#then eventually the syscovery happens

[nexus-nebulae]

known we were a system for about 7 years now, probably been a system for far longer, and just realised. we got an intrusive self-fakeclaiming thought today and laughed it away

[cambriancrew]

You know what I'm both looking forward to, and dreading?

The eventual publication of books where plurality is a big part of the narrative. Maybe, with any luck, those books getting popular.

There's already Brandon Sanderson doing a bit of that - His character Stephen Leeds from Legion, though that was resolved VERY poorly with the end being horribly stigma-influenced "omg they all started killing each other for no gods damn reason whatsoever" until Stephen was left the only person in his head. There's Shallan from Stormlight Archive - I haven't read the fifth book yet though and I'm very nervous about how he's going to resolve her and her system's storyline. There's the Hybrid Chronicles by Kat Zhang which we've read the first book of and is decent.

But we know several writers within the community who are really good, who are writing stories centering around plural characters. There's ours, which is going to be a massive project with at least five different kinds of plurality and at least three main books where that plurality is a focal point. There's people writing memoirs, including us, ours centering on our syscovery.

When this stuff gets published - and as the community grows and more storytellers, many of them REALLY GOOD storytellers, among us keep chipping away at our projects, that's going to happen just as a matter of statistics if nothing else - eventually there's gonna be publicity. There's going to be interviews where writers talk, not just about their stories, but about themselves. About their plurality.

And, with any luck, some of these are going to end up being filmed. Made into movies and TV shows. Which is going to get a lot of people talking about plurality.

And as much as I hope it helps people understand plurality, I'm dreading the inevitable ignorance of so many people turning them against plurality.

I've seen the ugliness of stigma up close and personal. And I and my system have seen it online. Not even just syscringe - we did an interview on tulpas that became a really popular episode of a popular podcast, and did an AMA on the tulpas subreddit, which was full of good, kind, understanding people. At the same time as that AMA, unbeknownst to us at the time, there was another thread on the podcast's subreddit tearing us down with assumptions. And they got personal with it. And the worst part is, they weren't even being bad people. They honestly thought they were caring about the "poor deluded jobless girl" (we had a job. Bits about it were trimmed out for time, leading to the misunderstanding that we never got a job.)

I think we can handle the outright stigma. The anger and hate of bullies who see us as a target. The people who hate those different from themselves, who don't see a reason why they should be considerate of people who are different. Those you can just ignore for the most part.

It's going to be the misguided caring of ignorant people that's going to be the hardest to fight. People who think they're intelligent and informed, and who have some good solid chunks of knowledge, but really know so little about the wide variety of plurality that their knowledge becomes the foundation for building boxes around us that never should be. And people are going to listen to them because they sound smart and like they know what they're talking about.

So to fight that, we're going to have to control the narrative in the best way we know how:

By writing a LOT of plurals.

[tadpoles-and-daydreams]

Witchcraft when plural, so far

SO because I'm procrastinating doing our intro post again, let's talk about plurality and witchcraft!

When we first realized we were plural, which to be clear is very recent, we dropped our practice entirely. Not out of lack of love for it, but out of overwhelm. We've barely spoken to our guides/deities since syscovery. (Which is what people tend to call discovering your system, which I love. It's a fun word.) We went from chatting with our deities often and being confident in our ability to "hear" them to not talking to them at all because we were so overwhelmed. We had to rework how we thought of ourselves completely, and really had to rework how we thought in general completely. It went from "Sometimes my thoughts act on their own, but they're still my own" to "Oh, fuck, that's other dudes in here???" (surprise!)

We still have no idea what in our practice "belongs" to who. The way our collective works is that we share one memory, albeit a bit messily. We dissociated from our identities as individuals to fit under one overarching identity- every trait was assigned to Frog. This means that everything in our practice right now is up in the air. Is it shared? Is it meant to be divided up? No idea! We're learning^^ So far Apollo and Loki are definitely on board with being worked with collective-wide. Apollo helps us take care of our body, and Loki is nothing if not versatile.

But now the fun part: What we're doing now. We've slowly but surely begun untangling things. We have specific goals for our practices as individuals. Malaika and Crow (yes, like the bird,) are planning on getting into making things we can wear! Crow plans on crocheting and seeing if eventually he can turns that into spellwork. Malaika wants to get into sewing + fabric painting, which we also would like to learn collectively, and she has an idea for sigil jeans she wants to make. This is both to help us express individuality by making things we can wear that look like us and to further our practices.

