Abyss is a place inside my mind. I've learned that between myself and its contents, we comprise an adaptive median system.

When I think about what it's like inside my head, usually all I see is a black void where I can look in upon a big black tangly ball of things I don't want to think about. “Abyss” is the name I've given to that big black tangly ball, all of it, the whole thing.

Lately I've been learning it's not just things in there. People also live there.

They aren't supposed to. It's just that every now and then, when something horrible happens, or a lot of small bad things happen, or maybe I just learn something about myself that doesn't seem to make any sense no matter how I think about it… the person I am can't go on any longer, and the easiest way to survive is to pretend that person is made-up and doesn't exist, and the only person who's really here is the new me. So the old me gets split off and pushed down into the big black tangly ball, where everything else I don't want to think about goes. What they felt, I will myself not to feel. What they knew, I will myself to forget. And they're relegated to living in some fictional world inside the big black tangly ball, as if they were never me, as if they were only ever a character I made up. The fake memories they make together there get all mixed up and confused with the real memories they came there with, and I stop knowing what's real and what I only daydreamed. But at least it numbs the pain, right?

This is really unhealthy. It was a necessary defense mechanism to survive what I now understand I went through, but it's run rampant and I don't know who I am anymore. But it's okay. We're working it out in here. We've found each other and we're trying our best to get us all back out to the surface.