The A-Z Blogging Challenge - A for Amber.

Written by Mia and Berlou. 

Our plan yesterday was to start doing the online journaling course we signed up for last week to keep our writing going, but first thing in the morning we saw this blogging challenge - blogging from A-Z in April… We deliberated, it feels like a lot when we’ve only been writing consistently again for a few days, but in the spirit of don’t think: do, and our hopes to write daily, we decided to try. 

We pondered a theme, and when we registered we put dissociative identity disorder, but that’s not quite right, and we want to explore some more personal topics. So it won’t be an A-Z of DID, more an A-Z of things we could have written about but never got around to…?! So it should probably have been Our DID A to Z, or something like that.

We anticipate a few of us will contribute to this challenge, there will be us two (Berlou and Mia), Tildy is a little and we can feel her being enthusiastic about contributing, maybe Maya, maybe Caris, we’ll see as we go. If we can’t agree on a topic for a post we might jumble stuff together and see what happens.

Anyway, day one: A.

Our first thought was anxiety, then awareness, then amnesia. Any of which we could easily churn out a few hundred words about, but we’ve been wanting to write about Amber, so that’s the consensus.

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Little girls trapped in Amber,

fragmented, they never played,

until she found them.

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We find the comparable existence of amber (the resin) and Amber (the person with DID) really interesting to ponder (we do like to ponder). There are parallels - insects can be perfectly preserved, trapped in time for millions of years… Just as somehow this/these brain/mind(s) preserved many of us within our subconscious, waiting to be found, cracked open, and allowed the space to heal (but for decades, not millennia).

Except, unlike the insects, we didn’t die. Many of us were dormant (buried deep inside and completely inactive - actually, much like those dead insects), others just trapped in separate parts of our subconscious, awaiting the triggers that would pop us back into this world, believing we all were Amber. We were protected by our subconscious, and Amber was protected from knowing about us, so she could live her life, until she found us, anyway.

Just as insects are discovered within amber, perfectly preserved and ready to be examined, Amber found us, and we were able to examine ourselves, exploring memories that had been locked away, and selves that had been hidden for decades.

Amber (the resin) goes through a transformation - from the sticky viscous resin exuded by trees to the hardened semi-precious stone we see today. The DID transformation journey sees us moving from fragmentation and dissociation to integration and healing. We, like amber, have evolved. 

Our name is Amber, and for 37 years we were Amber, and Amber is one of us, she was our host, she was a person, a real person who did things, she had a life, and then she found us, and now we’re living our life. She isn’t here, and hasn’t been for a long time, we don’t know why, but we think she’s giving us space to figure out what we want to do with our life, she did a lot, for nearly four decades, and we feel she is now giving us the space we need now, without being her (or annoying her - I, Mia, can be a nuisance lol).

This is one of the hardest things about DID (for us) - not being who we were, and being unable to be that person, or even mask as that person anymore (for any significant length of time). Our name, Amber, is uncomfortable for all of us, except Amber, because we aren’t her, but we know we technically all are Amber - because that’s our name! It’s confusing and difficult to navigate - like everything else with DID.

But, like amber, we have resilience... We were hidden, discovered, and transformed, we’re allowing ourselves to be examined, embracing our healing journey, and evolving from fragmentation to integration, and finding our place in this world... We are the hidden life, the insects, within the Amber.