(no subject)

[solarsys]

We might've found a grouphome. Maybe. It serves our county specifically, and it takes in people with "serious mental illness" as well as mentally ill folks with homelessness and substance abuse issues - it's a lot more open and general than most places we've seen. We shot them an email essentially asking if plurality and the struggles that sometimes come with it would be considered a "serious mental illness". I guess since DID and DDNOS are "disorders", they would probably count, but we don't think of our existences as disordered so much as our worldviews associated with our existences? If that makes sense? We can't function properly in the Real World and it's deeply and directly related to our being plural, and that's where the "disorder" comes in. We are not Healthy Multiple at this point. That's what we're hoping a group home will help us achieve, is becoming healthy as multiple. But we didn't say all of that in the email, of course.

I'm fairly sure that once we're legally 18 and diagnosed, they'll take us in. My big worry now is what we'll do in the meantime. We're graduating either this April or this June, depending on the circumstances, and after that we won't belong to any particular institution. We will have precious little structure, most of it centered around therapy appointments, which really isn't enough. We need pillars to lean on until we can get on our own feet. Barring a couple of programs we may be able to join, we won't have any pillars, any structure, until we turn 18. And even then, we could easily wind up on a waiting list instead of directly in a home. Especially considering our birthday is in December, which is a major mental health crisis time. The only saving grace is that it's before Christmas.

I'll have to look into those programs and see if and when we could get into them.

-Sam