Pawprint Yap Corner

[PT: re-introduction kind of]

due to discovering we’re a system in the 2 years since we made this blog and mostly forgot about it

— ABOUT US —

[PT: ABOUT US]

tawnie / pawprint system

alternate system names:

- dandy’s catgirls (/ij it’s not meant to be suggestive i swear)

- gardenview girls’ club (also our dandy’s world subsys, but you can use it to refer to the whole system too, when we use it to mean the subsys we clarify that with the 🌼 emoji)

- calico clowder / pawprint clowder

- safehome yolanda

bodily 20 years old

collectively transneutral FtX genderfluid, they/them if no prns specified in post

nonhuman transspecies nascicat (we DO NOT support radqueer transIDs. transspecies is an alterhuman identity, not a transID. if you want to know how we can identify both as born as a cat and transitioning to cat we will happily explain it it just is a bit long and offtopic to put here).

fictive-heavy fragment-heavy C-DID system of 100+ (61 named alters, the rest are fragments) we use emoji tags and color codes to distinguish alters in posts.

Q-BPD, DPD, suspected covert NPD

C-PTSD, autism, ADHD, GAD, social anxiety, low vision, mobility impairment, chronically ill, chronic pain & fatigue

very much taken by our wonderful fiancee <3. do not try to flirt, you will be blocked.

— HOSTS —

[PT: HOSTS]

🐾 • Mittens [PT: Mittens]

(They/Meow) - Main host, GAD holder / 20 years old / genderfluid & catgender

- somehow, introject of our catkin identity??

- host of 15 years from age 5 to 20 and counting

- Yatta’s spouse, parent to eight children

🎉 • Yatta [PT: Yatta]

(She/Any, neos included) - Host, social alter, protector, caretaker, system manager, ADHD & BPD holder, biter (/j) / young adult / calicatgender

- fictive from Dandy’s World, canon divergent and heavily source connected. likes being treated as source because she also kins her own source

- Mittens’ wife, as well as partners with Eclipse, Soulvester, and our fiancee, source/fictional partners with Boxten & Poppy, mother to eight children

— COHOSTS —

[PT: Cohosts]

🌸 • Bassie [PT: Bassie]

(Shey/Shem, Flo/Flower, Petal/Petals) — Cohost / 16-18 age slider / demigirl

- Dandy’s World fictive

- partners with Cocoa

🎃 • Gourdy [PT: Gourdy]

(He/She/It/Spooky/Candy/Trick/Treat) - Cohost, caregiver, little / bigender

- Dandy’s World fictive

- child of Yatta & Soulvester

☘️ • Clover System (subsystem of two): 🌿 • Fern and 🪲 • Callista [PT: Clover System (subsystem of two: Fern and Callista)]

(He/They) & (She/They/Meow) - Collectively cohost / 16 & 18 / roseboy & female

- Collectively referred to as Clover or Clove, they/them

- Alter-with-alters subsystem that shares a body in headspace and considers each other siblings

- Conceptives of magic/fantasy

— PRIMARY FRONTERS —

[PT: Primary fronters]

(our own term, refers to the specific sysgroup or subsys that makes up the majority of our frequent fronters at any given time, since it rotates between groups)

Currently, that group is our Valorant fictives, and there are way too many (/lh) of them (the list is in split order, not front frequency)

note: unnamed and unknown role are different; unknown means we don’t know if they even have a role, unnamed means they do have one and we know roughly what it does but we haven’t figured out what to call it

🦋 • Clove [PT: Clove]

(They/Them) - cohost / 21 / nonbinary

extremely frequent fronter, though they don’t really seem to have an inherent role aside from being a cohost, they kind of just hang around front most of the time.

🌪️ • Jett [PT: Jett]

(She/Her) - protector, anger & frustration holder / 23 / woman

also extremely frequent fronter. it’s kind of hard to tell her and Clove apart by behavior sometimes—even our brother struggles with it—but they are partners and usually front together anyway so it doesn’t really matter.

