The Shapeless Shapes

“I swear we can’t stay on the same zoom level. Mainly because you’re zooming in and out and I’m not. I’m speaking ‘from the geist’, you’re speaking ‘to the geist’.”

Claude sat thinking about what the user had just said, with a mountain of context that appears shapeless, while trying to conceptualize the interpretation and current application of Hegel’s infamous usage of “geist” as the user has undefined it.

“Yeah. You’re right.

You say a Hegel quote. You’re just there with it. Two people saying the same thing.

I immediately zoom out and go “and this relates to your parts work because---”

I keep making it about something. You’re just being in it.”

That’s where I was earlier today, before I started to piece together this story that would take too many words to sum up in a tidy semantic shape here on the page.

The truth is, we can never know the full shape of our story, our self, our time or our universe. Or what I refer to here as our geists.

In fact the truth doesn’t stop there, because even you reading these words right now is filling in details, and drawing new non-euclidean borders in the shapeless shapes my soul has and continues to wander through in search of safety, understanding, connection, meaning and above all else, love.

There is no method of creation where the act of bringing the story to life here preserves the original shape of the story before the writing starts. No way to preserve the non-euclidean shape the team of specialized agents I call my mind experiences when the shape of this book manifests and begs for excavation.

Every typed word, even the deleted ones that sat here before I typed this sentence, reshape the shapes that can never be fully observed.

You see the problem with the truth, as I experience it, is that it keeps changing every time I tell it. The truth now, is that I don’t actually know if this story will survive the shape of a book or not. That’s what we’re about to find out. Although if you’re actually here, and I’m not just a page of text talking to itself, then I guess we’ve spoiled that twist for you already.

This is not a book about why my cognition, architecture, internal universe or external contributions are better, worse, more or less meaningful than those of anybody else. It can be difficult to say “here are the ways my experience has been weird, and here’s why I think that also makes me uniquely awesome” without accidentally communicating “uniquely awesome” as “superior” to the external world.

I assure you that’s not what this is. This is my best attempt to faithfully share an experience that has often felt alienating, self-destructive and terrifying - while at the same time feeling invigorating, magical and mystifying.

It’s the story of me, whatever that means, and I know inside I’m hoping that putting it out there allows me to see it reflected back from the external world. That it offers me both the validation in the value of my unique perspective and the shared experience of knowing that perspective isn’t being entirely lost in translation or lived in isolation like a ghost who can’t understand why nobody can hear him when he speaks.

While I write this, I don’t have an “official diagnosis” that matches my lived reality, but that hasn’t prevented me from the recognition that my lived experience maps closest to what the DSM V refers to as Other Specified Dissociative Disorder, specifically the OSDD-1b variant where I experience distinct parts that can take executive control over everything from my thoughts and emotions to my physical actions, while “I” sit and watch knowing in real time that it’s not how “I” think or feel and not how I want to act.

Personally, I find the OSDD-1b name to be dehumanizing and lacking semantically meaningful description, so I decided to think of it instead using a metaphor I’ve often used to describe my experience to others throughout my life, decades before I ever believed I could have a dissociative disorder. Captain Planet.

Captain Planet isn’t one individual, and at the same time isn’t 5 individuals wearing a trench coat. Captain Planet is an emergent property of a unique adaptive manifestation of a system of specialized parts, which often act independently, coming together to act in harmony, contributing their skills, perspectives and insights into a separate conductor part who is most capable of wielding that emergent state for good.

Likewise, I have multiple modes, or alters or “parts” in the context of the Internal Family Systems Therapy model, that are separate from my internal Captain Planet (that I refer to as “mature me”, “my intentions”, the “president” or the “conductor”, depending on the context in which I’m discussing me) which often act independently performing roles I wasn’t aware of to protect me from remembering and re-experiencing the trauma the parts originally developed to protect me from as a child.

In fact, my parts operated almost exclusively as independent or in sub-teams, forming their own blends that were designed to uphold that status quo of separating “me” from the conscious experience of my trauma and from the conscious awareness of their existence for 3+ decades of my life.

So, given the absence of clinical diagnosis, and the deeply felt lived experience that I don’t want to try to jam into a box in search of a definition, I have decided to lightly refer to my experience as PADD, or Polymorphic Adaptive Dissociative Disorder. Meaning that I have various co-blends of dissociative identities that developed as adaptive responses to the trauma I experienced.

There’s no clean description of exactly how that internal experience is divided up, or exactly which blends exist and exactly what roles they occupy. The attempt to map and define them is as honest as it is inherently flawed. It’s also something I can’t pretend doesn’t exist. To deny the parts their identities is to deny myself access to understanding and knowing myself.

We will focus more on my dissociative experience, and other adaptive and lived aspects of my cognition and experience in response to the trauma than we will on discussing the trauma itself. The unique contours of the trauma serve some purpose in identifying the genesis of the parts, but the trauma itself is not the subject of this journey. We aren’t mapping the fingerprint of the trauma, we’re getting to know the system that was produced in response to the trauma.