I think Frog still eventually plans on continuing his work around writing as witchcraft. We're collectively learning to listen to our deities again, and it feels much easier now that we're not dissociating from ourselves all the time. I was able (thanks to that person who got a reading, which thank you if you happen to read this) to get my own tarot deck. While technically it will be shared, it will primarily be mine. Having something that we specifically own is such a big deal to each of us. Which is part of why we're getting into art and crafting, and hoping to do spellwork in that form too! Oh, and those of us who are fictives/sourced in some way are beginning to look into ways to incorporate our sources into our practice. Crow has an altar in the works for a deity from his source he's close to, Malaika is a typical "fantasy witch" so her practice is taking a flashier tone, etc. etc.

This is a huge ramble, but I just... felt like it was a good idea to post. It has no real point, other than to put our experiences as a plural collective relearning witchcraft post-syscovery out there. We have so much hope for our future that we've never had before. We our ourselves now, and we know our practice will expand accordingly.

-Rayne

[sophieinwonderland]

My point remains that it does happen that one is introduced with the concept of alters and then they suddenly have alters, not because they have DID, but again, because they have high suggestibility, prone to fantasy, etc.

Fun story of our syscovery and how tulpamancy helped the shit out of us in those early days:

Anon would almost certainly say our syscovery was exactly this "auddenly having alters". We were reading about genders on a fandom wiki and stumbled into terms for systems. Then suddenly someone in the back of our head questioned if we were a system and in short order there were like, 4-5 folks in here.

We started to struggle with the idea that we saw something cool and made it all up. But Moxie pointed at the tulpamancy community and said "if we weren't a system before, then you just speedran a tulpa so what's the problem?" And holy moly was that a doubt killer. Enough of one that we were confident enough to go back to therapy, which eventually led to our DID diagnosis.

I don't know really how to tie this all together, or how to articulate my point, but like, it's so unproductive to try and prove something isn't "really" going on. It doesn't matter if we suddenly gained headmates or they were there from the start (at least not when just getting to what's happening in the moment).

Oh and tulpamancers are fucking dope!

-Faye

This is a great post and I don't really know how to add on to it... So I'm just going to say thanks so much for sharing your story and perspective, Faye! 😁

Have an awesome day!

[pdid-positivity]

Hello! We saw you talking to The Question Mark System about headspace and communication and the such and was just wondering if you had any tips about communication specifically? I don't think we have a headspace (to be fair it's not like I can go back there and look myself lol) so there's not really any gathering around a table per say, but even then, it's hard to try and get clear communication other than just assuming things through feelings and vague thoughts. Thank you in advance, we appreciate this blog a lot as well :-]

i'll be assuming for the sake of this response that for whatever reason, headspace is completely impossible. (i'd recommend looking to systems with aphantasia too, if headspace creation is impossible/difficult for you, but you still want one. even if you don't have aphantasia, it could still prove useful! they may also have better communication tips than me if you send asks to them, lol)

i'm going to assume that you're starting from nothing when it comes to headmates too.

we never *actually* started from nothing. like we had headmates introduce themselves to me before i was ready to accept being a system, so i already knew some basic information about them when i was finally ready.

despite that, we still have some advice!

the brain puts a mental block between headmates, so it is hard to communicate. communication is still possible, but everything might feel all muddy and fuzzy. they'll try to talk, but no noise comes out. they try to share their emotions, but in the process, the emotion is dulled out to the point where you can't feel much of anything.

you say that you can only communicate with them via vague feelings and thoughts. that's how it started for us too (when i reached out to them myself. because i repressed my headmates for a couple years so they couldn't communicate with me easily anymore)

so, i believe the best course of action would be to ask them simple questions about themselves. questions that the mainly feelings/opinions based communication you have going on now will work fine with.

for example: ask them their favorite color! maybe they can't speak yet, but they'll respond by projecting a specific shade of pink. or maybe it seems like they didn't respond, but you start thinking of the color green.

as you interact with them more, it should get easier to understand them. it will get easier for them to communicate with you. the block that the brain put between you and your headmates will eventually start to wear down.

and then the more the block wears down, the more complicated questions and conversations you can have.

