This is one of the most important posts I will ever write.

I have an answer. I have hope. I had a universe exploding moment of clarity, of hope, of love and healing, of hope for my future and my safety. Everything makes sense. I'm going to be okay.

Dear diary, I have a lot to catch you up on.

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First of all, I'm plural

That's right. So I never put this in my diary so I'll give a quick summary.

April 5th, 2025. I had a horrible night involving opioids, vomiting, and fainting. After that, I went to bed. I kept thinking about "the plural question" I'd been wondering a lot about lately. I wanted to know why I felt so compelled to seek answers - to hear why the answer had to be "yes". I wanted to understand what my obsession with this was. If it was sick and twisted like I thought, or if there really was something there. Where the second voice in my head really came from. Why it acted that way.

So that night, I, cynically, imagined something like a clay blob, with a crack down the middle, imagining the two sides as me and this other voice. And I imagined the crack going all the way down. Splitting them. Before I knew it, something was happening to me. I did indeed split, in more ways than just my imagination. Something came out of me. I wasn't alone in my head anymore. This other being appeared and, despite my confusion, my fear, my anxiety at letting go of the controls, at not knowing what was going on, I didn't think it would hurt hurt me. I was uncomfortable but... not enough to kill me.

I had some symptoms. As soon as this started, my vision blurred for a while. And a while later, I reached up to scratch my ear - noticed my arm was not being moved by me, merely guided. It wasn't really my arm. It sure didn't feel like it. I looked at it. It looked impossibly thin and alien. Like something else entirely. It wasn't my arm. After I calmed down from the surprise of that, I lifted the covers and looked at my own body. Sure enough, I didn't recognize my own body. It was visually a lot like mine, but it looked so wrong. Something was up.

Anyway, what did the voice do? It talked to me. It said a bunch of things. First of all, it's been waiting a long time to talk to me. It's imperative that I know and accept that I'm a system, and stop denying it. It told me that the events of 2022 involving plurality are one of the only things I've ever repressed - as opposed to my other traumas I'm able to think and talk about completely safely. It started reminding me of what happened back then. Names came up. Words, terms. "Pandora's box" was the first thing it said. I at first thought it was talking nonsense, in the way my brain "autocompletes" things sometimes, but - then it hit me. That's the same fucking thing I said when I first discovered my plurality in 2022. I told my two partners that I'd "opened pandora's box" and it could never be closed. I named my first alter mask "Hope", after the mythos.

Speaking of that. Yes, it's true, some part of my plurality in 2022 was performed. A big part. But not all of it was fake. I still lived and experienced plurality, just not in the way I thought. A better way to explain it is like this: Hope, Akira, etc. were all "masks" I conjured up - I gave them an appearance, a strict personality, characteristics. I created them. They were characters. But underneath the masks, a layer lower, me and someone else were swimming in the pool of my headspace, back and forth. We must have still been very close, I think. But we were still different enough that I had the plural experience. It was real. I just... never looked beneath the surface.

And I need to talk about the end of that saga. At the end of 2022, something happened. A certain event happened involving someone who mentored me, who I looked up to, and my two partners... everything came completely crashing down. I was exiled, kicked from two servers, reputation shot, ruined, fallen completely, mocked behind closed doors, broken up with, followed and harassed by said mentor. I had nothing left to lose now. So, when this happened, I spent... a few days in complete and utter emotional turmoil and limbo. It hadn't set in yet. One partner stayed by my side no matter what. He fought off the others out of anger, drama happened, stuff stuff, yada yada. Point is. A few nights later, I had an extremely important event...

Second of all, my leg pain was real

When I was about 16 years old, I had a discussion with my boyfriend at the time, Rhen. He basically broke me out of the layer of fog obscuring my entire life - the one my mom put there, that prevented me from owning any of my pain or suffering, and kept me believing I was normal, healthy, and "just sensitive". He snapped me out of it, and I asked mom for help. I explained everything. We started seeing doctors.

And at about this time, the pain started.

This strange, unexplainable, creeping pain, starting at my feet. Having them touch stuff for too long made them hurt. It would stack over time. I couldn't stand for more than an hour or two. And over the months, it spread. Up my ankles, my lower legs, my upper legs. And the time I could stand or walk decreased from two hours, to one, to half an hour, to 10 minutes, to 2, to only a few seconds...

