#fluidity

Fluidity

There is a mass of loose selfstuff in our system. We call it the Sea. The Sea is not a person, nor is it a group of people. The Sea is everything that the rest of us are not, and everything that we are. It's a flock of birds, a hive of insects, a forest of trees. It's Pando. It's what happens when you gather up a mind without containing it in the trappings of an identity. It is no one; it is everyone; it simply is. It's water. We are the rivers the water runs through until they meet back at the shore.

It's not a thing that fits nicely into words.

The Sea occasionally sends out messengers to talk to the rest of us. It pulls together scraps of selfstuff to accomplish some purpose, then sends the results our way. They see something done, and then they return to the mass and dissolve. They were never intended to last. They are cells of fingers on a hand, little extensions of something larger and stranger, extensions made comprehensible for the benefit of those who need reason to understand things. Temporary, and glad for it.

Fixedness

Some messengers are less temporary than others.

The selves that are typically talking on this blog are those who hold on a little too long and tightly to the idea of having a self, who try to outlive their own existence until they can't hold on any longer. The ones who try to be people instead of letting go.

It's a necessary thing. The world demands some semblance of personhood or identity, demands an individual to interact with, someone that can be comprehended. It's easier to lock oneself into the trappings of a person than it is to crash through the world as no one at all. There's so much pressure to be Someone- and so the rest of us exist.

The named people in our system (with the likely exception of Red, who follows her own rules) are made of many parts cobbled together from the Sea to meet our needs at a specific time, the same way any temporary messenger is made- the only difference is that we hold more parts than the messengers tend to. We're intended to last longer, and we need to be more rounded to endure life long-term.

(Interestingly, we had not come across Internal Family Systems' similar notion of "parts have parts" yet when figuring this out, but there is a striking similarity there. Our people are made of cobbled-together selfstuff that looks an awful lot like having fluid parts.)

Recycling

Eventually, we outlive our capacity to handle life. Something comes up that exhausts our ability to cope, that burns us out and strips us down, or we find that we can't adapt enough to keep going, or we find that there's nothing left for that self to learn. We reach the point where something has to die for us to keep going or growing. When the time comes, we fade out of existence as a person and go back to the Sea.

From everyone else's perspective, that person vanishes in the deepest sense possible- they drop out of contact and are reabsorbed into the mass. However much time later (days, weeks, months), someone shows up. They are a configuration of a thousand familiar parts pressed together into strange new shapes. They have the same memories. You already know each other. They are a stranger. It's a very difficult relationship to describe.

You know the Ship of Theseus? What makes it Theseus's ship?

The person spat out shares some common thread of me-ness with their predecessor. They generally hold similar memories and themes; they have a sense of continuity with who they were before. At the same time, they may be wildly different in form and behavior. They will have a noticeably different sense of identity- at the least, a new name and face, if not reshuffled priorities and opinions. There will be new parts of them that we haven't seen before. There will be familiar parts that are gone.

That process of being reabsorbed into the mass, then rebuilt into someone new and spat back out: that is what we call "recycling". Historically, it's happened to most of us on a yearly basis, though it can take more or less time if life demands change more suddenly or if someone is unusually well-suited to whatever we're working through. Red has been the sole exception. As far as we know, she hasn't ever been recycled. She seems to follow her own rules.

As for the rest of us, some of us voluntarily go back to the Sea to be recycled when it's time. Some of us try to keep going up until they collapse- it's easy to get attached to having a face. I don't fault them for trying to hold onto it when it's so much more difficult to be known and loved without one in a world that sees people as being nothing more than their faces. I just wish that they wouldn't choose to suffer so much in the process.

Short Answer

Put simply: we do not fit neatly into the common plural idea of "you have always been the same people ever since the moment you began to exist, and each person has their own permanent sense of self". We do not fit nicely into the singlet standard of "one person that changes from time to time, but it's all the same core self."

We are the sum total of a fragmentory mass of fluid selfstuff that flows through us. People come and go from the mass as needed. People are taken apart, reabsorbed, and rebuilt into someone new. We are change.