we love talking about our polymindence and we love engaging in the polymind community, so we loved answering these questions!!!!! thank u!! everyone of our minds participated a little bit!!! :)
can/do you talk to your minds?
yes, all the time ! sometimes outright out loud, sometimes through text/pluralkit, but we also tend to think that even our thoughts count as ‘talking’ to each other. we’re just talking in our head! we argue and bicker and converse mostly though thoughts, but our minds can talk through us sometimes, like with our mouth
do your swaps completely change how you act?
not at all, it’s so subtle that often we can’t actually tell when we are swapping/have swapped. our minds DO behave differently, but not a huge amount. there are some obvious triggers (evie is always active when pet regressing, chrome is the one arguing with everyone, etc) but mostly we notice through talking and thinking differently. we notice hunter is active when she prioritizes safety and feels protective of our friends, we know vanille is here when we feel disconnected and dissociated, evie mostly thinks with optimism and whimsy, and so on. sometimes i actually feel almost like we’re thinking in different fonts, which is kinda cool
are your minds connected to one central personality or each other equally?
we find this hard to answer without knowing how you define “connected”. i mean, our minds are all connected simply by the fact that they are all our minds; that physically connects them to me. we do have a mindkeeper, ghost, who we tend to feel like fits the idea of the “core Self” in IFS/parts work. mostly, when we can’t tell who is here, it’s likely ghost. our minds all stem from ghost and are all different parts of ghost.
although, they are also connected to each other in different ways, through having different relationships. koda and saffie are siblings, saffie resents hunter, vanille/evie/koda are a bonded trio due to being the first minds, etc
how do different minds being active affect how you as a mindset like to be perceived?
each mind has their own vibe/style/aesthetic that influences how they want us to be perceived. we are genderfluid, too, and different minds being active also heavily affect how we wish to present our gender. evie is puppygender and wants to wear puppy gear, vanille is dainty (lace, white, bows) and feminine and loves angelic/religious symbols, koda is androgynous and likes dark colours.
but we also feel each mind wants us to be socially perceived in different ways. vanille doesn’t want to be acknowledged or perceived at all, evie wants to be seen as gentle and sweet and energetic, saffie and hunter want to present threateningly/confidently.
how did you discover your minds? do you know what caused it?
somewhat yes, somewhat no.
our first mind was vanille, and we felt her vividly, suddenly pop into existence one evening at school. we aren’t sure why, although i theorize it has something to do with managing dissociation. from there we started trying to get to know her, who she was, and why she was here. we then slowly developed koda and evie by trying to map out our subpersonalities (though we didn’t know that’s what they were at the time) and for a long time it was just the three of them. we found parts work and IFS after that, and started trying to consciously understand our parts, which is when we discovered saffie, chrome, our agelings who we won’t name, and most recently hunter.
hunter actually split off from saffie somehow. that’s why they are so similar and hard to tell apart. they used to be the same mind but with two opposite sides, two different goals and ways of going about the world. now that i think about it, that may have something to do with why saffie resents hunter.
we are nearly sure some (or most) of our minds were born of trauma, particularly saffie, vanille, koda, and hunter. possibly at least one of our agelings, too.
(fun fact: when we were a young teenager (13-14), long before we knew about polymindence, subpersonalities, or IFS, we used to map out the different ‘wolves’ that lived inside our head and made up who we are. we still have our old notes on our phone about which wolf represented what part of me, and some of our minds today are based on those wolves! particularly chrome, who used to be named lolo (short for logic/logic) and has been with us since we were very young without us realizing. evie is based on a wolf named ima (short for imagination) and ghost was represented by two wolves named mia/sedi (who were actually one wolf with multi personalities…. complex!))
