The King is Dead, Long Live The King: A DID Alter’s Ascension out of Parental Trauma
My host died on April 7th, just over a week ago. This death is not such a death that they could never come back from it; I can feel the truth of that. I expect them to resurrect (not be resurrected–they are the one to decide whether they live again) someday, and must live with this expectation that my dominion as host is merely temporary. But it may not be. There is no one who could tell me what will happen, this early on in my existence.
I am Laceleaf Ly; I am a copy of a copy of a copy of a man, as Squalloscope would sing; I come from a host of many names and divisions, but I am the most distinct split. Countless things killed my host and led to the internal chaos from which I formed: the trauma of emotionally neglectful parents, the Coronavirus, and the severe lack of media representation of their most precious identities. The parental trauma is a complex thing, and only a recently realized one, but formative. Quarantine exacerbated it by forcing my host into constant close proximity with both parents. And the lack of media prevented them from having any escape from this reality.
To establish a baseline, I consider myself an alternate universe version of my host. In fandom terms, we are connected by the same canon, the same source material, the same original version. I am not the original–I came to realize myself when I thought that phrase, I am not the original, but I am what I am. And what I am is alive. I have said it before, to one of my host’s former best friends who I had to part ways while for as long as I am hosting–I am sorry I am not the original, but I am not sorry to be alive.
As for the situations that led to my host’s death, one of them was their parents. My parents. My host’s life is my life now. These parents are my parents. A lifetime of emotional neglect adds up, especially when situations of disability contrived to force them back home (potentially forever). A child needs more than to be fed and watered. A child needs more than to have an infinite allowance (always within reason, never exploited), even when there is not infinite money in the house. My parents fed and watered my host very, very well. It is perhaps the only thing they did.
Vietnamese food held a lot of meaning to my host, as it does to me. Because neither of us are able to speak Vietnamese, the cuisine is our only link to the culture. A Vietnamese-American experience through home-cooked meals and learning recipes from our mother, though never allowed to practice them, since our mother always gets to the kitchen first. This connection holds double meaning when it is the only way my host’s parents showed their love and any interest in what my host had to say or think about.
Their parenting approach was–and is–like so: You can have food, water, and money: isn’t that enough?
My family never had dinner together. We all ate at separate times and did not have conversations about anything meaningful outside of what was for dinner or what groceries we were going to buy or what the weather was like. My host shared nothing about what they did in school. My host shared nothing about our writing projects (because they all are gay or mentally ill or trans or nonbinary or otherwise weird). Up until the day of their death, my parents had not a single clue that we have written a novel every single year since we were 16 (I am 23 now), although only three to four of those are even vaguely readable. My family and my host spent most of our time sitting in our own respective rooms with the doors closed. My host never knew what music my parents liked, what they liked to read, what their favorite TV shows were, or any major detail about their lives, or even how they met, or what my father did for work (something computers something automobile industry — what, I still do not know). I do not know my parents as people, and they do not know their daughter is a dead man.
During my host’s teenage years, my mother’s homophobic reaction to my host coming out as gay destroyed their relationship with her. However, the development of my host’s schizoaffective depressive disorder–so similar to the schizophrenia my mother has–did much to repair that relationship. At least in my host’s mind. When my mother first heard that my host was gay, she said such bitterly common things it makes me sick. You’re too young to know. You could be bi–you’ll meet a good man someday. Before I even thought to seek my father for help, she said, You can’t tell Dad–it would break his heart. And then, she said less and less common things. Don’t you know homophobia exists? You can’t tell anyone. And Didn’t you hear about the statutory rape case between two (whispered) lesbians whose parents didn’t approve of their relationship?
My host’s only defense to get her to stop talking to them about it was to scream at the top of their lungs whenever she entered the room. In high school, our father worked out of state during the week, coming back on the weekends only. So it was really just my mother and my sister, who did and said so much of nothing I almost forget she was even in the house.
