MUSH - Roleplaying on Acid

As far as I'm concerned, the MUSH is where my travel towards finding out about my multiplicity started. You can imagine a lot of giggling in the background because a) I'm considered exceptionally dense and b) it's speculated (by me and by others) that I came to be in executive control around that time anyway, so of course it started there.

A MUSH is an online roleplaying game, based in text. It's like making a story together - you come up with a character (or two or three) and other people come up with their characters and you role-play together. You can see the appeal for someone with characters in their head who want to express things. The MUSH I picked also had a very peculiar theme - that of the SF world of Pern. Pern has dragons (which Lemarath is like) - that love you forever and protect you for always and - this is critical - Talk In Your Head. Not only do they talk in your head, but sometimes - at moments of stress or glory - you feel what they feel, and vice versa. Sometimes the dragons want to have sex and you don't but you do and you like it anyway.

Dragons also have memory problems.

It's not all that surprising that this theme might appeal to a lot of people who were all in one body and some of whom had issues with sexuality.

My experience was that I made a character and she didn't behave. This is something that a lot of authors and roleplayers talk about quite lightly, so I didn't worry too much. Her name was Shandra and she was many things I wasn't - sexually confident, action oriented, loved to take charge, fought with people a lot and kind of enjoyed it.

What was strange was that she didn't just behave oddly about things inside of the game-world. First of all, she started commenting on things in my head - a lot. Like at lunch. I found myself going to bars and flirting, sort of in a taken aback way that I came to think of as 'playing Shandra for real.'

On the game, she also started talking about my life - I mean I started talking about my life (this is how I felt about it) with a guy named Dave. She talked to him about some traumatic thing, and I honestly thought 'oh wow, I'm a compulsive liar on the Internet.'

I certainly didn't remember that. I received external proof that bad things had happened in my family, and that disturbed me more than anything else. Once Shandra said I lost 10 lbs and I thought that was a big lie, but when I checked the scale it was true.

Over a period of about 6 years, I wrestled with Shandra, assuming that she was some indication of either extreme creativity or some kind of mental illness. But she got me through an awful lot of things. When I was tired I would 'play Shandra' and get through it. When I had to deal with sex I would 'play Shandra' and not remember it.

I got married. I got a house and a job. I got a mother in law who was really interested in MPD/DID so I read some of her books, but they were "boring" and I didn't remember them very well. I still felt compelled to play this darned roleplaying game many nights, and I started to resent the time that was going into it. I resigned from a lot of online positions, thinking that would help me feel less responsible to get there.

Shandra got extremely angry, In retrospect because she was losing positions she didn't want to, but at the time I just felt incredibly - strange. She and I fought in my head, a lot of the time. It was very tiring. I felt constantly attacked.

I finally came up with a plan - she was my _character_ darnitall and I would kill her.

So I set up the parameters of her death. It was a huge struggle, but at the time I thought the headaches, the memory problems, the feelings of despair over something -I- wanted to do were related to something else. The day (Easter Friday, 1998) came. I killed her on the game.

There was a terrible wrenching feeling inside and then - silence. She was dead. I was relieved, for a while. I had been promoted at work to a new, more political position, and I needed the time and space.

Three things happened.

The first was that I couldn't cope at work or indeed in many situations where I used to play Shandra. That was a bit weird, because - well - why would it matter if she was dead on a game?

Second, I couldn't relate to Dave anymore. At the time I thought he changed because my feelings did an abrupt 180 about being friends with him or working with him.

Third, a new character popped up on the game. She had been on the game before but as a very minor character for the most part. She was a fun adolescent to play, but lately she had been getting - yes - out of control. In a very different way from Shandra. She had a very loving and open heart, where Shandra was callused. She was a bit - well - not ditzy but just on some other plane. She was bisexual, or something. Her name was Lyria. Shandra had given her some keys to some important things.

I got upset, read a few more books on addiction, sighed, and decided to play her out a bit. Oddly, she fell in love with a character of a friend of mine - oddly because I -felt- her fall in love, a terrible, deep, searing kind of bonding love, but I had no plans for her do so. She drew pictures of her and her lover. She wrote poetry. She listened to music that expressed the glory of her love. I had given up at this point and decided to be nuts.

She started talking in my head too, expressing nearly complete opposite ideas to Shandra's. I felt that I was a lunatic, but harmless. I was working in social services and felt a kind of gladness that maybe they would keep a room for me there when I finally lost it. I hid a lot of this from Carl, although I did talk to him about Lyria.

At the same time this friend of mine was bringing up dissociation and therapy - a lot. Or maybe not a lot, but it seemed like it to me.

Then the scary day happened.

I went out to dinner with two people who played on the game, who I didn't know that well. During dinner, I 'heard' Lyria figure out that one of them was playing a character that her boyfriend really liked (don't try to figure out the sexual confusion). And then - wham.

Lyria was leaning over the table talking up a storm and I was - somewhere across the room. Total body displacement. Even I, who am very capable of ignoring gaps in memory and weird "creative" things had to notice that.

I got a therapist. He didn't work out, in the end, but going to see him started to prove a few things. One was that a lot of what I consider normal he gently explained is not, like not remembering having sex at all, or having years of no memories in your life.

Another was that other people talked to him too, and I was aware enough to note that they weren't me.

So I started paying attention to the MUSH. A lot was going on there. By watching my characters I could start to establish some contact with them, without losing executive control. I will try to explain this in a later thoughts piece.

It's crazy in a way - but like a journal in another way. They talk, I observe and listen. Then I start to try to talk more directly. This has really, really helped me life.