i will say. there are quite a few systems who *only* communicate via emotion sharing, and are unable to speak. this might make it trickier, but is completely normal and possible to understand. you just gotta play with the hand you've been dealt! it is still completely possible to have strong communication without speech!

there has been times when i wasn't sure if i was saying something, or if my headmate was talking to me. in those cases, i would empty my mind, calm myself, and ask them if they said that or if i was talking to myself. this especially happened in my first year of syscovery. it could also help with how your main method of communication is so vague currently. do some light meditation before reaching out to them, so your mind is clear enough to talk.

in fact, i'll make it its own paragraph. learn to meditate, and meditate each time you want to reach out to a headmate! (if needed, i can try to make a post about how we meditate? we have slightly different types depending on what we specifically need.)

oh, also! if you have *any* ideas on their names and/or appearances, or even things that they showed interest in, i would highly recommend doing little doodles for gifts! or write positive little notes for them! (even if they can't front to see it in the real world)

it might not necessarily help with communication for all systems, but i remember whenever i would do doodles of my headmates, they would pop in for a moment to either compliment my work, or say that i drew a feature wrong lol. it also makes them feel appreciated and safer to interact with you.

sending positive energy towards them may not always reach them, but there is times in which it will, especially if you do it a lot!

the time it will taks to improve internal communication will vary system to system. the most important thing, though, when you're first starting out, is to make sure you're being consistent with reaching out to them. i always tried to do it once a day, before i went to bed, until i became confident enough in my abilities.

i hope this helps at all? if needed, the tag #internal communication may have some more stuff to help! :3

[floral-atom-collective]

When did you guys discover you were a system? ^^

ooooh complicated questionnn

Theres multiple points where we could say "this is when we figured it out" but I'm just gonna go in order here

1 ☆* This is a little bit vague but we were able to identify different headmates pretty early on, we talked to our brother about how we communicated between ourselves to process what was going on

At the time we had Apricot, Shire, Avery, Aspen, Kiwi and possibly some others

Everyone had different names and had very loose identities. They were still headmates of ours just very simplified since that was what Apricot needed at the time

2 ☆* Some time a couple years ago, we were very involved in the alterhuman community on yt [ not fantastic to be fair but it was kind of nice, we found some good people <3 /p ]

There was one channel we really enjoyed watching and they had their own server

Said server was multipurpose, for alterhumans and systems if I remember correctly

Since we were introduced to the concept of being a system we did some research and found that, yeah that sounds like me

Only problem was we didn't accept it because the server we joined was anti-endo and we were very sure we did not have enough trauma to be a system

This definitely halted our syscovery because we solidified the idea that endogenic systems were harmful and if we identified that way we would be harmful

3 ☆* This is about where we are now! This part happened very very slowly but whatever

On our old blog that we no longer use we ended up following a good handful of plural people. It was likely we followed them because we have similar interests and/or they were alterhumans

This made us research the concept of systems again. We still denied it, we hadn't met any endogenic systems yet

There was a point where we started using we/our on our old blog and we kind of panicked in our intro post saying something like "I might use we/our sometimes but I'm not a system!!!"

[ Well.. as it turns out we are soooo ]

Eventually we found the pro-endo spaces. We slowly but surely accepted we were plural and left our old blog [ our boundaries weren't upheld there, we needed a new start. With new boundaries and new identities ]

So yeah, long winded explanation but it kind of happened in three parts

:]

Thanks for the question, it honestly helps us to understand what even happened in our past. Provides a good archive for newer or more confused headmates :D

[dolleriumfluffle]

Daydreams, Ghosts, and Plurality - Experiences of a Dreamway System

I think, in writing this, our goal is just to give a glimpse into our personal experience with identifying as dreamway, and how deep of an impact being neuronarrative has on our plurality. We saw a post about someone wanting more plurals to just write about experiences - so, here's some of ours, to share about ourselves, to ramble, and in hopes that someone might connect.

Our first ever signs of plurality as a child were through daydreams.

For as long as we can possibly remember, we've been traveling. Even as a very young child we lived a constant life of daydreams, of worlds we could disappear into in our head - and, more importantly, the people we met in them. Some of them were fictional; the fairies of the Pixie Hollow movies and the cures from the existing Pretty Cure seasons, both things we grew up with and deeply loved. These were perhaps our first experiences of walk-ins, as they would appear in and leave our daydream worlds as they pleased. Others were self-made, and would continue to appear with us until we had our first syscovery - a grey kitsune and an angel, who would protect and care for us on our journeys.

