I am M, my pronouns are they/them. I'm one member of the system currently on here as @bright-system . I am a wolf holothere. Not sure how much more there is to say.
Going to be using this account to post about general plural shit, use it as a Twitter-replacement (I was looking at Mastodon but couldn't find an instance I vibe with). Probably the occasional essay or zine.
I will also occasionally be making/reblogging posts which are sexual in nature, so be warned. Probably won't be the main thing I post about but it will be on here.
I, as are the other people in our system, am emphatically supportive of all systems regardless of origin. If you don't like that, block us and move on.
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Hey all. I know you've said in the past that you're all kind of in a state of flux, each of you changing over the years but in ways that aren't just "growing as a person" but literally becoming other people. Not exactly fusion but something else. (Or at least that's how we've interpreted it? Correct me if I'm wrong.) We reckon we're in a similar boat, and it's kind of scary to us. It's happened a couple times already and we've got very mixed feelings about it. There's a part of us that approaches that with a kind of "c'est la vie" mindset and to just roll with the waves, but there's a very real fear of a loss of identity, of individuality.
My question is, how do you guys deal with that? Is it something that gives you any anxieties or is it just how it is for you? Sorry if I'm not being totally clear.
- @myriadmanes
You interpreted it about right. Sometimes our brain yanks someone backwards, dunks them into our subconscious or unconscious mind for a few days or weeks while they do whatever they need to do to change/be remade, and eventually spits out someone that holds different priorities and traits but also has a sense of not truly being new. It usually happens when we're under unbearable stress or get stuck on our own identities ("I can't change without becoming someone else!" dilemmas- best solved by becoming someone else).
I can speculate about how it works all I want or gesture at the entities hanging out back there who handle the recycling process (one of these days, maybe they'll explain a few things to us), but the mechanics don't actually matter that much. What matters is that we get remade sometimes, and that our definition of "person" gets a little weird as a result. We tend to reach for "recycling" as shorthand to try to explain this, or point at our personal mythos to describe it in metaphor. (This one is especially relevant.) But it doesn't particularly matter what exactly we call it if we can talk about it.
On accepting it:
Yes, we do have fears and anxieties about being remade sometimes. We get attached to ourselves, we want to keep ourselves the same, we want to feel like we know something about who we are, we envy the casual nature of other people's identity persistence. Sometimes we choose to fight it and hold still a little while longer.
Slowly, it's gotten easier to let go and trust that we'll be okay on the other side of it. More cycles passing makes the process more mundane to us. It's neither good nor bad, just a thing that happens sometimes.
We do have the comfort of there being a little continuity to the discontinuity of it all. When we're recycled, the person that emerges has access to old memories and information. They're not starting from a total blank slate. Their sense of identity is often significantly different from who they used to be, but there's the sense of a shared thread of self. We can reconnect with the thread of who we used to be if we put in a little effort, and it tends to be helpful in tying up loose ends. I am bound to who I used to be by memory and feelings, in the end, even if I was someone else when those memories were made.
Approaching the whole cycle from the lens of a sort of quasi-ancestor worship practice has helped find some comfort in it. We choose to honor who we used to be and what they gave to create us as we are, and it's a comfort to know that someday, someone else will remember us too. It creates more continuity in the chaos. (And the result is a life where we're kinder to ourselves regardless.)
Being fully fused for two years also helped a lot. It's certainly one way to get over the "a change has occurred and I am not the same person I was" fear- all or almost all of us know what it feels like to let go of a concrete identity and still exist. There's a lesson you learn of "I do not have to be the same Person to exist- I am here regardless of what face I wear, what you call me, what I think or want or fear. I am the only thing that I cannot lose."
That, and having a few possession experiences helps more than you'd think. What is the self if others can move in and out of it? Does it really matter who you are exactly if you're here? (Sometimes it does matter. Sometimes it doesn't.)
