About three months into starting therapy, my therapist asked me a seemingly innocuous question: Does your handwriting ever change? This was something I had never thought about before. I replied by saying that while my handwriting was inconsistent, it was normal. She then asked me another question: Does your handwriting seem to change with mood? This question caught me so off guard that it plunged me into an acute dissociative state, rendering me confused and nearly unresponsive for the next several minutes. When I finally recovered, I didn’t remember what triggered the episode, so I asked her what had happened. She then cautiously told me that she had asked me if my handwriting changed with mood. I didn’t know the answer right then, but I knew I could easily find out—I had several years worth of academic notes sitting right next to me on the bookshelf. After the session was over, I dug into my notes and was shocked by what I found.
I now know that my handwriting changes depending on what part of me is active. Sometimes the change is subtle, and sometimes it’s more obvious. Digging through my years of academic notes provided me with an extensive history of how my system operates. Based off of my handwriting, it’s clear that I had two main math parts in undergrad, with one more dominant and the other playing a supporting role. These handwritings often blended together, but other times were discretely different. In my softer STEM classes, different handwritings emerged, demonstrating how I had different compartments of me show up for different classes. Given my academic history, this makes a lot of sense—for grad school, I only applied to interdisciplinary programs as my interests were far too broad to fit into a single field. Although my PhD field is technically in applied math, my interests are much more diverse than that, incorporating aspects of electrical engineering, physics, computing, and geology. Going through my academic notes and seeing how my handwriting changed based on which subject I was studying further validates my understanding of how I operate.
My notes in graduate school show a different pattern than in undergrad; while in undergrad I typically was able to hold several pages in the same handwriting, in grad school my handwriting became much more chaotic, often with one line after the other written in different handwritings. This aligns with my internal experience as well, as my ability to get concentrated work done has substantially decreased as I have gotten further advanced in my studies. My internal awareness has become increasingly fractured due to the stresses of graduate school, and this has become evident in my handwriting.
In this post, I decided to include concrete examples of my handwriting. This was actually more difficult than it sounds as I didn’t want to reveal any potentially identifying information about myself or my research. With this in mind, I have chosen three examples which I think show a good sampling of my handwriting while at the same time being generic enough to not identify me.
First, Figure 1 shows a page from my research notebook from January 31st to February 3rd, 2022. I started therapy in mid January 2022, so at this time I had less than one month of therapy under my belt and still thought that DID was a fake disorder and definitely did not apply to me.
Looking at Figure 1, it’s clear that my handwriting varied significantly, and it even seems like my parts are communicating between each other on February 1st. When I first saw this page a few months later when trying to determine if my handwriting changed with mood, I was shocked as I did not realize that my handwriting varied as much as this. I distinctly remember that I did not recognize many of the handwritings on February 1st, and was puzzled that it seemed like my parts were writing to each other between these handwritings. I sincerely did not remember writing down what I did on February 1st, and this was one of the first shocking realizations that I may actually have DID.
While Figure 1 was from just under a month after starting therapy, my handwriting variations had been going on since long before then. In Figure 2, I show a handwriting sample from June 16th and 17th, 2021. Here, I was cleanly writing down a finite difference scheme that I had derived in the previous pages. This is essentially the mathematics behind one way that we simulate physical systems on computers—after deriving this, I then translated it to code and had the computer simulate something like a sound wave propagating through the air.
I think Figure 2 is interesting as this page is from 6 months before starting therapy, so DID wasn’t even remotely in my awareness, yet my handwriting was still changing. I also chose this sample as my two primary mathematically inclined parts show up in it. My dominant math part was more prominent here (more curvy print handwriting, left page), but my helper math part showed up as well (mostly top right page, but also some in the left page, with more pointed print handwriting). Mostly, the two handwritings blend so they’re hard to differentiate between, as is common for these two parts in most of my math-related notes. A third handwriting shows up (cursive on right page), but since I have many parts with very similar handwriting to this, it’s hard for me to tell which one it is.
Finally, we can examine a third figure, which I include as it shows how my thinking is affected by me switching so much while working. Figure 3 is from March 29th - 30th, 2021, which is about 9 months before starting therapy, so at the time I had no idea what DID was or what switching meant.
In Figure 3, I am working on a problem that I can’t seem to find a solution to—I’m trying tons of different methods but nothing appears to be working. I repeatedly start over again from scratch, and it seems like every time I do so a different handwriting emerges.
None of the handwritings here belong to my mathematically inclined parts; internally, I’m trying everything I can to solve the problem, but I feel like I do not know how. This feeling is normal for these parts, so when these parts are out it is normal for me to try to solve the problem by brute-forcing it rather than truly understanding it. When the incorrect parts are out, I do not have the mathematical ability required of me to complete my research. This has made me develop major imposter syndrome, as I can genuinely look back at work I have completed (when my more mathematically-inclined parts were out) and not be able to understand what I had done or be able to build off of it. Additionally, because I am switching so much, my awareness of my work becomes increasingly obfuscated. When I do work in one compartment and then switch to another, oftentimes I’m unable to fully pick up where the previous part left off. When this happens, it feels like I’m reading someone else’s work—while I can try to understand what I wrote down, I typically cannot remember my thought process behind why or how I got there. This makes communicating abstract concepts between compartments extremely difficult, and partially explains why my mathematical ability is not accessible to all of my parts.
While I was struggling to solve this problem on March 29th and 30th, when the right parts came out a few days later I was quickly able to find the solution. This work is now undergoing the final stages of peer review for publication.
Finally, just to be explicitly clear, I am never consciously changing my handwriting—my handwriting naturally changes and the variations seen in these figures are just what organically comes out as I write. Until learning about how DID actually works, I wasn’t aware that my handwriting changing to this degree was abnormal because this variation in handwriting has always been normal to me.
In this post, I showed three handwriting samples from my academic journal, two of which were from before I started therapy and even knew what DID was. My handwriting variations are an excellent indicator of my underlying parts, and my extensive journal history has been a great resource for learning about which of my parts were active at different stages of my life.