Our daydreams have always had a spiritual component, one that we would never really understand until we became an adult and learned about astral travel. We continually had spiritual beings appear to us in our daydreams, such as yokai like the kitsune and fae-like beings - and, most concerningly to others, dead relatives of ours and friends. We once told a schoolmate in elementary school that we had seen her grandma who passed away a few years prior. Her deeply superstitious mother proceeded to tell our poor aunt that she believed we were cursed.

We used to journal to each other as a child, writing to each other by name and creating journal entries in the form of letters. People, including us, dismissed it as an overactive imagination. However, it felt so fulfilling to us to write about our day and know that somehow, the people in our daydreams would see it, and sometimes even write back.

As we got into our teenage years, we began to be aware of these daydream characters as more than just daydreams - they were alive, they existed separately and had their own thoughts and feelings. We confessed to an online friend at the time that we had "people in my head" that lived in "my own world", which would eventually lead to our first syscovery. This initial group is who we sometimes call "the original 12" - a series of 12 system members who have been around since we were very young, appearing as daydreams until we realized who we really were.

We were very confused about our origins at first. We hung out in tulpamancy groups for a brief time, wondering if this was maybe how we had come about. However, we soon realized it just didn't resonate, so we moved on to some general endogenic groups and forums. We really appreciate the people we met during this time, who were kind to us in a period where we really had no idea what was happening with us.

Having a headspace always came very naturally to us. We never really understood how to describe creating and interacting with one, because to us we had always been daydreaming about ours. It was an incredibly in depth other world with its own rules, its own people, its own life. Even before we knew the extent of it, daydreaming had a huge impact on how we interacted with each other and how we navigated our own plurality.

After some very stressful life events, the coming awareness of our amnesia, and a while with a good therapist, we were diagnosed with HC-DID.

This led to a long period of self hatred and fear, where we were less sure than before about our life and each other. Thankfully, with the help of therapy and finally having a good support system, we were able to recover from this part of our journey. However, even after this we still had a strong sense that there was more to our origins.

This was when we discovered the term dreamway and the origin paragenic, which hadn't yet been coined when we had our first syscovery. Suddenly, everything made sense! There were people like us! Our daydreams, paracosms, and paras were an essential part of our system, and this was a known experience.

We're extremely grateful for that discovery. Our paracosms are an inherent part of our headspace - many of our introjects used to be para versions of fictional characters. We are able to travel freely between them, continually encountering new people, new worlds, new lives. There is a strange spiritual component to them; we've often heard people say that "paras usually know they're in a daydream," and this isn't true for us. They exist autonomously of our daydreams about them, almost as if they really are in another world, unless they get pulled into the main system and gain awareness of it. Similarly, we can use our headspace for spiritual means, using daydreams and astral travel to encounter entities of all kinds.

We feel greatly at peace with ourselves having discovered daydreams and connected spirituality as an essential part of our system and its origins. There is a lot of joy to us in being mixed origin - in knowing that even there our initial splits were due to programming, there is so much more to us, so much that has in fact helped us cope and stick together since that initial split.

At the end of the day, we want people to know that being mixed origin can be amazing, and can be an essential tool to a system's growth. We hope maybe other neuronarrator plurals or plurals with MaDD may see this and relate, and also we just want to spread more posts about joyful in depth system experiences. Thank you for reading!

[in-mutual-weirdness]

On Dating My Partners

Here is a personal essay on being in a singlet-plural relationship, originally posted on cohost (RIP) and subsequently onto dreamwidth as well. Enough people liked it both times that I'm sharing it here as well.

So, dating and plurality are topics that get covered a fair bit online, when you know the right places to look. Tumblr's got a not-insignificant corner, even if I don't go looking for it. Unfortunately, the broader public not knowing a ton about plurality also means that there's a lot of facets of my relationships that I don't really get to share or talk about. I had a handful of opportunities to write about it recently, so now I'm making a big ol' post about it here. In case it helps people learn, or understand something a little better, or maybe gives some folks an idea of what their lives could look like.

Also! If you want to hear more about dating from plural folks themselves, I'd recommend you check out the work of LB Lee (on dreamwidth and itch.io), and the many videos available on the plural events youtube channel, the archive for the Plural Positivity World Conference. There are other written accounts on people's personal blogs and youtube channels, but these are the ones I personally go back to often.

