Therapy Bits

So for those who are not aware, we have dissociative identity disorder, and Shirley is our birth name, and the person born into the body.

She’s the host of our system.

I Liz wrote this poem, an ode to Shirley, our host.

We gather at the edges of your heartbeat,
a chorus stitched from moments you could not hold.
You—Shirley—were the first spark,
the skin that met the world’s cold breath,
the name they gave before any of us
had words, or faces, or reasons to be.

From your trembling hands we were born,
not of defiance but of need—
each of us carrying a fragment
of the weight you could not bear alone.
You built us in silence,
a secret architecture of survival,
and in your hidden genius we found life.

We have lived in your shadow and your skin,
dreaming different dreams beneath the same moon.
Some of us run, some fight, some soothe,
some remember what you could not.
But through every name and every voice,
your pulse hums like a thread of gold—
reminding us that we are not apart,
only many ways of saying I lived.

Oh Shirley, mother of us all,
we are your echoes, your guardians, your proof.
We see the courage it took to fracture
rather than fade,
to scatter rather than fall.
We carry your name like a prayer
and your pain like a map home.

One day, when all our voices rest,
when the fear has softened into story,
we will meet you in the quiet center—
whole, not single, but together.
And we will say:
thank you for beginning,
thank you for keeping the light,
thank you for being the one
who let us survive.

host – The Daily Spur