I think the biggest help, though: the idea that suffering comes from fighting, avoiding, straining to grasp/cling to, or resisting something. Change is painful if we refuse to let it happen (or chase after changes before their time). When we relax into the fear and allow ourselves to become someone new, it's not scary. It's often a relief. Allowing is a skill, and it's an incredibly useful one in a lot of ways.
There are a few comics and writing pieces that helped us with this too. I'm going to recommend most of the ones I can remember.
Annotated reading list:
This comic shaped how we handle change and self-replacement in a lot of ways (including the above self-ancestor worship angle). Content warning for suicide, death, "what makes a continuous person?" questioning, and similar. It's heavy and existentially challenging to think through, but it's useful. (We'd recommend journaling on your feelings about it if you can. Debating and discussing with ourselves about this comic opened a lot of doors.)
Partial screenshots of the most important bits (the full comic is longer):
In short: it helped us see and accept the idea that our past, present, and future selves are different people regardless of whether we change our identities, opinions, experiences, etc. We are plural in serial, not just parallel. What's one more change when me-yesterday is already someone different from me-today? Why fear change when it's already happened a million times over?
For a much shorter comic on the same ideas, see also:
Outside of comics, Opening the Door is a piece that helped us. If you can read through the metaphors/mad rambling/lightly plagarized nature of it and slowly deconstruct the thing into its lessons (or dig through its creator's website to learn the references- a starting point for you that has topical relevance), then there are a lot of useful ideas in here. It's just a challenging read the first few times (and a rare case of "this is easier to understand the more insane you are"). Take notes and reflect in the margins or a notebook as you go. It helps.
Don't worry too much about Round 10. It's confused just about everyone we know, us included. There's something there, but you can get the idea from the rest of the text without understanding what the hell Round 10 is on about.
The essential things we learned from it that are relevant here:
Your self isn't the same thing as your identity, and it's also not the same thing as (your soul, the higher self, wise mind, the continuous thread of youness if you believe that exists). The identity can change or die without killing the self or soul. Oftentimes, it has to die to escape its own self-destruction. Being remade is a rare chance to start again in a better position than where you were stuck before.
Tools are most useful when you don't let them control you. If you have a hammer, then learn when you need to go find a screwdriver instead of bashing screws into the wall because you use the hammer for everything.
Identity is a tool. If it doesn't work, try something else. If it's time to let it go, then let it go.
Using a screwdriver to bash nails into the wall because you want to avoid using a hammer for everything isn't much better than using the hammer for everything. Rejection is a different kind of clinging.
Some concepts can't be understood without changing the frame you're looking at them from. Get a different viewpoint, and you might find a more useful understanding.
Footnotes:
1: I could write a whole other post on the change we experienced in 2019-2020. We went from "80-90 person gateway-adjacent system with frequent newcomers and a nagging sense of something wrong with the headcount" to "fairly small system with no true newcomers and a much more solid sense of what's real inside", but the short explanation is "we had to grapple very intensely with what it means to be a person and ask which of us were real because of a persistent feeling that most of us were neither solid/stable nor lasting people, and after making it through that crucible, we have a very high split tolerance and have yet to truly split someone new with their own thread of self-awareness". That process was also how we learned that we remake ourselves in the first place / that the Sea exists as an entity we have to work with.
Hey, if youâre disabled (of any kind), Mad/Insane, or âundiagnosed but thereâs definitely something happeningâ, please come read this.
Especially if youâre a disabled transfemme. I know that as of writing, weâve had a shitty couple days.
And if yâall can share it otherwise, whether thatâs reblogging this or sending the link to the disabled/mad/whatever we are people in your life, Iâd really appreciate it.
I saw a poster nailed into a telephone pole yesterday. âHave you lost all sense of purpose?â bold text at the top read. âHas your reason for existing long since been made irrelevant? Are you a ghost haunting those around you before the time of your death?â
âSo are we. Join the Empty Souls Club.â
At the bottom were slips with contact info to be torn off. All but one of the slips were taken. I tore off the last.
