The Phenomenal Power of a Fractured Mind

TW: CSA, suicidal ideation, mental illness

I gritted my teeth so hard they squeaked. The physical compression was all that was keeping me from screaming. I checked the clock—2:25. Still ninety minutes left on my shift. The thing had been banging on the inside of my skull all day. It was as if there was a door in my brain, and some entity was knocking incessantly. It wanted to tell me something; I could feel its urgency like a physical sensation, but every time I considered letting it in, an unparalleled terror smashed into me.

I returned to my mantra, grinding out the silent words: I am only one. And yet a sharp voice in my head kept interrupting, cutting off the thought. We are NOT THE SAME! Tears of distress and frustration rose in my eyes. 

I stalked to my janitor’s closet and shoved my mop into its corner, locking the door behind me. I had to get out of there before I started screaming at the howling demon in my brain. I clocked out, slipping through the door before my supervisor could ask any questions. 

When I reached my car, I collapsed into the seat and slammed the door shut behind me. Finally alone, the suppressed fear, frustration, exhaustion, and anxiety detonated. Tears poured down my face as I screamed obscenities at the voice in my head. 

“You can’t talk to me like that at work, do you hear me? What do you want? I can’t listen to you banging around in my brain all day!” 

As if it were a physical person sitting next to me, the voice replied without hesitation. “Oh, please. You’ll listen if I say you’ll listen.” 

“No I will NOT! You’re not real! You’re just some sort of psychotic break!” 

“You know I’m not. I’ve been here for years. It’s not my fault you’ve been ignoring me! That ends today.” 

The words were frighteningly clear. I wanted to tear the skin off my face, crack my skull open and rip out whatever that thing was. I spit words out like bullets, numb with anger. 

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill us. I swear to God, I’ll kill us both. I can’t live like this! You live inside me, so don’t you dare ever speak to me again or—” 

“Or what?” the voice asked cooly, “You won’t kill us. You don’t have the guts.” 

As the silent words cut through me, entirely separate from my own thoughts, I knew it was right. I wouldn’t. My screaming slowly morphed into sobbing, and when I ran out of tears, I just sat in the car, head in my hands, choking on horrible dying animal sounds.

When I called my friend, Katrina, a woman who had been living with a dissociative disorder for decades, she wasn’t surprised at the horror story I recounted. I told her about how the voice was never absent, always mumbling or screaming or crying or hovering, just below the surface. She knew exactly what I was talking about, because the voices in her head did the same thing. The gratitude that overwhelmed me at the discovery that someone understood what I meant was somewhat eclipsed by fear; if this woman related so precisely to my experience, did that mean I had a dissociative disorder too? No. It couldn’t be, because I’d never had any symptoms before now. Right? 

Over the next few days, I picked that assumption apart. No symptoms…well, no symptoms like the portrayals of “multiple personalities” in the movies. I wasn’t Sybil or Kevin Wendell Crumb. But gradually, I began to sift through everything that had never made sense about my life. The way my personality had radically changed when I was five, and again at seven, and yet again at eleven. The way my motor skills fluctuated dramatically; some days I’d sketch a photo realistic headshot, and when I woke up the next morning I’d examine the paper, baffled, because I didn’t know how to draw. The way the handwriting in my diary looked like it belonged to the eighteen-year-old I was most days, but occasional entries would be scribbled in a child’s jumbled script. The way people sometimes told me I did things I didn’t remember doing. The way I was capable of feeling multiple opposite emotions concurrently. And how, for the past six years, every now and again I’d find myself with my hands linked behind my head as if I’d been sprinting, pacing in circles, tears of anxiety in my eyes, telling my mom that there was something I had to remember. But then, an hour later, I’d have no idea what I had been talking about. 

There had always been a puzzle in my brain, and the accompanying fractured, lost sensation had clung to the back of my mind for fourteen years. Finally, that terrible, slushy February, I began to accept that the voices might just be the thing that could put the pieces together. 

Katrina had a bottomless well of advice and support for me. I can never properly articulate the gift that was, and how eternally indebted I am to her for meeting me where I was. When I was losing my grip because the feeling of the voices hovering just outside my train of thought was maddening, she had a suggestion.

“Let them write.”

“What?” I asked, confused. 

“If you want to know what they have to say, sometimes it’s easier to invite them to write rather than speak. Try writing a prompt at the top of the page—something like, ‘anyone is welcome to write now’—and see if anyone answers.” 