--- 2 Girlfriends, 1 Butch, and Assorted Roommates in a Trench Coat My partner(s) and I started dating when we both thought we were cisgender. We'd figured out our respective flavors of queer, more or less, but transness was something that emerged over the course of our relationship together. There's nothing quite as fun as t4t high-fiving on the escalators as you swap places in the gender binary.

Of course, even with our established baseline of queerness (and even after my partner had already spoken to me about being nonbinary), I was nervous coming out to them at the time. It's a big deal after all, to tell your partner that you're not the person who you (or they) thought you were. In a lot of ways transness is an unfurling of what was already there, and a partner who is flexible and compatible enough will be able to accept this change as who you are, and keep growing alongside you. But also. How do you know if the person you are going to become is someone who will be compatible with them, or if they will stay compatible with you?

All this to say, I think in a very real way, our existing experience with coming out and transitioning in the context of a relationship prepared us both to better handle the syscovery when it happened.

I'm not gonna like, go into it in a lot of detail. That's really not my story to tell. I will say that I owe a lot to the educational and outreach efforts of folks who were already out and plural, from the 20-teens onward. My partnersys sorted their selves-discovery out with the help of some close plural friends and many good written resources around plurality, questioning, and figuring things out. Meanwhile I'd also benefited from casual internet friendships with both that same system and other systems who I'd met among other internet communities. As many of y'all already know, few things help better than simply getting to know people from the identity/affinity group and these folks becoming part of your normal. And several of them helped me way at the beginning when all of this was new and a little confusing and scary because it was new and not yet known or predictable.

Eventually, people in the system started taking on names, and figuring themselves out as individuals. And that's when I started getting to know them as them and not just as the gestalt single person I'd known up until then. And being able to do that has been one of the best parts of my relationship.

One of the major, baseline requirements toward respecting plurality is being able to treat different system members as independent autonomous people. Yeah, they're a collective in the sense of being all in the same body, and there's gonna be a degree of memory & knowledge sharing depending on the system in question. But like, they're still separate entities from each other, which means you gotta forge a relationship with each of them as individuals. What was once a relationship with a single person now is a multifaceted web across multiple people, with different comfort levels, boundaries, and personal tastes. That was the first major piece of advice I got, when I binged through a DID youtuber's channel[1], and watched the video their partner made.

In his case, he spoke about how his partner was Jess, the system host (not all systems have one, but this one did). The other system members were all distinct people who he forged unique relationships with. Some of them were still interested in physical affection/intimacy, while others weren’t, and they were simply roommates/friends. Even though they weren't all dating, however, he saw forming a relationship with them and getting to know them as an essential part of his relationship with Jess, and part of his duty as a partner. These were important people in her life, after all, and at minimum he didn't want to be an asshole. So he spent time with all of them, talked to them about their interests, and did stuff they liked together. No matter who was out, he respected them as a person, respected their autonomy and their boundaries when they differed from his partner’s, and didn’t treat them as peripheral or disposable, or do things like ask them to bring his partner back out, please. (Fewer ways to make someone feel unwanted than to directly ask them to get someone else instead. They have a place in this body and in this world as much as anyone else in the system does.)

Some systems do date as a collective, where every member participates in the romantic relationship. My partnersys does not, however, so our relationship is much more like the one from the youtube channel. Three of the most common fronters are my partners (the aforementioned two gfs and one butch [Edit: at time of this repost, we're now married]). The rest of the system members are either close friends, or similarly are people I care about because of their connection to the system and my partners. If they don't show up externally often, I may not be very close to them, but like. They're still people in my family unit and household.

All of us are tied by our mutual connections to the members I am dating, and our lives intersect closely due to us living together and all the system members sharing a body. Not all of the system members share romantic love with me, whether due to incompatibility, personal disinterest, or stuff like "being 12 years old". To a degree, I was already used to dealing with these sorts of incompatibilities or drastic changes in boundaries - they just used to manifest as shutdowns where my partner would suddenly withdraw from affection and not want to be touched. Some of that was more typical "I feel like shit and don't want to be touched", but some of that was also people with very different boundaries sharing a body in an atmosphere where they were socially expected to be available and receptive to touch at all times, and failing to do so was a mark against them as a Good Partner. (Even if I knew to respect sudden withdrawals, none of us are immune to societal messaging.) If anything, knowing what's behind it has made it much easier to accommodate and meet everyone's differing needs. It's made me better at being a truly safe person to be around, because I know they're there and can respond accordingly.

