Mercury is in the microwave again. The little cunt who likes to flounce about in retrograde so we can all use it as an excuse for all the bad things that happen for a few months, and blame every misunderstanding and tech glitch on it is, as of yesterday, masturbating it’s little g-spot all over my zodiac sign.
Aries season has begun. April Fools. Give Mercury a smooch.
This week, my psychotherapist and I are going to do a test on me for DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Last fortnight, I told her about Jasper Black.
I haven’t even mentioned Niki (the entity that has haunted my dreams since childhood) yet - nor have I talked about the “lady” that has whispered in both my grandfather and my brother’s ears all their lives (according to them), telling them to do things and insisting that no one loves them.
I should be thankful that Jasper loves me and isn’t actively trying to sabotage my life. At least…I don’t think he is.
I don’t have DID.
What I have is an almost God-like ability to create worlds and characters so real that they can quite literally swallow up people’s lives.
A little bit of history for you newcomers.
About a decade or so ago there was a sequence of events - betrayals by no less than a dozen dear friends, ongoing isolation and abuse by a narcissistic borderline partner, a car accident that killed an underage girl and dragged my family through the courts and the media for over a year, a cabaret club going under with lawyers, debt collectors, landlords and former friends and colleagues all emailing and phoning in angry abuse and threats, pets dying and being kept in a freezer overnight because I had to be on stage…the list is long and I don’t have the time nor the inclination to trauma dump any further.
So I created Jasper. Jasper who was supposed to be just a character in a show. Jasper who allowed me to remain clothed and not just be an object for cis men to fantasise about and sell and exploit. Jasper who did not allow audiences to feed off him until he had extracted his own pound of flesh with a wink and a smirk.
I forced myself into a dissociative state every Friday night for three years by drinking more than my weight in bourbon, in champagne, in absinthe. I wore contact lenses that gave everything a soap opera haze. I was not there. I had gone to return some video tapes.
My staff lost their minds. One wouldn’t talk to me on Fridays because she said “your soul is gone.” Another, with whom I used to have a friends-with-benefits relationship prior to hiring him, was angry because “Jasper killed you” and then “Jasper is trying to steal my new girlfriend.”
I currently have a fiancé, because she fell in love with Jasper first.
Jasper used to be able to stop my periods for 24 hours whenever he was around.
I poured every “negative” emotion I could into him. Every scrap of anger, every bit of my sexual liberation, my rage, my destructive tendencies, my unkindness, my selfishness, my loud and obnoxious thoughts, my childlike petulance, my dominance, my sarcasm, my joie de vivre.
All those things women aren’t allowed to show or do or be - but men slide through life expressing just fine.
Jasper became my barrier and my shield. No one could get in. If my abusive partner wanted to have sex, it was Jasper or nothing. If someone made me angry - it was Jasper’s voice they heard.
Jasper’s hair cut. Jasper’s hair colour. Jasper’s hands.
No one could touch me and for the first time in a long time, I was safe.
Fast forward ten years.
“I 100% guarantee you don’t have DID,” a well-meaning friend told me when I joked about it recently, when I said imagine the irony of me telling all those people over the years that they were the problem, not me.
Not me.
No I don’t have DID, except I can’t show most of those emotions now in day to day life unless Jasper is present. I can’t flirt, I can’t show anger, I can’t have sex, I can’t push my way through a crowd, I can’t experience rage, I can’t feel attractive and I can’t be on stage, I can't drink bourbon, I can’t be aggressive or assertive or display sarcasm or wear pants or laugh…unless he does too.
I changed my hair colour, I got fake nails, I tried to minimise myself in most ways that mattered to me and stopped performing so I could wrestle myself back from him.
And concluded, in the end, that I don’t want to.
“You shouldn’t have to get rid of him,” my psych said, “he’s part of you.”
I used to eye roll at those feeders who would come to me during my show claiming that every new emotion they had was a new personality fracture.
<Sigh> Kitten is feeling sensitive today. Mew.
But here we are, on the precipice of my next appointment, and the suggestion that I am actually “just creative” is what worries me more than a diagnosis of any kind of dissociative disorder.
I am Jack’s inability to look in the mirror.
These things are not a creation - these thoughts and feelings and yearnings and tendencies…they are part of who I am. And we either call them me or we accept that the concept of myself is as binary in my brain as gender.
And what if he is real? What if that danger and that volatility and that all-consuming black hole is actually who I am, too? What if every bit of “I’ve never felt unsafe with you” has just been me moulding myself into yet another socially acceptable little box for everyone?
What then?
Something has to give here - because I don’t know how to live and be right now.
But, I mean, at least I don’t have DID.
I just have Jasper Black.
xxx
Lefty Lucy
He has undoubtedly kept you safe. I love all of you, especially your dark parts x
Hoooo boy. So much to say about the attitudes from other people that came about when Jasper was new, but for now, whatever you discover in therapy I am glad you've had Jasper when you needed him.