#postivelyplural

When I discovered my system almost a decade ago I referenced older resources, and dabbled mostly in the DID/OSDD community. We called ourselves "multiple" at the time, because that's the only term we encountered. We dipped from tumblr for a long while and when we came back "plural" was ubiquitous, especially in the inclusive spaces we now gravitate to. I picked up using it myself because I do actually prefer it, but like... was that a sudden event (that I may have missed by being offline or in the wrong spaces) or a gradual change?

Ironically, both plural and multiple have a long history in the community, it seems. We mostly know of plural history things thanks to old websites (and web archives of old websites). We didn't really dive into the plural community until about 2010-ish, and aspects of the plural community may very well could be older than even the otherkin community even. So there is a lot of history we ourselves just don't know (or we don't have the sources to backup our thoughts, which is something we always strive for when we say/write things).

What we can say is that "plural" has existed alongside "multiple" since at least the early 2000s.

A few examples of things we have on hand include:

2007: An article titled, "Divisions in Plurality, 1.0" was written by Kerry Dawkins for the Ex Uno Plure website. In the article Kerry describes the make-up of the plural community at the time, noting there "seem to be three ‘camps’ – the MPD/DID camp, the natural multiples’ camp and the soulbonders’ camp." Throughout the article the word "system" is used for the different kinds of plurality regardless of origin, for example using the term "soulbonding systems."

Dawkins, Kerry. "Divisions in Plurality, 1.0," Ex Uno Plure, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20150306082026/http://www.exunoplures.org/main/articles/divisions-in-plurality-1-0/ .

2004: The webpage, "Multiplicity According to the Qilora," includes the use of "plurality" both in the url and in the text of the page itself; the first question in the FAQ even starting off with "What Is Multiplicity / Plurality?" Qilora, " "Multiplicity According to the Qilora," 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20041102054238/http://qilora.com/QILORA_POPULUS/plurality_faq.html .

2001: An instance of a webpage from Astraea's Web with the url including “plural” dates back to October 2001. This webpage contains use of both “plural” and “multiple.”

“Astraea's Web Multiplicity Resources & Controversy,” Astraea's Web, 16 October 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20011021152719/http://www.astraeasweb.net/plural/ .

The plural community's always been very spread out, nebulous, and flexible, but our longstanding vibe and perception has been that plural is the umbrella term describing practically any experience of being "more than one" whether that be DID, DDNOS/OSDD spirit possession, mediumship, tulpamancy, median systems, and more. Whereas "multiple" is more specific to experiences where a body contains more than one distinct and separate persons; a description not all of the formally mentioned things fit within.

BUT! Other people's mileage may vary. If the plural community has been consistent with one thing, its always been consistent on having different opinions and perspectives on what terms mean what (sometimes even in the same system...)

(reblogs appreciated so more people can see this! gonna tag @queerautism​ / @uniquely-plural in case it’d like to reblog this :>)

(You said a lot of your friends are systems, but we'll be addressing how to tell singlets as well, just in case you might be telling one or two of them.) If you're looking for a way to start the conversation among your system friends: you could try and bring it up when the topic of plurality comes up in a lighthearted, relaxed setting. For example, if a friend brings up something amusing another headmate did, you could remark on that with them and then mention, "This is kinda related to that... I need to tell your something..." and go from there. You could also bring up the topic yourself. For example, you could say that you have something important to tell them, ask them if they're mood to hear it, and go from there. If they're systems themselves, then they likely already know some of the ins and outs of plurality, which might make things easier for you. If they are already aware of the type of plural you are, then all that's left for you to do is to tell them about yourselves and explain what's going on.

If you're speaking to singlets: you will most likely have to bring it up yourself. You may want to start with the basics. What is plurality? What are headmates, switching, communication? Why are you telling them this? Try to avoid giving them too much info too quickly or broaching controversial topics in-depth, as this can overwhelm people and cause them to take away the wrong message.

When dealing with singlets, you might want to give them time to process the information you've just given them. They may need time to figure out what they will do with that info, and how they will react to you later on.

