Erin Reads/Watches: White Girl Within, The Rachel Divide, My Life As A Dissociated Personality

I didn’t come across this book in any kind of DID-related context — it was a conversation about trans issues, this author reportedly identifies as transgender and transracial — but reading the title/summary of White Girl Within, I thought “huh, this sounds kinda plural.”

And then I got the ebook from the library, and spent the whole thing like the interviewer in this one meme, except I’m thinking “Sir are you aware you are a system?”

The whole memoir is an extended dialogue between two people sharing a body, they address each other as “you” and refer to themselves collectively as “we”, and yet somehow it never comes up? They try all these different lenses and frameworks to understand their situation — the trans experience, the history of American race relations, analogies to a whole library of plays and TV shows — but they never mention DID, even to say “we looked into this and decided it doesn’t fit us”??

(It was published in 2023, they’re active on social media, but it would be weird to ask them directly, right??)

(I wrote up an entry about it for pluralstories, if you want more of a summary + content warnings. Diagnosis notwithstanding, their experience is so clearly in the Plural-Ish Ballpark.)

—

This only briefly comes up in the book, but Ronnie and WG believe Rachel Dolezal is a Legitimate Transracial Person. And there’s a Netflix documentary about her, which in turn has a brief appearance by Ronnie. So I ended up watching that next.

Some backstory, which goes by pretty quickly in the doc, but which I didn’t osmose at all when she was actually in the news: Rachel was abused by her white bio-parents for as long as she could remember, her white brother was the golden child who supposedly deserved everything she didn’t, and she also had four black adopted siblings who didn’t have such a hot time either.

She was conditioned, in traumatic ways, from the day she was born, to bond and identify with her black relatives. While being profoundly unsupported by her white relatives. There’s a moment where an interviewer asks something like, if she would “go back” to being white, and she says — I went back and looked it up, it’s at the very end — “I’m never going to be that [young] white girl in Montana again…I’m not going to subject myself to the punishment of my parents all over again.”

(Ronnie’s headmate, drawing a similar connection about his abusive childhood, though she seems a lot more self-aware about it: “Would your dad have beat a young girl? Would he have beaten a young White girl?”)

I don’t know if “transracial” is the right word for what all that did to Rachel’s brain. I’m definitely not here to say she should be running a chapter of the NAACP about it.

And she’s not doing herself any favors to give a bunch of interviews saying “gosh, anyone could do this, no reason why not, race is just a social construct anyway!”

But, oof, it doesn’t seem weird to think that changed something deep and foundational in her psyche, something she can’t just shake off.

—

Ending this post with something a little nicer! And a lot older.

“My life as a dissociated personality” (digitized on the Internet Archive) is a 1909 therapy memoir about exactly what it sounds like. (Didn’t see it on pluralstories at a quick glance, but LB, I’m sure I got this link from y’all.)

Thinking back on their experience after some fusion, they recall “A” and “B” having different outlooks, tastes, reading preferences, socialization habits. We get excerpts from the journals where they got around amnesia barriers by writing to each other! Fascinating how recognizable it is — including the use of terms like “dissociated personality” and “co-conscious”, in what sure looks like the same way they’re still used today.

At first, the preface from their therapist describes the “A complex” and “B complex”, but the prose quickly switches to calling these “personalities.” Later, they try to reconstruct a personal timeline, and decide that a “B complex” existed in some form since a traumatic incident at a young age, but only “flowered” into the full “B personality” some 20 years later, triggered by the sudden fatal illness of their husband.

It’s short, less than 50 pages if you don’t count the endpaper/title page/etc, and has a really clear, easy-to-understand writing style. Would recommend. (Especially to whip out the next time you hear someone claim DID was made up by Sibyl/Tumblr/TikTok.)

ETA: Went and gave that a pluralstories writeup too!