how did you start to recognize switches? Need help lol
ahh wow i feel like the wrong person to be asking this to lol. i've been thinking of making a comic for this but i haven't had much of the time (and i lowkey keep forgetting about this blog AAHHH IM SORRY)
we're like... baby system. syscovered maybe a month or two ago. we don't switch too often, and we're also monoconscious i'm pretty sure. but generally, switches can vary. i can mostly only talk about my experiences (as in, me (void) switching to someone else, or back to me. especially since everything else is from like before we syscovered) but...
sometimes it's slow. sometimes we get really brain foggy and it feels like sleepiness, except its in the middle of the day so it can't be normal sleepiness. and i lay down and fall asleep for an hour and wake up as flower.
sometimes its much faster. like this one time i played a song that was only slightly related to solar's source and suddenly he like. appeared out of nowhere and took over.
sometimes its because i'm super stressed out, sobbing in bed over something and jay, who is much more equipped to deal with the emotions at the time, sorta fades in and doesn't break down about it and can help us go to bed just fine and get through the next day
sometimes its because zee sees something that makes it super excited and it bursts to front to excitedly point at something and show it off to our friends
for the most part, it comes down to realizing that we feel like someone different in the moment. most of us are extremely attached to our identities/sources, to the point we get upset when people try to detach us from them. i know this isn't true for a lot of early syscovered systems, as i feel like being as fictive-heavy as we are kinda gives us that advantage of most of us having relatively solid identities already. so for us it can be as simple as asking myself, "am i [name]?" and gauging our reaction to it.
if i ask myself "am i [void]?" and my response is something like "of course i am, i always have been," then i of course know i'm me. but if we ask ourself, "am i [void]?" and the response is iffy, or even "no", then it's probably not me. because there's no world where i'd be iffy about my identity as [void]. iffy usually means that i'm just co-conscious in the background though, but typically we can easily affirm who is fronting with an "i am [name]" that doesn't feel weirdly dysphoric or anything.
it also helps for gauging when someone's gone too. we use front tracking apps, so we can check who's currently listed as fronting and ask, "am i still [name]?" and if we no longer feel that sensation of identifying as that name, then we can take them off and safely assume they've left for now
it helps if you know how different people type too. like, solar has a very specific way of typing, so we can easily tell if she's fronting based on if she's typing the way she does. and i can also tell if she's lingering because i'll get this subtle feeling of wrongness when i'm typing the way i usually do, and it's just because solar wants to type the way he does in the background lmao
another thing that helps is knowing what our triggers are. for us, especially positive triggers. i know now not to listen to that one song or else it might drag solar to front, for example lol... but at least i know that if i do listen to it i can pay extra attention because i know she might front if i do. that kind of thing
idk, i hope this helps. we've also been working hard to identify switches, and i, void, personally am still working on not pushing people out because i'm trying to deny a switch.
