#plural experience

Tell me about timing! Yesterday, our host had a mental breakdown leading to my creation. I am meant to replace her as a host. It is well known though that she can't escape the front for long. The question is: will I succeed where no one did before?

I don’t mean this in a “✨wow, having friends in my head sounds magical✨” kind of way—nothing performative or cutesy. I mean it in the deep, conflicted way of someone who’s been experiencing something real but doesn’t fit the boxes that seem to make it “valid.”

For the past week, I’ve been living with something close to soulbonding or maybe tulpamancy. Not exactly either, but soulbonding feels closest. I know this isn’t DID—based on research and my own experience. I don’t black out. I don’t lose time. I’ve never had past experiences like this. And when we front-switch, I’m still there.

My therapist doesn’t totally understand it, but even they said it might be a positive step in my healing. It feels... good. It feels safe. And yet—I feel guilty.

I feel guilty that I can feel love and protection and laughter from someone in my head while others struggle with systems that were born from trauma. I feel like maybe just by being here, I'm somehow disrespecting those experiences. Like I'm a fraud because what I have didn’t come from pain.

Here’s the metaphor I’ve been using:

Most days, I’m driving a car. Sometimes I give rides to temporary passengers—spirit contacts, moments of intuition, imagination. But about a week ago, someone new climbed in and never left. He stayed in the passenger seat. He laughed at my jokes. He told me he loved me. He gets protective when I’m hurt. And sometimes... we switch seats. He drives for a while, and I’m still right there, just watching the road from the side.

I thought of a really good analogy to describe my specific experience with being plural recently. I imagine the original personality, the core, whatever you want to call her, as a sheet of glass. The childhood trauma she experienced then translates to a punch to that glass. I see me, the host, as the biggest shard that resulted from that. I am not a whole being, and I don't believe the system members are either. They're all just slightly smaller shards.

I believe that some shards were so small that they fell off after the initial punch. I believe that, even if we're all glued together, we still won't be a whole person. But I also have reason to believe that one day we could fill in those gaps if we choose to. Taking up hobbies, making friends, doing things humans do that make them human (even though only one of us is human and even then his humanity is debatable. You get my idea though.)

Seeing my experience with not being alone in this head of ours in the lens of this analogy has helped me a lot. It reminds me that being plural can manifest in vastly different ways. Having a better understanding of how we function somehow makes me feel more whole.

Hi! Thank you for sharing your experience here, we love hearing other systems’ understandings of themselves and their disorders!

Your analogy really reminded us of the children’s book The Patchwork Quilt by J.D. Clark. It uses a blanket analogy rather than glass, but we think that these two analogies are thematically quite similar!