Andrew is the author of Dancing With Disorder, which gives incredible insight into his own experiences with mental illness. His full blog post can be read here.

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"This book follows the journey of a person through the discovery that they are in fact multiple people within one body, the fight to get diagnosed officially and the trials and tribulations that come from such a startling and disconcerting realisation as to the nature of their existence. Dissociative Identity Disorder is perhaps the most misunderstood and hard-to-fathom of all disorders, with Hollywood films and the wider media sensationalising the condition for dramatic effect and limited literature on the disorder itself from those who experience it. DID We Write – the author name for the collective that believed for so long she was one person – uses The Revelation to try and change that, and I feel they are successful in their aim.

This isn’t a traditional story, nor a medical textbook. It’s essentially a journal, one that compiles blog posts, social media posts, poetry and commentary. It is not a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, nor is everything left tied up in a neat little bow. Instead, the authors bleed onto the page, and it is the sense of raw emotion that encapsulates everything within this book. It is not an easy read, with the jumping between authors and the liberally-sprinkled poetry discombobulating and occasionally disruptive. However, rather than detracting from the book, this style serves to put you in the head of a DID system in a way a more traditionally-written story simply cannot replicate. You lose track of who is writing, despite the variety of fonts and stylistic choices to attempt to separate the authors. The fusions and separations of the personalities is confusing, and to attempt to follow more than the ‘main’ actors is very difficult. There was more than one time when I wished it had been written in an easier-to-follow manner, with the ‘narrator’ personality taking full control.

And yet, having completed the book, I find myself wondering if this was, in fact, the only way it could have been written. Had it been a traditional style, I would have felt great sympathy for the authors. Instead, I come away feeling empathy and compassion, and with a far greater understanding of just how difficult their life must be to make sense of. The book invites you into the mind/s of a DID system, asking you to be the lead character – the host. Then, it assails your mind with the mania and confusion that Amber Ainsworth – the individual who became the collective – endures every day. If it’s hard for us to read, knowing it only demands three hours of our time and we can walk away at any moment, imagine how much harder it must be to live this book permanently; to feel as though you are losing your mind, to endure such a startling discovery and then, when you have an answer that makes sense of it all, to feel that you are doomed to be stigmatised and forever. The juxtaposition between the joy of understanding and the fear of what that understanding brings permeates every page, and when you close the book for the last time, you are left torn between wanting the authors to find peace, but knowing that them doing so will involve immense pain and grief.

When I began The Revelation, I hoped the author would be cured of this condition, and could somehow find a way through it. When I ended it, I felt more that it is in fact the world that needs to change, not the author. For them to be ‘cured’ of their condition, then the people they are closest to in the world would have to die. I don’t know if that is a price worth paying, and I believe the focus should be on finding a way for people with DID to exist safely in the world, rather than bringing an end to the condition. I understand Dissociative Identity Disorder better for having read this book. It is not an easy read, but it is a worthy one, and that is perhaps far more important."