It is nice being able to date my 3 partners. In the same way that transness is an uncovering of what was there, I recognize aspects of each of the system members in ways they acted before discovering plurality. We have the many years of previous relationship history to build from, but it is a joyful thing to get to learn each of them as themselves. The things they like, the specific dynamics we build between each other, the ways they understand themselves and their relationships. All 3 of them are therian and bring those aspects of their identity into their relationships as well (i.e. ways they like to give/receive affection, ways they structure their relationships. The wolf has his pack, and one of the dragons has her hoard - each valued, unique, but never given primacy or ownership over her. I will be her husband, but she won't be my wife.) Getting to know them means each of them get to be loved as themselves, and like. Yeah, I am loved many times over because there are more of them. I love the cheerful energetic affection of Quinn, the gruff protective masculinity of Ace, the devastating femme elegance of Orchid. Each of them show up so differently even within the same body - in language, in voice, in mannerisms. I love how each of them love me in different ways, and how that feeds different facets of me. I love being shared by them, and the ways they'll tease me about each other. I love the act of caring for each other, and the ways those make our collective lives better because their needs are being met.[2] I love the ways that these have all added to my life.

--- Intersections with Polyamory: or, Sharing the Trenchcoat On top of me having this web of relationships, each of them also have their own partnerships with others. Some of these are spread across multiple bodies, and some of these are other folks within a single system. I make the distinction because sharing a body and therefore having to share consciousness and control of said body imposes some practical limitations on your daily life.

For one thing, you straight up cannot control who's at the wheel at any given time. Some systems have no control over switching, but even those who can control switching and consciously hand off front time to each other don't always have that control. Sometimes people might white-knuckle from stress and get stuck in front, to the point that even if they try to let someone else show up, they'll resurface by accident. Sometimes people run out of steam sooner than expected, or are struggling with something that makes being present too painful, and have to hand it off to someone else. Others might spontaneously show up because something has pulled them to front, or they get so excited they barge past everyone else.[3] They might be one of your partners, they might be someone else. It means that even if you're dating multiple people and hold them in equal esteem, you won't always get to spend as much time with them as you want. Or they might want to spend part of their limited slice of front time talking to other people, who they also have relationships and obligations to. Time is still a very present constraint, when the same 24 hrs and limited physical energy must be shared across multiple people.

Even if you can request people to get someone else...well, see what me and that other partner said in the previous section. That is not a request that can be made lightly, if you value everyone's autonomy. If you make someone feel unwanted, or disrespected, or less important/real than the others, you are Being A Dick. And that unequal treatment causes internal conflict for the system. Simply from a pragmatic point, you make shit worse for your partner if you cannot be nice to the people sharing their head.

In terms of how that impacts relationships and communication, for me it means having to save shit for the next time they're around. If I want to talk to Ace about a book we both read, I gotta wait til he's around. If I found some cute gay art for Quinn, I save it if she's out of town, so to speak. Yeah, if I post the link in our DMs, she'll be able to see it eventually, but I can't just keep spamming Quinn-links into the channel when someone else is there. It gets tiresome for them, especially if their interests don't overlap.

Their level of internal communication means that I can mention stuff to others and they can usually pass it on, or have a solid guess on what that person's response would be. For example, when I wrote a book review post and talked about reading it with Zanj (one of the "roommate" suite), I sent that passage to Quinn for a onceover before hitting post. Zanj eventually also showed up to comment directly (another reason to be careful with direct communication - you may unseat the current person in front if the person you've summoned crowds them out). For bigger things, like taking on a roommate or making travel plans, or anything that needs direct input from everyone, you do just gotta wait. The opinion of one person won't necessarily reflect the opinion of another, and while they can discuss stuff internally to reach a collective decision, that shit also takes time. Some folks may be difficult to reach, or they may need to resolve an impasse first.

Sharing the trenchcoat here also refers to the complications of dating multiple people in the same body. It is important that you not forget who they are. I've had moments where one person was out more consistently for a very long stretch of time, and when a different partner was out for a while, I treated them like the first person out of habit - got surprised by something the second partner did differently, or when they expressed an interest that the first partner didn't have. If you can see how that would be frustrating or hurtful to people who didn't share a body - congratulations. You now know exactly why that felt shitty for the second partner.