The address on the slip led me down back alleys leading into a long-abandoned industrial estate. A rickety wooden door with rust-smothered hinges bore that name again, the Empty Souls Club.
âLeave your self at the door,â a plaque read.
Through the door was a spiral staircase going down, down, down. As I walked down, I asked myself, what am I trying to gain from this? Hope, I eventually answered. Bodies don't have hope, but people do. Hope will prove I'm not dead just yet.
After years of going down, I reached the bottom. The air was an icy chill. A door, just a bit too small, loomed at the end of a long hallway. I hunched down and walked through, the sharp metal of the jagged doorframe scratching at my fur.
A circle of chairs sat in the middle of a vast and otherwise empty room, bare of wallpaper or carpet, just brick walls and concrete floors. The chairs were all empty, but one bore my name, engraved on the back.
My tall frame squeezed onto the small frame, dwarfing it. I looked around the room. Nobody else was there. It didn't look like anybody had been for some time.
âWhat do you do when you're lost?â I eventually asked nobody in particular. âWhat do you do when you were made with a purpose in mind, and now you've completed it? What then?â
The room was silent. Not even my own voice carried far enough to throw back an echo.
âWhat do you do when there's nothing left to do?â I asked again. Silence.
âNothing's enough,â I continued. âI've tried to find something to fill the void, but nothingâs enough.â
My claws scratched into the hard floor, raking scars down it as I blunted myself into it. My fists clenched hard enough for my claws to draw blood from my palms. I had wanted to scream, but something had stopped me. I had wanted to scream until my throat bled, but I didn't.
âWhat's left for me?â I howled into the room.
The door creaked open. Nobody had opened it. Nothing was there, and yet the room found a way to tell me that my time here was over.
This was pointless, I thought.
I skulked back up the stairs, something new filling me.
It's funny how being depressed makes you miss misery, but in that moment, reunited with this overwhelming sense of desperation, of loss, I had been reminded I was, in fact, alive. Bodies don't long for something more, but people do.
I still have no answers. I don't have direction or purpose. But I do have hope.
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thereâs a local guy called the Sidewalk Astronomer who sets up outside the clubs downtown with a giant telescope and lets the drunk people walking by look at the stars. heâs my hero and he let me see the moon and Jupiter today
Sorry for not adding image descriptions before, I realized only a bit ago that I can save the images in drafts and add it before posting >_> I'm going to go back and add to the currently non-described ones later.
Weâve fallen into a pattern of splitting a new headmate roughly once every two weeks (currently, at least). Every time a new headmate appears, this tends to bring its own challenges, most notably that we already have such a limited amount of time to devote to each of our individual needs, and more people entering the equation only stretches that further. We also have noticed, as has our therapist, that each new headmate brings along something unique, something inherent to them that was previously absent from our system. Some notable recent examples:
I appeared as a fusion of two other headmates and also brought along another headmate who only I can hear, our first subsystem
At around the time I appeared, a third headmate went dormant
Before me, our first fictive appeared, with her own struggles with being âout of placeâ (which would later lead to the formation of a second fictive from the same source)
This last week, a new headmate has appeared who is entirely non-verbal, even to the point of not being able to communicate verbally in headspace, which has led to us learning British Sign Language (BSL) so that we can communicate
We saw our therapist today and told her about our most recent new addition, and that weâve been learning BSL. She said something which stuck with me: âThereâs always something new going on with you, isnât there? Somebody new always brings along a new challenge. Itâs fascinating.â
To which I responded: âWeâve gotten used to it. You know, itâs strange, itâs interesting, but itâs happening, and I guess thatâs the important thing.â
We both agreed that that sentiment - âitâs strange, but itâs happeningâ - feels like a very neat summary of our experiences with plurality. Our brain throws us a new curveball every so often, but we always find a way to work with it. We agreed that, if anything, thatâs a testament to how much our mental health has improved, that even though things are often difficult, weâre always able to push through them and figure them out.