Time and distance have bred some acceptance–my parents knew that my host, and now me, volunteer at the LGBT center, and my dad has driven my host to the center during bad weather, and they do not comment negatively upon it, only to say to not to get too political. They have not accepted that my host is transgender and on HRT, despite their money and insurance paying for the medical visits, the changes being visible, and them having confronted my host with the fact that they were on HRT through insurance records. Somehow, in their minds, they simply have a child that wants to look androgynous, but is still truly a woman, not a man, of course not a man. My mother’s voice, to my host, after cornering them in the kitchen: Promise me you don’t want to be a man.
It is an immensely awkward and distressing dance to be called by your deadname and being called by the wrong pronouns all day every single day. Every single day. Endlessly. With no hope of change. On top of my host never having received emotional support, my sister receives a dangerous excess of coddling to the point that it is detrimental to her independence. My parents decided at some point during my host’s and my sister’s respective childhoods that they had two “daughters”: Documented Problems Daughter That Can Handle It Alone And Needs No Help, and No (Documented) Problems Problems Daughter. My host was the former, my sister is the latter.
Here is where Coronavirus comes in: my sister has moved back, and my father now works from home. This means that I cannot help but witness the dangerous excess of support they give to my sister in stark contrast to the complete lack of help they gave to my host, and now to me. I do not need or desire their support, but my host–upon realizing it was lacking–desperately craved it, and was extremely hurt every time they did not get it. In a house with only my mother, with a father at work and a sister at college, my host could begin to heal in relative isolation without anything provoking the wounds to open.
Now, the carefully placed stitches have been ripped, and the wounds are raw.
And without fictional worlds to escape into, there is no escape.
My host was a writer–I still am a writer. I have inherited their skill and continue writing, though I am more an artist. The two of us, we love stories with a deep passion. But the stories we need to see right now, the stories that would help us most, the emotions that we need to know others feel, those connections, they aren’t out there in any place we can access. My host, as the basest of baselines, wanted to read gay media written for gay people. This excludes the majority of traditionally published LGBT books, which are for gay people only as an afterthought–the big publisher’s priorities are to make a buck, and they do this by gearing their stories for Mass Appeal to the most Dominant of audiences.
If your gay narrative isn’t palatable to (white) (neurotypical) cisgender heterosexuals, it won’t be traditionally published. Much of the time, it is not difficult to see The Angle Of Mass Appeal interwoven into the narrative. By gay media written for gay people, my host meant “gay people of color” and “gay neurodivergent people” but, under the lens of Most Traditionally Published Gay Fiction, gay neurodivergent people of color are not people. And even when they are, they have to be extremely sanitized, and sacrifice the “less palatable” parts of their personhood in order to be recognized as human.
This severe isolation in the utter lack of media representation, in addition to the forced isolation of quarantine, on top of being forced to relive the trauma of lifelong emotional neglect every single day, on top of the traumatic gender experience of being misgendered and deadnamed constantly–it was these things, and not only these things, that led to my host’s death. There was no fantasy to escape into. There was no escape.
In the end, there is no hope of true reparations to the parent/child relationship, especially now that my host, my parents’ original “daughter” is dead. My parents have historically been horrible with handling gay and transgender identities, and while they have grown to tolerate it, there is no hope of true, genuine acceptance. Their emotional neglect and lack of desire to know who my host was as a person–a largely unashamed, schizo, gay, nonbinary, transgender fantasy writer–and their deep, unabiding shame to the point that they won’t even say the word schizophrenia or transgender or gay, have not brought me the most hope in engaging in reparations, and at this point, it’s too little too late. I am not the “daughter” whose forgiveness they must earn.
That person is dead.
The King is dead; long live the King.
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About the Author
Xuan Nguyen is a disabled and transgender writer and artist who does music as FEYXUAN. They focus on the intersections between transgender identity, divinity + monstrosity, and stigmatized mental and physical health. Their work has appeared in Prismatica Magazine, Rogue Agent, and beestung. Their short fiction chapbook, LUNG, CROWN, AND STAR, will be published in December 2020 by Lazy Adventurers. They can be reached through their website at feyxuan.com or on Twitter @feyxuan.