It is also important that you share independent time with each person. Yes, they have collective memory, so a date night I enjoyed with Ace is something that all three of them can remember (and I'm pretty sure Quinn stole his leftovers the next day for lunch). But like. This follows once again from the basic principle of "they are independent autonomous people." They will want different things. One may enjoy much more casual intimate touch, another may be asexual and disinterested in that kind of touch. The ways you banter with each other or spend your time together will be different. And like, shared memory doesn't mean they will feel the same immediacy to that memory - memories Belong to the person they happened to, even if you share the same brain. Quinn and Orchid know about the date, but they don't feel connected to the memory in the same way because it happened to someone else. If I want to date them, I have to date them. Otherwise all I'm giving them is secondhand affection and care. Not a great way to prove that you care about and value them as a person.

At the same time, this relationship arrangement is also different from previous poly arrangements I've had with people across multiple bodies. It's certainly cheaper to find shared housing with three partners if they're all in the same meatsuit. I don't have to navigate travel or scheduling in the same way - they handle the sharing of time among themselves, according to ability and circumstance. I just wake up and see who's around that day. And even if they're not in front, they can still be around. I have physical tokens and reminders around - a plushie they like, or a necklace they own. I already liked keeping orchid flowers in the house for personal and cultural reasons - now I have one more. The person who's in front may also pass on commentary or reactions, and I briefly get to glimpse them from their life inside. They all have a shared collective history, and we draw from the same 8-year accumulated bank of in-jokes and shared language. They rotate in and out of my daily life with ease, immediacy, and fluidity. It was different from the much slower work of building from scratch with someone entirely new. But it is nice to do that work as well. There is a different kind of novelty in getting to know someone with an entirely different life history, or physical body. This doesn't diminish the value of my partners, or make them less real as individuals. Just a difference in circumstances.

--- Why write this post? Plurality is pretty damn normalized in a fair few corners of the internet. I can track my arc of education and acclimation from stigma to familiarity. But that didn't mean I was prepared for it to enter my life in this way. It's been a net good, but a lot of it was stumbling through a significant period of uncertainty and having to figure shit out as we went. Some of that is unavoidable, because paradigm shifts are kind of just like that. My partners couldn't tell me shit they hadn't figured out yet, and they had to establish their own baselines first before we could reach a point of stability. I think about transition and relationships, and the difference between partnerships that do or don't survive a gender transition. It's no mistake that as more people become familiar with transness, there are more relationships that survive intact. Sometimes people change in a way that does make them incompatible, and that's always a possibility even with partners who do understand and support you. I would be lying if I said that all of this was easy, or that it didn't require a lot of effort and patience along the way. And sometimes that is a source of incompatibility as well.[4]

But also I don't think it takes a saint to date a plural person, anymore than it takes a saint to date a trans person, or a disabled person, or to date interracially. The partner from the youtube channel knew very little about DID when he first started dating his partner as a teen. But his reaction to hearing her say there were other people in her head was to go, "okay, so when can I meet them?" Stigma and oppression make things harder, by exerting pressure on relationships and priming people toward suspicion, scorn, and fear, instead of the curiosity and open-mindedness necessary to support you as partners. It is scarier to face down a paradigm shift in your relationship if you have no understanding, or a misinformed understanding of what that change will entail. I think about "trans widows" who see their exes' transitions as harm done to them, or see their exes as fundamentally dishonest or deceitful people. I think about common public perception of plurality, and the ableism bound up in it. I think about what I might have done with my fear and confusion, had I not found safe and reliable sources of information, had I not already been cross-trained through my immersion in transness, had I not had safe avenues to process and handle those raw feelings without dumping them onto my partner(s). I think about what would've happened to my partner(s), had their selves-actualization come at the cost of a foundational relationship they'd built their existing life around. There is a world where this went much, much worse. I know the outcome we got is not something that everyone gets, and christ but I want to make that a little more common. I want to help even one person get a better outcome. So here's my amateur roundup of things you need to know, if a partner comes out as plural.

Don't panic. It may introduce a lot of new problems or factors you don't know how to deal with yet. But you can and will learn. People have done this before, and will be able to tell you how to do it. You just have to find the people and places to ask.

