Graveyard Shift

is it just us that do this?

Switching is the process of changing who controls your system's body, mind, or other central resources. A switch can be voluntary or involuntary, and controlling and managing switching is a learnable skill.

Switching isn't a universal plural experience, but when systems do switch, they might experience it in a variety of different ways. It doesn't always feel like "changing places"!

This chart can't cover all possible experiences of switching, but it does talk about some of the more common switching experiences that we've had.

Image ID below the cut; there's also a spliced copy of the image for folks who need a different aspect ratio for comfortable viewing.

- matt from @th3-graveyard-shift

Source me?

a lot of "signs of plurality" lists focus heavily on introjection and alter communication, two things that we have very little of. we wanted to lay out some experiences we had prior to syscovery with a focus on memory loss, identity confusion, dissociation, and unconscious masking since these are what we experience most. we hope this helps someone.

this is not an exhaustive list and identifying with it does not guarantee anything nor does not identifying with it mean you are not plural. we are one system and these are our experiences, which have heavy overlap with our other comorbid conditions. you know yourself/ves best, use your own judgement when reading.

feeling as though i was never a child even when my body was, that i was always an "old soul"

feeling as though i never stopped being a child, that my body aged without me

feeling as though it is my first day on earth and nothing has existed before the present moment

experiencing all of the above so strongly at different times that i cannot imagine feeling any other way

"i don't hear voices, i just have multiple overlapping trains of thought all reacting to and arguing with one another. probably the ADHD"

feeling upset as a kid that my imaginary friends didn't act the way i wanted, or that they didn't like me

remembering my childhood in third person, as though watching a movie of my own life

feeling as though i am having lines fed to me when talking about myself

remembering times that i was upset, but with the inciting incident cut out. being unable to understand why i felt the way i did

feeling as though the "real" me died a long time ago and i took their place

being talented at acting and lying. feeling like i have spent my whole life acting, as though "i" am a character i put on for other people

being afraid of voicing opinions because i know they might change suddenly, being upset when someone tells me a supposed opinion of mine that i no longer remember or agree with

knowing when i am supposed to have an opinion on something but not knowing what it is, having to make up my own opinions based on what i think "i" would most likely say

"what did you do today" i don't know "how do you feel" i don't know "what do you want" i don't know "did you have work yesterday" ...probably?

feeling like my body sometimes says things that my mind does not remember/agree with, or that i'm surprised to hear the things i'm saying

reflexively lying about things i didn't do because i assume i must have forgotten about it

being freaked out when someone touches my stuff without telling me, because i assume i moved it and forgot entirely. being afraid of how quick i can forget things

having excellent memory as a young child and terrible memory as an adult

"face blindness" where i can tell that people look familiar but feel like i have never met them, being unable to put faces in context

feeling like i have never actually met my own friends and loved ones

"i don't have amnesia, i can objectively tell you what happened. even when i do forget, i can usually put it together through context clues."

"it can't have been that bad, i barely remember it and don't feel upset when i think about it"

"i can't have DID, nothing bad has ever happened to me"

no name ever feels right longterm

creating alt accounts due to a desire to "pretend" to be someone else

lacking a solid sense of identity, feeling like a hollow husk of a person who occasionally experiences moments of clarity and wants to be treated as someone other than the "me" i present to the world

"i've never had a switch, i just have an inconsistent sense of identity"

"i've never had a switch, i have always felt exactly the way i do right now"

feeling like my mind is being pulled in several different directions, especially when i'm upset. being unable to act because different "parts" of me want different things

feeling jealousy when seeing other systems be open about their plurality. feeling like it's something you're not supposed to talk about

feeling guilty for being happiest when i'm "faking" plurality

feeling drawn to stories about possession, secret identities, or doppelgangers

sometimes i find myself intrigued by the troubled teen industry, only to remember that our parents threatened to send us to military school because we were so mentally overwhelmed to keep up with our school work. how we got to a point where we just asked them to please send us there, because our day to day life sucked that bad.

sometimes i find myself looking through what my parents are selling at one of our garage sales and see some of my own childhood toys. but the reason we ended up with so many of our toys set out to be sold was because they would be taken away as a punishment. we would sometimes hide items we didn't want to have taken from us in our backpack to take to school so our parents couldn't come into our room while we were gone and take them.

sometimes i mourn my high school years. our mom thought that the best way to handle us not doing our school work was to keep grounding us with exponentially increasing days. all that did was make us feel like we were drowning and would never be able to break free.

i just.

Can I just say Pink is so so important to me as a plural deltarune fan?

I almost feel like Toby must've intentionally set out to write her as a system, even if the actual mechanics are a bit fantastical, just because of the themes of her fight and the thematic resolution.

Toby really wrote a story about two people who accidentally became a system, experienced conflict between each other and had differing wants/needs, and STILL chose to STAY A SYSTEM!

They choose to stay with each other!! They choose to stay with each other, because being a system isn't inherently bad! Because wanting to be plural is okay! Because sharing a body can be intimate and beautiful! Because there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a system, even when it's hard!

When I was playing the fight, I just kinda mentally prepared myself for the fact that their story was just going to end with the two of them splitting up, because who could possibly willingly choose something like that? (Sarcasm)

AND. THEN. THEY. DIDN'T!!!!!!

It's just such a beautiful and touching story to me, and one I haven't seen before. Plurality in media, intended or otherwise, is almost always a negative for everyone involved. It's always the evil alter, always the horror of sharing your body, always the invasive external force that you just wanna get rid of, it's never okay to want it, to be okay with being or even choose to be a system.

But Pink spits in the face of all of that, the ghost and the darkner stumble into being a system entirely by accident but they CHOOSE TO STAY A SYSTEM. Because they love each other and they love what they are,,, even when it's hard!