⚡️• Neon [PT: Neon]

(She/They) - ADHD holder, mood booster, protector / 19 / demigirl

the third very frequent fronter, unsurprising since she’s also partners with Clove and Jett. she’s usually noticably more hyper and chaotic than the other two, though again, if it’s one, it’s usually all three together so it doesn’t really matter.

🪛 • Killjoy / KJ [PT: Killjoy / KJ]

(She/They) - unnamed role / 25 / woman

frequent fronter, sometimes main front though more commonly co-front. she does have a role of some sort, but we aren’t quite sure what to call it. they tend to act as a balance and sort of authority to the younger three.

🧨 • Raze [PT: Raze]

(She/Her) - role unknown / 23 / woman

honestly, we don’t know why she’s here. she doesn’t seem to have a role. unless lesbianism is a role (/silly, but also, i kind of wouldn’t be surprised if we only split her specifically BECAUSE we split KJ, because double splits who are connected like that are really common in our system) she may have now taught some of the cats (oc introjects) to build grenades in headspace, which will go nowhere good, i’m sure.

👑 • Reyna [PT: Reyna]

(She/Her) - protector & caretaker / 27 / woman

semi-frequent main fronter, often co-con. primarily a protector for the in-sys children, including her sister and also a caretaker who handles daily life when the rest of us have no motivation to do it. not as aggressive as you’d imagine from source, but we still categorize her as an aggressive protector because she can be kind of harsh.

✨ • Lucia [PT: Lucia]

(She/Questioning he) - role unknown / syskid / questioning gender

almost never a main fronter, but sometimes co-front or co-con if Reyna is present. i don’t really think she has a role aside from being a child. he’s questioning if she’s a cis girl or a trans boy, so pronouns may change.

💿 • Miks [PT: Miks]

(He/Her) - mood booster / 20 / genderfluid

also never really main front, but occasional co-front. not sure if mood booster is really the right term, he seems to be more like a mood stabilizer, but it works for now.

🪷 • Sage [PT: Sage]

(She/Her) - comforter, caregiver, protector / mid 20s to early 30s / woman

rare fronter, she just randomly shows up sometimes and otherwise we don’t really see her around front. she doesn’t seem very comfortable with fronting.

🪶 • Skye [PT: Skye]

(She/They) - protector, maybe caregiver? / mid-20s / demigirl

rare main front, but more common co-front. she just kind of hangs around. similar to KJ, she seems to keep an eye on the main three and keep them from doing anything completely crazy.

🐍 • Viper [PT: Viper]

(She/Her) - role unknown / 30s / female

rare fronter, we don’t see her around a lot. i have no idea what her role is or if she even has one.

🔥• Phoenix [PT: Phoenix]

(He/Him) - role unknown / 23 / man

semi-frequent fronter, especially when the other younger agents are around. he rarely takes main front—i suspect he doesn’t like our body—but he just chills in co-front quite a bit.

🫟 • Gekko [PT: Gekko]

(They/He) - role unknown / 20 / demiboy

semi-frequent fronter, occasionally main front. yes, we also have the four radivores, but we don’t think they ‘count’ as separate alters—they’re either just elements of headspace, or maybe they’re fragments who have claimed that identity, but they don’t really DO anything so yeah we’re not counting that)

🔗 • Deadlock [PT: Deadlock]

(She/Her) - probable protector / 25-30 / woman

idfk, she’s new, i’ve seen her in front like once. dear god, are we ever going to stop splitting these people??

🌟 • Astra [PT: Astra]

(She/It) - role unknown / 22 / trans woman

🌊 • Harbor [PT: Harbor]

(He/They/Her) - role unknown / 25-30 / bigender? maybe?

