Glittering Shards

You can be a trauma-formed system and also attribute your system to metaphysical causes. Being trauma-formed doesn't mean a system can only ever be psychologically-based; endogenic systems aren't the only ones that can be metaphysical systems, too.

It's okay to also feel like your system is a mix of the two! Or not know for sure, or care at all.

Metaphysical explanations for systems are no weirder than anything else. And ultimately, it doesn't matter if a system feels like they arrived from another time or world or that their memories/headspace/etc happened (or are currently happening) somewhere out there.

Even if you don't think it's possible, keeping your opinion to yourself is Free.99! What's true for you might not be some universal ultimate unchanging fact!

We genuinely don't give a fuck about origin labels anymore and think that overall they're useless, but we put them out there for people to use if it helps them anyways-- and they're not meant to be super duper exclusive or imply other things. IE, endogenic doesn't mean not having trauma or not having a CDD, traumagenic doesn't mean having a CDD, it doesn't mean metaphysical/psychological, etc, it just means in general your system probably formed because of this or that WITH the acknowledgment that it's all very who-knows-who-cares.

Signed,

a lot of "signs of plurality" lists focus heavily on introjection and alter communication, two things that we have very little of. we wanted to lay out some experiences we had prior to syscovery with a focus on memory loss, identity confusion, dissociation, and unconscious masking since these are what we experience most. we hope this helps someone.

this is not an exhaustive list and identifying with it does not guarantee anything nor does not identifying with it mean you are not plural. we are one system and these are our experiences, which have heavy overlap with our other comorbid conditions. you know yourself/ves best, use your own judgement when reading.

feeling as though i was never a child even when my body was, that i was always an "old soul"

feeling as though i never stopped being a child, that my body aged without me

feeling as though it is my first day on earth and nothing has existed before the present moment

experiencing all of the above so strongly at different times that i cannot imagine feeling any other way

"i don't hear voices, i just have multiple overlapping trains of thought all reacting to and arguing with one another. probably the ADHD"

feeling upset as a kid that my imaginary friends didn't act the way i wanted, or that they didn't like me

remembering my childhood in third person, as though watching a movie of my own life

feeling as though i am having lines fed to me when talking about myself

remembering times that i was upset, but with the inciting incident cut out. being unable to understand why i felt the way i did

feeling as though the "real" me died a long time ago and i took their place

being talented at acting and lying. feeling like i have spent my whole life acting, as though "i" am a character i put on for other people

being afraid of voicing opinions because i know they might change suddenly, being upset when someone tells me a supposed opinion of mine that i no longer remember or agree with

knowing when i am supposed to have an opinion on something but not knowing what it is, having to make up my own opinions based on what i think "i" would most likely say

"what did you do today" i don't know "how do you feel" i don't know "what do you want" i don't know "did you have work yesterday" ...probably?

feeling like my body sometimes says things that my mind does not remember/agree with, or that i'm surprised to hear the things i'm saying

reflexively lying about things i didn't do because i assume i must have forgotten about it

being freaked out when someone touches my stuff without telling me, because i assume i moved it and forgot entirely. being afraid of how quick i can forget things

having excellent memory as a young child and terrible memory as an adult

"face blindness" where i can tell that people look familiar but feel like i have never met them, being unable to put faces in context

feeling like i have never actually met my own friends and loved ones

"i don't have amnesia, i can objectively tell you what happened. even when i do forget, i can usually put it together through context clues."

"it can't have been that bad, i barely remember it and don't feel upset when i think about it"

"i can't have DID, nothing bad has ever happened to me"

no name ever feels right longterm

creating alt accounts due to a desire to "pretend" to be someone else

lacking a solid sense of identity, feeling like a hollow husk of a person who occasionally experiences moments of clarity and wants to be treated as someone other than the "me" i present to the world

"i've never had a switch, i just have an inconsistent sense of identity"

"i've never had a switch, i have always felt exactly the way i do right now"

feeling like my mind is being pulled in several different directions, especially when i'm upset. being unable to act because different "parts" of me want different things

feeling jealousy when seeing other systems be open about their plurality. feeling like it's something you're not supposed to talk about

feeling guilty for being happiest when i'm "faking" plurality

feeling drawn to stories about possession, secret identities, or doppelgangers

Talk about how many of us are abandoned not just by broader society, but by our own communities because our experiences are considered "too weird," "too cringe," or too inconvenient for respectability politics.

