Hello, Everyone.

This is not going to be easy to write, but I'm going to do it anyway.

I spent three months this year (2025) in intensive outpatient psychiatric care. This was a choice I made to try to get a diagnosis. One I long suspected but didn't confirm until this year. I wanted answers and I was finally in a safe environment to go and seek them out.

After being tested and analyzed and under consistent watch of multiple psychiatrists, therapists, and experts in the field... I received a diagnosis.

I've known for a long time about the anxiety and major depressive disorder. I also knew about the cPTSD.

I officially got the diagnosis of OSDD this year. There was some debate, according to my team, they thought it may be DID, but decided on OSDD because my day-to-day amnesia levels are a bit less than typical DID systems.

If you don't know what OSDD is, you probably have heard of multiple personalities or split personalities. I've known that this was the case since 2021/2022, but it is now an official diagnosis.

OSDD and DID are caused by extreme and repeated abuse of a child. In essence, the child isn't able to survive what's happening to them, so their brain splits apart and dissociates, compartmentalizes the experiences. Each new part of the brain is built to deal with and cope with certain things that happened. In essence, every personality in the system has a job. For instance, my job as Marissa is as host (to get us through day-to-day things) and as an emotional protector (basically I deal with emotional abuse and help other members of the system with their emotional struggles if I can)-I inherited that second job in 2022.

As far as I'm aware, there are seven of us. Their used to be eight, but our previous host and emotional protector (Lily) fused or integrated in 2021/2022 to create me as I am now. (Which is how I found out that I wasn't just insane, even though I felt insane.)

I won't be speaking for any of them. Some of them do help out with books and blogs and videos and streams, but unless they give me permission to, I will not speak on their behalf. One of them has co-authored some of my books, as she shares a passion for stories like I do. I know a couple of them have been present on livestreams. Some of my friends have met them before, but they tend not to announce themselves most times (this disorder is meant to be protective and they all take it seriously so it's rarely overt unless you know us really well). For instance, I had a friend recently point out that they weren't talking to me and they knew it because of how my body was held, moved, and how my voice sounded. No one else noticed, just this one friend. There were other people around, but they didn't know me well enough to notice a change.

I am talking about this because we needed people, desperately, throughout our lives to be honest, vulnerable, open, and kind. If people like me had stepped up and talked, we may have noticed what was happening to us sooner and gotten free and safe sooner.

It's really fucking hard to be vulnerable and honest about this.

While the diagnosis is new, I've been sitting with this inside me for forever and I've been heavily debating whether or not to open up about it.

It's hard to explain how I can be present one second and then suddenly its weeks or months later and I have no memory of what happened and that someone else has been driving the bus while I was basically blacked out. It's hard to talk about my experiences without sounding crazy.

I know that by being honest, I'm going to get harassed and called crazy and people aren't going to believe me/us. I know that. If you guys think I don't know what denial and doubt is... that's laughable. Even with so much external proof and so many people commenting on it, I still go through doubt and denial. If I make it through a day without noticing I lost time I'm like WOW I'm cured! It wasn't real! It was NEVER real! only then to find more evidence.

So I know this is going to be hard for people to believe. I also know people are cruel, that's why we are the way we are, so I'm mentally prepared for people to continue to prove the trend.

I'm not being vulnerable and honest and courageous for any of those assholes. I'm being open and honest for the people like us. For the ones who don't realize that what they're going through isn't 'normal' and that it isn't 'love' to be in constant pain. We were hurt over and over and over again by people who taught us that their evil was kindness and we were lucky to receive their generosity and kindness.

It was DECADES for someone to tell us we didn't deserve what was happening to us.

So I'm being open and honest for the people like us. On the off chance that ONE person hears our story and our truth and gets out of their own hell safer and quicker than we did. No one should have to live like we did and I sit back and am scared and silent, then I'm just repeating the cycle. I'm only making it harder for people like me/us to see the truth, to know they deserve better, that they deserve love and safety. If I can help even one person not suffer, even if I only open their eyes a day or a week sooner, then I will consider that a win and any pain and hatred flung at me in the process is just the cost of someone else being able to get some support and safety sooner.

I'm not some hero or some shit, but I know the power of words. And I know the cost of silence. So I'll talk and be honest.

What does this mean for my/our writing?

Number 1: Publishing is going on hiatus. I've mentioned this before, but IOP care is expensive as fuck and while insurance covered the bulk, I wasn't able to work full time and have gotten pretty far behind on bills. So this girl is going to get her finances straight before she spends almost 2 k to publish another book. Sorry. It's how the cookie crumbles though. I have to take care of our safety and stability.

Number 2: I have a million and one projects and I'm going to slow down on them. Are two books a year still doable when I can publish again? Yup. But I used to be really fucking hard on us. It was non-stop gogogo and our body cannot sustain that. It's not fair either that I was putting my wants ahead of everyone else's in our system. So I'm adapting life a bit to be kinder with our time. If I come to in the middle of a park (this has happened) I'm done being upset or angry that the professional goals aren't being met on time. Going on a walk in the park and seeing the sun or painting or just spending a day relaxing instead of trying to get so much done is okay. So, I'm not going to be enforcing huge deadlines on myself/us and I'm going to try not to be super upset if I don't update things on a regular basis. I know how hard it is and I'm going to give us some grace for not constantly being on top of things.

Number 3: I will be attempting to be more open and honest and do less masking. I still mask a lot because it's an old habit that has kept me safe and I'm not expecting any of my brainmates to totally unmask unless they feel comfortable to do so, but I am hoping to do better about being more open and honest about what I'm going through.

Long and short of this, I'm working really hard to figure out how to live a healthier and more kind life especially in regard to us. I'm working through a lot and learning a lot. I'm going to try to be the person we needed instead of being silent and silenced.

So...yeah. That was a trip to write.

To be fair it's easier to write it online than it is to tell friends, so at least there's that.

I'm going to go rest now once I've cross-posted this thing.

Take care!

-Marissa