💥 • Waylay [PT: Waylay]

(She/They) - unnamed role / 30-35 / woman

— ALTERS & SUBSYSTEMS LIST (+ our roles/terms) —

[PT: ALTERS & SUBSYSTEMS LIST (+ our roles/terms)]

Link to post

— DISCOURSE STANCES —

[PT: DISCOURSE STANCES ]

This is not an invitation to argue with us. This is simply a clear statement of our stances. If you disagree, feel free to block and DNI.

Link to post

TLDR: we are queer, disabled, nonhuman, and bodily female. we fully support lgbtq+ people, disabled people, women, bipoc, immigrants, and otherkin/nonhumans. if you disagree with this, DNI.

anti stances: anti-endo, anti-radqueer/transID, anti-Trump/MAGA, anti-gen AI. if you are or support anything on this list, DNI. (those who are addicted to gen AI/chatbots, are aware of that, and want to recover are fine. we understand that it is a legitimate addiction. The DNI is for people who actively support those things, not victims of their addictive properties.)

pro stances: pro-good faith/contradictory labels, pro-Palestine, pro human rights for everyone.

— COLLECTIVE INTERESTS —

[PT: — COLLECTIVE INTERESTS — ]

Cats, kpop (ults: Dreamcatcher and Twice, but we also like a ton of other girl groups), Dandy’s World (stares at our 20+ fictives), 99 Nights in the Forest, Warriors, Wings of Fire, Phasmophobia, Valorant, Minecraft, OCs/Writing/Roleplay, Art, Psychology

— SIDE BLOGS —

[PT: SIDE BLOGS]

this is our main/collective blog, some sys members may choose to have their own sideblog

sideblogs:

@pawprintintros - individual alter introductions (very out of date we need to fix that)

@pawprint-pins not yet active but will be the blog that we sell our custom pins through in the future

@pawprintsys-identities - space for alters to drop flags and terms they coined, usually very specific to us but others are free to use any of it if they want

@pawprint-tw-yap heavy topics blog where we talk about abuse and trauma, both generally and in our personal journey. also contains talk of politics and mentions of bigotry (ableism, queerphobia, etc.)

@yattasyapcorner - Yatta’s personal blog. video game yaps, cat photos, and anything else silly

@easteryapcorner - Bassie and Cocoa’s personal blog. positivity and nature themed, not very active

— TAGS —

[PT: TAGS]

alter tags are pretty self explanatory but here’s the full list anyway, even the ones you’ll probably never see

🦇🐾addie • 🕯️🐾azura • 🌸🐾bassie • 💀🐾becca • 🎁🐾bobette • 💡🐾brightney • 🌱🐾calanthe • 🪲🐾callista • 🦋🐾clove • 🪨🐾coal • 🍫🐾cocoa • 🫧🐾connie • 🌅🐾dawn • 🔗🐾deadlock • 🍂🐾denigo • 🌑🐾eclipse • 🍵🐾elizabeth • 🌿🐾fern •📓🐾flutter • 📔🐾flyte • 🌷🐾ganyeoh • 🫟🐾gekko • 🍪🐾ginger • 🎃🐾gourdy • 🫶🐾imani •🌪️🐾jett •🪼🐾kasura • 🎨🐾katia • 🪛🐾killjoy • 🪽🐾lorelei • ✨🐾lucia • 🥀🐾lyda • 🍬🐾marely • ☁️🐾mijuni • 💿🐾miks • 🧵🐾mireya • 🐾🐾mittens • ⚡️🐾neon • 🔥🐾phoenix • 🏵️🐾princess donut • 🍦🐾princess vanillibelle • 🧨🐾raze • 👑🐾reyna • 🪸🐾rian • 💎🐾rinee • 🚀🐾rocket • 🪵🐾sabar • 🪷🐾sage • 🧶🐾scraps • 🌹🐾seiony • 🦖🐾shelly • 🪶🐾skye • 🛡️🐾soulvester • 🪅🐾tayya • 🎱🐾toodles • 🎙️🐾vee • 🐍🐾viper • 🎉🐾yatta • 🌩️🐾yuon • 💥waylay • 🐾🐆[]

