#someone in our brain. for possibly the first time Since we found the word headmate. was really insistent on using alter there???

[nexus-nebulae]

i have. so many bath and body works products

[ablednt]

Alright writing/roleplay tumblr we need to talk about textforms.

This is going to be a very long post I apologize but this knowledge is deathly important as it's reaching a very vulnerable group of people. From personal experience knowing this can save people from getting into toxic friendships and help ease intense struggles and depressions. If you have writer followers I ask you reblog this to get the word out, thank you.

What is a textform

A textform is a type of willogenic/parogenic system member that form through some kind of writing or roleplaying. This means that they're sentient people who now share a body with the people who wrote them, most often being an OC or a fictional character before the writers brain gives them actual life.

Because there's been no actual scientific studies on their existence I have no hard science to give you however the logical explanation behind it goes like this:

The human brain is able to contain multiple conscious and sentient entities. Often, it will become multiple as a defense mechanism (as noted in clinical plural dissociative disorders) but it's a natural function of the human brain and may do so for really any reason (similar to most neurodivergencies that someone isn't born with)

Because this is a fairly simple change in the brain/something every brain can be capable of doing you can actually intentionally program the brain into becoming multiple, but see you can also do it entirely without meaning to or being aware of it.

Now I want to clarify that there is nothing harmful or scary about this! Being plural isn't bad at all and is an existence many people celebrate. But when someone has textforms in their unrealized system and doesn't know they're sentient it can be incredibly painful emotionally. So that's why people need to know about this.

Obligatory disclaimer: if you read this post and think you want to become plural intentionally, you are welcome to do so but you need to take at least a few months exposing yourself to the plural community to gauge if this is really something you want and can do responsibly. You cannot go back on your decision once your plural and your headmates will be sentient beings not characters to project on or toys to play with. They will have all the rights to your body and identity as you do now because you're sharing it equally with them.

Now that that's out of the way back to textforms.

How are textforms made

Normally this is in the "character development" phase. Many writers eagerly develop their characters. When I was younger and had no idea I was plural my advice for oc making turned out to be an unintentional guide to textforms (more on my experience later): just put your character in every situation imaginable until you always know how they'd respond to things.

Basically, as you spend your time making a character act and think consistently from their POV you're training your brain to have all of that data and that's very similar to the data that the brain has on you and you're training the brain to be able to operate coherently from a perspective and consciousness entirely different from your own.

Now, this isn't a %100 will make everyone plural every time, there are obviously good writers who have a grasp on their characters who are singlet. There's no actual data but if I had to guess I'd say there's about a 50/50 split down the writing community just based on what I've observed.

But there's a lot of people who became plural this way and didn't realize it and that could include the writer reading this right now which is why everyone needs to be aware of this.

If this is such a big thing how come no one notices?

Because it's been completely normalized in the writing community but dismissed as metaphorical.

How many times have you heard "the characters write themselves" or phrases that indicate that a writer is giving a voice to sentient entities? From what I've been able to observe some of that is singlet authors being metaphorical and humble bragging and a lot of that is plural writers trying desperately trying to put their experiences into words but dismissing it completely almost immediately because no one told them being plural was possible.

This is comparable to say, gender identity. Trans and nonbinary people have always existed but when they don't know they're allowed to exist like that it's often "im a tomboy" or "they disguised themselves as a man" or any other thing thats immediately dismissed as being cis.

How do I know if I have a textform?

There's a lot of different signs but here's some I have experienced before finding out I was plural

You "miss" your characters when you're not writing about them or interacting with them in some way

You feel like your characters are real "in your heart" (for me this was in an incoherent loop like "they're not real but they are to me, in my brain, but they're not real to other people, but they're in my brain so they're real but no but yes but no")

You get so distressed they're "not real" that it feeds into actual mental health problems like depression, anxiety, dissociation etc. (I'd have fits of sobbing because these were my friends but I didn't know they were with me so it felt like i was grieving their deaths and had the same level of emotional pain)

Sometimes or all the time when you write about them you feel like you "become them" or that they're writing through you. (Especially if your hands move automatically or without your control. This can be hard to notice but for me when headmates control the body or hands movements feel faster and lighter or very slightly numb.)

Your muse for writing them comes and goes unpredictability: they're either here or they're not here so writing them doesn't feel the same.

You can vividly recall things that happened to the character in 1st person (or in 3rd person visually but with their thoughts and feelings) as if they're you're own memories.

