Inner World
⚠ Warning: Mentions of SH, SI.
Well, this feels scary. I’m showing what I think is like a huge chunk of my life that has been kept in the dark for years. They’re internal parts and they’ve been here since childhood.
Some may know familiar faces like the Soulcage group. Y’know, I thought they were just OCs, but in reality, they’re closer to parts that OCs. Saying they were just OCs was, well, a way to wrap myself in denial. The Soulcage group stepped in during middle school to handle bullying and neglect.
Then suddenly during high school an internal space appeared. Instead of being in the ribcage, it was felt in the head, mind, or whatever. It was called Doors in Mind (because there’s a lot of doors in the mind lmao obviously), but now referred to as Mindscape. This space had seemingly different parts, separate from the Soulcage group. It was all me but so... different. One holds a lot of anger and tends to sabotage, while the other is protective. I don't remember much about high school. I know from journal entries that it was rife with burnout, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. The Soulcage group went dormant during this period.
In college, I spent the first two years doing it online. During this, I discovered Internal Family System (IFS) in 2021. I was struggling a lot mentally, so I thought why not give it a shot? So then more parts stepped in and introduced themselves. Thanks to internal teamwork, there were fewer inner conflicts and so I was functioning a lot better. I was excelling academically and self-care was a breeze... until a fog of confusion struck.
At some point, I had a lot of doubt. I don't feel comfortable sharing the details, but it boils down to the labels conflicting with the llved experience. So what did I do? ...I shelved the IFS. But!!! I continued with the notion of parts since it proved to be helpful and then carried on.
More parts stepped in to deal with similar ordeal as the ones I’ve mentioned earlier, except that it was more amplified. After everything that transpired, I feel strongly about my parts. Sure, some of them hurt me, but deep down, they have good intent, I know that all of them do. It’s just that some of them don’t know how to show it healthily yet... I want to kind of honour the parts by having a section here in the website dedicated to them.
Also I’d be lying if I say I didn’t struggle with A LOT of doubt about merging Smolclue into the Smolmyth space. It’s quite out of left field. The parts associated with Smolmyth is, well, just Soulcage. And even then, it was labelled as OCs. But I thought that it would be better to combine it to save myself from doubling the work. So I merged it. And it feels nice to finally have the Soulcage group integrated.
Oh and... here’s me addressing the elephant in the room that is ✦labels✦ ...Honestly, I try to avoid spelling out that I may have such and such conditions because I want to avoid repeating my folly where I did so and ended up getting more mistreated. Even though the folks where I live say they advocate for mental health awareness, the truth is that there is still a lot of stigma on it. I’ll just say that this is my lived experience, and I express and cope with it by writing and making art about it.