girl whatever

There’s also the matter of headmate roles: not every headmate has a role, many headmates can have more than one role at a time, and roles don’t define the entirety of a headmate’s personality and identity. Multiple of ours don’t really have any roles? They’re just…people. Existing and living their lives. And the rest that do have roles are not defined by their role at all and are always growing and changing as people. Roles aren’t permanently static. There can be many completely different headmates with the same roles in a single system. We have many protectors, but slim to no caretakers (as of this moment in time lmao, this is massively subject to change). In our experience, roles are more of an optional descriptor word that can be used as a tool to better understand someone and their place in the system as opposed to a hard rule that someone must abide by. They’re flexible things!

Memory loss is also a much subtler thing than people give it credit for, and most plural folks I’ve seen try to mask their memory loss in some way. I was completely and utterly oblivious to my own up until recently. You can have memory loss about having memory loss and legitimately forget that you have amnesia. Memory loss varies a lot from system to system, even system member to system member, as well. Our memory loss isn’t severe, we lack significant amnesia barriers. We wouldn’t forget our own name or the names of our loved ones or the fact that we have a mother, but some systems do, and others don’t forget anything at all. We forget things like tasks or goals or ideas we literally just had/were doing, have terrible object permanence, ……uh we forget what it is that we forget lmfao, we forget appointments and scheduled events, numbers and specifics about details slip our mind a lot, we’ll remember that we watched a movie but forget most of the content inside the movie itself pretty quickly after seeing it, entire chunks of our childhood are completely missing, we need to archive everything we’ve ever known or liked or experienced or written or done or else it, too, will be swallowed by the void that consumes entire chunks of years like an unforgiving hoard of mental document-eating locusts, we forget the years something happened in, sometimes our own age, essentially any details of anything ever. We forget acquaintances entirely, the names of acquaintances, people’s pronouns, our bodily birthday always takes a solid second for us to recall every single time without fail for our entire shared life, memorization is hard for us, etc. Uniquely we don’t have any autistic vocal stims and struggle to quote things because we will straight up forget every line of dialogue we’ve ever heard from every media we’ve ever consumed. Or, well, not exactly, probably like 5-10% manages to slip through, especially if it’s something iconic that we’ve heard over and over again, but I could never mentally recreate an episode of something I watched or a letter I received in my head, because it’s been instantly consumed by the void. I have to re-read texts and emails pretty often. I have to re-read what I myself write because I fucking forgot everything I’ve said prior to this point and will need to re-read this entire post to make sure I haven’t accidentally said something wrong, because frankly, anything is possible when I don’t even know what I said 5 seconds ago. Usually our alters have to collaborate to try to make a complete puzzle picture of everything we can individually recall.

Despite all of that, memory loss is usually a fairly covert thing. DID & OSDD are covert disorders, easy to overlook and easy to mistake for something else. A common experience systems go through growing up is other people getting frustrated or annoyed with them for their memory loss, but not enough to actually seek a diagnosis lmao. I’m uniquely shit with mathematics, forgot years and years of math entirely and forgot the entirety of geography, so I’d say it impacted me academically. And mine isn’t even severe!! I could see a medicine cat apprentice with DID/OSDD-1a/plurality with memory loss struggling a lot with graduating and passing their tests because they struggle to remember all the different names of all the different herbs and keep forgetting what’s what. Or alternatively, a warrior apprentice struggling to pass their mentors tests because they forget instructions immediately after being told them, stuff like that.

Dissociation is another thing (obviously lol). I keep dissociating while I’m writing this lmfao. It’s usually involuntary, it feels like a fog comes down to claim you by your own mind and pull you away into a blank void where youre not present in the real world anymore. I struggle to stay present in the moment. I usually spent years of my life completely consumed by fiction and fantasy and my innerworld while I forget the entirety of my irl physical life. I space out all the time, and sometimes it can be physically strenuous to try to force myself to focus on the present. Some systems are so dissociated, they’ve never spent a single moment of their lives focused on the present, and don’t know how to ground themselves back into focus. This can be severe enough to impact people academically, and in relationships. Involuntarily spacing out during class or while someone else is speaking to you sucks ass lol.

