Can't We Be Sybil About This?

I had a Psychology class in my Junior year at Fredericksburg High. I loved it. Who can care about algebra homework when you have a paper on sexual deviation due on Monday? The chapter on criminal psychology was interesting, too, and it was right around the time the "Beltway Sniper" was shooting folks in and around my town so we spent a long time going over false empowerment and all that; but my favorite was always mental disorders -- the penultimate of which is Dissociative Identity Disorder.

People call it "Multiple Personalities" usually. It's fascinating, the reality of it. Sure, it's used as a cheap plot device in a lot of bad fiction to the point that most people start to question whether it really exists (like amnesia), but the mechanics of it are downright admirable.

You see, in some cases when a person's body is experiencing some severe trauma his mind just decides that it's not going to deal with this, so it ducks back into the dark recesses of the brain and invents on-the-spot a new personality or character to take your place and handle the trauma (typically when your mind gives up you throw up and pass out, but it's the rare cases when the mind makes up an imaginary friend to take its place). This usually crops up in cases of repeated trauma, like a girl being consistently raped by a relative; the alternate personality will take over and handle it and leaves the "real" personality with no memory of what went on. You just wake up a few hours later, thinking you were asleep while "somebody else" was dealing with the pain of reality.

This creates massive havoc in the brain's infrastructure, but the real problem is the one associated with all coping mechanisms. As someone who drinks to forget his problems will soon start drinking for no reason, a person whose brain splits off into multiple personalities to avoid dealing with problems will start doing it for no reason. Coping mechanisms are addictive, and people with DID can go their whole lives without consciously realizing that their life is being shared between two or more identities who simmer below the surface and struggle for control.

If those problems could be solved, the concept has a high value for consumer application, as I see it. There's been many times when I have to deal with crap and I wish I could just stroke off and have someone take over my body and I can wake up later with problems bypassed. Times like when I have to write stupid huge essays or for some reason have to sit around for hours to wait for something, it would be nice if some broken part of my psyche could take over for me.

Obviously, when I got in that fight or shot guns that well and couldn't consciously account for my actions the first thing I thought of was that maybe my dream had come true and I had formed a separate identity to defend myself. I suppose if someone were to have a split personality, the ideal would be to have one that could put four attackers on the floor in seconds or tag three bullet holes in a straight ascension in center-mass of a target ten feet away; it's just not realistic. I didn't show any of the signs of Dissociative Identity Disorder. I was never missing any time, I was always painfully aware of how unusual the world was becoming. I hadn't pulled the genetic lottery winner, my brain was all Chris all day.

If there ever was a time when I'd want to be able to leave my body behind and let someone else deal with this for me, it would have been now. My father was dead and I didn't seem to care, he'd left me more money than any 17-year-old should ever be accountable for, I'd assaulted four teenagers and nearly punched a cop and all the people who should have cared didn't, my powers of observation seemed to be running on overdrive, I could shoot a 9mm semi-auto like it was a squirt gun, and now that squirt gun was sitting in a box under a plastic bag filled with ammo behind me as my car sat parked in someone's driveway while the red and blue lights of a police cruiser spun around. A 16-year-old girl sat in the seat next to me, watching my face and expecting me to tell her what to do.

All I could do was stare at the rear-view mirror, past the police officer stepping out of his car, past the unlit street and shadows of mailboxes and sidewalks, hoping I could see into the inky darkness of the back of my mind. If ever there was a time to have a split personality, this was it, and boy was I trying.