Convos With My Alternate Personality, Deirdre

"Write something. Anything." Deirdre pressed.

My eyes flit to the cursor blinking on the screen. "I don’t know where to start."

Her tone was soft but hard. "Baby, you know exactly where to start.

"Start here.

"Start with me.

"Start with us."

And I did.

It might be strange to imagine that this conversation occurred through my own ten fingers. I sat down at the computer and I laid my hands on the keyboard but the words I typed were not my words. They were not said in my voice. I could hear them in my head as I recorded them. I could see them on the screen as I typed them. But I did not think them, and I did not write them. That was Deirdre.

You might be wondering what Deirdre is, or how to pronounce her name (it's dee-air-druh, Celtic I think). She's not a spirit or a ghost or a demon or any of that. No, she's just a human, like you or me. And no, I don't have telepathic skills and am not communicating across seas.

Deirdre and I are one and the same. But we are critically different. We use the same fleshy prison called a body. We have the same brain, the same capacity for emotions. We are, essentially, the same person. Except we're not.

Deirdre and I may inhabit the same body, use the same brain, have the same skill sets, but we are not each other. We are. And we aren't.

We're two separate identities in one body, and there's a heck of a lot more of those in this little head of ours.

But when I sat down to write, and I got stuck, it wasn't any of them that reached out and flit my fingers across the keyboard, it was Deirdre.

This is Deirdre's preferred means of communication, after all.

It was how I met her.

I was thinking up story ideas, the idea for my story A Message In Blood, Part 1 of the Warlock Killer series, actually, (subtly nudges you to check it out) when the words rang through my head and my fingers moved to type them out.

"Necromancer?" I had jotted down as I pondered ideas for what story to write.

"That’s stupid. Where are you gonna take that?" The words had popped into my head and slid across my screen before I realized what was happening, but having experienced similar strange scenarios in the past, I took it in stride.

"They could be nonbinary asexual?" I wondered, and when that didn't garner an approving response asked, "Battling inner demons?"

"What inner demons?" She had responded. Her tone was forceful, but not angry. She wanted to help me, but she wouldn't take any nonsense.

I didn't recognize her. I didn't know where she came from, didn't know what she was doing here, didn't know what had triggered this, but she was helping me, and I didn't want her to stop.

"A bad past is too cliche." She continued. "The good/evil thing is too cliche. You’ve got to do better Lilli. Come on, baby, come on."

"Selective Mutism?" I tried.

"Are you asking or telling?"

"Idk," was all I typed out in response.

"Be more specific." She pressed. "Think. Get those creative juices flowing."

But I couldn't get the juices flowing. The creativity wasn't coming to me, and so I let my curiosity get the best of me.

"Tell me who you are." I wrote.

There was no answer.

Her presence, which I had felt just behind mine, disappeared, and I was alone.

I eventually tried a plot generator for the heck of it, just to see if it could spur an idea. Those things are absolutely ridiculous, but hilarious, and even just one sentence might be enough to trigger inspiration. And indeed it did.

I brainstormed a little more with Dierdre. She came back after I stopped asking who she was. And we came up with a decent idea. Of course, when I actually wrote it, it turned into something completely different that I absolutely fell in love with.

But it began with a few typed words and a response I hadn't expected.

Now you might be wondering where I'm going with this, after all, I am too, so I asked Deirdre, and it turned out a little differently than I expected.

"I don't know what to say next." I wrote.

"Anything." She responded.

"That's not freaking helpful." I was frustrated, but not angry, and more so at myself.

"I'm not here to help." Her voice faded and it took a minute for the words to make their way across the screen. It took a minute to decipher what she was trying to say.

Sometimes their words come more in the shape of feelings and I have to wait for the feelings to settle before I can translate them into words. Sometimes I can't translate them, and then it’s impossible to explain.

"Then why are you here?" I asked.

"To save." Her reply was instant, so sure that it threw me.

"Save?"

"You."

"I don't understand." And I didn't. A lot of things in my head were confusing. This was a feeling I was used to, but it was never easy.

"You don't have to, Lilli. You just have to be. Live. Love. Experience life. Leave the rest to us." Her tone was painfully soft. Deirdre was never this soft. "Baby, its okay. It's okay."

"I don't understand." I repeated.

But all I got in return was: "You don't have to."

I stopped then, confused and a little worried. Whenever things in my head got mysterious, chaos using followed.

We had a whole world inside our head. We called it The Caverns because the whole thing is technically a giant, elaborate, color-coded cave system. It's not imaginary, but it isn't real either. It resides only in our mind. It's where we go when we're not controlling the body. We each have our own bedrooms, and there's even a kitchen and a meeting room. Chase hordes the library to herself.

Inside The Caverns, there have been straight up battles. I've been nearly kidnapped. Wave was stabbed twice in the same day. Jyn had a meltdown and accidentally knocked me back so hard I struck my head against the wall, then proceeded to hold me hostage for a night. There have been civil wars and tantrums and breakdowns, you name it, we've probably experienced it.

As you can imagine, all of that happening inside of your head does not feel so great.

Honestly, it's scary.

There's so much mystery in my life. Half of my childhood memories are locked away, and they trickle back in when they're least welcome. The other people in my head are always ticking away in the background, getting up to things I don't even want to know about. People get upset and people lash out, and it never ends well.

But we get through it.

We go on.

What else are we supposed to do?

This is a little glimpse into our lives, into how we communicate, and how it looks in this jumbled-up head of ours.

Now, I think it's time you meet Deirdre.

I'll record the conversation exactly as it happens in writing, changing nothing, only adding dialogue tags. These are our exact words.

"Could you say something, please?" I ask.

"Why?"

"Because, Deirdre, it's for the story." I press.

"What do you expect me to say?"

"Anything. Just write."

She chuckles. "Ah, so you're playing the reverse card on me. I see how it is." She pauses before she continues. "I don't have anything to say to these people. I don't care about them. I don't know them. They're not you, Lilli. They're not one of us."

Her ferocity startles me. It isn't her apathy towards the rest of the world's people that I didn't expect, it's how much she seems to care for me, for us. I had never gotten the impression before that Deirdre was so protective of me. I had never gotten the impression she cared so deeply.

It takes me a minute to reply.

"But if they were? What would you tell them?"

Her reply is instant and scathing. "I'd tell them to suck it up and get over themselves."

I huff in annoyance. "Seriously, Deirdre?"

"Okay, fine." She relents.

She's silent for a while and I type, "Deirdre?"

"Shut up, I'm thinking." She snaps.

"Okay." I let her have a minute and then to spur the words she's ready to say, I ask, "What do you have to say?"

I never expect what she writes.

I feel the confliction within her. I feel how she comes close to letting go of her walls, of her barriers. I feel how she closes off and shuts them until only just a small crack of light seeps through. And it is from that crack of light, that the words come.

"Sometimes you have to be vulnerable to be strong.

I'm not there yet.

But maybe you are."

Deirdre goes quiet and her presence fades, but I offer a quiet "Thank you," before she's gone completely.

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