On Kayfabe

Content warnings for: descriptions of ableism (in both institutional & interpersonal contexts) & emotional abuse, mentions of suicidality & self injury.

════════

When I was 14, I was very sick. I had been sick for a while - as far back as I can remember - but by the time that I was 14, it was impossible to ignore. I would forget important events, then forget that I had forgotten at all; large chunks of my recent history had simply evaporated from my awareness. The events that I could recall tended to ricochet wildly between different perspectives (I was fine, nothing happened and I was happy; I was hurt intentionally because everyone wants to hurt me; maybe what happened was unkind, but it's nothing I can't handle; the pain of remembering is too much for me to possibly cope with.) There were the suicide attempts, obviously, those though tended to go relatively unnoticed in comparison to my failing grades. I felt like a frightened toddler in a teenage body; I felt significantly older than I was. And, of course, there were the constant, swinging shifts between my demeanor, my interests, the ways I defined myself. Those, too, largely went unnoticed; when they were, they were given names like "mood swings" or "attention seeking behaviors."

While the suicide attempts and the self injury and whatnot could pass by relatively hidden, my grades needed to be addressed. The first time I was ever really acknowledged as sick was by my school's 504 plan, followed by special education classes, followed by near-daily visits to guidance counsellors and rigorous psychological testing and medication and ineffective therapy. Ultimately, my guidance counsellor ended up admitting to me, age 14, that she had no idea how to help me, and suggested that I leave that school entirely. So I did.

All of this is to say: I was not well. Every professional I saw came up with a different explanation for my behavior. At times, I was bipolar; other times, autistic; other times, attention-deficit; other times, just plain old attention seeking. I remember feeling despair when, at the end of one round of testing, I was given a list of seven or eight different diagnoses. Without getting any answers that made sense to me, I started researching, if only to figure out what the various labels I had been stuck with meant. Being a teenager in the 2010s, that meant spending a lot of time online.

It was in these online communities that I discovered the concept of plurality. Entire online communities, even, of people who had DID! In the circles I was in, there was a general structure to be followed: you would create a list of alters for other people to refer back to, with each one getting a profile. The most sparse ones would generally follow a name-age-pronoun-sexuality-species-source format, though many people would also choose to include details of the specific trauma that caused that alter to split off and the triggers that could be used to call them forward. It was also expected that every post, message, and comment would be signed off by the alter writing it, which was, of course, always obvious to whoever was writing. To not do this was oftentimes viewed with suspicion, along the lines of, "why don't you want to tell people who they're talking to? What are you hiding?"

Well, I found myself fascinated by this, though I couldn't really relate. Despite all of the aforementioned symptoms, my various shifts in personality-interests-perspective never coincided with a different name,. which seemed to be the base that all other symptoms were measured by. I always just felt like me. The problem is moreso that there are other, less-real versions of me that do things without my permission.

No worries; these online communities coined a separate term - median system - that felt more analogous to what I was experiencing. People who are median systems do not have alters; they have various facets of a personality with a shared memory and identity. While people with DID had fully-realized, separate people living in their brains, median systems are parts of a whole. (I can only hope that, through my other writing, including my present-day DID diagnosis and my preference for parts terminology, it would be clear that this does not align with my current opinions on the whole thing.)

It was around this time, and within these online spaces, that I met Theo. (Which is not his real name, for what it's worth.)

Theo was someone who, unlike me, had full-blown DID. He had a constantly-changing list of highly distinct alters; every few days, a new one would be discovered, played around with for a few weeks, and then killed off in a spectacular way. In one incident, after I told him that I was studying French, he suddenly discovered that he had a new alter who spoke it fluently, despite him never learning or being otherwise exposed to the language. When a friend of mine who did speak french pointed out that this alter's messages were machine translated, this alter suddenly killed herself, which was, of course, my friend's fault for saying anything. (I was then expected to drop this friend for being a murderer. I did not.)

Theo's main fixation was on other peoples' systems. When I told him about what I had labelled my median system, he became fascinated with me, which culiminated in him wanting to date me within a few days of me telling him this. As soon as this happened, he was constantly 'discovering' new alters who were fictional introjects from media I liked; these alters would then beg me to develop matching introjects, saying that they were lonely and suicidal, and they could only be saved from their impending suicides if I had a shippable alter they could date. The fact that I didn't have fictional introjects (besides one - ironically, this entire situation made me feel so uncomfortable that I hid her existence from him completely) seemed to endlessly frustrate Theo. My system was, to be frank, boring. My alters weren't distinct enough; I rarely knew who was who at any given time; none of them were fictional characters he liked. At one point, he suggested different dangerous, potentially life-threatening things I could do to traumatize myself enough to develop new alters for him to play with.

