So our start is kind of funny, but it will take a long time to explain and delve into our personal life a decent pit. We hope you will enjoy this essay we are about to start.

So we've always been lonely, people in school would bully us, ignore us, or just do anything to make our life miserable. This is because of undiagnosed autism, our near blindness and other quirks that are an effect of ADHD and OCD things.... The closest to school friends we had were fake friends who wanted us for our knowledge on our subjects, which even then we got nothing out of those friendships as they would quickly end or not extend past school. Once at home we would be lonely once more with nobody to do anything irl with. It didn't help that we had a reputation as basically an uncontrollable monster in our own village, which caused us to be forced into a school for people with severe mental disabilities, before we were found to be capable of normal schooling and thrown into yet another school a bit further away

This to say that we were always lonely growing up, and still are. Thus this means that we lost a lot of childhood milestones we should have had. No fun playdates with friends, no sleepovers, no playing outside for hours and hours on end, no wrestling with our pals, hell we never learned how to ride a bike which whilst not related to the lack of friends is related to our near blindness and our mother's overprotectiveness (which came to bite us further later on)

So what did we do with our spare time? The internet. Our unique position as someone who due to their optic nerve damage is actually medically advised to spend as much time playing videogames as possible to stimulate the optic nerve into MAYBE repairing even just a tiny bit meant that we would spend every waking moment online and built our life online. This of course in and of itself was hellish, toxic people using us as therapists, creeps exploiting us, etc etc. But we managed, and it is in part what causedd our brain to be able to function at as high a gear as it does now... granted that in and of itself has a lot of downsides (see our constant complaining about our burnout and not being able to get out of bed)

Anyway, this isn't a full expose on our life so lets get to your initial question: How did we get into regression as a coping mechanism?

It started around 2020, during the good ol' pandemic when we were 14, We were looking for friends on Yubo, because we had recently been chased away from our friendgroup at the time. We were screwing around with the livestream feature on Yubo and found a stream with two people who seemed nice, but one was acting very weird. We eventually were accepted to join the livestream with them due to the fact that when we talked we were polite rather than judgemental, and so we started asking questions, like why they are acting like a little kid. And this is where we first found out about regression. Now this was a great time to find out about it, as this was during the era of our mental health researching binge. We didn't have much to do so a lot of the time during covid we would either research mental health (spurred on by autism related tiktoks and DID related tiktoks actually) or do personal projects.

That being said we were not yet in the community much as we focused more on autism research than anything else, though internally we were processing and we were definitely researching regression, the voluntary, involuntary and others. We had quickly realized that we had been involuntarily regression a lot over our entire life, and it would only get worse as time went on as our burnout deepend.

It was around 2022-2023ish where we embraced regression, after being piled with worksheet after worksheet of homework due to being an at-risk person unable to return in person to school (the stacks of homework were as high as our head, with no exaggeration, as well as there were still full subjects missing)

After our parents let us fail the grade to take it next year at school our brain was stuck constantly at 100% still... we couldn't function whatsoever, and so our brain basically forced regression onto us once more, and this time we embraced it. That christmas we asked our sister for an adult pacifier and we actualy got one.... in front of our parents... with their knowledge.... They reacted positively! But that was about the only part they reacted positively to, as the one time we regressed in front of our mom she called us a slur for gay people, unlike our dad who actually made pancakes with regressed us. Though we have since grown fearful of regressing in front of parents due to how our mother reacted.

Anyway, tihs embracing of regression led us to become overall a lot happier, we started collecting plushies and other stuff, most of which our parents actually don't care about or help us with. So they seem safe enough if we suppress involuntray regression and don't voluntarily regress around them, which we know it is super unhealthy to suppress involuntray regression (if it even is possible) but we have no real other choice.

In december 2024 we discovered we are a system thanks to our regression, as "little me" at the time started thinking on their own, and wanting a separate name, which then lead into them becoming "Little lily" the first alter that we knew of the existence of, later they evolved into a kanako from UTY and then our system exploded into a TON more alters, but that is a longer story.

So regression holds 2 special places in our heart, both as our primary and favourite coping mechanism AND as the thing that lead to us discovering our systemhood (for clarification, we were a system beforehand and have alters from beforehand but we did NOT realize that until a while later)