Talk about how some plurals will happily throw us under the bus in hopes that sacrificing us will make them appear more believable, more legitimate, more acceptable.Talk about how being told "that's impossible" or "that's just psychosis" is often treated as an acceptable response, even by people who know what it feels like to have their own experiences denied.

Talk about how "endogenic" became a catch all category for wildly different experiences and beliefs, flattening an enormous diversity of perspectives into one caricature that people can easily dismiss.

Talk about how countless communities and frameworks that once tried to give language to the breadth of plural experiences were mocked, demonized, or abandoned because they were deemed too strange, too embarrassing, or bad optics.

Talk about the way people treat plurality as though it must have one acceptable explanation and one acceptable narrative, and how anyone who exists outside that narrative is expected to either lie, stay silent, or leave.

Talk about how many cosmological and metaphysical plurals feel forced to choose between authenticity and community, because speaking openly about our experiences means risking ridicule from singlets and exclusion from other plurals alike.

Talk about how treating trauma based plurality as the only legitimate form of plurality reinforces the same rigid ideas about personhood and consciousness that have historically been used to invalidate all plural people.

Talk about how "I don't personally believe that" too often becomes "you are dangerous, delusional, or hurting the community simply by existing."

Talk about how respectability politics have never protected marginalized people. They have only created new outsiders.

Talk about how some of us spent years hiding, not because we were ashamed of who we are, but because we learned that even among people who understood multiplicity, there were experiences they considered unacceptable.

Talk about how disagreement does not justify dehumanization.

Talk about epistemic humility. Talk about the limits of human understanding. Talk about how nobody possesses a complete theory of consciousness.

Talk about how plurality has always been more diverse than any one framework, diagnosis, belief system, or community would like to admit.

Boy, I admit I don't have much in the way of resources onhand for that specifically; it's a bit out of my scope. I probably can't tell you anything Google can't. It sums up to, starseeds are a New Age concept proposing that certain people are extraterrestrial souls sent to Earth to guide humanity to some kind of ascension. It purports that certain people are born inherently "higher" while others are more "primitive" spiritually speaking, which is already a pretty yikes concept even before you get into the history of this movement and ones like it being deeply steeped in racism and eugenics. Suspiciously, whenever you see physical descriptions of these "higher races," the ones who aren't just bog-standard "greys" always seem to be pale-skinned and often blonde, at least from what I've seen (Pleiadians, one of the most well-known and "highest" races, are literally described as "Nordic aliens" or "indistinguishable from Nordic people").

It's also heavily linked to the idea of aliens "seeding" earth in the past, which is itself a concept steeped in racism and the ideas that a) different peoples are literally different species (some of which are of course "higher" than others) and b) historical people of color of course couldn't actually accomplish anything impressive or significant, it must have been aliens. It's also linked to the idea that Someday Soon™ there will be a great purge, I mean ascension, where the enlightened and spiritual starseeds will rise to a New Earth and everyone else will be left behind (which doesn't sound like the Rapture or like every dream of the Grand Revolution which conveniently doesn't care how many people it leaves behind or kills in the process of creating its new dream).

So. yeah. There's more to it, but that's about all I know off the top of my head and with minimal research (all of which comes up in the first few links of google results for various starseed-related searches). I don't really have any spectacular resources that have all this information in one place, but it's not hard to turn up with a little searching.

No of *course* my child isn't autistic, they are a special new form of humanity meant to lead us to a higher state of being ect ect ect

and yeah it’s very frequently both white supremecist and ableist. Physical “signs” of bei g a starseed/indigo child/earth angel are often being blonde, having blue eyes, being pale, being very empathetic, being very passive, facing persistent cruelty, and being able to easily “read rooms/intentions”. You might notice that these might also raise red flags for a kid being abused.

often comes with a lore background of being an alien or future being or spirit inhabiting a human body for the purpose of protecting/saving/educating/guiding humanity. They’re seen as paragons of kindness, gentility, and virtue. This often leads adults around them who believe this shit to outsource morality and decision making, use kids to vent to, and punish them for failing at these things.

adults who believe theyre one of these archetypes often have a savior/superiority complex around it and see themselves as above those around them.