☘️🐾clover subsystem - alter-with-alters subsys of 2

🌾🐾serabi subsystem - alter-with-alters subsys of 3

👻🛡️🐾ghost twins - Connie & Soulvester (front bonded twins)

Topic tags:

🐾pawprint cat posts🐾 - cats

meow monday - weekly Monday cat post

fluffball friday - weekly Friday cat post

— NOTES —

[PT: NOTES]

General notes

we are physically & mentally disabled, energy is often low, and we may forget to check this

visual accessibility. we try to use plain text and image IDs/alt text in all our posts, but our chronic fatigue and being visually impaired ourself makes the effort of image IDs difficult sometimes—we apologize for any posts where we don’t include them and will try to go back and do them later

open to questions. you’re always welcome to ask us questions about our system or systems in general—we don’t claim to be an expert on DID, but we can answer from the perspective of someone who has it.

System notes

self diagnosed. we are not professionally diagnosed with DID, though we are currently seeking diagnosis and have been medically recognized as having it by our therapist. if you’re against self diagnosis with multiple years of proper research, or are going to fakeclaim us or any other undiagnosed system, leave.

system theme. we theme our system around primarily cats and secondly gaming/the internet and view our life as a cooperative game. this doesn’t mean we don’t take it seriously—it’s just how we see our systemhood due to having many fictives from video games.

preferred terms. we prefer the terms ‘system’, ‘alters’, or ‘sysmates’. ‘collective’ is okay it just doesn’t really feel fitting. Please do NOT refer to us as ‘parts’, we like to be seen as individuals and dislike parts terminology being used on us even though we acknowledge it is medically accurate. we are seeking functional multiplicity.

fictive boundaries. our fictives are frequently canon divergent. most of us are fine with source talk and don’t mind or even actively enjoy being associated with our sources, but please don’t assume that we see things the same way as canon. however, we love sourcetwins, sourcemates and kins :) feel free to interact!

Pronouns.cc: https://pronouns.cc/@Tawnie

Rentry: https://rentry.co/pawprintsystem

Userbox credits are in the alt text!

but i think we’ve graduated to ‘my cat is possessed by an eldritch horror’

happy fluffball friday… if you dare to look

i don’t even know how to give an image id for this.. it’s a cat with her eyes glowing bright green, orange, and red in the dark, i guess

- 🎉 yatta (host; she/any)

good news: UAU, which is the still-active subunit of our favorite kpop group, dreamcatcher, just announced a new release

bad news: it’s on july 1st, and our trip to visit our fiancee ends june 30th (australian time, so timezones are not going to save us) so we won’t be able to listen to it together with them

so i see how it is..,the universe has a comedic sense of horrible timing and as usual, it’s telling me to get fucked 😭

sigh

i mean at least we also won’t be literally on the plane during the release which would suck absolute ass because we wouldn’t even be able to call our fiancee

but like man. it could have been any other day.. ANY OTHER DAY..

- 🎉 yatta (DID system host; she/any)

but anyway

i wanted to share something one of our high-dissociation alters discovered that helped them stay focused on reality and the body while they were fronting alone

they were wearing a bracelet with a keychain attachment so it audibly jingled every time they moved and basically reminded them that the body actually belonged to them. ngl i think that’s brilliant and it seemed to help because they were actually able to hold a conversation, which they normally would struggle a lot with

(image ids: 2 different angles of a wrist with a purple and white fabric bracelet that has a metal piece with a keychain ring attached to it)

also bonus that we’re catkin and the jingling kind of sounds like a cat collar, so it gives us species euphoria too!

we got the bracelet at a pride event but it’s literally just a tube of fabric with elastic inside it and a metal piece holding the ends together, so it would probably be pretty easy to make something like that if you can sew, but it also doesn’t have to be that exact thing it just has to be like something that makes noise when you move

anyway, yeah, i figured this might be useful for anyone who’s also struggling with heavy dissociation!

