When you have a friend with multiple personalities--

     My first experience with little ones wasn't with my own. I had no idea I had any.
     I had a friend, K., who was sometimes confident, competent, creative, and happy, sometimes withdrawn and depressed, with episodes of self-cutting, sometimes so shy that when I opened the door at her soft knock she would be standing with her head tucked down, her shoulders hugging themselves, her arms twisting together.
     Now all those "roles" are familiar to me because I know myself better, but then I just knew that my heart went out to my friend. When the shy one came to visit, I would let her in and we--grown-ups ourselves--would go upstairs and put a sign on the guest room door: "NO GROWN-UPS ALLOWED" and we would be children together and feel safe. We'd sit on the floor and read stories or draw or I would comb her beautiful long hair.
     Sometimes she would invite me to come with her to her counseling sessions. I would watch as she re-lived painful abuse, feeling it again in her body, and listen with her to the quiet wisdom of her counselor, like a comforting brook. There was a part of her she called the Mean One that carried out the self-mutilation. I remember when a sudden switch brought the Mean One to the fore for the first time. From several feet away I felt the breath knocked out of me, felt some kind of powerful magnetic force emanating from her that nearly forced me off the couch.
     But at the same time I was amazed at this newly revealed part of K. Reacting with wonder, I exclaimed, "Why, you're not bad!"

     Now I know why I feel comfortable with multiples--I often say, "When you have a friend with multiple personalities, you have a lot of friends!"--why I don't fear them and have an instinctive empathy with them.
     We are one.