Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I did not find out, and I remember it quite clearly, until just after the formal wedding portraits had been done.

And so I was in this wonderful state of having just gotten married and this kind of golden light at the end of a September day.

And I started to notice that there just seemed to be a shadow on things.

And the people, my loved ones who were there, their voices and manners had changed.

And

I'm there in my wedding dress.

I've just gotten married and something, this kind of storm or coldness kind of swept over things.

And I wanted to go back to my hotel suite.

My phone was missing.

I wanted to check on my friend to see if she was okay.

I'd been told she'd had COVID and that was why she wasn't coming.

Later on, of course, Terry, I realized that

My friends and family were just all working really hard to protect myself and my husband and that joy on that day.

But the minute I got back to the hotel in an effort to locate my phone, I suddenly was able to see messages that then that's how I learned about what had happened.

So dissociative identity disorder, some people call it DID.

It's a kind of new term to describe a diagnosis of severe dissociation.

Some people have more severe forms of it.

I would put myself on a more kind of highly functional scale here.

DID usually comes into play after experiences of severe childhood trauma, and I have learned and researched and tried to educate myself to help myself live with this diagnosis.

What happened on my wedding day, I think, with my DID is that the level of dissociation that I experienced that day matches the kind of intense trauma and shock that my body went into, which means even now that many parts of my wedding day are