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About "Me"
We are the Wasteland System, but all of us will also respond to Salem. Friends can use our IRL name. We are a 29 year old gay man and generally use he/it pronouns, though female parts prefer she/it when being addressed directly. We are a multimedia artist with a soon-to-be-completed MS in Linguistics.
This is a space for us to make sense of ourself. It hosts our sketch diary and long-form blog posts (see log above). We also have side accounts on BlueSky and Tumblr.
System discovery and acceptance has been a slow process. We ae currently recieving professional treatment, but we do not have a formal diagnosis (this may change later). Communication between parts is fairly limited and amnesiac barriers are a problem, but we are attempting to be more cooperative now that we have a better idea of what's going on.
You may ask questions, but please do not give us unsolicited psychiatric or medical advice. We cannot do the same for you, either; we are not an expert we are just some guy.
Known parts include Salem, Delta, and Topaz, who handle the majority of socialization and day-to-day functioning, as well as Obsidian, Jade, Luke, Rin, Kitty, Kat, and Blue. Since it is still early in our journey, more parts may surface over time. Salem, Delta, Topaz, Jade, Rin, and Kitty are okay to talk to directly, but questions/comments can be relayed to the others.
We don't use plural or multiple as an identity label, but we may refer to ourself as a system. All of us prefer to be seen as autonomous parts of one person rather than separate people, or don't care at all how we're percieved. Collectively we are also uncomfortable being seen as human; we are a feline.
Warning for dissociationposting and potentially upsetting content — trauma, extreme bullying, self harm, suicide attempts, eating disorders, sexual assault, and other mental health struggles may come up.
My Untangling
I've been living with severe dissociation and other mental health struggles for most of my life. Recently, I had a bit of a breakthrough moment, and what was meant to be a single comic to humourosly depict the experience quickly turned into several more comics and now a website.
I've attempted journaling, sketch diaries, and other forms of art therapy in the past, but I would always end up getting frustrated by my conflicting thoughts, feelings, and even memories. It would immediately become an overwhelming mess and I wouldn't be able to keep up with it. Now, I think I understand why.
Let's use a metaphore. Imagine a spool of thread. Most spools can roll along a surface with no problems and keep all of their thread together.
Now imagine that this particular spool is rolled along a rough surface that slowly wears it down. Eventually, it gets enough wear that its thread starts to become loose, which causes even more friction in its movement. Then, it hits a particularly sharp obstacle which slices through part of the thread, and suddenly it doesn't even have a continuous strand anymore.
But still, the spool has to keep rolling. But the further it goes the more sharp obstacles the spool hits, and the thread becomes even more segmented. Over time they fray and tangle and tie themselves into knots. Part of it may even get left behind. What was once one long thread is now a lot of smaller threads, but they're so tangled up that they can't tell which is which, and their own damage is worsening that of the others.
Even when placed on a smooth surface, this spool can barely roll at all. When the surface inevitably becomes rough again, it is so difficult to keep moving that it just wants to stop completely.
Once I recognized myself as the spool, I knew I had to untangle it if I ever hoped to keep rolling.
The first step was surprisingly — unnervingly, even — easy, but also somewhat counterintuitive: identify the threads for what they are rather than trying to treat them like they're still one single strand, and then slowly start to pull them apart so they can be understood. This is what I'm trying to do here.
Just getting this far has quelled a lot of my internal chaos and I feel like I can think much clearer than I have in a long time, but it seems that this is only the beginning. There is still quite a bit of inner dysfunction, unaddressed problems, and interferance from other neurodivergencies and mental illness.
[As an aside, after coming up with this analogy, I found out that there is actually a self-help book called Untangling, which was recommended on a reading list for coping with dissociative disorders. I'll have to check it out eventually.]