I’m sad tonight. There’s been pain in some of my friendships lately. Relationships with other people who’ve come through trauma, or other multiples, can be deeply rewarding, but they can also be more troubled and under greater strain. Sometimes the risks I take don’t work out the way I’d hoped. The last two friends I grew close enough to to tell them I loved them are no longer speaking to me. My heart mourns. So many hopes about the future come tumbling down, the sadness is unbearable at times, and the gnawing fear. It’s hard to make sense of. Life suddenly takes a different path. Parts of me are distraught, other parts have more perspective. Tonight, it’s lonely in my unit. I can feel dreams flying away from me, like balloons with cut strings. It hurts and I let it hurt.

In the sadness I find two things; that all things change. That nothing at all takes away from the good memories, from the hope and care and growth and fun we had, the safe spaces we made for each other. I find it strange that our culture only deems those relationships that last until death parts them to be significant. What we had counted, and what we did mattered, maybe not to anyone else in the world, but for each other, it mattered. We will never be as if we had not met. We take it all with us.

And the other thing? That if you love something, you set it free.

Today I went to a second hand shop and I bought two beautiful baby wraps. They are the first baby items I have ever bought for myself. A long time ago, before I was diagnosed with DID, when I was very sick, a long term relationship ended and I found myself often stuck in the baby aisle of a shopping centre, with a hole punched in my chest so large I couldn’t breathe around it. The grief of the children I did not have stayed with me.

Now Rose and I are talking about children of our own. When things in my life I’d hoped would last much longer and be much stronger fade away like they have this year, having a child seems like madness. I don’t consider it because I believe my life and relationships are stable and unchanging. I am confronting my incapacity to work full time and support a family. I have no idea where I will be in 5 years time or what my life will look like. Life changes, takes wing beneath you, turns on a dime. Both opportunities and tragedy await, and only some can be predicted. I can consider this because I know I can survive my world breaking. Because I understand that life changes. And because I believe that some things do not change, and that I can continue to make choices guided by love and compassion. It’s all we can do.