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Not yet pictured: Royal (he/it).

Welcome to my public comic journal, a place where I share things that I feel could be of use to others in their own journeys towards understanding themselves. Here I will discuss many themes, including but not limited to:

dissociation, depersonalization, derealization, trauma, abuse, neglect, transphobia, queerphobia, and mentions of self harm, suicide, and substance abuse.

Exercise personal discretion before continuing.

Asks may be sent to @lordoftalkingbeasts.

Q&A / FAQ Below ->

Additionally, I'd love to be able to signal boost stories and perspectives from POC with parts who feel alienated from the plural community / plurality as a concept.

-🃏

i wanted to know if you had any particular way of communicating with your parts? whether through text, writing, etc? we tend to dissociate a lot in our day to day and never realize which part is most present until after the fact. we're pretty bad with active communication and differentiating ourselves at any given moment, especially because we forget so often. i was wondering if you had any advice on this?

Well, the answer to this question is definitely different depending on how intense of amnesiac barriers you have or do not have, I imagine. As #one dude, I can only answer for my experience, which is one with minimal amnesiac barriers beyond emotional amnesia.

We put off answering this ask because we've been incredibly unsure of who, if anyone, is present recently. It's still pretty hard to tell, but it's not as bad as it was the past couple days.

The ways we communicate with each other most often are through:

Journaling. This is the best tool because it is easy to look back on and is private. I've talked about journaling as a tool for memory retention and identity recognition before, but the important thing to note is that writing things physically can clear your head in many ways. We will read back others' entries throughout our journals to get a better grasp of who was writing and what they experienced. This can also help you to recognize tells in yourself as they happen.

Typing things out is also cool, but not as effective.

"Meditation." Basically just sensory deprivation and listening closely to your thoughts. See if you can identify anyone from how they think to you, if you can sense their thoughts while they aren't present.

System mapping! Very crucial to getting a clear idea of who is who and if a part even exists. Including the progression of our old maps below the cut to show how gradual he exploration can be. And don't be scared to get things wrong and revise! These also don't have to be super aesthetic either, we're just annoying. /lhj

And remembering verbal conversations had throughout the day if possible. Reflect on what was said and how to use that to color future interactions and stuff.

I recommend mapping the most if you have difficulty with identifying who's-who in the moment. You can consult the map to determine who you are by ruling out who you aren't. Or, at least, that works for me.

There are also apps and sites that are made for systems, even though I do not use them, that sometimes have mapping capabilities (ex. PluralSpace). You can try that if you want an easy structure. PluralSpace specifically I believe has a function for editing past "fronts" (you can change all of the system/plural words also) so if you realize afterwards then you can change them retroactively to give you a clearer log to look back on.

Well, first of all, good on you for getting a journal. Second of all, you definitely need to use it. I've made posts about journaling before but I'll tldr it for you here:

Journals are for you and your eyes only (and anyone you choose to share parts of it with, but this is completely optional), so you can do absolutely anything you want in it. Write about your day, write about how you feel, draw, doodle, write poems and prose, write funny things you wish you had the courage to post online, hell, copy down funny posts you have stuck in your head. Literally anything that floats your boat. It doesn't have to be unique, it doesn't have to be interesting, but it has to be *you*.

It can help differentiating who is writing what by using different colors to write, if you can. If you have childhood totally non-brand-affiliated colored pencils (or even crayons), that works just fine. If you don't have those but you have access to stores in person or online, consider getting a pack of multi-colored pens (gel is recommended because they come in a wider variety, but if you wanna start out small with just a standard set of black/blue/red/purple ballpoint pens, that's also perfectly fine, you can differentiate if different parts are choosing the same color later). You can find these anywhere from Staples to Michael's.

Mandatory disclaimer that I am NOT a clinician or counselor. Take everything here with a healthy dash of skepticism and remember this is simply anecdotal advice and not in any way law. I am not the most intelligent person, I am just well-spoken.

