The Ones Who Stayed Inside

Chapter Two

She didn’t grow up with imaginary friends.

She grew up with real ones—just no one else could see them.

The first time she realized she wasn’t alone in her own head, she was eight. Sitting in the back of a classroom, staring at the chalkboard, drifting again. The teacher called on her, and just like that, someone else stood up inside her skin and gave an answer with a voice that wasn’t quite hers.

The other kids stared. The teacher didn’t notice. But she did.

She remembered watching her own hand move, her own lips speak. She heard the words, but she hadn’t chosen them. It was like watching someone else drive her body from behind a fogged-up window. That’s when she knew—something was living inside her. Several somethings.

They didn’t come all at once. They arrived in whispers, in fragments. Some were loud. Some were silent. Some came to keep secrets. Some came to protect her from things even she didn’t want to remember. And all of them, in their own way, were trying to keep her alive.

One named herself Sky—always 16, sarcastic and sharp, unafraid to say what the rest of them couldn’t. Sky could fight. Sky could flirt. Sky could steal. Sky was the one who got them through detention, lockups, and heartbreak.

Another one—Little Red—was six years old forever. She only came out when the world felt too loud. She still sucked her thumb and curled up in closets. She spoke in riddles and rhymes and sometimes didn’t speak at all.

There was Jude, who never cried. There was Maggie Sullivan, who remembered the smell of urine and cigars. And then there was Grace, who wore the pain like a rosary and tried to hold the rest of them together.

She wasn’t crazy. She just wasn’t whole.

When a therapist finally explained what it was—(multiple personality disorder 70’s)Dissociative Identity Disorder—she felt two things at once: relief and terror. Relief that she wasn’t imagining it. But her mind took over and she wouldn’t hear of it again until her 60’s. The old terror because now the world would label her, the monster. 

People don’t understand DID. They think it means evil, or dangerous, or fake. They make movies about it where the “crazy girl” becomes a killer, or a liar, or worse—a punchline. But her reality was none of those things.

Her alters were her survival system. They didn’t harm her. They saved her.

Because when the worst parts of life came at her, they took turns carrying the weight. One would dissociate during abuse. Another would take over in court. Another could walk out of a room without crying. It was teamwork. Broken, yes. Messy, always. But it was theirs.

She began to write letters to them, sometimes from them. She kept notebooks—some in cursive, some in all caps, some with hearts dotting the i’s. And over time, she spoke German (but doesn’t remember studying it) today she is learning to talk with them instead of allowing them to control her.

They had needs. Boundaries. Memories. They had reasons for existing.

And slowly, painfully, she realized: all these parts weren’t strangers.

They were her.

Every last one of them.

The truth was, she had never been alone. Not in the worst moments. Not in the silence. Not even in the darkest corners of her mind.

She had been accompanied by her own strength, divided into pieces so she could survive what no child should have to endure.

And now, as a woman trying to live on the outside—free from prison walls but still caged by invisible bars—she carried them with her.

They were the ones who stayed inside when no one else did.

And she was learning, for the first time, not to 

push them away.

But to welcome them home.