⚠ CONTENT WARNING: this entry is about incest in multiple forms. Please proceed with caution. ⚠

It's my birthday! Well, actually, at the time of writing, it's the day before my birthday. Regardless, by the time you're reading this, I'll be 26 years old. Hopefully. It's hard to believe that I made it to this milestone, and it still hasn't really sunk in yet. Not that 26 is a very notable age or anything... but this past year has probably been one of the worst in my entire life. I sincerely didn't believe that I'd make it this far. This entry has technically been in progress since... *checks notes* the middle of February, apparently? Maybe a little bit before, but that's the date I just had to change in the frontmatter... I've been trying to come back and work on the site, but more and more keeps coming up out of the woodworks to prevent it. I figured that a birthday retrospective would be as good as an opportunity as I'll get, and I won't be able to kick myself enough to work on this without an excuse like that. I'm forcing myself to do it, because I've wanted to for so long! So here we go. This will be a heavier one, and will necessitate dropping the collective mask in favor of DID terminology (while maintaining distance for privacy).

What does my birthday mean to me? It usually wouldn't matter very much. If you asked me any year before last year, I'd probably say it's just another day. Most parts over the course of our life haven't had a lot of personal connection to our birthday. It's just the day this body was born. Beyond just the day itself; hardly anyone has any actual connection or identification with said body, or the 'person' that it's meant to represent in our 'real' life. This identity is self-made, and a years long work in progress. I've considered myself some form of nonhuman since I was around 12-13 years old; meaning that's over half my life. This is something that has been known and accepted as part of my self for so long, that I sort of just stopped thinking about it. Parts that have always thought that way no longer had to consider that there was a 'before'. Shortly after identifying those feelings and trying to assign labels to them, I would come to the realization of my dissociative symptoms. That meant that anyone who had come to terms with life enough to identify themself as a part, was already familiar with this feeling. The disconnect with the 'before'. April 25th belongs to the 'before'. A formality. Just something that people do.

It goes without saying that this identification with nonhumanity and our DID go hand in hand (paw in paw, har har), but I wouldn't really piece that together for a long time. Why would you question something that's always felt true to you? Accepting nonhumanity was not a crisis to me; it was as easy, observable, and verifiable as coming to the conclusion that water is wet. This feeling of: "My life isn't like theirs, it's something else." There's no reason to question it. Again, why would you? There were other things that felt like crises: for example, having a gender identity crisis was one of them, considering I grew up in (and still currently live in) the deep south of the US. Ah, well, that makes sense - this must be part of why I feel so different. Learning about the existence of gender outside of the binary felt revolutionary to me as a teen, and it felt natural. Exploring gender and learning about the nuances of it helped temporarily explain some of those feelings. But it didn't make it go away. As I came to terms with experiencing dissociative symptoms amidst 2 hospitalizations, misdiagnoses and rampant psychiatric abuse - it was eventually undeniable that yes, there was something wrong. My life just isn't like theirs. It's something else.

Even years later, in my 20's, the feeling was always there. Years into recovery, years and years into endless work on communication and breaking down dissociative barriers and "functional multiplicity". You eventually start to think you have all the answers. You don't need to know why your life isn't like theirs. It just isn't. It never has been, and never was. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the answer itself from existing. It's always there. It always was there, under the surface, and you couldn't see it. And when you can, it completely turns your entire life around on it's head, and nothing is ever the same. You can't go back to not knowing the answer. To stop beating around the bush and talking in prose: uncovering the effects of incest on not only your own life, but the intergenerational snare that affects everyone remotely close to you, is like realizing you've been on fire for your entire life and just never saw it. You felt it under your skin, and everyone told you it wasn't there. You aren't allowed to mention it. Everyone you ever thought you could trust has actually lied to your face, every single day, for every waking moment of your life. Anything you ever thought you could believe was true is now false. Every trusted figure in your life is now someone who was complicit in concealing a multi-decade chain of horrific events too shameful to mention, to think of, to even consider. Every feeling you ever had that you couldn't figure out suddenly, horrifically, makes sense. What made you different was never anything that had anything to do with you in the first place. It was never about you at all. But it is true, now: your life isn't like theirs.