If you're having trouble connecting patterns parts have, try to figure out why that's an issue for you. Do you have a lot of parts or do they shift and change regularly? Do you dissociate/are you dissociated frequently (which *might* be responsible for breaking up memory)? Whatever it is, try to figure out if you can help yourself manage it more effectively through methods such as grounding.

Oh, well none of us look like anything! We don’t have internal appearances and cannot perceive each other in any visual/aesthetic sense. All of our depictions of ourselves are variations on our real world appearance mixed with a healthy dash of idealism. The comic personas also have some features based purely on some of our defining interests.

Also, if you’re new to identifying your parts, don’t jump right into the deep end of detailing your parts completely (whether they have an internal appearance or just want to draw something to represent themselves). Any kind of forced development of your parts can be harmful, so be careful. Start small and slow, like with stick figures with singular defining features. Even if you don’t usually draw, this can be helpful. Similarly to hand writing something, drawing something yourself can be incredibly useful for understanding yourself/yourselves. Art therapy is a thing for a reason!

Essentially, you don’t see all the work that comic diary creators are putting into their development before even starting their comic publicly. Hopefully this can demystify some of it for you and make it easier for you to be kind to yourself about your own journey.

Currently the changes are thus:

Thank you so much! I'm glad you can relate to my work and that it means something to you, that's all we could hope for. I'd love to do more abstract comics but I've been in a very traditional art mood for like a week+ and I don't know if I'm good enough with comics to do one traditionally yet. Also haven't had many ideas, life has been kind of mundane lately.

In all honesty, I still don't know for sure that my parts are part of a dissociative disorder. I have no diagnosis (even though I don't truly believe in the necessity of diagnosis), but I am believed by my therapist. Me and my therapist have agreed for years now that I experience C-PTSD, but again I do not have a diagnosis on paper.

Ultimately, I don't know how to parse a lot of these things. I don't like putting labels on any of it, so I don't. I know it's not just flashbacks because I don't just feel like an earlier version of myself. I know it's not just being genderfluid or having a fluid sexuality because it's much more than my gender identity and sexuality that changes. I know it's not just my mood for the same reason. But I don't know if it is the symptom of a dissociative disorder, either.

I'm just me. All of me, every part, even if they're different and even if they don't get along. I still experience denial sometimes, though. If you experience denial, I urge you to consider why. Not to say that you are wrong about what you are experiencing, but instead that examining what is causing your doubt can help you solve it.

Sometimes that means you were wrong, other times it's insecurity, other times it's just another part of what you're experiencing. There is no shame in any of those things. Self exploration is important, identifying who you are and what makes up you is important even if those components are or are not separated by dissociative barriers.

I am cautious to tell people that they should accept the existence of their parts with no question because it can be harmful for some. Not all, of course IFS exists and can be beneficial to people without dissociative parts to understand the inner workings of their mind, but for some it can do more harm than good.

Be careful approaching the idea of having parts too quickly. I approached it very, very slowly, and only recently have I come to accept that I cannot go back to believing I had a whole and integrated identity. I, however, am still functional knowing that I have parts.

I also do not want to entirely pathologize the concept of being distinctly faceted. Not every person who has parts of themself that they can distinguish is experiencing a disordered condition. Human beings are complex, and we should be allowed to experience our lives and ourselves how we choose to. But we don't need to label any of these experiences to understand them. Words are constricting, they create a structure that is not always congruent with every experience. As much as people like to say that words can be fluid in meaning, I do not agree about all words.

At the end of the day, just listen to yourself and examine what makes your experience yours. Don't worry about what to call it UNLESS you are in distress and desperately need professional help. If you are functional and uninhibited day-to-day, I would not worry about diagnostic labels.

Just wondering about your thoughts on this

Personally, we do it for some extra privacy. Not necessarily anonymity, if we wanted to be extra anonymous we would take other measures. We chose colors initially because it's easy and we were inspired by alteredpanel, but we have considered changing to a different style of aliases (namely bird names).