#mod jetstorm

Fair warning, this obviously gets a bit personal. I'll be giving brief mentions of trauma and abuse, though will go into no detail. Also disclaimer: while we're still figuring things out, it appears that our plurality likely manifested from a place of trauma, so we may not be a good frame of reference to anyone trying to figure themselves out if their plurality manifested in non-traumatic ways.

Hi, I'm Damien, aka Mod Jetstorm. Host was originally making this post but I'm starting this section from scratch, nice to meet you all!

So, we're in the "we've known but have been in denial for many years" boat. We're not sure where we originated, to be honest. We've had dissociative experiences for as long as we can remember, though we're not sure when plurality came into play.

We were teenagers when we realized that there may have been more than one of us in here. Again, don't know when/where we originated, but teenagehood is when we realized ourselves. We were unfortunately trapped in a bad emotionally abusive dynamic with an adult who had power over us. As such, at that time in our life our dissociation worsened significantly, as we needed to continuously separate ourselves from our reality in order to prevent further abuse. That's where myself and Hyde (Mod Rodimus) manifested strongest. We started playing around with giving ourselves names, as we all kinda realized that... yeah, we were able to talk to each other and seemed to be different people. Our names kinda changed over the years as we explored our identities, but we're happy with Damien and Hyde right now.

As years went on, we found more of us in here, which is why when we realized our plurality, we were so quick to have six of us listed out. All but one of us have been around and named for literal years, we just never called ourselves "plural" till now. We keep pretty good communication, though we sometimes fight or will act in ways that sabotage others' intentions, sadly.

We thought that we were just some kind of elaborate coping mechanism, and called ourselves "personified states of dissociation". That never felt quite right, but due to wanting to avoid the stigma of it possibly being anything else, we avoided addressing it as anything else.

A large reason we kept ourselves so hidden was that we felt that we weren't "system enough" to warrant "actually" being a system (aka we thought we were faking, or at least being overdramatic), and the alternative of being "personified states of dissociation" also hurt, as those who suffer from dissociation know that it's often distressing. While that's very true for us, allowing another to front has often been a neutral experience, and we hated being treated like we were "bad" for merely existing or that we were "obstacles" for getting to Host.

Recently, Hyde was having a bad day, and this bracket made us a lot more introspective of ourselves lately, so he wrote an entire 3-page journal entry. He named all of us, explained why we are the way we are, and ranted how he hated being treated as a "bad part of the host", rather than just as his own person. We read this over later and went "... Our therapist should probably see this." and sent it to her. We've since then been discussing what plurality means for us. We were mostly only "permitted" to exist, by ourselves and others, in terribly negative contexts such as being abused or emotionally distressed. The idea of being "allowed" to exist in neutral and positive contexts, while scary in concept, exhilarated us. Our therapist explained that, if we wanted to, we could continue to be this way- We already exist in negative contexts, so possibly allowing ourselves to exist in positive contexts may help us overall and increase positive communication between us and others. As you can see, we're trying to do just that... by taking baby steps and mostly keeping any talks of ourselves being our own people to this blog only haha.

I think a big thing is that: When dissociated, one will often feel like someone else. But out of that dissociation, a singlet will go "Oh that was just me, I was just dissociated", while someone plural may go "No that was still someone else". Obviously not EVERY singlet nor system will always experience it that way, but it may help. I do not see myself as our Host, nor as Hyde, nor anyone else other than myself.

We even have slightly different tastes in music, fashion, etc. We're still figuring ourselves out as we've suppressed this desire to be our own people(aka HAVE different interests than the Host) for so long, but that may also be something to consider. Though haha yeah it's hard to tell the difference between "Am I just in a mood for something else today" versus "Is this someone else's interests"

Oh, another thing- Host can semi-often speak to Hyde in their dreams. We used to assume this was some strange lucid dreaming thing, but we have spoken to each other in the dreamscape before. It's usually just Host and Hyde, though I recall one time were I was able to speak to Hyde in the dreamscape as well... I forget if Host was in that one or not. But I've heard that other systems sometimes speak to each other in dreams? Obviously again not every system but yeah another thing that made us realize "Oh wait this is a plurality thing isnt it"

One thing we'll also do is write each other notes from time to time. Which is funny, because we don't have any time loss between switches to our knowledge, so we don't need to leave notes. But one thing we may do is- if someone else is fronting, one of us may take the baton for long enough to leave a compulsory note, we have a few examples I'll leave below to get a chuckle

One of us, Roy (Mod Shockwave), left this after changing our phone backgrounds in the middle of the night

Hyde (Mod Rodimus, surprise surprise) very suddenly made us write this when we were picking mod names

And lastly, something I wrote to Host in our original draft of this post before taking over.

Not every system will do this of course, but this kind of helped us realize that we're probably not just one person.

In order of who we think tends to front most often (i.e. the mods you'd see the most of here) to least often

Mod Jetfire - He/Him

Mod Jetstorm - He/Him

Mod Rodimus - He/Him

Mod Bumblebee - They/He (Minor, please avoid swears with this one haha)

Mod Arcee - She/Her

Mod Shockwave - He/They