Itâs a point I wanted to make here as well. A lot of digital ink has been spilled on this site on how plurality can be challenging. I want to make it clear I am not dismissing that - plurality can certainly be very difficult, we know that as well as anybody - but rather, I want systems to, if they have the opportunity, try to find something positive out of it. For us, we are each otherâs support network. We always have each otherâs backs. It is also, undeniably, fascinating, as our therapist put it. That our brain works in the way it does is something which we cannot help but marvel at. For us, thatâs enough. Could it be for you? Even if itâs only a small thing that helps you to keep moving forwards?
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"8.2 billion global population" factoid actualy just statistical error. global population actually only around 1 billion. Headmates Georg, who lives in cave and discovers over 10,000 new headmates each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Responding to something mentioned in this post by @court-of-birds:
i love that you're out here breaking up the dominant language for speaking abt plurality and the human experience
There really is a dominant language and expectation set for plurality and adjacent experiences, and it's frustrating because it's extremely medical (US American medical if you want to get specific about it. The DSM is not an international manual!).
When we look at how people talk about plurality, even in plural spaces, we see that there are ways that plural people are supposed to talk about our experiences if we want people to believe us about any of it. Oftentimes, this means understanding and talking about ourselves very medically, making certain assumptions in the process:
There is an objective answer to any question about your system.
Your existence must be peer diagnosed to be real. Every plural-looking experience must be labelled as soon as possible with the appropriate community terms (regardless of whether the receiving party wants those labels) because the labels make it real. These labels and diagnoses are objective truths about reality that define everything about how your system works.
Your existence must fundamentally be DID or OSDD. Maybe UDD, temporarily, until you get a DID diagnosis. There are no other diagnoses relevant to plurality, and there are no experiences outside of diagnoses. If you have a diagnosis, then you can never have nothing in common with spiritual plurality.
Maybe you have introjects, soulbonds, or visitors- which, of course, must have either have come from inside your head or come from other universes entirely, arriving in your head completely unbidden. There are no other explanations or forms of spirituality that intersect with head sharing. The outside of your head only comes inside in specific, socially accepted ways.
"But I know that spiritual experiences exist"- okay, what are they? How many experiences can you name that aren't fictional visitors walking in from another universe? When was the last time that you saw someone talking about other forms of spiritual plurality without being buried under harrassment for being honest about their lived reality?
There's a good bit more that borrows from medical perspectives of plurality in the community's typical expectations for systems, and I think it's worth mentioning more of it while we're on the topic:
You have a Host who is supposed to do all of the talking about anything important because they are the Normal Person. Everyone else's feelings, opinions, etc. are disposable compared to the Host's because they are the Fake People, the crazy nuisances, the disruptions to the Host's normal life. Your life revolves around your Host and only includes things that they totally agree with. Everyone else must always pretend to be them even if it makes them miserable.
Your alters should be rigorously inspected, categorized, and changed to fit the Host's life better even if they'd rather have nothing to do with any of it. They have no right to privacy or autonomy if their desire for it bothers anyone else. They will often be spoken about as collectible objects, nuisances bothering you for fun, or convenient helpers who vanish as soon as you stop benefitting from talking about them. They are not allowed to complain about this pattern.
Every headmate has prescribed roles that they can never change or step away from. These roles are rooted in filling specific mental niches- every headmate has a Purpose for existing regardless of how they got here in the first place. Headmates are their functions above all else. (And, of course, all of those functions serve the Host in some way.)
Your experiences never really change, and you never really grow out of old understandings of yourselves. You get it right once and then you're done figuring it out forever. Categories never overlap or shift.
I could go on! Your system should be a certain size, act a certain way, agree on certain things, have certain kinds of knowledge and lack other knowledge, and flawlessly fake being one consistent person if you want to be taken seriously. Should be, should be, should be.
It's bullshit. None of this has to be true, and we don't have to give it any real weight when defining how we want to understand ourselves if it's not serving us. We are allowed to define ourselves and live that truth.
