There's this perceived expectation in some plural spaces to understand everything about yourselves, to know who you are at all times, to be able to spot each other instantly, to generally have it all sorted out. It's complete bullshit. I promise you're not alone.
Not a single system we've met has known everything about themselves, but a lot of us have reason to hide that fact.
We still live in a world that stereotypes Western systems as one of a few things:
Actually just one person who's very confused, sick, or fucked in the head. A permanently helpless, deeply ill victim who needs to be saved by a therapist or psychiatrist. A traumatized little meow meow who can never have a meaningful life without delving deeply into all the horrible trauma and becoming one normal person. A problem to be fixed.
Secretly a murderer, criminal, etc. May be lying about it to get out of being responsible for their actions. (Thanks, Hollywood.)
Imaginary friends. Not real, not something that needs to be interacted with, just something to ignore as a quirk (or maybe reason to point someone at therapy to make them stop talking about it).
Clear-cut, well-rounded, and strongly-characterized people that anyone on the street would be able to notice. Distinct enough to obviously be different people despite sharing a face. Subtlety? What's that? (See also: stereotype one. Somehow, these often coexist. "You're all parts of one person, so I can treat you the same even though you act differently all the time.")
Malingerers faking a disorder that doesn't exist.
Like it or not, these stereotypes affect how people interact with each other, and they affect how people interact with systems. Being openly plural will get you some negative reactions rooted in stereotypes even if you do your best to bust myths when explaining yourselves. That's the case both offline and online.
Only one of these stereotypes is sort of positive to the average person in Western spaces. (I could go on a whole tangent about possession as a positive experience across different cultures, or the phenomenon of imaginary friends still sometimes being real enough to matter to other people, but the stereotype isn't usually that positive. It's more like The Exorcist than anything else.)
A lot of folks want to feel not just known, but liked.
Is it any wonder that there's so much pressure to fit that one sort-of-okay stereotype? To look separate and well-defined, even if you aren't? To give the world every reason to believe you about your own existence, especially if you doubt it yourselves?
(Another thing experienced by just about every system we've met: chronic or occasional doubt/denial. It's easy to think that getting an outside person to believe you will get rid of the doubt. It probably won't.)
And how much worse does this get online, where there aren't readily-available tools for folks who can't easily put down a clear-cut name, face, and set of traits for strangers to browse? Social media wasn't designed for us. There are no easy markers to list for the nameless, unpersoned, and unknown.
What are we left to do in a world that expects us to know more than we do? Where people still go on hunts for "fakers" and use any scrap of inconsistency or confusion as justification for a callout? Where, in hopes of being believed or just seen by someone, a lot of us have learned to lean into the least harmful of the stereotypes that get used against us?
Have a name, a face, a color, preferences, quirks, all nicely sorted and never shared. Make that perfect social media profile that reads like a Wikipedia article. Be so obvious that no one could miss you- after all, they're not going to look for you, let alone believe you otherwise. We've barely got a public understanding that systems can exist, let alone exist fuzzily.
Half the time, you're seeing someone's best guess presented as fact because there's not much else to do in a social space without making someone else uncomfortable- without directly challenging the expectation that you will be concrete, unique, distinct, obvious.
"If you can describe and explain it clearly, then it must be real enough to matter. If you can't, then it's fake."
In reality, we're often messy, blocked off from ourselves, contradictory, fuzzy, overlapping, and confusing. System members can hide, pretend to be each other, lie, withhold information, or just have a different answer at different times. Folks don't always announce themselves. Figuring out who you are is hard when others inside are influencing you, often without informing you about that. Sharing a life makes it easy to wind up similar in the same way that siblings might wind up more similar than strangers.
What are your interests? What are your traits? How do you feel? What do you want? How do you know if that shit belongs to you if there's someone else in your skull who could share it all (or leak their shit onto you)?
How the fuck do you ever know anything is yours when we're all using the same wetware?
A lot of us do struggle to have any sense of self. A lot of us do struggle to know who's here, to notice newcomers, to know anything at all. Is that surprising? I don't think so. We share a body and brain. We don't have that nice, neat, physical border that the general public uses to define the self. We have to make your own definitions and figure it out for ourselves.
What's a person if they're not a body or brain? What's a self? What if everyone in the system has their own definition? God forbid, what if we disagree about it?
Add in dissociative issues and yeah, the self is a mess of a concept. Good luck. I guarantee we've thought about it more than Bob at the grocery store, but that doesn't mean we have an answer to some of the most unanswerable philosophical questions.
One of us told our therapist last week that they feel like everyone else knows them better than they know themselves. Most of us feel to some extent like we're blocked off from knowing ourselves, aren't "really" people, or otherwise struggle to figure out anything concrete for more than a short time. It's taken us a literal decade to figure out what we think we know about ourselves, and even that's up for debate.
We know nothing for certain. I doubt we ever will.
