sysvents

[sysvents]

hotswapping to your emotionally stable alter is faster than calming down yourself

[sysvents]

Inadvisable narrative frames #137: second person omniscient viewpoint. Every character is "you", simultaneously and without differentiation; oblige the reader to rely purely on context cues to determine which "you" they currently are.

[sysvents]

Your girlfriend outed you?! That's horrible! Why are you still with her? I'm glad you're feeling great, at least. It's just that it bothers me..

Okay so I didn't clarify this at all. She's a system herself, and it was completely accidental. She just let it slip since she wasn't used to keeping it from close friends. It was hell, but it wasn't intentional, they were already really close friends, and she was immediately apologetic. We talked it out, I forgave her, it's all good.

[sysvents]

Deeply terrified to consider this, but. Maybe having a system isn't inherently horrific agony.

This whole coping mechanism works by hiding things. It's built around the fear of being found out. Part of the way the system functions is by remaining hidden by any means necessary.

It didn't help that I had a really bad fucking time realizing everything. I was homeless, terrified, stuck in a place with endless fucking fleas and people who Wanted me Gone, and then i woke one day with my entire concept of self crumbled. I really wasn't in a good place to have put everything together.

I also had a couple horrible experiences of people finding out. One was I asked someone at a work experience for guidance, which led to her telling me to subordinate all of my family and make them my pet slaves. Her insistence that I was the "core" made me sure that no one would understand.

The next was my girlfriend accidentally outing me to a friend group. The friends were all nice and still are. That violation made me certain I could never trust anyone with this information.

I never wanted to have to go through admitting I was abused as a kid. My entire self concept was built around the idea that I was fine, just a bit anxious. Admitting I was worse off than that hurt, and honestly still hurts. If every alter is some kind of coping mechanism (not true, but like hypothetically) then mine is definitely thinking everything is fine.

I'm in a better spot now, though. Housed. It's given me some space to actually try to get better. I've been able to reconnect with my hobbies some more without that looming threat over me at all times.

More importantly, I've reconnected with my alters. I'm really glad I have, too. Everyone has some love and joy and interest to indulge. Twelve even managed to help me unpack a lot of the religious trauma that I didn't even notice was still eating away at me until I tried to be edgy and tie my shoelaces into inverted pentagrams for her.

Also found a server that has a lot of plural people in it. They're all friendly enough that a couple alters have even started hanging out in it as themselves.

Which still horrifies me. But. Perhaps. Has some benefits.

It's helped communication to be a bit more open about it. There's been loads of internalized shame that I've just left because it was too inconvenient to unpack because it would risk people knowing. Having them able to be themselves instead of fitting themselves into the general "me" mold has really helped communication. It's helped them have a chance to figure themselves out.

This is hard. All of it is. Nothing about being a system is easy (except dissociation, I rock at that), but I hate that I've been capitulating and feeding into the idea that it always has to be agony and pain.

It doesn't. You can make progress with your system. You have to. You will.

I still never want to be public about this. Not now, if ever. I want to keep main accounts at the very most ambiguous, but I still want everyone to have a space to express my and themselves (not saying "ourselves", still refuse to use first person plural pronouns forever).

Someone'll need to make a new pinned. Sorry, nine, it was a mess from the beginning. For now, this one'll take its place. Until then, well.

Hey, this is 💛

Name: Max

Species: Pikachu

Pronouns: she/her

System: Storyteller (yeah, like a Time Lord's name. Blame Thirteen.)

[sysvents]

Hiii, I had very abusive parents. These are all exactly things that they said to me.

My knowledge about child development versus the social pressure to not interfere with other people’s parenting fight daily

[sysvents]

I have come to the conclusion that self hatred is unhealthy, so moving forward i will be splitting myself into 12 distinct identities who all hate eachother.

