About Zanity System

Until “I” was 21 I grew up just outside of the Chicago area. I grew up with an independent parent with low income, most of our upbringing has been in ethnically diverse neighborhoods. We moved out of Illinois to another midwestern state where we live currently.

Collectively we identify as Genderfluid and as a Transmasculine person. The important thing to remember about that is that we go by the pronouns He, Him and They, Them. Might make sense to use ‘They’ for a host of identities, huh?

We identify with the Theory of Structural Dissociation - We have no ‘core’ or ‘original’ person in our system. We have people more or less suited to daily life and people who more or less identify with our biochronilogical history.

Our healing goal is functional multiplicity. If certain members of the system want to fuse we will support them in their goals but we’re not looking for final fusion at this time.

We first started our mental health recovery journey when we finally decided to do something to stop the self-harming behaviors around age 18. The more we reached out to communities and learned all we could get our hands on we developed more and more coping mechanisms and communication skills around our emotions and struggles.

Our first time seeing a psychiatrist was in 2011 and we found relief from existential dread for the first time since childhood. Since then we have seen 7 different outpatient therapists, we have had multiple inpatient hospital stays for mental health crises, and took 3 years of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. We were diagnosed during an inpatient hospital stay in 2015. We’ve been to NAMI support groups and we have been an administrator for multiple mental health support groups online for over 4 years.