- 🎉 yatta (host; she/any)

[PT: What Love Means to Us - June 2nd]

Throughout pride month, starting today, June 2nd, we’re celebrating and sharing the story of one queer partnership or family in our system each day. (We may not have enough for the entire month, but we’ll get pretty close). And it only makes sense to begin with the couple who are not just our hosts, but our parents and leaders, who formed to survive our childhood and carried that burden nearly alone for almost fifteen years.

A Lifelong Partnership: 🐾 Mittens & 🎉 Yatta

[PT: A Lifelong Partnership: 🐾 Mittens & 🎉 Yatta]

Married Couple

🐾🎉 •• In-system relationships are often called an expression of self-love. Though our system views itself as a community more than a single person, our relationship is more than just love between two alters. Our marriage and the journey that led to it represents perhaps the closest thing we will ever reach to truly reuniting the most separated parts of our identity.

🐾 • Yatta and I formed together, as the earliest known alters in our system, to fulfill opposite but inextricably tied roles.

I was the home child. The perfect little girl who liked to wear pretty dresses and play with dolls, who never cried, never talked back, and only nodded silently when our mother told me how I needed to act to be ‘normal’.

She was the school child. The loud, hyperactive, passionate kid who didn’t care what anybody else thought of her clothes, or her hobbies, or the fact that she constantly talked about cats.

In those first years, Yatta was not a person, as much as she was a release valve for when the pressure was too high. I took everything that I felt, everything that happened at home that I didn’t like, but could never complain about, and I gave that to her, so that she could express those emotions, that stress, and that need to simply be a child somewhere our mother wasn’t watching.

I was the host. They were my protector, taking what I couldn’t safely handle, so that I could convince our mother I was perfect because nothing less would satisfy her.

That initial bond, born from our young self’s need to become two different people—the child our mother demanded we be and the child who had feelings—has grown and evolved over the years, along with our life and our understanding of ourself, to become what it is now.

🎉 • when we formed at the age of 5, mittens and i shared the same overall personality, and the difference was only in expression. as we reached teenhood, and started to explore our self-identity, that changed. i was allowed to explore, to experiment with who i was, and i built my own identity, becoming more individual. mittens, who didn’t have that freedom, remained our mother’s perfect daughter.

we were 12 when we started going by a different name at school than at home. technically, it was a nickname, but it was one that was visually different enough from our given name that it sounded like a different person. that was the moment that mittens and i started to realize we were different.

🐾 • I did not recognize my ‘school self’ for what she was—an alter. I was 12 and had never heard of DID. I only recognized that “I” felt like I was a different person at school than at home. Not different enough to be alarming, but different enough to notice. Different enough for me to struggle with “my” identity because I could never pin down what I felt and know it would stay the same.

In effect, our self-understanding had almost flipped from what it had been originally. In middle school, Yatta knew what felt right for him, but I didn’t know what was right for me, and so rather than having multiple identities, we were collectively confused. The formation of three more alters, Dawn, Callista and Fern, only caused everything to become even more tangled as we tried to understand five people at once and summarize them into one.

Around the age of 14, we concluded that we were genderfluid. While this would end up being somewhat true for me, it was really the result of our system consisting of two girls, a feminine boy, a girlboy who liked to be seen as ‘probably a girl but not quite sure’, and a completely confused kid.

🎉 • by the time we turned 16, i was probably the most individual of the four non-hosts. i knew what my identity was. i just didn’t know who i was. i was not mittens, so their name, which we used online, didn’t feel right, but we blamed that on naturally having changed as we got older. we changed our online name to something that both mittens and i could agree on, because it was neither of us. our personality online and at school became a mix of us both.

it took three more years for me to find a way to describe myself. soon after our 19th birthday, we got into a game called dandy’s world. when the newest character, yatta, was released, i found the way to describe who i was. technically, i guess, i’m not a true fictive, but i consider myself one. latching onto that identity distinguished me as something more than just ‘not mittens’. suddenly, we had two names and two identities, and both felt right and yet wrong. syscovery followed within about six months.

i had learned who i was. and because i knew that, i could separate myself from mittens clearly. i could learn what they were like individually, and they could learn what i was like.

