Two Systems Walk Into a Podcast and… Talk About Comparing & Despairing

So we were, the topic for today is comparing and despairing because, you know, really comparing, but every time we do that, you end up despairing.

So it seemed like a good thing to put together.

I feel like it starts at the beginning of a journey, right? When people think, wait, do I really, do I have DID or OSDD? Could that be what this is? And then what do we

do? Absolutely, yeah.

I think sort of my first experience was of being a system and we looked at all the information that I consumed, buckets of it, all this information that I gathered off the internet and different articles, different pieces of work, different things that I could compare myself to.

I found out everything I could about DID, OSDD, I discarded it, kept some of it, tried to fit into a box, tried to fit into a label, tried to fit into everything that could possibly be and found out that I didn't fit because we're all different.

But the compare and sort of the despair is so true because all it did was invalidate me and invalidate me as a system.

So, yeah.

You see it all the time, too, on social media.

You know, if you're looking at content creators who create content about like DID, OSDD, including on the content on my Instagram, where people will read something about whether it's, I don't know, communication or intervals or littles or something like that.

And there's always usually somebody that will say, oh, like, that's not how my system works.

I don't experience that at all.

And usually within 20 minutes, there'll be a DM in my inbox, right? That's like, does that mean I'm not a system? And it's, I mean, number one, I can't tell somebody they are and they aren't from sitting in the United States behind an Instagram account.

But to your point where every system is different, you met one system, you've met one system.

Just because you see something on social media that doesn't resonate with your personal experience doesn't mean that you're not experiencing life as a system.

Yeah, and I think that's hard when you first sort of, I guess, start out, if you like, if that's the right words, to be honest, because it's all so confusing, the language that's used, the different sort of terminology you need to learn, everything that goes with that.

I think, for me, it was just so confusing to find all this information and just try and sort of sift out what felt like me.

And I found some information that felt like me, But that was my only point of validation, I think, in terms of comparing.

It's just so hard.

Well, you know, the other thing that I wonder about, and I wonder if this played a role for you all, Two, I'm trying to think of how I want to phrase this, but there are professionals out there who are accusing folks of feigning being a system, right? And so you're trying to figure out what's happening for you internally, and you're trying to understand your own experience moving through the world.

And then you are acutely aware of of a number of professionals in the field accusing systems of actually not being systems when in fact they are.

And I think it put a lot of people in this almost like, what's the word I'm looking for? It's not just defensive, right? It's you're trying to be really careful because you don't want to be accused of something.

You also don't want to be misdiagnosed because we've all had that happen for decades.

But it's a really vulnerable kind of awful slash shitty position to be in when you're trying to figure it out and you're afraid of being accused.

Yeah, and I think, you know, for us, we felt like a fraud for so long because we couldn't, I don't, make ourselves fit.