"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
One of the most common forms of complex dissociative disorder-related media on video based platforms is the "Meet my Alters" video. These videos are exactly what they sound like. A person records their various alters introducing themselves, talking about who they are, their opinions on things, and life in general. These often serve a second purpose - to showcase the floridity of the creator's system. After all, people don't want to watch a video where every alter presents the same and gives the same answers. In these videos, the alters often change their outfits and makeup between takes; the differences between their behaviors, their mannerisms, their ways of talking, sometimes even accents are notable even to the untrained eye. These videos are immensely popular. This is apparent just from searching the term "meet the alters" on Youtube - the top result has 24,000,000 views. These are not resources for people within the community. They are content.
This level of floridity, the distinction between alters, and the obviousness of their presentation is not relegated to one genre of video. Across every social media platform, this seems to be the standard of how a dissociative disorder looks. The interesting thing to me is that this "standard" presentation is relatively rare in people with DID, with only around 5% of people with DID regularly experiencing overt, noticeable switches between alters. The other 95% have what's referred to as covert DID - that is, the differences between alters are subtle and are often unnoticeable to the people around them - sometimes (oftentimes) even to the system itself. And, of course, that's not even getting into the territory of dissociatives who don't meet the criteria for DID in the first place, who end up being treated as less by both the social media landscape and the clinical realm. (I highly recommend reading Carolyn Spring's essay DID or OSDD: Does It Matter?, which goes into great detail on the differences in the way DID and OSDD are treated.)
So, what's going on?
I know I write a lot about social media and complex dissociation. I'm sorry. Unfortunately, most other things I have to say related to structural dissociation have already been said by better, more eloquent people than me. What hasn't been written about - frankly, because it's not really as important - is the way that complex dissociation is discussed on social media. So, here I am. You're going to have to read another essay about this. Sorry.
Anyways, I touched on this a tiny bit in On Kayfabe, but this is a concept that I wanted to give the proper time of day instead of relegating it to a sidenote in a different essay.
To understand why this is the way it is, we need to understand the concept of an attention economy. On social media, a majority of the content is free. Individual creators might have paid content off-site, which they use social media to advertise, but in general, you don't have to pay to watch someone's Instagram reels.
Instead, social media generates revenue using a different resource: your time. After all, there are only so many hours in a day you can spend watching videos or reading posts. Social media companies have a few different ways they're able to profit off the time you spend on there. More obviously, there are ads. A lot of ads. And, a little more insidiously, there is data harvesting. Every piece of information that could possibly be scraped from your social media habits - your locations, which videos and links you click on, who you follow, how long you spend on each individual post - is packaged and sold to advertisers. In order to keep the money rolling in, you need to stay on the site for as long as possible. So, naturally, the powers that be are keeping track of what gets peoples' attention, and they will push it to its most possible extremes.
Of course, it's not entirely a big data harvesting conspiracy. Part of it is also just - well, I don't want to say human nature. People don't feel particularly strongly about boosting the voices of those who they don't find charismatic or interesting enough. Everything needs some aspect of performance. (Even me, writing this, is putting on something of a performance: my thoughts are being curated and cut into a neat little package to make it easier to digest.) If you don't have enough social capital, it's hard to get noticed. So individual people are drawn to and want to share the most flashy and engaging content because it's what catches their eye, and everything else tends to fall to the wayside.
There is not a single community that is immune to this. These are social dynamics inherent to every online platform. In fact, it's not even relegated to the internet - before Mark Zuckerberg ever had a single thought in his head about Facebook, it was only the most compelling and bizarre stories given the time of day on daytime talkshows. Social media is more or less a slightly more decentralized version of what was done on Oprah and Dr. Phil.
When it comes to dissociative disorders, the attention economy prioritizes shock value and novelty over anything else. What was surprising a few months ago is average today. Forget about being an influencer if your alters can't adequately perform on camera. There's a constant race to create what is oftentimes shock content more than anything else. More alters! More floridity! More trauma details! For an influencer, you need to constantly be showing newer and more dramatic things, or else you're going to be left behind by the people who can keep doing this forever. It's the red queen's race. You need to keep running as fast as you can just to keep your spot.