Okay so here's the story: I talked to someone with the same first name as a guy I went to high school with. I couldn't remember his last name and I thought about that passively. Out of nowhere a voice from inside my head said his name with a last name. I looked it up on Facebook and it was actually the correct last name. I was shaken but after a couple months of not hearing anything, I just thought that was a one-off thing. Then a couple of months later, after moving, I tried to remember where I packed my pencil case. I can't remember if I heard it or if the word was just sitting in my head/thoughts but I got "suitcase" so I checked my suitcase and to my surprise, it was in there. Then the same day or a day later I was closing the front door to my apartment after coming in. All of a sudden it felt like I was slamming the door on someone. I was very confused so internally I yelled "why?!" then heard (in the same loudness as the voice was when I heard the guy's name) "because I felt like it". I'm still very confused. Anyways, later that night I thought about how maybe I was multiple, which deeply upset me because I know a bit about multiplicity and I know I don't want it. Then I heard "harrowing" so I Googled what the word meant, because I didn't know, and it perfectly described how I felt in that moment. I got even more upset so I said "fuck this, I'm getting drunk" and then bought a magnum of wine and drank the whole thing that night.

I haven't heard anything since despite trying to get the voice to talk to me again.

My therapist and psychiatrist said they weren't worried because it didn't sound like a hallucination (because I explained how the "voice" doesn't sound the same as a voice you'd hear when someone is speaking out loud - it has sound but isn't the same as what you think of when you hear that someone is "hearing voices"), but I'm still wondering what the hell is going on.

If it was a psychotic symptom then why was everything the voice said accurate/right? And if I'm multiple how can I get it/them/?? to talk to me again?

Do I write it off and pretend it didn't happen or ???

We’re not queer because of our plurality and our therianthropy; we’re queer in the sense that our gender and orientation is nether cis nor straight. But we feel like our queerness goes beyond our gender and orientation. Like what our queerness means to us is being that which does not fit within the traditional ideas of what a person should be. Being “deviant” just by being who one is.

Being strange. Being misunderstood. Relating to the monsters of the story more than the knights and heroes. Being in-between worlds. Crossing boundaries, or at least dancing on the arbitrary lines some monogamous, cis, white. straight Christian men decided what “proper” at some point in the past. We are impossibility in their eyes. We are what happens when the world tells children they can “be anything” and so we became everything.   Not because we have run around and tried to check a box in every category we could find like we’re trying to “:catch them all” Pokemon style. More like we just liberated ourselves to explore who we are and what fits our experiences and who we are.  And we take a quiet kind of pride in that. That we explored ourselves. Discovered our plurality, therianthropy, neurodivergence, spirituality, and even a lot of our fandom-y interests; just as we discovered our polyamory, our being nonbinary, and our being demisexual to bisexual - and we accepted all of this about ourselves. We accepted and found a love in ourselves despite a world at large calling us strange, weird. Queer. Often well before we even were consciously aware of our own queerness ourselves. That’s why we call ourselves queer. Because we want to own it. We have embraced that we will never be what the world at large expects. We’re here. And we’re queer.

It's Plural Acceptance Week!

We are a large mixed-origin nonhuman multiple system that goes by House of Chimeras.

We received a diagnosis of DDNOS from our 1st therapist in 2010. When the DSM-5 came out our 2nd therapist reassessed us & found we did not meet all criteria for DID or OSDD with the DSM-5 (though we once did). While every mental health professional we've seen since has acknowledged our plurality, we've never been rediagnosed.

Our plurality is caused by several factors. In brief: we believe were born already predisposed toward multiplicity due to neurodivergence, were born with more than one soul, had trauma that directly messed with our identity development, various negative childhood events pushed us to maladaptive daydreaming which lead to the creation of tulpas/thoughtforms, & an animistic predispositions leading to spirit possession.

We' accepted our plurality in 2009/2010 & have been in the community ever since across many platforms.

Being plural is just who we are & how we exist. We're a we & we're here to stay.

  Our websites are:

- The Study of Chimeras is our personal website only about ourselves as a nonhuman system: https://sites.google.com/view/houseofchimeras/home

- The Chimeras Library contains our essays (both personal & informational), our past panels, and more. https://houseofchimeras.weebly.com

We have been pagan for over a decade and we rarely interact with out pagan community (local or online) due to how much our multiplicity and therainthropy effect and blur with our religion.

 Part of our multiplicity is due to spirits walking in / long-term spirit possession, is a big basic example. A good chunk of the people in our body are deceased spirits. We often tease that fate took a look our multiplicity and went "they this one is prefect to be a home for spirits that don't need to pass onto the next life yet but need a body/place to be." Sometimes we find the spirits, sometimes they find us, ... and on rare occasions we've had a local nature spirit will come by and effectively say "take this one in."

