plurality diary

I keep seeing people say that they wish the plural community would focus less on labels and slapfighting and more on the experience of living as plural, so I decided to make an ask game about it. All systems welcome to participate as long as you respect the spirit of the post and don't drag discourse onto it. Feel free to copy and paste this wherever with or without credit, a bunch of these questions were lifted from other places anyway.

I tried to pick or at least phrase questions to be as inclusive as possible, but I've almost certainly missed things - plurality is diverse and my system only experiences a small corner of it. I encourage people to make their own ask games!

🌱 (seedling) - How did you discover you were plural?

💐 (bouquet) - What analogy would you use to describe your system to a curious stranger?

🌸 (cherry blossom) - What things were major influences upon your system? (e.g. life events both positive and negative; meaningful media; other identities)

🌻 (sunflower) - If you can communicate internally, what is that like? If you can't communicate internally, do you have other methods for communicating with each other?

🍁 (maple leaf) - If you can switch, what is that like? If you can't switch, is it something that you're interested in?

🪴 (potted plant) - If you have a headspace, what is that like? If you don't have a headspace, where do system members normally hang out?

🍂 (fallen leaves) - Do you experience yourselves as individuals, as parts of a whole, or some secret other thing?

🌴 (palm tree) - Is there anything that you do to spend time together?

🌿 (herb) - What tools, if any, do you use to navigate life as a plural system?

🌲 (evergreen tree) - What kinds of relationships (familial, romantic, platonic, etc) exist between members of the system?

🌵 (cactus) - Do system members have disagreements with each other? How do you resolve them, if so?

🌺 (hibiscus) - Is there a "common" plural experience that you don't experience?

🌾 (sheaf of rice) - What does your average day look like? How does plurality intersect with it?

🎍 (kadomatsu) - Do you decorate your space or keep mementos of/for yourself and other system members? (e.g. perfumes, clothes for specific people, art, jewelry)

🍎 (apple) - What advice would you give to a singlet looking to be an ally?

🍀 (four leaf clover) - What advice would you give to a newly selves-discovered system?

And when she goes a bit ’crazy,’ when she starts crying and can’t stop, when she sits and stares into space for an hour because she can’t figure out what to do next or how to do it, when she doesn’t want to go for a drink after work with her colleagues and can’t bear their jollity, when she can’t concentrate at work or remember what it was that she was doing, when she lies awake at night worrying about how to pay the mortgage… when all these things happen, no one actually says that she’s gone mad. Everyone understands that she’s in grief and that it will take time, perhaps a long time if the death was sudden and unexpected, for her to rearrange her life again so that the new normal becomes automatic and comfortable and comprehensible. And even then, for decades afterwards she may contend with the why? questions of sudden tragedy and life not being as sugar-sweet as the John Lewis adverts suggest. But when we have a ‘breakdown,’ when our dissociative coping strategy that has kept our trauma or abuse at bay for years or years suddenly collapses in the lounge and dies on the floor, and we find when we come home from work that it’s not there anymore, people don’t see our resultant behaviour as normal. Even we ourselves think we have just ‘gone mad.’ We don’t have a paradigm for it. And because there’s no corpse in the lounge, no funeral cortège, no life insurance pay-out and a bank statement in a single name, because it’s all intrapsychic and hidden in the undergrowth of our mind, then our outward behaviours do seem ‘crazy.’ When we can’t go to work the next day, and we can’t concentrate, and we keep bursting into tears, and we can’t bear to socialise, and we lie awake at night, and everything seems too much, then we don’t think, ‘This is normal.’ We think, ‘I’m insane.’