We have been trying to make a timeline of life events together with the help of our psychologist. We think this could help us get more clarity and peace because we often don't know what memory belongs to who and what age was the body and things like that. While working on it a few days ago without our psychologist, our little told us about one of our earliest memories.

Just to clarify one thing before getting into the rest: to our system, the best way we can describe the feeling each of us get when we realize we are fronting is "waking up". We are unsure if there's a better term for it, but that's ours. Just can't really think of a better one.

Our little described to us the first time she remembers feeling dissociation and derealization. She was laying in the grass at our grandparent's house. She said she remembers laying down and realizing she had "woke up" even though she knew she wasn't sleeping. She sat up and it felt very robotic and mechanical. It didn't quite feel like she was moving her own body, almost like she was moving this body for the first time. She turned her head to look around, the sun felt so bright, almost too bright. The grass felt unnaturally green, kind of glowing an emerald green. She saw a tall daddy long leg walk across the yard. She felt the grass under her and thought "none of this is real, this feels like a movie. whats going on? Am I real?" She felt our heart start to beat incredibly fast and she started to get scared. She had no idea where she was or how she got there. Before she could start crying, our grandma called her in for dinner. She pulled herself together, ran inside, and ate dinner. Everything else went pretty normal.

While trying to piece together what age we could have been, we asked if she could describe what grandma looked like that day. She described every detail of her outfit and also said "she still had her short, blonde hair". Our grandma died of cancer and lost her hair near the end of her life. We were 4 when she passed. We think the memory comes from when we were 3 and happened around June 1999. Our host was shocked as she thought she identified when our DID began. This means we had to have split before this time at the age of 3, which also means our abuse had been going on for even longer than we thought. Like at least 2 or 3 years longer than we thought. It kinda scares us. We thought we knew all of our trauma and this proves to us that there's so much we don't understand yet.

Sorry if this was long and ranty and boring. We don't have a great support system right now besides our partner. Just needed somewhere to put this and hopefully process everything better. Thanks for reading pals