We’ve been having a lot of trouble with understanding and navigating our system lately, mostly just feeling lost. We have selves that we know exist, but don’t want to front or make themselves known generally. We have selves that we haven’t seen in a long time and aren’t sure if we will see them again. We feel clearly split in some areas, and only partially split in others (which is creating a lot of confusion and feels like identity instability). We have some conflict between selves (personality conflict, and differences in sexuality creating a lot of tension). We don’t know how we should navigate things in the long run, whether we’d be better off partially integrating to create a smaller system, whether we need to blend and merge more, or whether we need to work on being more separate. We’re not sure what we should be working on to improve our system’s health, our selves individual experiences and lives, and our life collectively. In short, we are (and Ellie in particular is) feeling really lost, confused, scared, and not sure what to do. Sometimes some of us just want to go back into denial mode, pretend to be one person more or less integrated. But we know there is no going back; there is nothing to go back to. We likely never were integrated to begin with.

All we could think to do about this tonight was jump out of our head and try some free-form/association art and writing. This is what emerged in about 5 minutes. We cried a bunch afterwards, but are feeling somewhat better and more in control now. And we had a few good laughs about some of the things on the map (like Micah’s love of Star Trek, and Brook’s seemingly straightforward matter-of-fact existence).

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If you want to try such a thing, I suggest paper, pencil crayons, and thinking as little as possible. What emerges may be similar or completely different, but hopefully it will (at some level) be helpful. Good luck. :)