It’s taken me decades to get the courage to share my mental illness with the public. I’ve had multiple personalities since I was a teenager. Back then, they called it multiple personality disorder (MPD). In the 1990s, they changed it to dissociative identity disorder (DID). Regardless of what they call it, the disorder can be debilitating and—for me—dangerous.
DID is born out of trauma. You’ll hear people making jokes about it—and, admittedly, it can result in funny moments—but life with it is unpredictable and terrifying. Not every case of DID is the same. Some people who have it are “co-conscious” with their alters. In other words, when their alters take over, the person knows what’s going on. They just can’t do anything about it.
In other cases, the person has blackouts during which their alters do things and the “host” has no memory of doing it. That’s what happened to me.
I decided in 2022 to write a memoir about my life with DID. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. To do it right, I had to relive the memories of all the trauma I went through as well as all the terrible things I did to hide my mental illness. In conjunction with writing the memoir, I decided to start a website and a blog. Writing the book alone wasn’t enough for me. I needed to create a platform to help spread my story and the lessons learned.
When I was sixteen years old, I decided to hide my illness from everyone around me. For twenty years, I repeated that bad decision over and over. That’s no way to live. If I’d only told someone and gotten help, my life likely would have been much different.
Bringing my story into the open will surprise and shock people who didn’t know this side of me. Many have no idea that I had alters who did things like embezzle, steal, and rob banks. I’m sure lots of people will be shocked to learn I spent nine years in prison.
Because I kept things secret, I never got the proper help for my mental illness. I hope my story will convince others with a mental disorder that hiding it from people can result in catastrophic consequences. I should know.
This is a difficult project for me to make public, but I won’t keep secrets anymore.