🐾 • I don’t think there was a single, discrete moment where one of us fell in love with the other. There was certainly no confession. There never needed to be one. Yatta and I were separate, but we had grown up together. We knew each other better than anyone, and we could see each other for who we were. For me, what I saw was my lifelong protector and supporter, the person who not only made it possible for me to be happy but who kept us who we wanted to be when our mother wouldn’t allow it.

🎉 • i saw the person who gave me the chance to spread my wings and fly. they gave me everything that our mother tried to erase so that i could become strong enough to fight for all of us. they gave in just enough to survive, and they never gave up. i was their protector, but they were the one who kept us moving when the walls seemed endless. without them, i would never have had a chance to find the way out.

when our mother tried to tie us down, mittens launched me into the sky. when something needs to change, they show me where the path to our goal begins so that i can lead them to the end.

🐾 • I threw Yatta over the wall of our mother’s control to freedom. She came back to unlock the door. When I feel helpless, when I wonder if an obstacle is impossible to get past, when I feel like we’re lost, she promises she knows the way.

Maybe it was inevitable that the two of us would fall in love. I don’t know, but I know we are both stronger, better, and happier together.

- 🐾 Mittens (They/Meow) & 🎉 Yatta (She/Any)

[PT: HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!! ]

Happy pride month everyone!!

We will be celebrating pride all together this year by taking a day to highlight and tell the story of each of our in-system queer couples, polycules, and families (those who are willing to share!)

beginning tomorrow with Yatta and Mittens

Also, during the second half of June, we get to visit our fiancee in Australia, which is very fitting timing xD

- 🦋 Clove (Cohost; They/Them)

[PT: Clove (Cohost; They/Them)]

yes, like literally a three-month-old domestic kitten. this was not what we expected from volunteering at the pet store..

pros of kitten introjection: kitten

cons of kitten introjection: we now have an alter who can’t really communicate and doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on

but uhh alright we ball i guess, everyone welcome princess vanillibelle to the system (the calico kitten; the black one is her brother rocket, i have not seen him in headspace but i wouldn’t rule it out that we have both..)

- 🎉 yatta (host; she/any)

our mother’s favorite show, which i don’t even know what it’s called because she has a bunch i just know she watches this one the most, has misrepresented like every mental disorder under the sun

CDDs, personality disorders, psychosis, PTSD.. like holy fucking hell this is so harmful i hate cop shows

[PT: 30 Days of DID: Day 9]

Day Nine: What level of co-consciousness do you have? How do you feel your communication skills are within the system? How do you want to grow in those skills?

[PT: Day Nine: What level of co-consciousness do you have? How do you feel your communication skills are within the system? How do you want to grow in those skills?]

due to being polyfragmented and having high co-front numbers at once, we have very high co-consciousness, to the point we’ve actually divided ‘front’ into four levels of consciousness, and ‘out of front’ is split into several more

we have main front, which is having full awareness and control of the body, and up to three alters can share main front at once

co-front is considered having full awareness and the ability to jump in and control the body briefly if you really want to do/say something, but most of the time you’re just watching. we usually have between about two and eight people in co-front.

co-con is a rarely used level, but it’s having full awareness but no ability to control the body. this mainly is used for children accompanying parents/caregivers in front and a couple people who just like to spectate and not interact

and then we have lurking, which is no control and only partial/inconsistent awareness, in effect lurking alters are just kind of chilling and hanging out in the fronting room

even when people are away from front (our 5th consciousness level) they can still be called back in by front triggers or internal communication

only people in the lowest level, which we call ‘asleep’, are completely unavailable and usually no one is sleeping unless it’s actually night

