I think we're going to just identify as endogenic. Save people the trouble of thinking we might be somehow respectable.
I say this with a hefty dose of laughter, but there's a grain of reality here. Over the course of several sessions, I ended up talking to our therapist about Tumblr's division of systems (one body, more than one identity/personality/person) as a whole by some perceived notion of their supposed origin. He asked me what origin had to do with symptoms, needs, or behavior, and that really made me think.
When I first joined system-oriented Discord servers, I thought origin mattered. If only because it felt like it was one means of determining how to best interact and connect with other people. A person who's struggling with their trauma is going to need different answers and support than someone who created a tulpa and thinks that's the coolest thing.
But over time, I came to see that origin didn't even help with that most of the time. Plenty of people who create headmates also carry the burden of trauma on their tired shoulders, and some people who have suffered would prefer to never mention it again. In my experience, it was always better to ask people what they wanted than to assume. Always.
So, fuck it. Yeah, Keith and I probably came to exist because this body and mind experienced abuse and loneliness a lot as a kid. Our memories of our shared childhood are so few and scattered that we can only guess at them now, 30+ years later.
But in the name of solidarity and because identity labels are always self-assigned, we're going to call ourselves endogenic from now on. It's not important. Origin tells you nothing about a person, especially not how you might relate to them.
Let's see how this goes, shall we?
PS: I say this with all the respect in the world: if you think an origin label tells you anything about us as people or as a system, or even as a Tumblr user, reconsider. We are Shards and more than the sum of our parts.