At another point, Theo became fascinated by the idea that, through spiritual means, he could physically transport alters from his head to mine. He would start to claim that he was doing this without my knowledge. According to him, these alters would then return to him and report back on any negative thoughts I had about him, and he would use this as an excuse to take his anger out on me. As skeptical of this as I was, I didn't want him to be angry at me. I started to wonder if, maybe, I really did subconsciously hate him, that he was somehow able to pick up on this through less fantastical means, so I started trying very, very hard to never think bad thoughts about him.

This relationship didn't last very long - around half a year, if I had to guess - before blowing up spectacularly. It came out that he had been cheating on me with two other people who also happened to experience some form of dissociation. Maybe the worst thing about this is that that wasn't what ended the relationship for any of us. During our time with him, he had been sowing the seeds of distrust between the three of us, taking opportunities to talk badly about the others whenever possible. Once the cheating came to light, he came to me and told me that he had no interest in the other two - he hated them, actually - but they had forced him into a relationship he didn't want to be in. I was the one who he really loved. He told the other two the same exact lines about me.

The end of this story isn't particularly interesting; my two friends and I got together, shared notes, realized we had been duped, and things ended very publicly and very dramatically. At the end of the day, he left these spaces altogether and never returned. What's interesting is, towards the end of this, I had a private conversation with him in which I believe he showed me a rare moment of honesty: he told me that he did not believe he had DID. It was his fascination with "crazy girls" that lead him to do what he did. I understand this as a crude expression of a desire for power over other people. The real draw, I believe, was the malleability of someone who doesn't have anyone else. Teenagers with complex dissociative disorders happened to match his criteria nicely.

This is terrible and all, and really, it wasn't a pleasant experience for a severely mentally ill teenager. But, looking back with an adult perspective, what sticks out to me is that he didn't come up with these concepts on his own. All of them were concepts that were already well-established in these online system spaces. Not only that, but the suggestion that these things aren't part of how the whole DID thing works (or that there could even be a common structure among people with DID to explain how it functions) were met with scorn and accusations of academic elitism. Between these experiences and seeing how these concepts have continued to be expounded on in increasingly fantastical and oftentimes ethically dubious ways, I have come to believe that there are some - though absolutely not all - system spaces that operate under the assumption of kayfabe. To put it in a different way: there is an unaddressed belief in these spaces that DID is not, in actuality, a real, material disorder, but rather an elaborate system of improv; everyone is assumed to be aware of this, but to state it directly is break character and thus taboo.

Before I go further, I would like to address the concept of fakeclaiming (that is, the online arguments to decide which people with DID are "valid" and which are pretending). I do not think that everyone in these spaces is faking a dissociative disorder, nor would that be a fair judgement to make. I was in these spaces, and I'm not very interested in the pissing contest to decide whether I'm valid or not. For many people with a complex dissociative disorder, the idea that this isn't real is a tempting one. It's easier to go along with the idea that your experiences are all do-whatever-you-want-forever roleplay than it is to acknowledge the intensity of its alternative; that your alters are real, the pain is real, this really happened, and you continue to be affected by it. I also think that discussions of "validity" are, to be frank, pointless navel-gazing. You will never come up with a clean set of criteria to decide who is 'faking' and who is not, nor are you likely qualified to even try. My point in here is to analyze actions and ideas that arise in a shared space, not to condemn the individual (who is, more often than not, struggling immensely themselves, and often does not know better because they have not been given the right resources.)

With that being said...

I think this idea of kayfabe is the source of, or at least a contributing factor of the rampant anti-intellectualism in these spaces. The idea of academic rigor is widely derided under the assumption that, well, everything is valid, you can do whatever you want forever, and studying and theorizing about DID on an academic level is ruining everyone's fun - the worst crime of all. To suggest an underlying structure or cause of DID is the same as godmodding a roleplay. It's impolite. You're interfering with other peoples' games. Let people enjoy things.