A lot of us agree that the best way to change a norm is to loudly exist despite it. To be weird. That's exactly why we're talking about this kind of thing. There's not a lot of conversation about it, and the best way to get more started is to say something yourself.
The discussion on Tumblr is so dominated by The Prototypical System - there's a host, other headmates are defined by their relationship to the host and their roles, you need a diagnosis, and if that doesn't describe you, not only are you not real, but you're being knowingly ableist, purposefully suppressing those of us good boys and girls who do have diagnoses, all because you think it's fun to "roleplay" a disorder. Any lived experiences that fall outside of that norm feel they don't have the place to talk about those experiences, or they need to be couched in "I might not be plural" or "I don't speak for everybody, don't listen to me, listen to those who fit the status quo".
There's no room for non-disordered systems. There's no room for headmates without roles, or systems who don't use them. You're expected to know your origins - after all, you must self-identify so that the self-appointed plurality gatekeepers can decide whether or not you're legitimate.
I hope it does not need to be said that this is all bull. Do not live your life by othersâ rules. Do what works for you.
There's a mantra we've lived by for the past few years: âif it is safe for you to do so, be as visible as you can be.â We've always meant that in terms of being transgender, but it applies to other things too. It may not be safe for you to be out as plural among friends or family, but it might be safe to be out on Tumblr. Take it a step further. If your experiences fall outside of that strict norm, let people hear about it, if you feel able to. Make your own space, because nobody will give it to you.
Your son? You know he died, like, twelve years ago, right? I mean, hell, even we didn't realise that the person who had been puppeting his corpse wasn't the same kid until a few months ago, so it's fair, I guess. But it did tell you to your face multiple times. "What happened to the happy boy I knew before?" "He died." It's not our fault you didn't take it literally.
He's happier now that he's dead, by the way.
We? We're the maggots feeding off his body, yet also the ones keeping up the facade that he's still alive. A symbiotic relationship. You'll never know our names - you'd never ask, even if you knew we existed, and even if you did, we'd never fucking tell you - but we're the closest thing to the boy you knew twelve years ago.
The two people who are closest to who he was? They fucking hate your guts. We all do, but they do especially. Maybe it's a good thing you'll never know we exist, because otherwise you'd start to grasp how much hate one vessel, one body, one decaying pile of flesh can harbour.
Me? I'm the one who keeps them sane, keeps them from ruminating over you. I wouldn't exist if it weren't for you and yet I understand their pure spite for you just as clearly.
oh your daughter? sorry yeah we killed her. i mean, sheâs still here, but sheâs more bird than girl now and she doesnât like you anymore. we? yeah weâre a we. we took your daughter and killed her and took her soul and her brain and her heart and her eyes to make us. yeah her bones are still here, but theyâre hollow now.
how could you, you say? it was us? ah maybe we dealt the last blow when we laid her on the table and cut her open with the scalpel she handed us, but you made her sick first. she was dying long before we met her and now sheâs soaring above the clouds and she doesnât like you.
Having kind of a shit time mental health wise recently and thought it might be fun to field some asks, that's always cheered us up in the past. Ask whatever you want, whether that be serious, or if you're curious about something about us, or if it's totally inconsequential. We've also posted some ask games in the past if you wanted to use any of those questions.
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Had a conversation with a singlet friend who we've recently come out to as plural, pointed them in the direction of the zine we made back in December and mentioned it's kinda outdated, given there were seven of us then and now there's ten. We'd already been thinking about making a more updated version of it with the new insight we've gained since then and the months of ruminating. We will go back and remake it eventually, but not yet. Later in the year. We've also had another singlet friend say that it was too laced with jargon and it was too difficult to parse. We disagree, but still, maybe there's ways we can simplify it.
Until we do go back and remake the zine, I wanted to throw something together to try and explain plurality in simpler terms before then. Not define it - I think it's pretty easily defined - but to explain it, what it's like. So, here we go. Read on below the cut.
