The first outfit Ei would wear is a modified version of the hospital pjs we were made to wear in visits to the ER. The outfit has gone through four major iterations and one minor one, the first being green with a long top that was almost a 1:1 to the clothes we wore in the psych ward proper when we were 18. The slippers are the only outlier (explained further below) as we needed some degree of dissociation from the experience and purposefully changed that to be different from what we wore those days.

The second revision was a stylized version that opened up the top into a button up shirt, with a white undershirt under it. The relevant aspects, however, come from other elements such as the spiky bun, the IV (I never had one in psychiatric visits but it's thematically appropriate given our weird medfet) and most importantly, our own shoes. Instead of getting the widely used grippy socks, I was allowed to keep my street shoes on the condition that I removed their shoelaces. With that, walking made the tongue flop about, which felt like yet another shackle to my freedom, both physically and metaphorically, that I felt was important to depict.

Third design came after lifting the veil of shame and self consciousness that identifying as plural brought and I started naming alters and giving them physical* shapes. I handed down this design to Erika, “the evil alter”, who was basically all my traumatic baggage from recent years: depression, my obsession with hospitals, desires to hurt and be hurt, things like that. Not much of her changed when transitioning from what I used to call my self portraits (as one singular individual) into her own alter selvesportraits, other than the inclusion of burgundy red for her hair; “a dark, more messed up version of my dark brown hair that is meant to look like blood, because she’s bad and evil and likes hurting people”.

Third design came after lifting the veil of shame and self consciousness that identifying as plural brought and I started naming alters and giving them physical* shapes. I handed down this design to Erika, “the evil alter”, who was basically all my traumatic baggage from recent years: depression, my obsession with hospitals, desires to hurt and be hurt, things like that. Not much of her changed when transitioning from what I used to call my self portraits (as one singular individual) into her own alter selvesportraits, other than the inclusion of burgundy red for her hair; “a dark, more messed up version of my dark brown hair that is meant to look like blood, because she’s bad and evil and likes hurting people”.

Third design came after lifting the veil of shame and self consciousness that identifying as plural brought and I started naming alters and giving them physical* shapes. I handed down this design to Erika, “the evil alter”, who was basically all my traumatic baggage from recent years: depression, my obsession with hospitals, desires to hurt and be hurt, things like that. Not much of her changed when transitioning from what I used to call my self portraits (as one singular individual) into her own alter selvesportraits, other than the inclusion of burgundy red for her hair; “a dark, more messed up version of my dark brown hair that is meant to look like blood, because she’s bad and evil and likes hurting people”.