Introduction: Reclaiming Complexity

I've been sitting with something quietly for a long time—something that doesn’t yet have clean language or clinical consensus, but lives deeply in my body and story. I want to share it with care—not as a diagnosis or a truth for everyone, but as a gentle theory emerging from lived experience.

What I’m exploring is the possibility that there is a meaningful distinction between Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and a form of internal multiplicity that many autistic people—especially those who have experienced chronic, unconscious masking—know intimately.

And I say this with full respect for the DID community. This is not about claiming space that isn’t mine. It’s about giving shape to something that’s been flattened—both in language and in life.

The term “masking” has become a buzzword. It now covers everything from neurotypical politeness to conscious social modulation. But for some of us, masking wasn’t about social strategy. It was about erasure. A survival mechanism that wasn’t chosen, but hardwired.

What if what we call “masking” was actually a nervous-system-level disappearance of self?
What if what we experience as multiplicity isn’t fragmentation from trauma alone—but adaptation in a world that demanded our invisibility?

This piece is for those of us who don’t fully fit into existing definitions, who’ve never lost time but have lost ourselves, who’ve lived for decades with internal systems—modular, relational, logical—trying to hold everything together.

Let’s explore that, gently.

What Is Multiplicity?

Multiplicity, in broad terms, refers to the experience of having multiple internal “selves” or “parts.” For people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), these parts are often protective and formed in response to profound early trauma. They can be distinct, compartmentalized, and sometimes accompanied by amnesia or switching.

But what if there’s another form of multiplicity? One not rooted in classic dissociation, but in chronic neural camouflage?

What if, instead of being torn apart by acute trauma, your mind split itself into pieces slowly and quietly over time—so you could survive the emotional noise, sensory overwhelm, social punishment, and constant invalidation that come with being autistic in a neuronormative world?

That’s not a mask.
That’s not a social tool.
That’s a system—an architecture of self-regulation built under immense pressure.

This isn’t DID.
But it’s not singularity either.

It’s something else. It deserves language.

The Duality Paradox: When Erasure Looks Like Function

There is a strange kind of reward for vanishing.

You are most accepted when you are least yourself—when your voice is measured, your reactions muted, your truths trimmed to fit someone else’s comfort. The praise comes easy when you're palatable.
But what they love isn’t you.
It’s the echo of who they wish you were.

From the beginning, I learned that being my full self—curious, intense, excitable, painfully precise—made adults fidget and peers recoil. I could feel it in the tightening of shoulders. The sighs. The way conversations thinned out when I opened my mouth too wide with wonder or truth.

So I began to fold.
To tuck away the parts that made people uncomfortable.

And they rewarded me for it.

They said I was so mature for my age, so well-behaved, so articulate.
But those weren’t compliments.
They were applause for the performance of disappearing.

So I built parts—not costumes, not lies, but functions.
Internal figures sculpted for safety, for praise, for peace.

• The one who cracked jokes at just the right moment to defuse the tension hanging in the air.

• The one who absorbed everyone else’s sadness so no one had to feel uncomfortable.

• The one who calculated every social interaction like a puzzle, just to avoid saying the “wrong” thing.

• The one who curled inward and only emerged in moments of absolute safety—rare, fleeting, sacred.

Each one arose with a purpose.
Each one learned to carry a piece of the burden.
Each one was real.

But over time, these roles—these fragments of self—stopped being temporary scaffolding.
They became the house.

I wasn’t pretending.
I wasn’t faking.
I was surviving—through segmentation, through precision, through invisible labor.

Until one day, I looked inward and realized:
I could no longer tell where the performance ended and the person began.
I wasn’t sure there was a singular person underneath it all.
Because all those pieces were me.
And yet somehow… I still felt lost.

Rational Anarchy: Who Benefits From Our Disappearance?

It hit me one day—not like a thunderclap, but like a whisper I’d been ignoring for years:
Who benefits when I disappear?

Who gains when I compress myself into something smaller, smoother, more manageable?

I used to think this was about me—my mental health, my trauma, my “quirks.” But the deeper I looked, the clearer it became:

This was never just about my psyche.
It was about the systems built around me—systems that rewarded invisibility and punished truth.

