An idea that's been massively influential recently on how we live our life as a plural system is that, more than anything, DID/OSDD is a disorder of living in parallel realities. This incredible Twitter thread by @documense puts it perfectly, better than I can, so I'll just embed it directly.
(CW for embeds: parental emotional and medical abuse)
If you're taking me in good enough faith to read a post about this stuff, there's a good chance you're aware that DID/OSDD (and CPTSD, and honestly most mental health conditions to at least some degree) are… "controversial" conditions, ones where it's common for people to be accused of presenting the disorder facticiously.
For better or worse, there is a part of this system that has internalized all that noise, and lives in a reality where we're making this all up and faking this for attention… and as we transition into living more and more openly as a dissociative plural system, it is becoming more isolated and miserable. That is an alternate reality borne out of necessity for survival through many traumatizing situations, so it's not as simple as just telling the part of my mind that lives there to join us in "the real world" — that is its "real world", as difficult as that is for me to wrap my head around.
Originally, I thought it could be that simple, so I kept trying to coax it to do so, and each time I thought it worked, that I'd saved it… but really I just would end up having pulled out some small part of that (in the form of a new alter; there are four of them in the "starter pack" in our readme alone, but there's a whole gaggle of them, many of which don't have their own names). The rest of what lives there on the other side of that barrier, meanwhile, continues to exist, and live, and bear hate, sorrow and loneliness that continue to fester. Each time I think I've managed to bring it into "the real world", it feels a little more left behind, and its resentment grows that little bit heavier.
I want to help it so much. It's me, and I love me; as Melody, loving me is my job and my passion. But that particular me lives in a world where this is all a bunch of attention-seeking bullshit, where I'm just made up, not real, and do not exist. How can something be helped by something that doesn't exist? How can I give it my love when the rules of its world are that my love can never be true?
I love you. All I know how to say is that I love you, and that I'm not going to give up on you. Please hold on. I'm working on it.