I think about lost identities this week, my therapist is walking me down the path of internal family systems. Internal family systems, coming from the brain of someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, tries to give roles to the parts of you that interact, contradict and conflict with each other. This apparently helps in externalising thought patterns so that you are able to observe them more clearly. There seems to be two parts to this, one is to identify these parts and roles and the other is to have conversations with them as a proxy to better self-talk. It is an interesting idea to me, to see yourself as this carrier bag of identities and I have been meditating on that this week.
Having dealt with a form of Bipolar Disorder for almost a third of my life till now, I have seen different identities come and go. The disorder is quite a disordering condition, it swings the pendulum left and right from different initial conditions each time. And each time, I would find myself in a new state of confidence or despair. Out of this oscillation have come various things atleast in the most recent years since I came to the US. This included 4 rebuilds of my website, 10 classes of drums, a yellow belt in taekwondo and 4 classes of swimming + a week of an actively used gym membership (out of the two years that I paid for). The Despair is, however, much more muddled and it is hard to point to specific instances or milestones within that despair. However, since I started therapy and medication, I have grown to be able to deal with it more and also have had to deal with it less.
These snapshots or milestones or turning points have often brought me momentum in life or taken it away. I have relied on them for directionality in the paths that I travel. However, as I start regulating more, I find myself less swung around by the forces of my mind and more towards quieter and slower modes of decision making. It scares me to no end that I cannot be a complete sailboat anymore. Or if I can and I don't know it yet since the sails themselves have changed. I think back wistfully to voyages where the wind was in my favour, where the masts creaked with the joyous abundance of motion. But I do not miss the deep dark lulls, where there was darkness and sickly stillness in the sea and the body refused to move. I am hoping that a fragmentation of identities does offer me new directions in that sense. These winds are quieter and I need to be more practiced in listening to them.
There is a new game to be played and I am just re-learning the rules.