Be supportive. Selves-discovery is a complicated and scary process. They're gonna be uncovering a lot and learning a lot of necessary skills on the fly. And you, as an established stabilizing presence in their lives, will be an important source of support through this process. Be ready to listen to them, no matter how strange or contradictory the things they're saying might sound. They may describe things that sound physically impossible, like phantom limbs, or having teleported into the body from somewhere else, or feeling like they're a different age, ethnicity, or species from the body. They may vacillate between believing they're plural or thinking they're a fraud and it's all fake. Believe them about what is true for them in that moment. Brain stuff is weird and symbolically driven - your perception, especially if it's persistent, is real enough to directly impact you, and flat disavowal doesn't make the impact or perception go away. You have to respond to the impact, and do what makes your life easier to live. Even in a case of clear-cut denial, when you see pretty clear evidence of plurality, you have to meet the denier where they're at. Otherwise you'll piss them off or make them feel unheard.

Be a safe person. If they ask you to keep their confidence, keep it. If someone new shows up and they're really scared/confused/sad/angry, help them de-escalate. They may not know who you are, or who/where they are, and need grounding. Find out how they're feeling, and what they need, and help them get it if possible. You may need to use the dementia toolkit (i.e. if they ask for something that isn't possible/safe, like "going home" to a place that no longer exists). Try to meet the need that's driving the request, whether that's feeling safe, or having autonomy, or wanting something familiar. I've sent scared kids off to work with a childhood stuffed animal, and while that didn't fix everything, it did help them calm down enough for an adult member to take the helm.

Give your partner space to discover things. This is the most important lesson I learned from transness in relationships. Open a trans subreddit or online community space and you will find stories aplenty of partners who tried to bargain folks out of their identity, or who imposed their desires over a trans person's exploration and self-definition. The same thing applies here. I kept my theories and thoughts to myself unless I was prompted. I let them tell me who they were, and asked questions about things I was curious about so I could learn more. And I also gave them space to be uncertain, so they could figure things out at their own pace instead of being forced to provide false reassurance or certainty. If they changed their name and pronouns, if they wanted to start presenting differently then they had before, I didn't get in their way. It will be new and will take some getting used to, but the principle is similar to transness. Here are people who have never gotten to develop an independent identity. You gotta let them do it. They will be happier this way.

Build your own support network and knowledge base. This may be difficult if you don't have many people in your life who know about plurality. My partner(s)' syscovery was also the creation of a new closet to maintain, and I needed safe outlets to handle my stress and uncertainty. For the latter, this meant turning to youtube and educational resources to learn things and dispel uncertainties. For the former, this meant hitting up online community spaces which had no connection to my partner(s) and asking folks who were knowledgeable about plurality to help me out. I could be scared, or frustrated, or messy, and return to my partner(s) after releasing that shit so it didn't drive my behavior toward them. You may also end up turning to loads of different people for their experience in completely unrelated things - an AAC user friend helped me a lot with supporting a system member who didn't talk out loud. You truly don't know what new experiences or identity axes each system member will fall along.

Respect everyone in the system. This includes angry or self-destructive folks. They may show up and try to sabotage shit, or say really angry and hateful things toward you or your partner. You don't have to lie down and take it, but you do have to remember that they're still part of the system, and they may likely be a permanent resident. They're also caught up in a situation they cannot control, with people they have to share a brain and body with, and cannot reasonably make any distance from. It would be surprising if no one flipped their lid from time to time. Try to establish trust and understanding - show them that you're willing to respect and listen to them. That is a much better basis for establishing improved relationships once they calm down, and are given the choice to cooperate with the collective.

I hope this was helpful, and thank you for reading. When I originally posted it on cohost, I'd intended it mostly as a chance to talk about my relationships and as an educational guide for singlets. What followed was a lowkey overwhelming amount of positive reception from plural folks, and I'm kind of jazzed as hell that I could write something like this well enough that many of y'all liked it too. So thanks for your cosign, I'm glad I could make something useful and good. Also! I would love to hear from others about their relationships. A lot of this stuff is individual, and I wasn't able to articulate some of the major points from here until coming across folks who experienced it differently. And it is nice hearing people talk about their relationships, and to swap stories with each other. ----------

[1]: For those curious, it was MultiplicityandMe. