Into the open
We had always lacked words to describe what was going on in a way that felt save and understandable for other people.
Liam, who was most of all interested in finding out, lost hope of ever doing so over the years and at some point just gave up and stopped paying attention.
It was about three years later when we return from studying abroad and certain problems could no longer be ignored. Liam was the one to insist that we needed help and should see a therapist. By that point, a lot of what we had known about how we worked together had gone lost or seemed outdated anyway.
We started into therapy with a prelimary diagnosis that did not feel quite complete. It took a few months and background reading, clues from therapy session and digging up memories to change that.
But when we finally learned that there is a name for what is going on, that changed a lot.
This image was created when we tried to recover all we had known and align it with the new terms we had learned. We also picked names to allow better communication with our therapist at this point in time. When all the inner dynamics had been strictly secret from the outside world, names had not been necessary.
In some ways, this painting has been the first intentional open representation of our multiplicity and at the same time it felt like the beginning of the end. We had reached a point where we would look back at the old wounds that caused us to become seperated and sooner or later we would be saying goodbye to some of our individuallity.
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