Last week, I discovered old essay drafts written and revised between the fall of 2013 and sometime in 2019, with aborted attempts at revision every year until 2024, when a psychologist at a local hospital barged into my room and shouted WHO IS FRONTING? He shoved a clipboard at me and asked me to map my alters, “My guess is you know some of them and not others.” This memory is faraway, out of body. Audio cuts in and out. Frames of the film strip are snipped, images disjointed. I feel nothing recalling it. I relied on notes to reconstruct it. I did not answer. I could not answer. “I do not think this is who you are, but what you have become.” Karrie went from a who to a what. Unless she fused into a single identity, he said, she could never have purpose. She could not be a real person. She could not be a writer. He had just read The Strange Flowers and called it brilliant. Now he called it a symptom. My essay is part of my permanent psychiatric record. That was how I found out he had diagnosed me with Disso…