I am a woman in my late 20s who is clinically diagnosed with autism and dissociative identity disorder (DID). I have a PhD in applied mathematics and work as a scientist in industry.
I was first diagnosed with a dissociative disorder at age 12 and later received a DID diagnosis in my mid-20s while pursuing my PhD. My dissociative symptoms are relatively severe but are purely dissociative in nature—I experience complete amnesia, often coinciding with regressive behavior (“flashbacks with amnesia” in PTSD terminology), a shuffled and disjoint internal experience, blunted emotions, over-intellectualization, subdued behavior, and have a predominantly naive, optimistic, and loving worldview. However, I do not experience non-dissociative behavioral or mood symptoms often associated with DID. I have a history of repeated early childhood sexual abuse, which is the most common precipitating factor in the development of DID.
I got to where I am today because my dissociative coping mechanisms allowed me to compartmentalize my early childhood trauma so thoroughly that it never integrated into my sense of self. While this has allowed me to build a fulfilling and conventionally successful life, it has also left me with immense confusion and an incomplete understanding of my own experiences.
The modern conceptualization of DID is imprecise, shaped more so by shifting cultural narratives than by a well-defined underlying mechanism. For the first two years after my diagnosis, I struggled to make sense of it. Much of the existing discourse focuses on identity fragmentation at the expense of understanding DID as fundamentally being a disorder of compartmentalization of memory, perception, and self-experience.
I’ve spent a decade in academic mathematical research, transitioning from applied to theoretical work in pursuit of deeper, more fundamental truths. I’ve taken the same approach to understanding DID—moving beyond the applied cultural framework of “multiple people living in the same body” to examine the underlying dissociative mechanisms that shape my experience. Over time, I realized that just as mathematics has layers of abstraction built on top of foundational principles, the way people describe DID is often filtered through cultural and applied narratives, obscuring the core mechanisms driving dissociation. This is not something I’ve seen discussed in dissociative disorder spaces, and my goal on this blog is to explore this from a lived-experience perspective.
For me, DID is not about having “multiple people in one body”—it is about extreme internal compartmentalization. I see “identity fragmentation” as a cultural lens overlaid onto what is fundamentally a process of compartmentalization, and this distinction shapes how I understand my own experience. I consider myself to be a singular person with a very compartmentalized internal experience, and I use the word “compartments”, or “parts” for short, to refer to my dissociated self-states. Since DID is a highly stigmatized and misunderstood disorder, I wish to remain anonymous.
Disclaimer#
On this site, I share my experiences as an autistic person living with “polyfragmented” dissociative identity disorder. These are my personal experiences, so they should not necessarily be generalized to other people living with these or similar disorders. Dissociation is complex and uniquely experienced by each individual, so others' narratives and conceptualizations may differ from my own. On this site, my intention is to provide a nuanced and balanced perspective of living with DID that tends to deviate from more popular narratives of the disorder. I believe that sharing and embracing diverse experiences and narratives within the DID community is vital as it alleviates the widely-held expectation that one must conform to a singular conceptualization of DID merely due to its popularity. I am not a medical or mental health professional—just someone with lived experience who is trying to understand how I operate in order to heal.
Technical details#
This website is made with Hugo using a modified version of the Paige template. The header is made with Processing.js.
Contact#
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or relate to my experiences.