She said it matter-of-factly, and assured me that it had worked for her dissociative system, but I was skeptical. What, was one of them going to take over my body or something? It sounded straight out of a Stephen King novel. I was about to discard the idea, when it hit me—they’d been taking over my body for years. I recalled those drawings that I was utterly incapable of doing, the fluctuating handwriting, and the times people asked me why I was yelling when all I could remember was speaking calmly. If the voices in my head had been doing things without my permission already, what was the harm in inviting them to do something as tame as write? 

I took myself to my favorite tea shop, plugged in my headphones, and played a song I hated, because it always made the loudest voice in my head excited. I opened my journal with unsteady hands, and wrote at the top of the page, I’m ready for you now. Do you want to talk? I closed my eyes, and finally gave in to what the voice had been demanding for weeks. I let go. 

In a few moments, a manic energy exploded through my body. It was foreign, opposed to my own exhaustion, but as real as the pencil in my hand. “The voice,” who has since informed me that her name is Dorcha, wrote. 

It wasn’t pretty. She hated me for ignoring, suppressing, and drowning her out for over a decade. That first entry was crammed full of profanity; she berated me for what she saw as the selfishness, arrogance, and sheer stupidity that had kept me believing that my brain was intact. She also referred to the others. She wrote about the four-year-old and the seven-year-old, children frozen in time that she swore she had been taking care of inside our head for years while I locked them up. 

When she was done, I slowly resurfaced. I hadn’t blacked out the way they do in sensationalized film portrayals. I remembered the physical act of writing and the muted surprise as my train of thought was co-opted by this parallel young woman who shared my brain. But the words on the page, scratched in a large spiky script, were not my own. 

As I read back over the entry, I was confronted with the experience of someone who had been locked away for years. With brutal certainty, I knew she was real. And if she was, the others must be too. 

There was relief in the tentative acceptance, but also immense dread. I knew that dissociative disorders are usually caused by childhood trauma, and that terrified me, because if I had experienced something catastrophic enough to fracture my mind into multiple distinct entities, I couldn’t remember it. I was under no illusions about having had a perfect childhood; my dad was a recovering alcoholic, my mom a cult survivor, and myself a severely obsessive-compulsive child. However, I knew that none of that was of the caliber that would have me collapsed on the bathroom floor at work, begging the voices in my head to stop screaming. 

One night, I was sitting on the kitchen counter, silent tears dripping down my face. I was trying to articulate my tumultuous feelings about my first real relationship—the circumstance that had triggered the onset of debilitating dissociative symptoms—to my mom. One minute I would feel warm and fuzzy, the next I would devolve into a full blown panic attack at the idea of being near my boyfriend. Episodes of devastating terror would rip through me after dates, dread plaguing me when I was away from him.

I poured all of this out to my mom, concluding hopelessly, “Why am I like this?” 

“Well…” a wary hesitancy was in her green eyes, as if she was afraid her words might crack me, “...you know, your symptoms do kind of match someone who was…well…molested, as a child.” 

The shaking was almost instantaneous. In seconds, my teeth were chattering, muscles twitching uncontrollably. 

“That idea seems to give you a pretty intense reaction,” my mom offered, in a tone of impeccably controlled composure. 

“Mhm.” 

That night, we talked in circles until the early hours of the morning, despite the fact that we both had work the next day. It was like a compulsion, an insistent urge to solve the puzzle. The words I’d been saying to her for years resurfaced in my mind: Momma, there’s something I have to remember.

The idea only made the voices louder. Broken, cloudy memories hung thick in my mind, but I could never quite grasp them. Talking with Katrina and doing my own research, I realized that the reason I couldn’t get to them was that they simply didn’t belong to me. The voices, who I was slowly coming to know as individuals with their own thoughts and feelings and personalities, had taken on those memories when they snapped off from our original, intact consciousness. They had held on to the traumatic recollections, protecting the others from having to carry them. Our brain had given us the messy, terrifying, invaluable gift of amnesia, and I had been able to keep living because I didn’t have to know what happened to me. 

But she knew. I felt her before I heard her. A timid, fearful presence, tiptoeing into the corners of my mind, slipping into my train of thought and out of it again. Now, I know her as Nell, an incredibly brave five-year-old who split off to take on the memories of a traumatic event so that our younger parts didn’t have to. But when I heard her first, she was a nameless, timeless entity, who brought with her a crippling darkness. What I did know was that I always felt her when my mom and I talked about my uncle. When I revisited memories of him, some benign, some uncomfortable, Nell bled fear into my brain. When my mom dug up pictures of him from eleven years earlier, my pulse rushed, my breath came short, and my eyes dilated to unnatural black pools that refused to constrict in bright light. 