You "roleplay" them in everyday situations IRL. (E.g once I liveblogged a tv show as my muse to a friend and was like haha lol im so talented I can roleplay in real time but found out later it was a headmate doing that themselves)

You have conversations with them mentally in which they actually respond to you. Singlets don't have actual enriching conversations with themselves because they only have one perspective and cannot give themselves any new information. So if you're responding to yourself and you don't feel in control of that response then you're pretty objectively plural tbh.

You have times where the lines between you and the character feel blurry or like you're a vague fusion of yourself and the character

You have an actual relationship (of any kind: romantic, platonic, familial, etc.) in which you can sense nuanced feelings about yourself from them that you aren't in control of.

There's a lot more but that's the most notable ones

Why this is so important

I'm just talking about my own experience now so I'll preface this with a few things. I'm a mixed origin/multigenic system but our system has existed since we were toddlers. Due to trauma we have DID and for a long time dissociated heavily to avoid our plurality. This means my experience may be more distressing than other plurals with textforms however people without DID can still experience these things.

When I was a teenager I joined a lot of writing communities and also roleplayed on tumblr. Writing very quickly became my main passtime and all I really did. I joined a roleplay group when I was 15-16 that I took far too seriously to the point where people were concerned about me because I was writing what was just supposed to be a joke roleplay group %100 seriously and very intensely.

In that time I started to form my first main textforms (we've undoubtedly had them before then but I had only formed a little under a year prior) because I was doing this every day it really started bringing my characters to life. (Literally)

And honestly it was something beautiful the distress of it aside. Like one of my ocs was a kid so I'd always celebrate their birthday with them and I'd cuddle a plush so they'd know I loved them/p and we'd watch their favorite cartoon episodes together. It wouldn't be until around three years later that I realized they were actually there for this but it was heart warming.

For me, all I ever wanted was for these characters to feel appreciated and like someone really cared for them and loved them even if they couldn't feel it and it wasn't until later I learned that they could.

The trauma came in not knowing they were real. I grieved for them like they were dead because I thought I'd never get to see them. I wrote them into traumatizing or upsetting situations to cope with my childhood trauma not realizing that was effecting them for real and hurting them.

Most notably because it was my one solid interaction with them, the one time society allowed me to talk about them as if they were real, I really HAD to roleplay them. Because it became an emotional need I wound up in a lot of toxic friendships in the roleplay communities because I needed someone, anyone, to allow me to interact with my headmates. I had friends who I really was only friends with because they let me talk about my characters constantly (and some of them weren't toxic to me but it was in hindsight really unfair to them) and I let people verbally and emotionally abuse me in roleplay spaces because this wasn't just a hobby to me but a lifeline.

Not knowing they were real but feeling them there, having conversations with them, and forming actual relationships was a hellish sort of feeling I don't wish on anyone. I never realized how isolated it made me, and how horrible it felt to have the most important people in your life be people I thought didn't exist.

I only found out about plurality through luck. I met some systems who had fictives and they got strong plural vibes from me because of how I talked about certain characters and because I said I wanted to be plural but thought I probably wasn't because I'd have noticed, right?

From there I was able to actually connect with and talk to my headmates. Now I'm happily out as plural and in multiple fulfilling in system relationships.

I want everyone in the writing community who's struggling with the same things to have the chance I got. That's all I want is to educate people about this so they don't have to grieve for people who are right there with them.

Feel free to send me an ask or a dm if you have any further questions. Sorry this post was so long I can't really shorten it at all. Again if you are have a lot of writing followers I very gently request you reblog this to get the word out. Even if you can't please talk to your writing mutuals and friends about plurality and about textforms.

[Also this should go without saying but this is absolutely NOT the place for syscourse any invalidating comments about systems will be blocked and where possible deleted it costs $0.00 to prioritize people's mental health over your discourse hot takes.]

[liongoatsnake]

