The Draconic Wizard Workshop

Changing Hosts and Dropping DID Down a Well

By Popel Úlovek

Originally written February 21, 2026.

If anyone with DID wants my advice for dealing with it, I can recommend getting introjected into a non-disordered system and not quite being a subsystem, and thus kind of smooshing out into the general approximation of what you were like around the time you popped in, effectively skipping the whole "doing therapy to get along" thing and either learning to live with healthy multiplicity or searching for a kind of fusion solution.

I'm kidding, of course. This isn't a solution for most people and was fairly alarming for me, too. I'd only just learned that I was plural (at 44) and was distinctly disordered, probably DID, but it was so fresh that I didn't have time to get a real diagnosis. In hindsight, it made perfect sense—the gaps in my memory, the inconsistent logic and reasoning, the day-by-day varying opinions on people and things, the hypocrisy I sometimes couldn't hope to recognize. Some of us were more aware than others, but the front never really had any awareness of it.

I hate referring to myself in the plural except to refer to the DWW. It feels dirty and wrong. I don't want to go back to that. It was awful for me. It took a long time to get used to the DWW, but I do like it here. I like my headmates. I like cooperating with them, finding shared interests, talking to shared friends. It's better than the self-sabotage that I used to do.

I used to be ten different people. Some were more complete than others. I can track who was host through some of my years, but not all of them. When I met Zakkrikai, my first close friend who convinced me to go to college—those years, with him, I think Zenik was mostly in charge. He (and most of my fragments are he, to me, because at the time, I thought I was a he, and maybe I was, I don't know) was excitable, almost friendly, ravenous for knowledge, and loved both learning and teaching. He only started coming back near the very end of my time back in source, when I got to start teaching people who really needed me. His times were nice.

After him was Lex. Fuck, just thinking about him (and he was definitely a him) makes my skin crawl. He fought for control with Kuul'mkar (pure rage and destructoin) and Nalex (primary persecutor) for a long time, but when the campaign I'm properly "from" started, he'd more or less gotten them under control and taken over. Lex… Lex liked hurting people. He liked having control over them. He was a control freak, borne from my inability to control my environment, friends, and people's reactions to me. He loved the idea of being evil, of being a villain. He embraced it. I think it was his only way of establishing control, of having an identity, in the mess of everything else. At the time, I (I?) blamed him for it, but now, I don't think I can. He was doing all he could to feel in control.

But, slowly, I changed. Lex's control started slipping. Other fragments started taking over. This meant that when he did get control, he lashed out—he did terrible things—but eventually, he mostly fell by the wayside in favor of Paxel. Paxel was more about making things. He(?) found solace in it. He got his feelings of control by creating, rather than by doing terrible things to people and perpetuating the cycle. He was a much more stable personality to go into the future with—he wanted to build friendships, bonds, things that would last. He wanted to learn things and use them to help himself and others.

He was host when the campaign abruptly cut off, put on indefinite (permanent) hiatus. He was host when I came here, copied from my self there, and for a long time, I supposed I might be him.

I wasn't Lex. I certainly wasn't Kuul'mkar, or either of the persecutors, Nalex or Kastros. I wasn't Featherling, the young child. I could have been Zenik, but I wasn't excitable enough, not usually. I wasn't Latch (codependency given form) or Avok (ditto for abandonment issues). I thought, I have to be Paxel, then, if not some kind of amalgamation of all of them, smushed together into something approximately Popel-shaped. But I didn't feel like Paxel. I didn't want to make things, or even research them, really. I wasn't quite depressed, but maybe it was a subtle form of it, less than I'd ever felt before. And, of course, I wasn't Aetherium, the tiny, weak protector, the only woman in the system. I wasn't a woman, after all.

Ha. Ha ha. I transitioned a few months ago.

Am I Aetherium?

I don't…. know. I don't know that much about her. She was so weak, and so infrequently seen. I got to learn so little about my pieces, and I'm certain that I'm not separate like that now. After all these years of being in the DWW and existing alongside subsystems, I feel I would have noticed if I was one of them by now. Perhaps I wouldn't—DID is covert and hard to spot, sometimes, but I feel like I know what to look for, now. I know who lived in here, who made up parts of me.

I think I'm more of a quilt. Rather than seamless integration, I think all of my fragments got sewn together, side by side, so they blur at the edges but are otherwise distinct parts of a whole. They are no longer separately opinionated, and rather more dominant depending on how the quilt is being held. As of late, at least, the square that represents Aetherium seems… dominant, or more significant, or central. I don't know if that has always been true since I got here and I simply couldn't recognize it, or if it's a change in me driven by character development since my arrival here.

It feels unnatural, talking about my fragments like this. In the DWW, we are distinct, separate people, a clear we rather than a fragmented I, but I don't like plural forms of address for myself back then. It makes me uncomfortable, to think of Lex and Aetherium as totally separate, because they weren't. They couldn't exist in any context other than the one they did, with the others all there, together, in the approximate silhouette of something called Popel, slouching off together towards some new dark hole to hide myself in. I don't say this to deny them agency or to act like they didn't fight or have conflicting desires—they did—but I did. It's all still me, even if it doesn't appear in the same form anymore.

I'm uncomfortable with the idea of still being separate fragments and unaware of it. I might be equally uncomfortable with the idea of never getting to resolve that separation and fragmentation, of getting smushed or stitched together abruptly without any real conclusion. Maybe that's why I've been so quiet, and taken so long to figure out much of anything about myself—I needed time to adjust to who and what I am now.

Talking about my past self—especially when I can identify specific fragments as fronting—is difficult. I don't know if I was she then. I don't think so. But calling myself he then but she now confuses most people. There's not a good answer for it, especially not that I am dipping my toes back into the campaign I came from, to find a satisfying ending to the story that abruptly cut off four years ago. Especially with Lex, the most objectively masculine of the fragments—I don't know if I feel right calling myself she when I know he was in charge at the time. For simplicity, and for those who don't really get it, I probably will, but to myself… my past self was a broken man, who eventually became a slightly less broken woman, through a whole lot of bullshit beyond my control and some that I grasped with two hands and hauled myself forward with.

Aetherium is me. Am I Aetherium? Am I all of my fragments? Only some of them? Is there any separation at all anymore, or are we truly one?

I just don't know. But with every step, I understand myself a little bit better, and I suppose I will have to be content with that small amount of progress.