A World of Sad

     I've noticed, with myself and others I've observed sharing bits of their lives with DID, that most anything relating to the subject of Dissociative Identity Disorder is gruesome.  The lives of people who have survived consistent trauma that result in their minds being split into different sections often have quite a bit of humor, as a survival mechanism, but rarely offer glimpses of happiness.  We often tell jokes and funny stories to lighten the mood but they tend to have a macabre quality, perhaps necessary to ease into the transition of facing a reality that stares death in the face.  In hearing story after story of lives that are a string of betrayal, rape, neglect, terror, abuse, torture, and disease, on top of the hardest burden of facing up to those things in my own life, it is hard to see this world as anything but sad.

    I don't really have any answers to negate that, the evidence of hardship is too strong for anyone to ignore, but I do have one ability that so many people don't.  Or I should say, one ability that my abuser didn't.  In this case, the abuser I refer to is my father, the term 'abuser' and 'father' switch in my mind, I had many horrible experiences with him and many good, and I can't justify ignoring either.  In my mind he was either 'good dad' or 'bad dad' and which ever he was I would switch accordingly.  But no matter which dad he was, good dad or bad dad, abuser or father, he believed absolutely to his core in the badness of the world.  Perhaps one of the things that made me such a target for him is that I refused to give up my belief in good.  I saw beauty and good in everything.  He tried to hammer it out of me, make me understand the world as bleakly as he did.  I think, actually, he was torn, wanting to hold on to me for the hope I stubbornly held to and wanting to crush me for it at the same time.  Not as torn as I was.   Now at age 24 with 36 personalities I can testify that trying to balance love in a world with the extremes of desperation and hate was very difficult indeed.

    I still see beauty and good in everything.  That is why in spite of everything I believe I have won, against him and other people who hurt me but perhaps more accurately I have won against the evil and hardship in the world because I don't believe in it.  I know it is a lie.  I still see beauty and good in everything, even him.