We call it “functionality,” but what we really mean is obedience.
We say “resilience,” but what we really mean is tolerance for suffering.
We praise “independence,” but only when it comes without needs, without noise, without inconvenience.

Palatability becomes the currency.
And the more you can mimic the expected, the more value you hold in this economy of acceptance.

In school, I was rewarded for sitting still—not for learning, but for not disrupting.
In doctor’s offices, I was believed only when I spoke calmly, even when my body was screaming.
In jobs, I was promoted when I suppressed everything—burnout, injustice, my need to stim—because “you’re so composed under pressure.”

But they weren’t praising strength.
They were praising simulation.
They were praising how well I could silence myself.

And so I kept erasing.

Until I realized this wasn’t neutrality.
It was coercion dressed up as professionalism.
Violence by design.

Because the truth is—when autistic people vanish into simulation, everyone else feels more comfortable.
But comfort built on someone else’s erasure is not safety.
It’s compliance.

And no one ever thinks to ask: At what cost?

When you live like this long enough—fragmented, praised for palatable versions of yourself, punished for showing too much—you begin to believe the fragments are the self. That vanishing is the only path to belonging. But the cost of that kind of survival isn’t just burnout—it’s something deeper. A slow and quiet forgetting. A loss of access to your own internal truth.

That’s not just masking. That’s not just being misunderstood.
That’s a collapse.
A disappearance that becomes embedded in your nervous system.
And eventually, even you start to wonder—Did I ever exist whole?

This is where Neural Camouflage Collapse (NCC) begins.

Neural Camouflage Collapse (NCC): When Survival Becomes Disappearance

There’s a difference between pretending and disappearing.
Between wearing a mask and becoming the mask so completely that you forget there was ever anything underneath.

Neural Camouflage Collapse (NCC) is what happens when the performance stops being voluntary—when the nervous system itself begins to delete parts of you in real time.
Not out of malice.
Not even out of choice.
But out of a raw, animal instinct to survive.

Coined by @travelingalkaline, NCC isn’t about strategy—it’s about surrender.
It’s not you playing a role. It’s your body exiling the parts of you that aren’t safe to show.

It’s what happens when you’ve spent so long masking that it no longer feels like a behavior.
It feels like who you are.
Except… it isn’t.
And you know that, somewhere, in some distant echo chamber of self you can’t quite reach anymore.

Here’s the difference, laid bare:

Imagine this:

A child who silences their joy because excitement got them scolded.
A teen who flattens their voice, their face, their body, because anything expressive was labeled “too much.”
An adult who no longer knows how to speak without rehearsing it first—even alone.
Someone who seems fine… until they crash so hard they barely remember how they got there.

This isn’t acting.
It’s not even coping.
It’s camouflage that has turned inward, like a costume fused to skin.

And when that camouflage starts to collapse—when the nervous system can no longer uphold the simulation—what’s left isn’t a return to self.

It’s a crater.
A question.
A hollow silence that whispers, Where did I go?

When We Are Misread: The Harm of the Wrong Lens

When you’re living in a collapsed state, you don’t look like someone who’s in distress.
You look “fine.”
You look high-functioning.
You look resilient.

You smile. You nod. You say “I’m just tired.”
You pass.

But passing is not peace.
It’s a form of unseen harm.

Because in a world that only recognizes suffering when it’s loud, visible, and disruptive, autistic people who collapse inward are routinely misdiagnosed, dismissed, or pathologized in ways that deepen the injury.

We are told we have anxiety, depression, OCD, personality disorders.
We are told we’re dramatic.
Or “too sensitive.”
Or “resistant to change.”
Or “emotionally dysregulated.”
We’re given the language of disorder but never the context of survival.

No one sees that the traits they’re labeling are not symptoms—they’re side effects of a system that taught us to abandon ourselves to be accepted.

When I was younger, I thought there was something wrong with me.
Why was I so good at being who others needed me to be… and yet so lost inside?
Why did people praise me while I was falling apart quietly, invisibly?

Now I know:
I was being read through the wrong lens.
A lens that could only see what was externally broken, not what was internally fractured through adaptation.