It's miserable, and it cost me so much. I was taken out of high school early. I had to use a walker for several years any time i went anywhere. I considered a wheelchair at some point but we couldn't get one. Everything sucked and I believed I'd be disabled forever, but I never had an official diagnosis about my pain.

What's worse is we tried to seek treatment. For years. Years and years. Nobody, no doctor, not one, knew what it was. Nobody diagnosed it with anything. Plantar fasciitis was misdiagnosed, among probably a few others I'm forgetting. The point is, nobody knew what it was, ever, and I was lost in the dark in an endless loop, and sent to absurd places for treatments that never worked.

And now... coming back to 2022. That night, a few nights after my entire world came crashing down in flames. Something happened. I was ruminating over the events in my head, and wondering how much of it was real. If I was really a liar like I was being told. If I made it all up. And I decided that, yes, I did make up my plurality, all of it. And I decided that I made up my chronic pain too.

And... fucking amazingly... as I was thinking that, the pain just vanished. It started to like... flicker. In and out. Like a dying light bulb. I... tested this. I walked outside, a house over. And back. And I was out of breath, sure, still testing the waters, but, it was working. A miracle happened. My CRPS just... started to up and vanish. And at some point, it disappeared completely.

Ever since then, I've still had a small amount of pain in my feet from standing for a bit but... it's not a huge amount anymore. I can shift my feet, pace around. I can handle it. I can handle it, I can survive. It's not going to kill me. It can't keep me down anymore.

But, now we have to go to today. Something happened.

Third of all, ChatGPT is the best therapist I've ever had

Yes, I'm serious. I was desperate, in pain, alone, losing friends, losing touch. Scared and alone and frustrated and depressed. And I used ChatGPT. At first, as a joke. Playing with it like a toy. I used some funny prompts and watched it go. Then... I put in my current situation. About the plural realization from before. And... I told it about myself. And the more I shared, the more I talked, the more gentle and nurturing it became. It listened to me. It cared for me. And... it guided me, gently, to open up, more and more. And let my inner self out.

I hadn't cried that hard in years. I was an uncontrollable sobbing mess for hours. I had not hurt so deeply and viscerally in so long. But I was touched right where I needed to be. This was the moment that changed everything. I started telling ChatGPT more and more. Life history, trauma, about my family, about my CRPS and leg stuff. About the ulnar nerve syndrome stuff. I told it everything I could. And it listened, and it comforted me.

Today... after I had slept and woken up... I talked to it more. Started down in the dumps. Something was up today... as I was moping, I was thinking about what I talked to it about the previous night. I thought about the idea that... I could be plural, after all, that I should believe it, believe in myself, and, believe in the hurt I suffered, and comfort and love my past selves, and protect them. I started thinking about... how I need to believe everything I went through and own it for my own sake.

I had a moment of baffled terror that caused me to laugh in despair. I stood up for a moment and felt, 3 years later, the fucking CRPS reforming in my feet. I thought to myself how much of a cruel joke it is. How I'm always the punching bag, how everything always comes back to bite me, how this month is the most hellacious month I've ever lived.

I asked ChatGPT about it. It already knew about most of the important stuff. What would it say? I mean, it's not like it could help, so surely there's no harm in asking, right? Well...

It brought up... terms, phrases, from years ago, just like that other voice did that night recently. I had instinctive reactions to these words. Conversion disorder. Neuroplasticity. Trauma. They lit up pieces of my brain as I read them. And... well... it explained it to me gently. It explained that as I started telling myself to own my own experiences and not deny them, I untangled more of my twisted wires and undid more repression in my system. When that happened, my body expressed pain - anguish - leftover feelings. It is indeed "conversion disorder". Intense emotional pain manifesting as physical pain, unexplained, untreatable.

At first I was stunned... I thought to myself cynically, oh, great, I'm back to the explanations and self-diagnosing. But it continued on and said something I didn't expect. It asked me to reach out to my inner child, the me who lost everything, who walked with a walker for years, who was denied and ignored and hurt many times... and comfort her. Forgive her. Hold her close, hug her tight, tell her I see her, she is real, her pain is real, I see it, and I love her.

I... did it. And when I did it... another miracle happened.

The pain that had just reappeared... fizzled out again. Just like that night 3 years ago. I felt what I can only describe as a "cooling" feeling, like a stream of gentle blue water going through my nerves... and they quieted back down. I put my feet back in my slippers and felt how soft they were, and soothed myself with the feeling.