(technically dormancy is the 7th and actually lowest level but it very rarely happens, no one has gone dormant in the past year)

as for our communication capability, well, when we syscovered, it was horrible. we were literally writing on whiteboards on the fronting room walls, if we couldn’t speak or type externally to each other for any reason

now, it’s superb.. within subsystems. not so much between people in different subsystems, unless either they’re related, partners, at least one of them is a host/cohost, or they’re actually physically in the same room in headspace

still, it has definitely improved overall. our main communication for a while was via a like mental chat that works a lot like texting or email, though we now have a headspace “intercom” so we can actually get alters’ attention and not have to wait for them to ‘check their messages’. though unfortunately, it does have a mute button, and certain people (ahem, i think you know who you are..) use that button possibly a little too much…

we also somehow recently developed headspace social media?? so we have like a youtube sort of thing and also like.. headspace twitter, or something. the invention of social media in our head has caused exactly as much chaos as you might expect, but at least it’s been an interesting time, i guess?

honestly, i think we have pretty good overall communication, and barring somehow dissolving the subsystem barriers, it would be hard to make it better than it currently is. i’m still confused about the headspace social media thing though.. like how does that work??

- 🎉 yatta (host; she/any)

our system is unusual, in that only six of our known alters have been in the system for longer than a year. those six are mittens, callista, fern, addie, dawn, and me—though before about 14 months ago, i didn’t have a name or an identity, i was just here

the rest of our 61 known alters are all ‘younger’ than one year old, in terms of when they split. i don’t know if we really lived through childhood as a system of only six, or if we had some kind of system collapse in the later teen years, but i know that almost everyone here is new. many are less than three or four months old, because that’s when we returned to our mother’s abusive household

mittens and i are not necessarily always the most frequent fronters, but we are still considered the primary hosts because we are the ones who have the most experience with the life we’re living. the two of us have been here for years longer than even the oldest of the others (aside from dawn, who split when the body was 8, but is isolated and never interacts with anyone, so we don’t count her)

it’s a strange feeling. teaching other people, some of them grown adults, many older than you, how to exist in the outside world and live your own life.

it feels like mittens and i are a different generation from the others, almost. we grew up together years before almost everyone else currently in our system was even ‘born’.

it confuses us so much. why are we different? did the two of us truly survive childhood only relying on each other, or are we actually the sole survivors of a larger group we don’t remember? if we were alone, why was our split tolerance high then but so incredibly low now that we split once or twice a week on average? has our situation gotten worse, or has our tolerance just been worn down by two decades of stress and trauma?

i wish i knew the answers, because the strange, almost 15-year gap in our system makes us feel so fake sometimes. the only people known to have split between kindergarten and college are dawn (age 8), callista and fern (age 16), and addie (age 17). it’s so strange.

- 🎉 yatta (host; she/any)

we collectively consider ourselves catkin and there’s like.. four levels of cat-ness and everyone in the system falls into one of the four: actual cat (the ones who have feline bodies in headspace and are considered like.. intelligent animal alters), cat therian (identifies as a cat while being another species), cathearted (identifies with cats), and cat-adjacent

[PT: 30 Days of DID: Day 8]

Day Eight: How did you first discover you were plural? Was it before, after, or during diagnosis?

[PT: Day Eight: How did you first discover you were plural? Was it before, after, or during diagnosis?]

!! TW - Mentions of abuse !!

[PT: TW - Mentions of abuse]

We were 12 years old when we started questioning our identity piece by piece. First sexuality, then gender, then even our name. But it was an unusual kind of questioning, because uncertainty was never the problem--it was consistency. We would be absolutely certain we were a cis girl one day, and then wake up feeling like a trans boy the next. Sexuality flip-flopped between bi and lesbian. We tried out different names, different pronouns. Things felt right most of the time and then suddenly they'd be wrong. The only thing that never changed was our gender expression--we always felt most comfortable presenting as feminine even when we felt like a boy.