This is the harm of clinical models built without lived experience.
This is what happens when you diagnose the symptoms but never ask about the story that shaped them.

We’re not broken.
We’re not malfunctioning.
We’re responding—brilliantly, tragically, adaptively—to an environment that was never built for us to thrive. Healing Is Not Integration—It’s Invitation

Healing isn’t about collapsing the system.
It’s about inviting it back into relationship.

It’s about:

• Sensory reintegration.

• Relational safety.

• Expression without performance.

• Meeting your parts with reverence, not suspicion.

You don’t need to become a unified self.
You can be beautifully modular.
You can collaborate with your system instead of correcting it.

That’s not disorder. That’s design.

Healing from NCC: Unlearning the Disappearance

Healing from Neural Camouflage Collapse isn’t about peeling off a mask.
It’s about remembering there was never a mask—only a nervous system doing everything it could to protect what was too sacred to expose.

Healing isn’t about “getting back to your real self.”
It’s about realizing that every fragment, every part that held you together, was your real self.
It’s about bringing those parts back into conversation, back into belonging, one tremulous moment at a time.

But here’s the truth no one tells you:
This isn’t a linear process.
There is no neat timeline, no tidy curriculum, no five-step plan for reclaiming a self that’s been splintered across decades.

What there is…
Is slowness.
Safety.
Unlearning.

And the first thing to unlearn?
That visibility has to be earned.

You were never meant to disappear just to belong.
You were never meant to translate yourself into something less so others could understand.

You were always meant to take up space.
Even if your shape doesn’t fit their mold.

So we begin—gently.
With sensory reintegration: letting the body come back online without urgency.
With relational safety: building friendships that don’t demand performance.
With expression that isn’t for approval: journaling, stimming, silence, creation.

With telling the truth—not just to others, but to ourselves.

Sometimes the most radical act is letting yourself exist without explanation.

This Is What Liberation Looks Like

There’s a quiet revolution happening—not in institutions, not in systems, but inside of us.

In autistic people learning we were never broken.
In those of us who built internal systems not to escape ourselves, but to hold ourselves through impossible conditions.
In realizing that the parts we thought were shameful were actually evidence of our brilliance.

This is not a call to integrate into a world that harms us.
This is a call to integrate ourselves—on our terms.

We are not here to be palatable.
We are not here to reassure the status quo that we’re “functional enough.”

We are here to reclaim wholeness—not as singularity, but as a dynamic ecology of self.

Neural Camouflage Collapse gave us the name for what we’ve lived.
Rational Anarchy gives us the framework to question who benefits from our disappearance.
And the language we build together—this collective medicine—is how we start to heal.

Not by becoming “normal.”
But by becoming visible.
Together.

Beyond the Personal: Toward Collective Recognition

This theory wasn’t built in isolation.
It emerged through resonance. Through dialogue. Through the electric recognition of me too.

In particular, I want to honor the work of @travelingalkaline, whose articulation of Neural Camouflage Collapse (NCC) and Rational Anarchy gave language to something I had always felt but could never name.
This is what relational theory looks like—born not in institutions, but in connection.
This is collective medicine.

Imagine:

🌀 Clinicians who recognize modular internal systems as adaptive, not disordered.
🌀 Support plans that begin with: “What do you need to feel safe in this body?”
🌀 Communities that welcome complexity without demanding we flatten ourselves to fit.

Until we stop rewarding autistic people for disappearing, we remain complicit in their collapse.

A Final Note

If any part of this resonated—if your heart whispered finally—know this:

You’re not faking.
You’re not broken.
You are a system that made sense in a world that didn’t.

And you deserve to come home.

To your parts.
To your body.
To your truth.

We are not defective.
We are not singular.
We are many—and we are valid.

Further Reading & Credit

The term Neural Camouflage Collapse (NCC) was coined by @travelingalkaline, whose original two-part thread offers a powerful breakdown of the concept:

• Read Part One →

• Read Part Two →

Her framing of NCC and Rational Anarchy deeply shaped this article. These ideas are ours—held in relationship, offered in care, and rooted in a shared knowing that some truths cannot be found in textbooks.

They must be felt to be known.