u/ObviousTempAccount1

When my egg cracked, and I started transitioning gender, I immediately conceived of my experience in plural terms, even though I had no idea I was plural at the time.

Pretty much immediately after my egg cracked, I experienced a separation. I described myself as "suddenly having 40 years worth of a total stranger's memories in my head."

The emotional amnesia of these memories, made me refer to everything Pre-Transition as "The Before Times." I had a personal mythology about how I was a girl who had "clawed my way to the surface, murdered my jailer, and took over his body."

2 years later, I found out about my plurality.

Some of my headmates have since discovered actual emotions linked to certain memories that I had already considered "dead" - part of the Void - the Before Times.

This, unfortunately complicates my *clean break* gender narrative.

My headmates are mostly women, but gender under the shell is opaque. We're lucky any of us can touch any old memories at all.

Touching any memories of my boy self - even utterly mundane ones - feels absolutely horrible.

Life was so much simpler when I could say "fuck yeah, my boy self was one guy and I killed him.". But truth be told, I don't have any idea what the fuck was going on under the surface. I only know that my headmates can now touch memories of his that I cannot. Those memories feel horrible and familiar.

I feel really gross knowing that any part of him is still with me. It's fucking with my collective narrative, and it's utterly confused my relationship to my past.

I don't know my headmates' genders Pre-Transition either.

Any advice?

In my dreams, I do not have a body. I do not have a name. I am merely a floating consciousness engaging in what's going on.

The exception to this is that I sometimes dream I'm watching a movie (or tv show) that doesn't exist in the real world. At some point in the dream, my perspective will shift, and I become the main character of this movie, and forget that it's a movie. I am acutely aware of the character's body - their name - and think nothing of taking it on as my own (until I look back and realize that I had stepped into a movie in the dream).

I used to tell people this just cause I thought it was a funny quirk my mind did. But I'm kind of realizing now that that's a dream metaphor for switching.

I shared this with another friend who suspects herself of having OSDD, and she was amazed that it worked the same for her.

I'm curious what other systems make of this.

I don't have access to a mental health professional I can talk about this with, so these are tentative labels of course, but I've never met a system who functions quite like this, so I'm wondering if anybody can relate.

I have headmates that seem to fit the OSSD-1b description. They have their own identities, but we switch pretty fluidly between one another, and there is zero amnesia. There are some dissociative differences like pain tolerance, but that's a conversation for another time.

I also get clobbered periodically with random giant shifts in mental state and sensory orientation that do not have identities. I call them "rooms" because it feels as though my head is a house with an ever shifting layout. When the rooms of that house shift like a Rubik's Cube, any headmate near front needs to scramble around, and try to figure out which direction front is.

When I'm hosting, this is all just experienced like sensory disorientation, and lack of coherent co-fronters. The shift itself is sudden and without warning, or trigger (that I can decipher).

These various states are difficult to document or categorize. There was one occasion where I experienced a spark of intuition. I saw the gears underneath, and felt extremely close to an epiphany about them. When I reached out to touch them and understand them, I instantly felt a violent "room shift" and found myself in a mental state where internal communication was cut off. I only remember this happened at all because it was like the hazed memory of a dream. I wrote it down immediately. I lost a few hours of memory leading up to that near "epiphany."

I have since stopped examining the mechanism behind the rooms (or suspected OSDD-1a) states.

Last but not least, while these "rooms" do NOT want to be known, and for the most part do not contain any information about identities, every now and again, one of them comes with a strong thought/emotion chain.

Examples:

"Why isn't it November??!" I find myself asking myself, even though I can logically remember the months between 11/2025 and today.

Sudden interest in books I had stopped reading months ago - as though I had never stopped.

A shift coming with a "what have I been doing the last few hours?" feeling. I legitimately have to struggle to remember, and if I try really really hard I can usually nail down the basics.

"Why am I still here?" feeling like my shift at work has been going on for 36 hours straight.

Conversations with loved ones who reference things I said that I have zero recollection of.

...

...

None of these are every day occurrences - even though "room shifts" are, in fact, every day occurences. When I am in a crisis, more of these experiences are likely to stack on top of one another.

It has been suggested that these are signs of P-DID because of these amnesia signs, and the surreal temporal confusion that comes with shifts sometimes, but I currently (preliminarily) self dx them as OSDD-1a because 90% of the time, it's just a sensory disorientation or brain fog that we power through.

Any thoughts or perspectives?

I have heard horror stories of mistreatment in Emergency Room settings - mainly from friends with BPD or Schizophrenia on their chart. I am erring on the side of caution and have avoided seeking any psych diagnoses whatsoever, despite being in mandated therapy (I found a therapist willing to keep all diagnoses or suspected diagnoses off the books).

I would also like to understand how Emergency Room doctors (in America) even know what's on your chart in the first place.

Can they read the ICD codes in your insurance? Is there some kind of database? Wouldn't this be a HIPAA violation?

Does anyone know how hospitals' "Red Flag" systems work?

