Rachel Eliza Griffiths

are blacked out in my memory and are not available to me.

Every now and then, I might get a glimpse, or if I'm triggered, I will see some aspect of myself or that day.

But it's very hard for me even to look at photographs or anything from my wedding day and feel connected to it in the way that I'm sitting here having this conversation with you.

And that is also a kind of grief.

What does dissociation mean?

This is a kind of word as a writer, I can ask 10 people what it means and they'll all say something different.

For me, I feel that it's a part of my mind and my body that attempts to protect and cope in moments where I feel, you know, flight or fight and I'm trying to get away from something that

often externally or it can be in memory, that might cause me a pain or a kind of mental assault that I will not be able to withstand.

And so I've learned to see my dissociative identity disorder as a protector.

I've befriended it.

I've learned so much about it so that I don't feel like I'm out of control or I don't know what's happening.

Absolutely.

I mean, I think one of the things I write about is how if you picture maybe, you know, the same version of yourself, you know, in a car and there are different people driving it at different times, but you're all in the same car and you're all the same.

So it's connected to me ultimately.

It's just that it kind of is a container or a space that is very explicitly attached to often a memory or a kind of just a state of being is what I would describe it.

So there are moments...

And when I'm in my day, for example, I'll think of myself, you know, my altar as an artist is connected to my altar who is a young child and my altar who in my 20s as a young woman struggling to be an artist and becoming, you know, the person I'm still becoming.

That's a different set of memories and a different kind of character.

But they all kind of visit me.

I have a future altar who is a really lovely character.