 Some of the spirits in our body have an external anchor in the form of part of their remains being in our possession. This of course makes for from interesting dynamics: our bone casting set - every bone in there is a piece of someone's old body making divination even MORE of discussion just being one example.    

 Oh and how instead of a normal house guardian spirit, we ended up a spirit both attached himself to our system and a Smilodon replica skull in our living room and decided he liked spending more time out then in (maybe 80-20 split). So yeah, our house is spiritually guarded by a Smilodon dubbed Prowl.  

 Then there is how much spirit journeying or simply projecting has been turned on its head. Going of-body is easy as breathing, perhaps made easier because our phantom body isn't human and so doesn't "fit" anyway.  Everyone in our system who participates basically just uses every other participant as their spirit helper or guide. We got a natural little posse going on and already being animals in form and nature changes how the practice is experienced.

 And it doesn't help we intuitively fell into an animistic lifestyle. We never consciously learned to have out-of-body experiences, trance, or anything it all just started happening in our early teens. (Probably not helped by the fact some dissociative symptoms include non-spiritual out-of-body experiences, trace, etc.) There are relatively few beliefs and practices we've consciously adopted (mostly from our learning about the pre-Christian practices and beliefs two major contagious to our heritage. [W don't consider ourselves a reconstructionist or revivalist in the slightest, it has mostly just occurred subtlety and organically while trying to learn about our culture to know it.]    

 Oh seeing a ghost cat on the bed is like... a Monday. In fact going about everyday stuff is often met by at least one person projecting just because they can. So even people fronting have company 90% of the time.

 And while the spirits in our multiple system seem the naturals in projecting and such, even those who we know are alters can do it to. Heck, I'm probably in the alter camp and I'm usually the one rallying to get ready to pay homage to the local major spirits of place.

The names of headmates in systems can get pretty weird.

For our own system, being left to have to name ourselves while still a child and the fact our brain doesn't think in a normal dialogue-based manner doesn't help.

The thought processes that goes on in our brain is almost entirely made up of non-words. Whether it be the communication between headmates or our own personal thoughts, what goes on in our minds is not a string of speech-based thoughts. Rather it is almost entirely made-up of images, smells, non-word sounds, sensations, tastes, emotions, and even bits of memories. Very rarely are words a part of our thinking process. Our thoughts as pictures are like detailed videos in our mind, our thoughts as smells are like the real deal, and so on. All very detailed and meaningful. When words are used it is because either the thought contains something too abstract to think in senses and emotions, it is because we are reading something, or one of us is thinking about what we specifically plan on saying with our voice box. Only in cases like that is there a likelihood for some words to be internally heard. Even when words are thought, they are often not thought in how English sentences are made. They may be alone or disjointed (especially if being used just as a necessity modifier because a thought can't be conveyed easily as a sense of emotion), for example. Rarely, less someone is actively focusing on reading or writing something, are words used in ways fitting the phrase "proper English."

So while still young, any area means of thinking about another headmate was formatted around this way of thought processing. This lead to the way we think of each other in our own head, the label, the tag, the name not being not naturally being based around speech. Rather what we think when we "say" someone's name is something else.

Thus the reason our names are very... nature-based,  descriptive, what-have-you. They are rough translations of some part of how we actually think of a headmate put into actual words. The reason most of our names are based on visuals or something related to something they do or have done as opposed to smells or such mostly stems from it being harder to put smells or such into English. So that is why we have people with names like Earth Listener, Ocean Watcher, Prowl, Zephyr, Weaver, Cloudtail, etc.

Now to make things more complicated most people in our system have secondary names. This came about because during our teenage years some people tried to move away from their translated names. Plus having less "weird" names started to become popular because it was easier for our therapists to recall a "Jordan" as opposed to as a "Sky Singer." However since wrapping up the majority of our therapy (something that took nearly a decade, yikes), we don't rely on these secondary names as often. Especially because our brain doesn't think in words naturally and names as English sees them are very wordy indeed. So naturally we end up defaulting back to the rough translation-descriptive names because even if they are "weird" their more authentic to how we think of each other.    

Names are weird, ours are no exception for sure.