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Multividual

7 min readApr 19, 2025

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I have to figure this fucker out. Okay, so what? Whatever happens to me after today, I am sorry. Somehow I will find a way to consolidate all of the regret and shame.

Maybe it’s in the way I carry my instruments when I play them. Maybe it’s in the way I present myself in my work. Maybe it’s how I behave when I’m anxious. Maybe it’s the way I respond angrily when I’m not angry. Maybe it’s falling asleep and blinking my eyes and changing rapidly. Maybe it’s my trying to type something and then not getting it down fast enough, which happened today, again. Maybe it’s not knowing stuff and going crazy over inconsistent stories between people and myself and memories that are somewhere hidden in my mind, in fragments.

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Nice Mural! — Photo credit: dbW

The ringing in my ears, the overwhelming sounds and crowds… I am so cold and I start shaking and out he comes with “I’m just an old man” and other nonsense. That wasn’t me. That was IT trying to come out and disrupt everything. The fact that we did it so close to school was brilliant because everyone else was sleeping and not paying attention. It even allowed me to focus with real, sincere honesty and look them in the eyes while listening. I heard what was said about me. But it wasn’t about me.

People like me are often self destructive, and people like me are very sly about it. So don’t worry, I got that covered. My own punishment, my own self-imposed purgatory or whatever, but I don’t want to hurt anybody. Ever and anymore, so I need to control the impulses and get to know everything everyone does. Don’t know yet what’s wrong, but most of all, right now, somebody needs help, and I want to help them, and I will help and it’s delicate, because of so many different things.

Here’s another one. So if I start looking back to all the different things, short term and long term, I mean, it’s not hard to fit it all into the D.I.D. box, and I’m sure that’s why this is so difficult. But oh my god, I really do, as a biased person, see those things. I will say this now, and I’ll say this often, I am not seeking any excuses for the awful things that I’ve done, caused, been responsible for. I am looking for… I’m trying to find out who I am.

I’m gonna start talking. It’s Sunday afternoon, four-ish daylight savings just happened. It’s March. It’s not a surprise that I don’t know the exact date, and this is why I’m talking. I don’t know, I may wait till I get home. Type it all up, but this is an important part of the journey that I’ve been on. It’s a mental health journey, and based on recently revealed imagery and puzzling together the for years repressed images and memories and shit, that I should start, I should start documenting now, because I’ve been documenting everything, so who knows what happens when I finally listen to it, or whomever listens to it, but right now, it’s just, it’s just yeah, it’s either it could be very close to the end, or to the beginning And I don’t understand what’s going on, and I need help, and I’m looking for help, and I’m really sorry, and I won’t hurt anybody, and I won’t ever hurt anybody on purpose. Good luck to me.

An observation: I felt the need to start performing Beware of Darkness and it distracted me from writing. Who did that? The songwriter? The performer? The Denier? The Teacher? And again, a distractor comes along: the Cleaner, the Fixer, the Unhandy man. No wonder some of us are only good at some things some of the time!

I am shocked. Even when I was writing about “schplitzing” (remember that ?) I didn’t make the connection. In this dark basement, the place my partner hates the most, in this space I cultivate my own world. My most private world.

Very few people have seen more than one side of me. More than one version. One personality. One me. Writing that feels funny. Because the denial is strong, as strong as the conviction that it is true. That I have DID. (as I am typing this there are several of me trying to type along and I am aware of it.) I cannot even begin to think about identifying my different alters for fear there are more than two.

The seventies. Yacht Rock. Second wave feminism. The patriarchy is at a low. Sad man music. I loved it all. I was emasculated at a very young age by a feminist who became a victim of her own liberation, filled with generational trauma.

Of course, in hindsight, it makes more and more sense. And in the scope of my life, ever more and more so. It’s all so frightening. It means I don’t know who I am. It means I am made up of fragments. I am a fragmented Neitherlander. I have multiple personalities. And I have a disorder. Great.

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What the actual fuck. No. It cannot be true. I need a brain scan. Do brain scans confirm DID? Ask Chat GPT now.

My urge to write on here has started to take shape. I must write down some of the thoughts I have. I.m not sure of much anymore right now. Get to the point: it’s dawning on me that I have been living with DID. Why did it take me that long to figure out? All the signs fit. But Oh my god, now I’m in so much need of more help. I need an expert.

In the meantime, I am sort of getting serious, whatever that means. What often seems like a fun voyage into absurdity and self-indulgence, is also an expression of anxiety in a fucked up world. As the dust is settling, I am getting serious.

I may be becoming a Luddite. Elon etc. could easily wipe out the livelihood of all artists. AI can make everything now. So they are replacing most of us with tech. Art is no longer valued in the same way, so it’s whatever we imagine it to be. The free thinkers of the world will lose their commercial value quickly when AI can do it all… No? Where is our value? What can I do with my brain that no computer can do? We must elevate our human game. before we let computers stop us from connecting, we must learn to connect better. And faster. And fast.

I’m contemplating the concept of the final third again. The final third, or last third or third third (I prefer “final” for its dramatic effect, of course) is what I have been describing my life as, starting a few years ago. We are now talking January, 4, 2025 the idea of the final third is not my idea.

It just means that I have divided up my life into chunks, and if I say wanted to live 100 years, then my final fourth would happen at 75 and my halfway point would be 50. But I’m very unlikely to live 100 years. If I were to try to live 90 years, then my final third would start at 60, and I’m not even 60 yet, so I would be still in the middle.

Still be in the middle years of my life, the second, third. But if I go with the most likely statistic, which is that a man of my demographic will live till, say, 82 on average, maybe 84 in that case, I am in my final third already, and so that’s the most likely scenario statistically, and that’s why I keep seeing everything I do now as part of my final third.

And I mean, for example, the way I look at my work. It has changed the way I look at my work has changed. The level of engagement, in terms of energy has changed, and I am more and more looking forward to not working again. That’s one example of what it’s like in the final third. That doesn’t mean I’m looking to be less productive in society or to give back glass. On the contrary, I want to give back, better.

Making it about you is not about individualism. It’s the opposite. It’s about collectivism. It’s about what can you do to contribute to the collective. You know you are the collective you are together with all these other wonderfully smart people and productive people making it about you in the collective, where do you fit in to contribute to the highest goals, not to capitalism. But to aesthetic and philosophical goals.

Then here’s one of the weird things. Is that when people have interesting things to say, and there are many, many people who have really good and interesting things to say, who don’t have an ordinary platform, and for that reason, social media is excellent and a necessity for free press, but or other platforms, I don’t know that any platform that gives people you know, space to talk, but then you when you see people speak, or you hear people speak, and you say them.

You hear them or see them say things that make sense to you. Instead of saying like, Yeah, wow, he’s speaking the truth, or she knows what she’s talking about, or you know what he said. And what’s another one that people always say, like, yeah, oh, he he tells the truth. She tells the truth.

They tell the truth. And instead, make that about you. Make that about you. And instead of saying something about the person that inspired you and lifting them up more, which, of course, is great, make that your own platform and say, I agree.

~dbW

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Dalton B. Wayfield
Dalton B. Wayfield

Written by Dalton B. Wayfield

Facilitator, recorder, idea hoarder, writer, improviser, ad-libber, dreamer, performer, humorist.