Introjects are also a thing, don’t forget the introjects! (even if it’s incredibly easy to forget everything lol.) Introjects can be formed from real people (including abusers), fictional characters (including OCs), concepts, songs, aesthetics, anything. Even a blend of multiple different kinds. We have a few fictives (introjects made from fictional characters) in our system, and they don’t just relate to the character, they ARE that character, in a literal sense. Their source material feels like memories, even sometimes with sensory experiences attached to it, and it feels vividly like their very real lives that they lived and can have psychological trauma and emotional impact from. If a fictive goes through something traumatic in-source, that can be very legitimate and real, valid trauma that can even impact the psyche of other, non-fictive alters! I can’t speak for factive (introjects made from real people) experiences though, I don’t know enough about that personally to speak for what the factive experience is like. Not every system has introjects, some have none at all, and some are entirely consisted of introjects! Theres nothing cringe about being an introject, in-source experiences are just as valid and deserve just as much respect and care as irl bodily experiences.

Headspaces are also optional and vary a lot from system to system. Something notable is it can also vary from subsystem to subsystem as well, our subsystem has a completely different headspace from the main, larger system. Our introjects have an innerworld that is completely separate from our main headspace, it’s essentially their in-source home where they live as their true selves internally. But not every system has a headspace.

Communication also varies. Some systems have really vivid internal communication and they can hear each other speak in clear, distinct voices inside their head, some systems only have external communication where the alters can only communicate through external means like journaling or notes or art, some have both. It can be a struggle trying to communicate with your headmates if your internal communication is low or none or otherwise a big struggle. Amnesia barriers between alters can make it a lot harder to communicate effectively.

In-system relationships can, you guessed it, also vary a lot. They can essentially be anything under the sun. Platonic, romantic, sexual, queerplatonic, familial, alterous, etc. You can have in-system relationships between alters who absolutely hate each other and fight all the time, you can have friends with benefits, purely romantic asexual relationships, in-system spouses (not sure if you can legally marry your own headmate though), parent and child, siblings, anything and everything. They can have just as much richness to their dynamics with each other as you’d write with any other pair of singlet characters. Though I will say, there’s a certain level of intimacy that can come with sharing a body with someone that you just don’t get with someone outside of your system. These people share a body with you, share a life with you, share the same mind, they know your thoughts, your feelings, the same sensations, etcetera. For us, it’s an indescribable bond of deep intimacy and connection that can be present through even the greatest of internal conflict and infighting. You can hurt each other easily, and fight a lot. We still struggle with our fair share of internal conflict. But at the end of the day, you’re all in this body, in this life, together, and you gotta find a way to make it work together.

Some systems have more internal conflict than others, especially if persecutors are present in the system. Ours gets along fairly well and is generally pretty cooperative with one another, but that’s not a universal experience. Additional note though: If youre going to write a persecutor character, I’d recommend making an effort to not fall into the Evil Alter stereotype. Persecutors are a form of protector, and they’re people too, with personalities, interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes, and a capacity for joy and love. They deserve love and respect and affection just like anyone else, and deserve a space that makes them feel safe, too. They’re not automatically pure evil or like “the evil Hyde half” at all.

If you’re going for a more simple, surface-level representation of the disorder, honestly imo all you need is a character with headmates that are legitimate people with differing personalities that aren’t automatically evil. Everything else is pretty customizable. Even if one or a few of the alters are violent, as long as you depict them as fully complex and sincere people (usually people who are just trying to protect themselves) and not flat, one-note Hollywood maniacally cackling mass murderers designed to warn the public about those "scary crazy people" (which you wouldnt do if youre asking the question of how to write a plural character lmao) I’d say you’re fine. Have fun with it! Play around with it! Make multiple characters, then put them in the same body, that’s… really all there is to it at the end of the day. It’s up to you how in-depth you want to go or feel comfortable exploring with plurality as a whole. I’d be cool with both simple and complicated representation.