The problem with this, of course, is that complex dissociative disorders are real in a way that I fear is not properly appreciated in these spaces. The brain of someone with chronic traumatization has been physically altered. The structures at play in people with dissociative disorders are real - not in the way that Santa is real to a child, and not in the way all the wrestlers in the WWE "really" have all this beef with each other, but as an actual, material condition. This is something that impacts peoples' functioning both on and offline.

These are varied spaces with varied people, and I think there's different reasons why people fall into this belief system. To reiterate what I said earlier, there are absolutely people with dissociative disorders for whom the full weight of what living with a dissociative disorder truly means is intolerable - and, considering that they have the "dissociate yourself from trauma" disorder, it's completely unsurprising that they would continue to dissociate themselves from their trauma. There are people like my 14 year old self, who are skeptical about some of the claims in these communities, but don't really know enough to have much of an opinion on it, and are desperately in need of a community to the point where they prioritize getting along over critical thought. There are people who maybe don't have a dissociative disorder, but appreciate the idea of a heavily-enforced kayfabe among a broad, multifandom group of roleplayers. And, unfortunately, there are Theos.

The above groups all convalescing into one shared community, coupled with vibes-based politics and a distrust of scientific rigor, creates the perfect storm of misinformation. If there is no academic structure to draw from, then your understanding and explanation of complex dissociation is based entirely on what your friends are saying. Even worse, bad actors can come up with any rules they want to manipulate the people around them, and no one wants to rock the boat by disagreeing. Your theories don't need to be proven, because asking someone to prove a theory is elitist. Anything that anyone says needs to be added to the canon, because to not do so is exclusionary and, of course, is also elitist. The end result is thousands upon thousands of community resources that are based on nothing at all. They hold up to those already entrenched in these communities, but to everyone else, it's nonsense.

When my relationship with Theo ended, my biggest tie to these communities was severed. But, because these communities are the most readily available entry point to people with complex dissociation, I had no idea what the alternative could look like. So, with the information I had available, I took stock of the situation and came to the most logical conclusion: I don't relate to any of this. I don't have DID.

It took nearly a decade for me to be diagnosed because of this.

The misinformation is bad. Ironically, the increasingly fantastical depictions of DID stemming from the "exclude nothing" policy leads to large amounts of people with complex dissociative disorders who can't keep up with the red queen's race being excluded, and thus left without a community. None of this is good. However, even more concerning to me is how easily a community that "yes-ands" everything becomes a breeding ground for abuse. Keep in mind that people with complex dissociation are a real, material class that are notably vulnerable to further victimization. We need a coherent understanding of our experiences so that we can notice when bad actors start misusing the language of dissociation as an excuse to harm us. We need to be able to disagree with other people. This is a matter of self-preservation as much as it is a matter of protecting each other.

I don't really know where to go from here. Be skeptical of unsourced claims. A fandom wiki is not a source, nor is a carrd. If you want information, there is decades worth of research and study that has been peer reviewed, picked apart, and discussed. People are going to say that you shouldn't read books about DID because "it's under researched and no one understands it." This is one of the most blatant examples of people just making shit up. DID is probably one of the most intensely-studied disorders out there. The model of structural dissociation has existed for more than 20 years, and it continues to hold up to current scientific standards. Compared to many other disorders, for which our best explanation is a half-hearted shrug, this is crazy! We understand a lot!

Other systems cannot use their DID to beam themselves into your head and read your mind, they are lying. You can't buy or sell alters, these are people who are lying to you, and they are also trying to scam you. A majority of the resources you read online, particularly on social media, are based entirely on one person's friend group. You are probably not going to relate to them because you are not a member of that person's friend group. This is fine. You don't need to be. They are trying to present their conclusions as the way it works for everyone because that's all they know. Read books. Read studies. These are based off of sizeable populations of unrelated people and not single insular groups. Anna's Archive has PDFs of just about any book you want. Skim through The Haunted Self if you like dry & clinical literature, check out Got Parts?: An Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder by ATW or Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation by Kathy Steele or any number of other books if you don't. I personally really enjoyed Amongst Ourselves: A Self-help Guide to Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder by Tracy Alderman and Karen Marshall, which also happens to be free on archive.org. Listen to things in audiobook format, break it down into smaller, more digestible chunks, whatever makes it easier for you. You don't have to have it all figured out. Just do what you can.

[note to self: go through library and come up with a longer list of resources - include link to google drive DID resources once i dig that link back up]