One impactful but not immediately obvious symptom of DID for me is that I do not seem to have a continuous internal sense of time—my awareness of my life is shuffled. Because of this, I may have a hard time differentiating what happened yesterday versus what happened last week or last month, or struggle with remembering if, for example, I have leftovers in my fridge now or if that was from weeks ago. This has made things like tracking changes in my environment difficult. For example, I have had spring-time allergies for much of my life, but I was unable to realize that until recently—every day in the spring, I’d wake up with allergies, but to me that was just accepted as fact. I didn’t remember that I had allergies yesterday or every day last week, or that I didn’t have allergies last fall, or that I’ve had allergies every spring since childhood. All I am aware of is that I have allergies in that moment. Only since concretely tracking my symptoms this year was I able to determine that I do have springtime allergies, despite having them for years. Life really feels like a blur to me.
I believe these experiences can be explained by my system structure, which is heavily impacted by the fact that I am polyfragmented. I seem to shift and switch between compartments a significant amount on a daily basis, and many of these compartments, or parts, only seem to come out every few days or weeks. Since what is at the forefront of my awareness depends on which memory compartment I’m in, and many of these parts only come out once in a while, the end result seems to be that my understanding of my life is very shuffled.
Right now, I have a hard time differentiating between these parts, which makes it difficult to map how my understanding of my life is shuffled. I can vaguely tell when the last time I was in an active compartment was because I remember those memories most prominently, but I don’t know who the part is. Many of them feel the same except for mild memory differences, seemingly because I have low identity alteration. I have been told that differentiating between parts takes time, so I am hopeful that I’ll soon be able to identify my parts. I’ve been operating like this for my entire life without awareness that most others do not have such a shuffled awareness. I’m glad that I finally understand that I have DID and that I operate in this way, as it provides me language to contextualize my experiences. With time, I hope to gain a more broad view of my life and form a more continuous relationship with time.