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Inner Worlds: The Metaphorical Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder
The minuscule details of my outside world became the blueprint for my inside world.
Vast fields of rippling carpet fibers. Bedsheet mountain ranges. Prism-reflected pathways crisscrossed walls and dimensions.
A world where logic was built on riddles, and secrets were spoken in rhyme: where the deeper you go, the more there is, and everything is both nothing and exactly as it appears.
***
We started surrounded by stone darker than midnight. Stone that would gleam with phosphorous, gradually-fading fingerprints when touched, and sometimes when not.
We started in the dark. Not knowing who was beside us, behind us, or in front. We started with a blink, started with a step. We started with a tentative “hello?”
And the dark whispered back.
***
Inner world. Mindscape. Head space. Mental landscape.
Everyone has one. It’s how we think, where we think. The phenomenon is not limited to DID, but it is often utilized in recovery work as a way to process trauma, practice containment, and communicate with dissociated parts.
Inner worlds reflect our history, memories, emotion, and translates it into pictures, into a narrative we can tolerate. Our inner world absorbs unfelt feelings and unthinkable thoughts and gives us a place to go when the reality at the edge of our fingertips starts to burn.
***
For some survivors it’s a house. Or a couch. Or an expansive city. For some, it’s nothing, and for others, it’s much more.
At first, I couldn’t understand or relate to other dissociates who talked about manipulating or creating their internal spaces. Ours just was, and we had to survive it like everything else.
It didn’t seem to make sense; it wasn’t seamless or mappable, and it wasn’t just one place, either. Our inner world is precisely that: an entire universe (nay multiverse) seeded from the mind of a child.
Friendly forests and wooded clearings. Barren wastelands and acidic swamps. Earthquakes, floods, thunderstorms, mudslides. A beach, an ocean, a volcano. An attic. A snow globe. A motley-cobbled spaceship. An empty theater. A scrapbook.
Dreamlike and liminal, hovering between awake and asleep, dead and alive; while young, my inner worlds were a place not of safety but escape. At my worst, my mindscape was a treacherous, traitorous environment; an inseparable mental purgatory.
Every metaphor is a clue. We are learning symbiosis — to pay attention to the information given, to hear the message inside its scream, and we are learning to visualize and reshape for the betterment of all.
Through these worlds, we’re reaching between time to pull ourselves free. We’re bridging the gaps between past and present, weaving our universe together, creating our future, and I am only just beginning to truly understand the power of the mind.
***
When drafting this piece, there were a few topics from which to choose, and I thought I’d selected the easiest one. But there’s nothing easy about this. Turning the literal into metaphor is effortless, but reverting symbolism into its mirrored reality is gut-wrenching.
Let them stay gargoyles and trees. Let them stay starfish dreaming beneath the ocean. Let them stay in their forests and pockets and raindrops. Let them stay in their mercy sleep, where dreams are kinder than memory.
Emptiness signified escape. Monsters meant bravery. Wilderness defined freedom. Everything in our inner world is truth couched in the cryptic, and probably why it’s still so hard to talk about my life in any way other than poetry.
We’ve had to be careful while writing this; revealing too much about our inner world would expose too much about us and our history. Every element in us reflects something that happened to us, or what we did to survive it.
It also shows us, underneath it all, exactly who we are, and what we can do.
#DissociativeIdentityDisorder #dissociativedisorders #DissociationDisorders
*** Original Title: "Bigger on the Inside" ***
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