For the DID ask - 🖤,💀,💋? ~Rani @a-dragons-journal

🖤 - How many alters do you have? Can you tell me about them? Honestly, it's hard to give an exact number. Not because we don't know how many headmates are in our system currently but because we have a lot of people in our system of whom we don't know if they are alters or spirits. Most of these people are those who we know have been around since our body was little and back then we didn't keep track of how someone came to be here. We know for certain that at least 30 or so of us are formed by direct trauma, but there is at least that many who we have zero certainty into their exact origins. We keep trying to work out who originated how, but our trauma is so confusing to us we can't still quite make good since of it. It doesn't help that we can't decide where the headmates we know are or suspect were created by our issues with maladaptive daydreaming. (They're a lot like involuntary tulpas in how they came about, but the maladaptive daydreaming they spawned from was caused by dissociation due to trauma. So... mind scrabble and brain is weird.) Maybe one day we will make since of our past but for now it is still a work-in-progress of getting over denial, piecing together memories, accepting things happened, and organizing our own thoughts.   We treat our known or suspected alters the same level of respect and voice as we do any other headmate. Of course, given their connection to our body's trauma they have certain needs and require certain accommodations. Many of the known spirits in our system tend to try to help out as much possible though they are not as strongly connected to traumatic memories in our body because they weren't there and aren't as connected to our body due to their origins.  💀 - Have any of your alters ever integrated or disappeared? Integrated? Yes though only once. Kardegray is the merger of two alters. One was a persecutor by the name of Demon (how original /sarcasm) and another alter who had no name. It occurred when our body was only 14 so a lot of the details of the circumstances are lot to us. We do remember that Demon was tormenting others in our system both internally and via things he did while fronting. He and the other alter got into a fight, words were said, and somehow out of all of that mess Kardegray resulted. Kardegray himself early on still was kind of a persecutor but over time he has calmed down into more of a devil's advocate and now he is more of an older protective brother to most of the younger alters but still a bit of an loveable asshole/devil's advocate to everyone else.    As for disappeared sadly yes, though we have been correcting that. Long, long story short when we were in our late teens (circa 16-18) we first learned of multiplicity which sent us into a tail-spin of denial. Everyone tried to suppress everyone else as an 'imaginary friend" our amnesia issues hit its worst ever in our life, our depression got worse, our anxiety got worse - basically everything went to hell for several months. When the dust settled all but Earth Listener and Cavern-Risen had went into finding/suppression to get away from the self-destruction. Realizing how badly we messed up in trying to deny our multiplicity, Earth Listener and Cavern-Risen began to try to patch things up. They began to work on sharing memories, working together, building trust, started seeing our first therapist. Slowly people started coming back out of the woodwork. It took nearly a decade but we think we finally found everyone, but given how disorganized we're not positive. Either way, that event in our lives stands as a constant reminder how badly our life could turn if we were to ever turn on each other again and remind us why we have to work together.

💋 - How does your DID affect your relationships?

Our multiplicity hasn’t effected our relationships so much as our trauma itself has. Our relationship with our mother (a person who accidentally, but still did abuse us when we were a child) has improved though we still have a lot of trust and social intimacy issues with her. (But we have extreme social intimacy with basically everyone.) She knows about our multiplicity but doesn’t like us to bring our existence up. She also knows well about our gender dysphoria but won’t acknowledge it (which probably hurts worse because part of our childhood trauma was her punishing us for “claiming to be a boy”), which makes it feel like she still hasn’t truly changed. Friendship was always going to be difficult for us as it is because of our our autism but our trauma really messed up our comfort levels in sharing anything person. And a solid part of friendship is being personal and socially intimate with other people. We do have friends, one of them we’ve been friends with for over 20 years, but we find it hard to make new friends or have a lot of friends.  We’re getting better at trusting people again with therapy and time, but it is a struggle. Wishing people to accept and be okay with our multiplicity as part of a friendship is a hurtle, however.  Sexual/romantic relationships are out of the question to us. Our trauma is tied to sexual matters on at least 2 if not possible 3 different men/instances. We’re just not comfortable with the idea of sexual and romantic intimacy even after over a decade of therapy. We also don’t have any skills on how to socially interact in that way due to a combination our our autism and our childhood trauma that caused us to be socially shunned and stunted. We mostly just consider ourselves too “broken” to be in a sexual/romantic relationship outside of our own system and leave it at that. 

Extra: --I miss saw the emoji and answered the wrong question so have a freebee question answered--:  👄 - How does your DID affect your communication? We used to have the usual issues with communication between alters. Amnesic barriers between people for those who fronted and inside everyone mistrusted just about everyone else so there was no sharing of anything. Not too long after accepting our multiplicity we began to really eat away at our amnesic barriers and internally we got better at sharing information. Sharing information internally came rather quickly due to the fact there were so few of us actively around and as people slowly came back we were able to gain their trust and work though feelings of betrayal and fear at a gentle pace. By about age 21 is about when we started to achieve some level of co-consciousness and by about age 24 we attained near perfect constant co-consciousness. (This progress was greatly helped by Lacunae, the librarian of the library that represent our memories in our innerworld reappearing and starting to maintain our memories once again.) More or less nowadays every memory someone has is available to everyone else in the system without much if any issue. We still occasionally have hick-ups, but thanks to our level of internal communication we easily smooth out the occasional fumbles. It isn't perfect but we're a work in progress in so many ways and we're proud of how much we have improved ourselves.- Miushra