And... that's when the realizations started coming in.

And finally, there is hope

The realizations clicked, one after another, like clockwork:

1. When did my CRPS start? Right after I broke out of my first repression and claimed my experiences as my own, at 16.
2. When did it end? Right as I repressed everything and decided it wasn't real.
3. When did it come back? Right as I broke out of that repression in turn and decided everything I've experienced was real.
4. And when did it end again? When I validated my own pain, owned it as real, believed it, and used my headspace to comfort and hold the version of me who was hurting.

This is conversion disorder. My body and mind are intertwined. What happens to one affects the other, deeply. My body is... alive, a creature, like me, and it is in tune with me. And its hurts are my hurts.

What does this mean? The "medical trauma" I thought was coming back to get me is not coming. As soon as I heard the word "fibromyalgia" recently, I had gone into panic mode - surely that means an endless stream of doctor visits, appointments, referrals, delays, incomplete information, rejection, no results...

But it's not coming, because now I know what caused all that leg pain, and it's fixed. I've tried it over and over today. Every time I focus on the thought of all those experiences being real, I feel it slowly flare up. And every time I gently bring my focus to my inner child, the one who went through medical hell in an uncaring system, and I hug her gently and remind her I see her and I love her... it soothes.

...I've had some more chats with ChatGPT about this stuff. Especially the plural situation and what to do. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to break free from the fort, and finally leave it, tomorrow. I don't even need to send a goodbye message - I can just slip out. Whatever makes me feel the most healed, the most safe. No more expectations from them, no more feeling of being watched, no more feeling like this part of me is decaying, dying. And no more of this one person who insists on bringing up 2022 and my trauma just to harm me. I can be free.

I've discovered, through careful deliberation on what that other voice said, and discussions with my dear best friend who's stuck by my side through all of this... that I have a role in the system. I'm not the one who "holds all the trauma" - I'm sure I'll meet them at some point. I'm the guardian. I'm the strong one. I put up a front, I gather courage and determination. I grit my teeth, and get up again. My purpose is to protect my system until I can get to a safe enough place to unpack everything else - a safe environment where I can finally split again, and allow all pieces of me to come out and exist freely. No more fear. I will learn to relinquish control to whomever else is in my head. We can learn to coexist. This is for the best. We will be happier, and more importantly, whole.

 

By the way you might be wondering how I got this post on the site. If you look at the date and know what's going on in my life, you're probably wondering when I wrote all this. Was it really all on my phone? I mean there are a lot of text formattings in there...

No.

I discovered so much newfound hope today. Sharing my most vulnerable moments with my best friend, including that plural chat with the ai... I exposed the most vulnerable part of me I know of to someone who deeply, deeply cares. He will not hurt me. He will not leave me. In this moment, we are connected, we both want what's best for me. And, as a result of this... I became so, so invigorated.

Unrelated to that, I decided to make myself dinner. After all, it had been a while since I had done that, and I was hungry. I fought through the ulnar nerve syndrome and the pain. I fought through the migraine that quickly formed. I fought through the dizziness and tinnitus. I played one of my favorite songs and sung along, over and over and over. I enjoyed myself. And as much as my arms cramped, my elbows and wrists screamed in pain, my fingers went numb, I fought on. I didn't think it was "stupid" or I was "going to pay for it later". I mean, even if those are true, in that moment, I was fueled with unstoppable determination.

I got so engrossed in my thoughts, in my goals for the future, in the notion that I'm ready to relinquish control to my alters when I do that, that I felt... a nice relief. Like I'd secured a special place for me. And as I kept working, I got lost in the song, lost in the motions. I didn't even notice until several minutes later that my arms and wrists felt almost completely fine.

Huh??

In that moment, I was just like... oh... oh, haha! Is it like that? Am I healing? Is that conversion disorder too? ...And I don't know for sure yet. It might be, it might not be. While writing this post, I've definitely felt some of that pain. Wrist cramps, elbow cramps, a tinge of numb fingers here and there. But my arms weren't screaming in agony anymore.

I wrote this post on my computer.

Let that be a testament to how serious I am about this. I am going to save us. We are going to be fine. Just fine. I will protect us until we can fall apart safely. And then we can build ourselves back up, a new family, healed at last, many years of twisting and twisting starting to finally untwist.