We have been plural since (almost) earliest memory, going back to age 4 or 5 at the oldest. We only have one tiny shard of memory before remembering being plural. In that second memory, Crystal and Shiloh were arguing over a spelling toy that belonged to an older stepsister, at the stepwitches house - the stepmother we had before our dad married our real-but-step-mom who raised us from 6 on up, so the age is pretty easy to pinpoint.
Every memory of us past that is all four of us Willows together. We grew up with a lot of teachings about what we thought was like us - be the same person throughout the week as you are on Sunday, don't be double minded, listen to your inner child, etc. We thought we recognized several similar things in our parents and friends - they're in their emotionally fragile part so that's why they're so touchy and angry about nothing right now, etc. We fought and blamed each other a lot growing up, until we went through some pretty severe trauma at age ten and banded together: there's nothing wrong with us, it's THEM that are wrong.
At 15, when we started writing, we created a character and muse, Jas, who we spent thousands of hours talking to. We believed she was just a character. She believes she has always been real. We created other characters who had the same sense of realness, but drove most of them away by treating them terribly.
At 26, we stumbled on the tulpa community and realized (after some denial) that we'd done on accident what other people did on purpose to create tulpas, after an argument with Jas where she refused to take back something she said or let us imagine her not saying it. We realized that our headmates are full people, 100% outside of our control. We apologized to Jas and worked on rebuilding our relationships and doing right by our headmates.
We still believed we originals were one person, until after trying to learn how to switch. It felt like part of "me" was stuck in the body and kept rubberband snapping us back into the body. We talked about this sensation with friends, and one, a DID system, mentioned median systems to us.
Turns out that no, people aren't being 100% literal when they talk about arguing with other parts of themselves as if they're real full people, or their inner child, etc.
The fact that our headmates didn't have this kind of separation should have been a clue. (Jas has an inner and outer self, as the things she thinks are often very different from what she chooses to do but she's still in control of both parts of herself. Doc is close, as he has an awareness of his previous incarnations, but it's still different.)
So when we were trying to switch, we weren't getting all four of us Willows out of front at the same time together. Once we realized though, it was easy to get us all out and for our headmates to front without us Willows being in the way.
We're 38 now and there's 12 of us altogether now, and we literally don't know how to NOT be a bunch of people sharing a brain - it's all we've ever known.
We know we are arranged differently from traumagenic systems - while we all have trauma, none of us are traumaformed. We could write another five page essay on why we know that, but in brief we have thoroughly examined ourselves in comparison to several different trauma models, and we don't fit any of them.
We've also been in therapy off and on for over ten years for our depression and ptsd, and every therapist and psych doctor we've seen in that time has said we're obviously different people - once you know us and know what to look for, it's pretty recognizeable - but we don't fit the criteria for a dissociative disorder because we don't have issues with general dissociation nor do we struggle to function due to our plurality, and we don't have memory issues outside of specific physical health conditions (fibro flares and migraines, both of which mostly manifest as expressive aphasia - difficulty being able to put our thoughts into words and forgetting words.)
The only professional we've seen who disagreed was a pastor and counselor who didn't know it, at the time, hadn't been called Multiple Personality Disorder for well over a decade, said we couldn't be plural because God breathed into Adam and Adam became one soul, wanted to help us "heal" by getting rid of everyone else other than the "real" us (we never did get the chance to tell him we originals are a median system lol) and many other stupid things like that.
Our case was even discussed with Dr. Richard Loewenstein, who used to run a trauma and dissociative disorders center in Baltimore and has written dozens of papers on CDDs and has been referenced in hundreds. He said that so long as the others in our head aren't causing us distress, we don't have DID. There's also an episode of a podcast called Reply All that has an audio interview with him, courtesy of the same journalist Laura Klivens. There used to be a decent-ish transcript of it up on Gimlet Media, but it's not there anymore, and the Spotify transcript is pretty terrible.
Anyways sorry for the long essay š