[sysvents]

I mean surely we all grew up feeling like there was a wrongness inherently deep inside us that will endure for the rest of our lives

[sysvents]

Sometimes autism is a nightmare because I'll see someone I agree with respond to a misunderstanding of what someone I disagree with said. And like I agree with what person A saying, but I still want to try and clarify what person B meant. I just also know that if I do that they're going to assume I'm trying to defend B or say they're arguing in bad faith or have opinions that I don't when really the problem is I'm terrified that if I disagree with what someone who hates me didn't exactly say I'll get beaten

[sysvents]

if anything else happens to me i’m not enduring it. somebody else do that

[sysvents]

if i’m plural my alters hate each other and if i’m not then i’ve found the most convoluted way imaginable to hate myself

[sysvents]

[sysvents]

Gonna front load this with saying I have the kind of autism that leads to perpetual misunderstandings on both sides of communication, so I'm largely just trying to understand what your saying as well as reply to what I think you said. If you didn't say what I think you said, sincerely very sorry because I know that's annoying as hell. I know this many paragraphs implies a stupid ass bullshit cancellation/scold response but I don't at all intend that I just suck at communication

I've got DID and been dealing with it for a while. I call it that even though I'm also deeply critical of psychiatry. It's at least as corrupt as every medical institution, but imo even more considering. More than is relevant to this conversation so moving on. I still call it DID, though, because I check every box and the description works personally for me.

So, I definitely agree that psychiatry has a horrible problem with pathologizing the human experience. That being said, there's still worth in describing the non-normative experience of plurality since it can in very many ways be disabling. Dissociative barriers make introspection with the selves harder than it is to introspect with a self, causing other problems like not knowing what you believe, who you are, if you've eaten, where your car keys are. Whatever. The many problems of dissociative amnesia

Because of that, I wouldn't really compare it to being gay or trans. Those were obviously wrong to be disorders at all, and only called such because they differed from societal norms rather than ability to access a happy, functioning life in a way that differs from plurality. Treating it as a disease that needs to be "cured" is a fucking nightmare, but it is a disorder. It's like depression. I don't know if everyone who talks about being depressed would meet the clinical criteria of it, but demanding people do would be asinine. You know if you're depressed because it's impairing your functioning and/or emotional life.

Being plural is much more in that boat. Well, it's more like PTSD 2 than any kind of depression, but I'm sure you get what I mean. It's less an identity to adopt to make sense of yourself, and more a description to understand and heal past traumas.

Tl;dr: I wouldn't compare it to being gay why did I take this long to say that

if you do come to the conclusion that you ARE plural, you don't have to try to fit your experience into a diagnostic box for it too be legitimate

- someone who is a system, but seems to exist in the exact middle section of the venn diagram of did, osdd 1a, and osdd 1b, and thus cannot get diagnosed

oh 100% that’s why i’m saying “plural” and not “DID” though both could be applicable? i’m very critical of psychiatry & the pathologization of experience & see mental health diagnoses as being potentially useful for understanding your own experience in the context of others but ultimately social constructs to take with a grain of salt. i’m not seeking diagnosis for any of this largely because of how stigmatizing it is. plurality strikes me as something that people can simply claim if it helps them understand themselves rather than having strict diagnostic criteria & i think it functions more as an identity than a disease. kinda reminds me of the way that homosexuality and transsexuality were heavily pathologized until gay and trans people organized around identities defined on their own terms to mainstream the concepts and have them be treated less like diseases.

[sysvents]

(pretend with me for a moment that you are a singlet getting your first alter if you're already a system for the sake of entertainment. if the character/person you last reblogged IS you, please pick a different one.)

okay: you've been hit by the System Ray, and you now introject the last character/real life person you reblogged onto your blog. if you reblogged a multi-character post, it's the first character you look at.

[sysvents]

i am a firm believer that ocs are a reflection of the self in the way that every character you create has to hold some piece of you to really feel alive. sometimes this is why all your ocs have certain traits, sometimes this is why you can track your various issues and traumas all the way from middleschool to now based on what your ocs are like. this is a feature not a bug

[sysvents]

conversation topic that does not work when you all have the same disorder

(feat. us / @qquackitee, @metfell / @stelledore, and the geese / pine)

[sysvents]

the different parts of me disagree on the validity of plurality

[sysvents]

Sometimes I feel like I am building up madness and there's a hidden meter and everything is normal but when it hits max I will grab my head and flames will burst out of my eyes as I die like Elden Ring