The Split I Had the Other Night

 This isn’t attention-seeking. It’s survival. And it happened again the other night.

The other night, I was lying on the living room couch while my husband played his game. Nothing dramatic was happening on the outside: no yelling, no chaos, no confrontation. But inside my body and mind, everything was collapsing at once.

I was stressed, angry, sad, and scared. Not the kind of scared where you jump at a noise, the kind that sits in your stomach, tight like a knot, and waits. The kind of scared that comes from medical trauma and not knowing what your own body is doing anymore.

And then it started.

My vision blurred. Panic came in waves. Suddenly I wasn’t just “me” anymore: I had four perspectives at once. Three main ones, and a fourth that was just watching and smiling because they knew this was going to happen before they left. I was fully aware, enough to cry out for help if I needed to, but awareness doesn’t mean control.

Inside, there were parts.

There was Blossom, who holds anger, but this time she just watched. Then there was Hawk, who carries rage and protects Alexa, the child part who is full of fear and already has trauma from doctors. And then there was Alexa herself, scared and overwhelmed.

Hawk was furious, not over nothing, but over medical trauma. Over how we have been treated. Over how the medical system has made things worse instead of better. Alexa was terrified, trying to get us to stop fighting, trying to keep everyone safe, even though safety hasn’t really existed for her. And me? I was trying to get help. We’re dealing with real medical issues right now, and I wanted support instead of silence, dismissal, or guessing games.

Meanwhile, my husband sat there playing his game. Not because he didn’t care, but because he didn’t know. From the outside, it just looked like I was lying down. On the inside, it was chaos. Dissociation doesn’t always look cinematic; sometimes it’s a quiet war you fight by yourself.

Eventually, it crashed. My body shut down, and I fell straight asleep. When I woke up, the pressure was gone, but confusion wasn’t. I felt scared and disoriented, like my mind hadn’t returned to the same place it left. It hasn’t happened like that since I was 17 at Job Corps, severely stressed, dissociated, and trying to survive.

This wasn’t some dramatic episode to get attention. It wasn’t “pretending.” It wasn’t something I chose. It was a trauma response: medical trauma, lighting up old trauma, stacking on top of each other until everything splits to cope.

I’m scared. I’m confused. And I feel like no one really cares or understands what this does to a person. Medical trauma doesn’t just sit in your body; it gets into your brain, into your identity, into the parts of you that learned to survive when adults didn’t protect you.

And the truth is: I want answers. I want safety. I want someone to acknowledge that these responses aren’t “dramatic” or “attention seeking,” but survival strategies formed when there were no other options.

I don’t know when the next split will happen. I don’t know what stress or doctor or dismissal will trigger it. I just know it’s real, it’s terrifying, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

— Symone