#system journal

I've been seeing a lot of opinions being shared on the Simply Plural and Octocon shutdown situation, but not many posts compiling things to do personally while new alternatives are being made... so I thought I'd make one.

If these don't work for your system, don't beat yourself up. If you want more advice, feel free to send an ask or leave a comment! I'm also certain there's other things you can do, but these are things my system use. Pluralkit is mentioned lots here... and frankly, it's because pluralkit is such a solid monolith I hardly think it's going anywhere.

The blog I mentioned archiving/making essentially a database of projects for systems is @systemprojects ! I hope you don't mind being mentioned, I think your blog is very well organised and many will find it useful.

And here's a link to Lighthouse for a journalling website/app made with systems in mind.

I might make a text version of this depending on how well it performs, but likely in a separate post or a reblog as to not make this too long!!

1. We’re individuals and we’re parts of a whole. We see each other as people in our system, but in a different way than those in their own bodies. We share a brain. We share a life. I’m me, but I’m also him/her/them at the same time. If you take a piece out of a puzzle, it doesn’t cease to exist, right? It’s still its own object. It just doesn’t make much sense when it stands alone. We need each other to be truly complete.

2. Time keeps coming. I know it’s not an unlimited resource, but it’s not scarce either. Okay, so somebody in the system didn’t get to do what they planned today. They’ll do it tomorrow. No big deal. No need to fight about it or stress over “how I’ll ever manage all this”. We’ll simply give it another shot in the morning.

3. Reality is subjective. We’re a very philosophically-inclined system, and I could write books on what “reality is subjective” means. Basically, reality is based on perception. On a societal level, it is based in the common agreement of what something is. If anyone’s perception tests the limits of this common agreement, it is labeled as untrue. This ties into why DID is largely disbelieved; it doesn’t fit in with the common reality (perception) of the average person. So it is seen as fake. And, well, if I’m going to be told I’m wrong for the most basic, inherent part of this disorder… I don’t really care if they disagree with any other aspect of it. My reality is different. That’s okay.

4. There is no original. I strongly believe the Theory of Structural Dissociation. Maybe science will prove it wrong with a more suitable theory to take its place in the future, but it’s what I roll with at the moment. Now, to us, this translates as “there is no original/we were all the original”. We’re Adventure Time fans, so we think of it like the “Mother Gum”. If all of the Mother Gum broke off into people (like PB & Neddy), no specific one of them would be “the original”. Rather, they’d all be repurposed parts of the original whole. (In a less serious way, we like to say “we all came from the primordial personality soup”.)

5. Our body is shared equally. We’ve decided our body has its own identity & “look” that helps represent us as a whole, but doesn’t take after one member specifically. In a gnawingly self-aware way, I know this is a further form of dissociation. But adopting this view changed a lot for us in a positive way. We don’t fight about hair or clothes anymore, we don’t have discomfort around our legal name, we don’t even really have struggles with gender/sexuality anymore. (We identify differently internally, but externally we identify as nonbinary & bisexual. Even if the person fronting at the moment is, for example, a gay man.)

6. Be open-minded to what happens internally. Seems straightforward enough, but we’ve wasted a lot of time trying to “make rules” for each other in the system. The biggest example I can think of is in-system dating. Around 10 years ago, as we became more aware of each other, it became clear that two system members were basically in love. We immediately became defensive. We told them that they couldn’t do that, that two system members being together was absurd & “impossible”. (This view became stronger after discovering online system spaces & “fakeclaimers” that come with it.) Though we regret it now, we shamed those two a lot in the hopes they’d drop it. They didn’t. About 3 years later it became an actual problem. They didn’t trust us; they were fronting & we were coming back to absolutely no memory of it (we usually have a vague idea at least). Eventually, they wrote us a whole thing about how they were going to be together & there was really nothing anyone could do about it, seeing as we couldn’t technically keep them apart. In modern day, we’ve had an in-system couple recently fuse. Upon reflection, we were standing in the way of genuine healing by trying to break up the first two, and we did so solely out of shame. As long as it isn’t genuinely causing harm, we try to be accepting of each other these days. This applies to a lot of other aspects; how system members appear internally, the pronouns and/or identity labels they choose, anything to do with how system members engage with each other, our differing individual perceptions of an event, etc.

7. We don’t have to like each other, but we do have to love each other. Mostly because, if we don’t, we’re holding hatred for ourself. There are certainly members of my system I would never choose to befriend if we were actually separate people, but we’re not, and we don’t get to act like we are. So even though it’s hard, I’m learning to love every piece that makes up “me”, no matter how difficult they try to make it at times.

8. Nobody’s system works like mine except for mine. Meaning, no two systems are going to be alike, and experiences aren’t often going to translate perfectly. This is true for people who aren’t systems as well— everyone’s experience is going to be different, because nobody is wired exactly the same way. Once I took that to heart, it became easier to focus on my own way of being. I could take the pieces of represented/online systemhood that resonate with me & leave the rest (which probably resonates with someone else).

9. There’s a reason for everything. This kind of ties back into the ‘we have to love each other’ thing. Each component of the system is a clue regarding how to move forward. We had someone in the system getting really uptight & controlling, to a point that it was irritating, but, taking a step back, we recognized it was a response to feeling a lack of control. Instead of simply getting angry at him for how he was acting, we were able to address the problem. My collective self is more laid-back for it.