I now realize, that feeling I had of being less than human feeling so familiar: is because I was an accident, a traumatizing aftereffect of my then 17 year old mother dealing with her own battle with incest. As the cycle continued, and proceeded to find itself reenacted onto me. Never meant to be born in the first place, and neglected as she battled her own vices. A sickening reminder of her own experiences, and her own mistakes. I was born months premature due to alcohol and tobacco consumption, and spent the first 2 years of my life in and out of the hospital with multiple surgeries. April 25th was never meant to be a day I was born, but it's the one where it happened. So I ask myself, today, what does my birthday mean to me? I don't have an answer. All of this information is what I've been unpacking over the course of the past few months - to a lesser degree, the year before, too. I'd been uncovering emotional memories of incest as far back of 2023, but only came to terms with using the label itself last year. On a random Tuesday in February, it was dropped on me that multiple members of my family were incestually abused, confirming what was then only a suspicion in my mind, and recontextualizing my entire life. I'm still struggling to deal with it, and don't know how to bear the weight of it. 45+ years of repeated cycles and I'm having to fight to do things differently. I don't know where to go from here. I didn't realize that's what I was running from, last year, when I wrote all those journals about needing to get out of the house and needing to run away. When I took on all that work and burned myself out. I had no idea how gigantic the scope of it was. I had no idea. It's horrifying to me, just how little of an idea I had, about how bad it was all about to become.

Since my last proper life update, I've had not only that dropped on me - but also the fact I have secret siblings, secret incestual parenthood to ones I already knew of, and multiple people in my life that spent time around me having been child molesters. Memories I thought were dreams are no longer dreams. Arguments witnessed as a child, lies told to me throughout my entire childhood, now are entirely recontextualized. Worst of all, no one - and I mean absolutely no one - will mention or even acknowledge it. That's what started my uncovering these memories in the first place... in 2022, my mother created an elaborate lie that got law enforcement and CPS involved, that my sister was kidnapped and being incestually abused (I know now that she was projecting - at the time, I had no idea where this was coming from). It turned out to not be true at all, and no one in my family has talked about it since. This is a product of decades of learning that to speak up is to break the illusion of familial peace. It does cost a lot to be the only person willing to deal with it. I've never been this lonely and isolated in my entire life. I've never felt this removed from the entire rest of the world. I'm trying to make space for myself and it's not working because there's no longer a concept of who I ever was or anything that I used to be. It's all just lies I made to try and survive in a world I was never supposed to be in. Any 'before' I could have ever thought of was never true, never real, and so much worse than ever imaginable. But it's real, and I have to survive it.

I appreciate the support and patience I have gotten over the past year. It is truly the only thing that has kept me alive or allowed me to experience life outside of this. I am working every day now, and taking on extra work, in order to be able to get by. I have savings built but have had to use them on my car repeatedly (replacing sparkplugs, freeon leaks, tensioners and belts... the cost of buying a car so cheap and impulsively), so progress is slow. Progress is slow but has to happen.

So, I know all I've used this journal for is venting about my life. It's not how I intended to use it... I wanted to write about things I was passionate about: art, games, random niche oddities I spent too much time on that were only interesting to me. Random thoughts. Ideas. Inspirations. This entire website is meant to embody that, but that source of joy and that entire part of my "self" feels long crushed under the weight of realization and inescapable cruelty. I no longer remember what it felt like at all. I feel like that part of me is "broken". My therapist says that isn't true, and that what is actually going on is more like shock and grief. I hope this is true. I want to tell myself that it will come back. I'll find a way to be creative and channel this unbearable pain into an outlet again. I don't want to believe the problem is me, even if it's hard not to. I think the first step is finishing the backlog I have from last year, when my life started going to shit, so that I can work on art guiltfree again.

Thank you for listening. I lost track of my thoughts in the middle of writing this, but I need to get this out there, if nothing else, to show what has been going on and that I'm not dead. I hope to make it through another year, even if it feels impossible right now.