I have a friend with BPD who lost a great deal of agency in medical settings once BPD was on her chart. Healthcare professionals don't take you seriously and self advocacy becomes extremely difficult.

Is OSDD also stigmatized? If so, in what context might that come up?

I personally believe that the Structural Theory of Dissociation applies to a great many people, and probably myself included, given the age of my first split.

However, I've noticed other systems reporting very different experiences.

I will always trust people to know themselves better than a textbook does - especially since there are huge demographics of plurals that simply never get studied.

How do I argue effectively against the Structural Theory of Dissociation as the end all be all?

My system is co-conscious, so we don't experience blackouts, and originally conceived of ourselves as having "zero amnesia".

But in the 5 months since our initial syscovery, we have experienced three mind wipes that we were actually aware of.

It each of those occasions the wipe was triggered either by stumbling on a traumatic memory, or investigating the inner mechanisms of how/why we switch. When one of us comes close to uncovering these kinds of Truths, we get a moment of static, a sudden disorienting switch, a feeling like our senses just got put in a blender, and a "it was on the tip of my tongue, what was I thinking about just now?" sensation.

While these are specific instances with traceable triggers, it makes me wonder if some of my other memory problems are just...dissociative amnesia, and have been all along?

I get along fine most days without any notable glitches in continuity, but every now and again, my husband will reference entire conversations that I have zero memory of - even witticisms that I apparently made up, (so I was clearly paying attention at the time).

I guess my question is: how do I frame this? How do I navigate this? How can I tell the difference between ADHD bad memory and dissociative amnesia? What if my brain is fritzing out more than the handful of times that I caught it in the act?

I function pretty well in the world, albeit clumsily at times. Is it possible I'm more disordered than I originally suspected? What do?

Plurality itself complicates one's relationship to the body and to gender. Even a slight variation in the gender identity of one headmate makes gender discordance and dysphoria an issue that the system has to wrestle with, and places you within the spectrum of trans experience.

I personally have never encountered an entirely cis system, but they must exist?

I would be very interested in others' thoughts and reflections on this.

There are a hundred different flavors of dissociation. Spacing out emotionally, or mentally, or muting our experiences of the senses, combinations of all three, etc..

For as long as we remember, dissociative states have hit us pretty much at random. Several times a day. (My headmates and I can front and switch regardless of these dissociative states; whomever happens to be in front just ends up having to deal with feeling kinda off. For no discernable reason.

But we have also recently discovered that it happens whenever we touch a memory that we aren't supposed to, or when we get too close to learning how our system functions internally. This usually accompanies mild amnesia where we lose our train of thought entirely and can't recall what had led us there.

Those kinds of incidents are rare, but I can't help but wonder if the hundred flavors of dissociation we cycle through at random...all have actual triggers and purposes after all?

Has anyone else dealt with this? How do you navigate it?

Will attempting to investigate my own triggers just get me clobbered with the wall of amnesia as soon as I get close? Is it worth it? Does it even matter?

We all have a very hazy memory of anything before our gender transition at Age 42 (2023,), and the further back we look, the less any of our memories are remotely recognizable.

We had pretty bad DPDR in the Before Times, but generally have worked out that some of us came into being during transition, and some of us are far older, but were simply buried in the subconscious, fighting for recognition.

All of our former selves who identified as male are dead, as their entire function was to mask and keep the rest of us prisoner.

Today, when engaging with a memory from 2001, I pinpointed a pivotal moment in our lives when our trajectory pivoted from Jax-like coping mechanisms (TADC reference) to less toxic masks.

Looking back, it suddenly became easier to understand our history if we conceptualized this as a split.

There is no way of actually knowing what happened internally, but both headmates are currently dead so does it even matter?

I feel like we are ret coning our own life and history.

I worry this may lead us towards convenient lies rather than inconvenient truths. On the other hand, we felt the split when it occurred to us to conceive of our history this way. If it actually helps us dig roots in, and be able to connect to our past - even in the slightest - perhaps it's worth pursuing?

Anybody else experience a posthumous split?

Jumping on to this trend. Cause why not? Pick a number. Ask questions.

I have no memory of ever having had imaginary friends as a child. I got them when I was older. Is that a thing that other people experience?

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History:

I recall when I was 5, at Christmas, my grandmother struck up a conversation about imaginary friends, wanting to know if I had any. (She seemed to think I really should, and was oddly excited about it).

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But I didn't, and I was proud of it. I thought I was oh so grown up.

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Now I'm left wondering where I got that idea in the first place - the notion that I had to grow up so fast. Did I have imaginary friends, and get pressured by my parents into repressing them? (Context: I split when I was 2.5 or 3, and my parents might have freaked out about it?).

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Did my grandmother know something I didn't? Or am I driving myself crazy with "what if's" when I legit didn't have any imaginary friends as a kid, and I'm just projecting backwards now?

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It really doesn't matter now, but I would still like to know if any of y'all developed imaginary friends later in life, but not at childhood.