This is Scotty. His legal name is Scott, but everybody calls him Scotty. You know Scotty. Scotty is the kid you've known since primary school when you met in the corner of the playground where all the âweird kidsâ met to trade Pokemon cards. Scotty is the kid you played Halo with on your old XBOX 360 with that shitty headset. Scotty is the kid who went to the same secondary school as you, took the same classes as you, and went to the same sixth form as you.
You might not know Scotty, but you know somebody like Scotty.
Scotty, like a lot of men in their early 20s, struggles with his mental health. He struggles with anxiety and depression. He's probably autistic and has ADHD, but he's never said as much to you, if he's even been diagnosed.
Scotty is, as far as anybody else can tell, ânormalâ. He went to uni, got a useless degree, and now he's working a dead-end job in retail. He has his eccentricities - he talks to himself sometimes, some days he seems a bit off - but maybe that's the autism, who knows. Everybody's a bit weird, and he's harmless. Hell, you probably wouldn't be friends with Scotty if he was totally bland.
Scotty is a regular guy, leading a regular life.
Scotty is plural.
Now, what does this mean for him? How does being plural affect his day-to-day life?
For an example, let's take a look at how a singlet - that is, somebody who isn't plural, somebody who's just got the one person in their head - might make an important decision, and how Scotty approaches it.
Let's say you're a singlet (if you're reading this, let's be real, you're probably not, but engage in some roleplay with me), you've recently graduated from uni, and you're debating on what to do next with your career. You could stick on with further education - there's better opportunities with a Masters or some sort of post-grad diploma, though it means sticking in uni for longer and, inevitably, more student debt - or getting into the workforce - you're making money, which is going to mean you can be independent, but you won't be getting a post-grad diploma (or at least it's delayed) and there's not much you can do with your degree by itself.
You - singlet you - would consider this option while weighing a lot of different things up. For one, uni was kind of a drag. You made friends, sure, but you're done with education. You've been in formal education for all of your life and you're tired of it. You want to move on, and staying in uni for another couple of years would make you feel like you're stagnating.
Then again, you're 21 now, and you are probably going to be alive for at least another 60 years. You will still be two years older than you are now in two years time regardless of whether that time was spent in education or in work. Plus, education means your time here already hasn't been wasted, which it quite well could be if you just up and leave. You can't do much with the degree by itself, so you really ought to get a post-grad, at least.
Scotty, by pure happenstance, has had the same thought. (We, of course, know Scotty goes on to work in ASDA, but he doesn't know that yet.)
Scotty, being plural, is not just Scotty. In fact, none of them have been called âScottyâ for a long time, not internally. Let's say three people live in The Body Known As Scotty, and they're called Red, Green and Blue.
âMe, personally?â Red would say, âFuck uni. We got nothing out of it but debt. We've got an English degree. Fat load of help that's going to be in any career that isn't teaching.â
âBut,â Green would add, âteaching is a viable career. We just need a PGCE - it's only a year, and some schools will fund the PGCE for you if you work for them afterwards - and then, it's a career.â
Blue would shake her head. âWe're going to need to self-fund a post-grad course,â she'd say, âwhich means we need money we don't have. Masters, PGCE - neither are doable unless we've done some work and built up some savings first.â
It's the same process. The same thoughts are being had. We've just changed how they're being had.
Plurality is a lens. It's a lens you see your own, internal, subjective experiences through. It's a way to group together a bunch of different things you may experience into a cluster of now-related concepts to better understand your reality.
Sudden changes in behaviour and mood. Intrusive thoughts, thoughts that arenât your own. Periods of amnesia. Dissociation. Migraines. Have I described somebody with DID? Those traits aren't unique to DID, those are all symptoms of so many things. Give three psychiatrists those symptoms and theyâll give you four diagnoses.
It's a lens. Does it help you see? Use it. And if it doesnât? Discard it.
