Of all the places to be afraid on the road, a traffic light intersection was never one of them, especially when you’re going straight. Nothing about this intersection was uniquely alarming.

You were just a couple of hundred metres from the pathology lab you had to hop into for a quick blood test. You’d chosen mid-morning precisely so the trip would be quick.

You’d be back home in 10 minutes to gear back into work.

The traffic light had been green for 10 or 20 seconds and would stay so for a good while after you pulled away.

You drove with the flow of the other cars, singing along to LISA’s Born Again – off-brand from your usual genres, but the beat danced along the car’s dash.

You felt a violent force crash into your door.

The car rolled onto its roof and twirled upside down.

The daylight flashed against the shattering window as it rotated; the cracks glowed like lightning.

You hung upside down (thankfully you’ve always been a seatbelt-wearer). The side airbags shielded you from the worst of the shattered glass and impact.

Someone outside yelled, “Are you the only person in the car?”

“Yes!” you answered. Which was true. One body, one brain. But the brain, since then, has created two of us.

There is you, who went through the accident.

And then there is me, who, at the moment of collision, thought: “No, this isn’t happening to me. It’s happening to someone else.”

Let’s take a step back. I, Elzé, was recently in an accident. I have realised that my memory of it fluctuates depending on the day, the hour, the minute.

The second of the accident is when this divergence began. It’s not because of any head injury – mine was mild, just a knock when I released my seatbelt to crawl out the window.

I’m not sure of the correct clinical term. Suppression? Repression? Dissociation? My counsellor reassured me that it’s not a concern. She said it’s a way for your brain to cope with the trauma. My consciousness will merge again, so long as I work to process what happened. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll give a name to these different versions of me.

Ellie is the one who experienced the accident. She can feel the sensations, physical and emotional, vividly. She has mood swings, from fury to fear to nothingness.

Ella, meanwhile, recounts the incident as though she didn’t experience it herself, but rather as though her friend Ellie told her about it.

Ella knows the logical steps and descriptions, but she doesn’t feel the memory the way Ellie does. Ella comforts Ellie while she takes charge of the demands the day throws at her.

“A burden shared is a burden halved.” In this case, my brain created two selves to achieve this. In sum, Ellie holds the trauma, and Ella holds Ellie.

However, I must emphasise that calling them two distinct selves is inaccurate. Rather, there is a spectrum of how much I can recall.

Ella and Ellie have a porous boundary, which grows steadily thinner as I work through the trauma.

What’s vital is that I must not allow either to dominate. Ella will keep things going as usual, but by never facing the trauma head-on, she will allow it to fester.

Ellie, meanwhile, can become paralysed by the trauma. We must communicate with one another to process what happened.

We do this through verbal discussions, journal entries, and quiet reflection.

I’m sure this may sound strange to most people, but dissociation is quite common after trauma.

People may choose one identity over the other, disquieted by the split.

The idea that consciousness is an infinitely complex and changeable manifestation of the brain is earth-shattering to those who hold on tightly to a more static conceptualisation of the mind.

But I think it’s amazing how impossibly adaptable and mysterious the mind is.

My brain created this split for a reason: to give itself additional support.

I’m different from who I was, and it will take time for me to drive with confidence again. But one day, I’ll once again be able to sing along to upbeat music on the road, carefree and comfortable in a car.