This is just my own personal take, but it feels weird to try to socialize with most folks in the community because most of the time its seen as "taking it too far" when you actually act as your species. (coughcough wolves are not friendly social creatures to strangers and can actually be quite shy, and growling is not always a form of aggression, on a similar note a wagging tail isn't always a sign of friendliness either)

The TikTok "therian" culture seems like it's largely to blame for this, but it's also a side effect of people moving from forums to public social media platforms. It isn't really possible to post on social media about genuinely "weird" experiences without the risk of bad actors seeing it and harassing you, so people (intentionally or not) downplay or cute-ify their experiences to make them more palatable for a public audience. It's part of the same trend as people self-censoring swears when there isn't actually any evidence that that has any effect– there's been an increasing push toward toning down anything someone might find objectionable, to the point where I don't think most people realize they're doing it. And people doing that leads to outsiders seeing "therian" stuff and going "that looks like fun! I want to do that!" because there aren't any immediately available resources to explain to them that therianthropy isn't a roleplaying trend– which is how we've ended up with people on TikTok saying stuff like "therians don't really think they're animals".

People co-opting community terms, toning them down, and calling the original community "taking it too far" happened already with fictionkin, and it seems like therians are next. The best thing we can do is to just hold the line, correct misinformation, and keep being loudly authentic.

The whole questioning process seems to have fallen by the wayside in a lot of places, so you get people who, for example, feel a canine-shaped tail or a connection to werewolves and immediately go "I'm a wolf!" without considering other options, and nobody encourages them to question that assumption because they're worried about coming across as gatekeeping– even though that person would be happier and more secure in their identity if they took the time to introspect and learn about other animals before settling on something.

"You can be whatever you want forever" is a mostly true statement, but self-discovery is a long and personal process, and I absolutely believe that other people asking you (polite, good-faith) questions like "so why do you think you're X and not Y?" is a helpful bordering on necessary part of that process. Helping people figure out what they are used to be half of what we socialized about in the community! It's how we shared experiences and bonded and welcomed people! But I feel like now, asking questions like "you seem to act a lot like a dog, so what lead you to identify as a wolf and not another type of canid?" is often seen as rude or as an attempt to invalidate that person's identity. And it shouldn't be! Answering questions like that is how other people learn about what therianthropy is like for you, and if you're secure in your identity being asked these things won't make you feel defensive or invalidated, they'll make you excited to talk about your experiences with others. "I express my wolf theriotype in a doglike way because I was raised by humans like dogs are" is a perfectly valid and interesting answer to that question, for example.

Which we've read, cover to cover, as well as piecemeal a few times, and are in the middle of another cover to cover reread. It makes a lot of sense with our CPTSD and PTSD. It doesn't explain our plurality, because our plurality isn't caused by that kind of dissociation. The theory says nothing about the possibility or lack of possibility of any other kind systemhood.

And even two of the three authors of that book have said that their theory is only about traumagenic dissociative experiences, and that there are other kinds of similar experiences with other causes.

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:

"Hostzilla" usually describes someone in a system who is declared the Host and uses that position to completely take over the system's life (often against the will of everyone else). If the Hostzilla doesn't approve, then it won't happen without a whole rebellion and a half of effort because their word is law even if you hate it.

We don't have a host, and we aren't meant to. we don't have roles, because we're not meant to. we do come from outside the vessel and this time/space, but we do not reside WITHIN the vessel, we don't have a headspace because it's located outside the vessel between time and space, not bound or held within a body, we travel here and use the vessel for our own benefit, first and foremost, not on behalf of the vessel.

I could go on and on because we wrote an entire damn list about the things, expectations and assumptions, other Plurals and Systems would force onto us. And then they'd get mad when we didn't live up to that expectation or kindly asked them to NOT use certain terminology with us because it wasn't accurate.

Anytime we try and explain our plural experiences, we're always met with people trying to "prove us wrong" and were, on numerous occasions, told that we would "grow out of this eventually and understand that spiritually plurality doesn't exist".

With the news of Simply Plural being discountinued I thought I should make a thread of alternatives, I will list the alternatives name, platform, pros, and cons. If you have any alternatives you'd like to add reply or reblog this post

Here's the post explaining what the discontinuation of Simply Plural means for you and your system

https://apparyllis.com/simply-plural-will-be-discontinued/

Ampersand(https://ampersand.moe/)

Platforms: Android and Windows desktops

Pros:

Is made with offline use in mind

Has the same markdown as simply plural

Allows for imports from Simply Plural, Pluralkit, and Tupperbox

Allows for needing a password to access the app

Has polls and message boards

Cons:

No chat feature

No friends feature

No folders, the app uses tags instead

Octocon(https://octocon.app/)

Platforms: Android, iOS, web

Pros:

Has a friends feature

Allows for needing a password to access the app

Has a stealth mode to make the app look like a news aggregator on startup

Allows for imports from simply plural and Pluralkit

Has polls

Cons:

Does not have the same markdown as simply plural