This is gonna sound really stupid to non-knowledgeable people… but it’s true. I have autism. The reason I mention this is because I believe it has something to do with it.

I never felt a true sense of identity due to being outcasted. I was always seen as different because, well, I was. I’m neurodivergent, after all. I also grew up without the words to describe how I was feeling until I was older due to having an unaccepting family and “support” system, but I also have gender dysphoria so I always grew up feeling like I was in the wrong body. I always felt like I had the “brain of a boy”.

I would be happy when someone called me boyish or whatever because it felt more like me than “girly”, “femme”, “feminine”, and the like.

Anyway, I got really hyperfixated on the TV show called Eddsworld. I had the idea to do a reenactment of the characters where me, my childhood friend, and his friend would do something together but AS the characters. The friend was Tom/Edd because there were only 3 people and 4 characters. My childhood friend was Tord. I was Matt.

I see a lot of myself in Matt.

And yes, they are based on real people, but I always saw myself as the CHARACTER called Matt, not his counterpart/actor. I don’t feel like I share a soul with a real person who doesn’t even know I exist or anything like that.

Well, to “Tord” and let’s say “Tom” (he acted a lot like Tom), it was an act. It was a persona or mask. To me, it was more. Matt felt like PART of me.

I really enjoyed the reenactments so much that I would feel euphoria embodying Matt and it became a problem where teachers would misinterpret my intentions and think I was just delusional and told me to “just stop embodying him” because it wasn’t “normal”.

To this day, I still feel like him… and I also discovered I feel even more like Tord. I have my own version of him and I made him my own version, and sometimes I get “glimpses” into Eddsworld where he’s (I’m?) with his (my?) friends.

Sometimes, the overstimulation gets very strong when I feel like Matt, for example, and it also feels like I’m looking into a mirror or in a way, watching a recording of myself.

But I don’t have any Dissociative Identity. I don’t “remove” myself from the character, he’s part of me, my identity, and personality. We are intertwined. And I know I don’t look like him or anything like that, it just gives me euphoria when I imagine myself as him or embody him. To me, a delusion would be to genuinely believe without question that I had his appearance or something, when I don’t.