Ouroboros is a story about multiple personalities by a person who actually has them. You may have noticed that I am not using the clinical terms when I describe this (Dissociative Identity Disorder- DID,  Other Specified Dissociative Disorder- OSDD). I know ‘multiple personality disorder’ is not an appropriate term because this is not a ‘personality disorder’. However, ‘multiple personalities’ is the most intuitive phrase to say when explaining it to someone who is uneducated on the subject. For example, before we really knew what was going on, we told somebody that we have multiple personalities and they said, “oh, like DID?” And we were like “....no?” because we had no idea what that meant.  Also, Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the only diagnosis that can have multiple personalities as a symptom. OSDD May also present with multiple personalities, and I honestly don’t know which one applies to me because I do not like or trust most doctors.  But I am self aware enough to know that I have multiple personalities, so that it how we say it. 

 

Ouroboros begins during a moment in my life where everything was sort of imploding. We weren’t sure exactly what we were doing, or how honest we were going to be when we started writing Ouroboros. The actual events of my Real Life are pretty foggy, so in the first couple chapters we began by fabricating a plausible event where Dante gets drunk instead of working on whatever thing we were supposed to be doing for school.  There’s general internal chaos happening. Everyone is tired. We basically just took a random stab in the dark at something that *could* have happened, but that was also illustrative of the fact that this story is about the Inner World of a person with multiple personalities. After that the ball was sort of rolling— I said that too casually.  We actually wrote the 1st chapter three times over the span of about two years, and the next three chapters involved a lot of hemming and hawing and thinking.  Chapter 5 is where I think the writing really figured itself out. It’s where we really established a process where I could think about what happens next, and somebody who knows could fill me in. 

 

As far as honesty goes, It’s just really difficult to hear what my system is telling me if I’m focused on editing. So at this point, the only things that we changed are some names and my physical appearance. Marcy is not my legal name. I am uncomfortable hearing my legal name, even when it is somebody else’s name so we decided not to use it in Ouroboros.  My physical appearance was changed because we wanted the freedom to depict our body in the nude when it suited the art, and not everyone was comfortable doing that if we made Marcy look like me.  Half of my genetics are Welsh, so we just nudged things over to the island next door.  Other names that we changed mostly include the names of everyone in the Outer World (for privacy reasons), and the name of our protector, Raphael. This is partially because my legal name is only one letter away from his name, and changing it to Marco kept that the same— but also because we frequently call him Raph, and when people see it shortened they almost always switch from pronouncing his name with a soft ‘ah’ sound to pronouncing it with a hard ‘Ay’ sound (which he hates with the burning passion of a thousand suns).