I want to keep you right here
The tale of dissociation through the eyes of someone who does not know they’re a system yet
Date written: sometime at the beginning of 2023, never finished
I have been having trouble with dissociation — a certain kind of self-erasure — for a very long time. It goes years back; my childhood is an interesting thing, a puzzle never to be solved, a fuzzy, milky fog. Sometimes there is a shape within this fog, one that stands out like a sore thumb, because it should be gone just like the rest. I mourn the loss of my memories and detest those that managed to stay.
I can’t tell you much about myself. My earliest memory is one from when I was 5 years old — it’s a memory of a nervous breakdown, of me crying after my mother left me all alone in a foreign place, forced to do some shitty Christmas handicrafts with other children. It was not a traumatic moment for me; just a very unpleasant, stressful one.
It’s the only thing I remember from that period of time.
My elementary school days, up to when I was 11-or-so, are almost completely erased. They’re not even foggy, they’re gone. I do know who I was at that time — but I know that from conversations with my family members. I remember I liked playing with this girl whom I later on started to hate, but that’s because my mother told me about it. I remember the information; I don’t remember the experience itself.
Later on, as I grew older, I started retaining a bit more of my memories. Which doesn’t mean much, just that there are a bit more sudden flashes of something having happened. My awareness of my past from this period becomes clearer, because now I am able to tell something happened without needing someone else to tell me; even if at most I don’t remember it happening at all, I just know it did take place. I just know. That’s empty knowledge, drifting across the boundless white ocean of nothingness, but at least I know.
But there are some things that I do not know; there are at least 2 instances of me finding out after a few years that I used to have a friend whom I liked very much, and in my brain, there is nothing. I’m in high school and I click on my Facebook conversations and find out that in middle school someone existed, someone talked to me, I talked to that person, and they—
They stopped existing to me at some point.
How many of those memories have I lost over the time? Completely erased entire events, people, things? I couldn’t tell you. The thing about them is that I can only discover them if I, by complete accident, stumble upon some proof that they existed.
…It doesn’t matter, I want to say. It never does. I want to brush it off already, move on to what I’m about to say next — because this is so boring, so meaningless. It doesn’t matter that I have a black hole in my brain constantly devouring my past. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hurt.
But the more I try to be unmoved by everything, the less of me there is.
Perhaps there is no pain after death, but does it have to come at all? I do not cry over what’s gone — it is gone, it cannot bring me pain — but shouldn’t I mourn it all even so? It is a question I try to approach intellectually: well, would the me from a few years ago want to be gone and completely forgotten? Would he want there to be nothing left of him at all? Would I, in this moment in time, want not to exist in any other future I will ever be having?
——— (The essay abruptly ends here)
Written by: someone who is now long gone, but perhaps not forgotten