Lunar Roses

If you missed Law & Order: SVU tonight, you missed the latest installment of the media’s take on DID / Multiplicity. If you don’t want the ending spoiled for you, stop reading now. ‘Bye.

We don’t watch SVU, except when spending quality time with the father, for the obvious reason that every single episode centers around a sex crime: rape or child molestation, usually with murder on top. But the teaser promo for this episode flitted by me today, and I saw it was going to feature a Multiple. So I set the kitchen timer to remind me, and I watched.

Why don’t I just beat my head against the floor?

The actress who played the Multiple did a great job. I can tell you, having watched the others here trying to get along in the world and also deal with people in the mental health system, that she was a lot more convincing than we are. Much more dramatic. Of course, if a system were that dramatic and obvious, they would be ostracized and marginalized and everyone who met them more than once would know they were utterly whack, which makes their DID a pretty crappy defensive system. But it looks good on TV.

It’s interesting to watch Multiplicity “played” by a professional actress. And also to see what the other characters’ reactions to her Multiplicity were. I don’t usually get to be part of the audience. I was part of “We” - “We” always being the normal and the good - and Multiples are so far out there, so far into the wild blue of “Not We.” Worse than freaks. Farther out than that. That is the message I get every time I see Multiplicity portrayed. Multiples are weirder, yuckier, and harder to identify with than bigamists, sociopaths, celebrities, serial killers, wizards, and professional wrestlers. THEY are all portrayed as possible varieties of “We.” They have their own reality shows. But Multiples? They’re out there with the faeries, extraterrestrials, ancient goddesses. So far beyond any possible “We” that We take it on faith or not at all that Multiples can even exist.

I was in the audience. I got the message.

And then, of course (of course!) it was all a lie. The DID character really faked five different personalities in every detail for an entire year, fooled a shrink (gullible buffoon), fooled some of the cops (too sympathetic), fooled a jury (juries will believe anything) - and then smiled at the cops who figured it out, a nasty triumphant smile, and boasted that she’d gotten away with murder, and now she could drop her charade.

She was a fake, a liar, a murderer, and colder than Antarctica in June.

And that’s what they think, when these here tell them the truth about their lives. Our lives. Supposition A is too far out, cannot be true. Faeries and goddesses and ETs do not turn up in the Emergency Room, on the Psych ward, bellies full of poison, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. That leaves supposition B: patient is a malingerer, a liar, a fake, cold and calculating. Patient is wasting our time. Patient is a nasty piece of work.

Right.

You see, we live with the reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder every day. Every hour, every minute, every breath. It’s not a game, or romantic, or a convenient excuse, it’s confoundment. It’s an endless series of obstacles. It’s pain that won’t die. It’s problems other people do NOT understand, and it’s sharing everything you have with people you are stuck with forever, whether you like them or not. It’s taking or ducking abuse from all comers, because you have a big, fat target painted on yourselves.

And times like tonight, for extra credit, it’s seeing “your kind” through the eyes of Everyone Else - the dominant “We” - and knowing despair.

And yes, it’s lying. Constant lying. Pretending you know what’s going on because you should, and you don’t. Pretending you’re the person the person in front of you thinks you are, all the more so because you aren’t. It’s dependence on clocks and calendars and other people’s rhythms, the slant of light, the state of the foliage and the weather and even the phases of the moon, because you lack continuity, and you shouldn’t.

I don’t know what the big payoff is supposed to be. Do we look like we’re having a big party, laughing at the people we can get to take us seriously, yukking it up in our private moments? Plotting the day’s dull blog post just to keep up the pointless charade?

Attention seeking? We don’t want or ask for more attention from anyone than we need - we ask for less, when we can. We HATE relying on you. How honorable and trustworthy do you think “the Other” looks from our side of the fence? And we hate that what we are is so often not even close to what you see and assume - to what you are, without any special effort. We’re not trying to get rich and famous selling our sensational autobiographies. And we aren’t trying to get away with murdering our abusers, or anyone else.

I don’t see this situation improving any time soon. I’m going to stop thinking about it, now, because there isn’t anything at all I can do about it. I can’t force people to see what’s here instead of what they expect to be here, and I can’t make them follow their own trains of assumption to their (il)logical conclusions.

But fuck you very much, NBC, for the hand up. You keep on kicking us. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we woke up honored and safe, some crazy day.