The dread plagued me incessantly. The others who lived in my brain grew louder, more insistent that I listen. They began to take over more often. I would be at work, going about my school janitor duties, and suddenly I would be stuck in the mind of a seven-year-old child, or be absorbed in the feelings of an irate young woman, or crumble under Nell’s crushing fear. To say it was exhausting would be a ludicrous understatement. 

Always, I felt as if there was something I had to do, some action I should take to calm them, if only I could identify what they wanted. Or what I wanted, for that matter. Most of the time, I was confident that I wanted my memories back, but whenever I felt them creeping up on me, I would panic and pretend they were fake. I started getting flashes of a pink room and a fort my uncles built in the middle of a cornfield. I told myself they weren’t real, that my mind was just making things up in a desperate attempt to solve the puzzle. But when I asked my mom about those places, she told me they were real. Real. Real. Real. 

For the next forty-eight hours, I barely slept. At work, I listened to anything that could possibly distract me in my earbuds. At home, I kept up a steady stream of empty, noisy YouTube videos. I felt too sick to eat, and in combination with the exhaustion and the high caloric demands of my job, I found myself barely able to climb stairs. I finally knew, with painful certainty, what I had to do: listen. But, devoured by a terror unlike any I’d ever felt before, I refused to do it. 

It had been two months since that day in the car, screaming at the voices to never speak again, when I hit rock bottom. I reached a level of anxiety and exhaustion that I was simply incapable of living with. Sitting on the kitchen floor at four in the morning with the dread making me feel physically sick, I knew that I had two choices: die, or remember. 

Teeth gritted, I walked to my bedroom, laid down, and turned the light off. I forced myself to take my headphones off and put my phone away. Laying there in the dark and the quiet, I spoke softly to the children who inhabited my brain. 

“I’m ready now. I swear I’ll believe you. Please, just…tell me.” 

And finally, after nearly fifteen years, they did. As the memories came back, images and sensations and emotions, it was like an exorcism. My limbs jerked at odd angles, I said disjointed words aloud without knowing what I meant, and I choked on deranged laughter. I yanked at my own hair, clawed at my face, overheated and pulled my clothes off, sobbed and clapped my hands over my ears. It was ugly and brutal and sick. But I remembered. 

Hopelessness ate me alive that night. I sat in the valley of the shadow of death, utterly, irreversibly, finally broken. I wanted to die, because I couldn't imagine what living was going to be like now. 

But I didn’t die. I lived, second by second, minute by minute, until dawn. I firmly believe that if I had been the only one living in my brain, I would have given up. But I was fortunate enough to have children in my head, children who had carried this pain for me for so long, ensuring that I could live a normal life. If I died, I would be throwing their courage away because I could summon none of my own. 

It was in the depths of the dark, as every inhale was a choice and every exhale a victory, that I began to understand why my brain had fractured. I realized that, despite the years of confusion and recent distress, my multiplicity was not a curse. It was not a sign of weakness; it was our way of continuing to live. It originated as a way for my brain to protect itself, but soon became a way for our internal family to protect each other. Our splits were simultaneous acts of self defense, and the selfless courage to protect the younger parts of our brain that had no business living with such things. I realized that my fractures were born out of terrible pain, but also fierce love—for each other, and for life. 

Since that night, we have come a very long way. We discovered the last part of our system, a four-year-old who was the first to break off, and learned the reasons why she had to. We flew home to Virginia, and told our uncle that we remembered. We alerted the parents of our little cousins, bent on making sure they’d never face the same fate. We found a therapist. We enrolled in university, and are on our way to a history degree. We kept on breathing. 

Meeting the people who share my mind has radically changed my life, and also my understanding of gratitude. You see, there are things that are easy to be thankful for—privileges you are born into, people who choose to love you, and so on. But I found another kind of gratitude: the kind born out of confusion, anguish, terror, courage, hope, and the messiest kind of love imaginable. Gratitude for something I once thought I hated.  

My internal family has saved me, over and over again. Now that I know them, have learned their names and consciously allow them time to interact with the world, I have discovered the wonderful things we can do. Dorcha paints beautifully, with a level of coordination I could never pull off when I’m in front. Gaeligh has the endless patience to crochet clothing. Nell paints each of our fingernails a different color. Credence likes Johnny Cash, a lot. Daisy is still a happy, squishy toddler, because we never let the horrors touch her. For my part, I write our stories, and as long as I live, I will be eternally grateful for the phenomenal power or our fractured mind.