The unfortunate side effect of a majority of our information coming from influencers and edge cases is that, well, this is also the main avenue of information through which people learn about complex dissociation. Plenty of writing has been done by better people than me on how this skews the perspectives of people without dissociative disorders. What I'm interested in discussing is how this affects the people within these communities.
This style of presentation is not contained to people trying to be influencers. Within online communities, these same exact pitfalls continue to be the way of presenting yourself. People don't know anything else. It's not uncommon to see alters with Homestuck-style typing quirks to differentiate themselves between the rest of the system. Post sign-offs! Lists of alters! Accents! Pluralkit! Different icons! The community prioritizes emphasizing the difference between each individual alter. This is not problematic, per se - and I really hope that none of what I'm saying is coming off as accusatory - but when it's viewed as the norm, when it's what's expected of you, then it ends up being alienating to the people who are more covert. Which, again, is 95% of people with DID, and presumably even higher for people with OSDD-1.
Why is this the norm? Let's go a little deeper. I feel like it is an intellectually incurious take to decide that everyone is doing this as part of an elaborate ruse. This tends to be the explanation from skeptics whenever the topic comes up. Everyone is lying because they are bad people. Let's wash our hands of the whole thing. As understandable as the desire for a simple explanation is, it's also just not something that makes very much sense. Hundreds of thousands of people all come together to make up the same thing for no real reason. For attention? But how are you getting attention if everyone else is saying and doing the exact same thing?
I think it's more logical to understand that, when something is presented as the only model as to how your disorder should look, you're going to do what you can to fit in. Failing to fit in comes at a cost. It can limit your access to resources; it deprives you of a community to be in; more broadly, it just doesn't feel good to feel excluded.
The other piece of this puzzle is the adaptibility of dissociative disorders. Complex dissociation is an ingenius way to adapt to frightening, unpredictable, traumatic environments. The ability to shift who you are as a person, your awareness, in response to your environment is amazing! As terrible as living with a complex dissociative disorder often is, and as terrible as the circumstances that lead to us developing it in the first place are, the disorder itself is an incredible way of making sure you can adapt to whatever happens. I know it doesn't feel that way, but if it helped you make it to today, then I'm glad.
Community is a need. As much as people like to fetishize rugged individualism, you need a community to survive. Communities dictate our access to survival needs like food and shelter. On a deeper level, we need to connect with other people, to feel like we belong. We suffer without it.
So, you have a disorder thats main function is to adapt to serve your needs. You also have a group of what are largely alienated, traumatized people, people who have a base survival need that is not being met. If changing the way you present yourself helps you fill that need, doesn't it make sense to do it?
I want to emphasize that this is not a matter of trickery or dishonesty. I think it's entirely possible for someone's actual system to shift, on a very real level, to better fit this need. There are other people who might be trying out different ways to present, seeing what feels right for them. And someone maybe exaggerating or calling more attention than they usually would to different aspects of their system is not being dishonest. It's better to give the benefit of the doubt that they really are experiencing what they say they are; it's only a different way of discussing it.
I'm not entirely sure where this fits in, but another thing worth noting is that the internet allows self-expression in ways that you can't really get away with in person. In the physical world, it's not like you can change your entire outfit, makeup, appearance, what have you in an instant to signify that someone else is fronting. I'm not really sure where to take that thought, but it felt like something that was worth noting.
The end result of all of this - though my evidence is largely anecdotal - is that, for the people who can't keep up with the race, they often end up with no community at all. They can't talk about their experiences because they don't have the language for it. The people who do speak about it have their voices drowned out by the attention economy. Without the ability to connect to people like them, many give up. The giving up is a symptom of the issue, but it also becomes another arm through which the issue is perpetuated. It's a vicious cycle.
Where do we go from here?
This is where I would like to give a list of solutions, but really, I don't have any good ones. If you have covert DID, or if you have a dissociative disorder besides DID, you're not alone. I know it feels that way, but you're not. There is an entire constellation of ways we can look, experiences we can have. It's difficult to talk about. How do you put any of this into words? But, well, every time you try, you might end up making a connection with someone else who gets it. So keep trying for as long as you can stomach it. Individual solutions like this won't fix structural problems, but it beats being alone.