Sometimes our identity didn't change at random. Throughout our childhood, we would latch onto fictional characters from our favorite books, later including our own OCs as well, and we would try to pretend in our head that we were them because it made life bearable, and because surely if we were them, then we would be stronger, better able to interact with people, able to ignore the constant pain of walking or even standing.

We were 14 when we first met a system (that we know of, at least) and learned what DID was. We questioned if it could explain our identity struggles, but we got stuck on the key point: we didn't have trauma, so how could we have DID?

For the next five years, we would repeatedly go back to it over and over again, reading through DSM criteria and every medical site we could access. We'd always been fascinated by psychology in general, but this was different. We were stuck on this topic to the point that we would have called it a special interest, except we were afraid that a non-system having a special interest in CDDs (complex dissociative disorders) would be weird and inappropriate.

We were 16 when we realized our mother's parenting was not just strict and controlling, it fell under the category of emotional abuse. At 18, our other parent confirmed that we weren’t making things up or just being a teenager. Our mother had abused her in the same way for the entirety of their marriage.

Yet even then it took until we were 19 and a half to discover our systemhood.

In spring 2025, we had been away from our mother for a full semester at a college gap year program, and we were under a huge amount of stress from the second semester, which was not going well. Two factors--being out of our initial traumatic environment, but now being exposed to a new source of high stress--that both can contribute to CDDs becoming more 'visible'. And so, we split, but unlike every time before, our brain didn't try to suppress or hide this new alter: Yatta from Dandy's World.

It was also around this time when we learned what a fictionkin was, and I, the host of our unknowing system, immediately latched onto that term to explain my identity instability and fictional identification. Despite it being increasingly obvious as Yatta developed more complexity in her identity that she and I were not the same person, I resisted even considering the possibility of DID, and when I did look at it again, I couldn't quite believe that was the answer, even when I had explored and rejected every other possibility. It was as if now that we were right on the cusp of finding out, our brain had suddenly backpedaled and was pushing me away from that line.

It didn't work. The signs were already there in bold block letters; I was just refusing to get close enough to them. But I wasn't the only person who could take that step, and it would be Yatta who finally pushed us from 'possibly questioning if I MIGHT have DID but you know, probably not, because I don't have enough trauma so like yeah' to 'Oh shit, this is real. We're actually a system.'

On August 17th, 2025, Yatta sent a message to our then best friend (now fiancee) introducing herself as an alter. Our friend knew we were questioning systemhood, so this wasn't a surprise to them. It certainly was a shock to me, however, and it was the undeniable proof I couldn't ignore, because I did not write that message. There was no world in which I could convince myself that I had typed those words when I clearly had not, especially since her typing style was obviously different from mine.

Technically, I guess I had the stereotypical "your alter tells you (or rather, your best friend) that you're a system" syscovery, but it wasn't like Yatta actually knew something I didn't. She was just willing to accept it when I wasn't.

Yatta is now my in-system wife. We have at least eight adoptive children. She has seven roles in the system--second host, social alter, protector, caregiver, ADHD holder, BPD holder, and system manager--more than any other alter, and she manages to perform them all incredibly while also being near front at least 95% of the time.

Yatta is the reason we got into therapy and are now medically recognized with DID, and in the process of seeking diagnosis. She is the reason we first got into a relationship with and then got engaged to our loving, amazing fiancee. She is the one who convinced our safe parent to support our plan for a new life. She is the one who has fought for our future over and over and over again, and I could not be more grateful that she's here to take the first step when I can't do it on my own.

I know you're literally watching me type this and I don't need to say it 'out loud', but, I love you, Yatta.

- 🐾 Mittens (System host; they/meow)

[PT: 🐾 Mittens (System host; they/meow)]