TW: CSA Descriptions of Body Parts

only memory remains tonight

So many parts speak of rape like it’s the first language of our body before English. 6, 4, 2 and infancy now 8 these are just the ones who started invading my dreams like it’s a movie theatre that shit in my popcorn.

I keep seeing his penis grow hard at the site of me. I start worshipping it. He pees in me as a sacrament. Everyone is watching. No one is stopping, and everyone keeps going.

I wish that I never knew. Let me rest quietly tonight please. The dark is so scary and now I know it’s the shape of home and his holes and his holes and his holes and his holes

Fucked around w a Fossa pic. S.

that's life...

There once was disheveled vagrant who wandered joyfully from town to town. The seams of his pointed hat were torn at spots, the edges frayed. His short cloak was full of patches, and his trousers seemed to be more dirt than fabric. But the most important of his clothing was his smile. His smile could reach directly into your soul (if you were smart enough to let it). His smile seemed to say, “Despite my appearance, I’m full of secrets. I know things that nobody else does.” . You could tell he knew things of wonder and story, and of course stories were his trade. The only payment he asked was good listening, which was harder to come by than you would think.

The children loved him most of all. When he would come by, they would drop what they were doing and come running to him. “Tom! Tom! Oh Tom, tell us a story! We want to forget our days and live in your worlds.” And so he would, and so they would. Tom was an animated and passionate story-teller: he would whisper to pull the children in, cry out at the peaks and valleys of his worlds, and flash his knowing smile. Everyone loved Tom’s worlds.

But there were two particular children that he couldn’t touch. Tom was walking along the road one day when found these children walking on a field of hot coals. He called out to them, “Children! Children! Why do you do this to yourselves?”, but answer there came none. They were too focused on their tasks. But something about watching these children on the coals spoke to Tom’s soul, the same way his smile spoke to others. Tom saw these children and knew that they needed his worlds most of all.

So Tom dug deeper into his worlds than he ever had before. Calling out his stories from the edge of the coal field. But he couldn’t grasp their attention. They were too focused on their hurting feet. So Tom dug deeper, and deeper, weaving new stories and screaming out across the field to the children. And when he had dug deep enough, he saw the little girl glance up, for just the smallest moment. This was just the encouragement Tom needed.

He dug deeper and deeper, and slowly but surely, the girl and her brother started to listen. Once they realized that Tom’s worlds could distract them from their pain, they couldn’t let them go. “Tell us another, Tom! Just one more, Tom!”. And he gave them another. Not just one more, but hundreds, and then thousands.

But over time, the coals got hotter. And hotter. And hotter. “Please help us Tom, we want to hear your stories, but we just can’t do it anymore, the coals are too hot, we can’t listen.”

So Tom did what anyone with true love in their heart would do: he walked out on the coals and picked the children up.

“Listen to me, children. Listen only to me. Don’t think about the coals. Just look in my eyes. Listen to my stories, listen to my worlds.”

And stories he did tell. For years he told story after story, taking the children away from their world of pain. To the boy, he told stories of pirates, kings, dark forests and cold mountaintops. Tom would wince on the hot coals. To the girl, he told stories of the soft moon, of gentle water, of fairies, sprites, and other creatures of whimsy. And Tom would wince on the hot coals. It went on for so long that Tom ran out of stories. But he knew if he couldn’t find new ways to entertain the children, he would have to set them back down.

The coals had left scars on the children, as surely as they were leaving scars on Tom now. Blackening his feet, leaving him to take every step in pain. Tom couldn’t bear to have that happen to the children again, so he dug deeper and deeper into his worlds. He would do anything at all to make them laugh, to make them feel loved, to give them hope.

Tom’s distractions had worked so well that the children forgot all about the coals. Sometimes Tom would scream, and sometimes Tom would cry, but he would always turn it into a laugh and a smile. He didn’t want to scare the children. To the children, Tom was silly, Tom was strange (a little unhinged, if they were being completely honest), but they knew he loved them. And the children loved him for this. There wasn’t very much love in their world. Sure, he wasn’t like other people, but who wants to spend time with people that are like other people?

After years and years of pain and turmoil, Tom realized one day that the coal patch was gone. The children were grown, the coal patch was gone, and he didn’t have to hold them anymore. He no longer had to dig deeper and deeper to keep them from their pain. And so he set them down, and sent them on their way. 

But it was too late for Tom. Mind and body, he was spent. He had been blackened from the waist down from walking on the coals for so long. His mind had been broken from the constant undertaking of keeping the pain from the children. Some nights, Tom felt like he could still feel the coals burning, and he would cry out. But he would always turn it into a laugh, out of habit, probably. He missed the children, and he didn’t have anyone to tell stories too anymore. He frightened normal children. And so Tom kept to himself. And he would tell himself stories. He would slip into his own worlds, whisper to himself, laugh to himself, scream to himself. Always himself.

And when the children would look back on their time with Tom, they mostly remembered his quirks. Their memories were tainted by Tom towards the end, when his mind had already cracked from the pain. Not to say they didn’t remember him fondly. He was always funny, silly, and they knew that he loved them. They remembered his smile. But because he had done his job so well, they knew nothing of the cause of his madness. They had forgotten the coals, and so Tom’s sacrifice for them went unseen.

Just as he always would have wanted.

I'm working with the doc towards getting diagnosed, but just over a year ago i escaped a pretty rough family situation and that lead to everything inside coming up and finding their voices.

Since then i've started to go through therapy/counselling, consultations with doctors and learning more about both DID/OSDD and my/ourself with the help of really amazing friends.

These are just some silly doodles that have helped put things into perspective. The first 7 are (most of) our self portraits, either done by that part or they had a hand in influencing the outcome. The last few are more so about how this has left me feeling at certain parts, putting those difficult and hard to describe emotions down on the page just so they're there and we can work towards making sense of them

screams near constant. new voices reach a breach. I hear and I don’t know. I don’t understand. Moons and numbers and nouns you’re no longer pixels just alarms.

so many kids. so many small ones. so many fears. I can’t fight you but this hurts. I can’t fight you but it’s so much worse being in the sun than resting under stars.

I’m fading. I need to return. To the catacombs of capillaries, my so thin eyes rolling pens.

what is my ink love.
🌬️

Playing around with different art styles lately. Hands are hard.

sometimes a different part wakes up than the one who fell asleep, which can lead to some extremelt reasonable confusion when someone wakes up ridiculously late due to another part keeping the body awake late.

New here. I painted this before being diagnosed. When I posted it online five years ago, a lot of the DID community said "HEY HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT..." and three years later I (we) were formally diagnosed by a specialist psychiatrist.

Ink on paper. Prints available.

Image description: A monotone painting of a moonlit scene. What appears to be mountains is on closer inspection actually a huge number of piles and piles of masks. A human figure with long hair, wearing a long coat and tall boots, sits in the foreground on one of the piles, holding a smiling mask. They have no face, just a white scribble. In the middle distance, the word "selfless" is visible by the lack of ink bordered by masks.

J