sweet cool liquid calling out not only to us, but to cattle and gazelles, mice and people. We are dazzling in our response to the life source in an inhospitable land.

We are the rolling cracks in a mountain that has lived for 400 million years. We are the dust and sand of the mountain, as it blows away into infinity, trickles down rivers and streams and shatters under earthquake pressures. We have known annihilation, as keenly as we know the other side of annihilation: creation, rebirth and the formation of something from the nothing that was left behind.

We are survivors with dissociate identity disorder. We are beautiful.

The Mighty is asking the following: What’s one thing people might not know about your experience with disability, disease or mental illness, and what would you say to teach them? Check out our Submit a Story page for more about our submission guidelines.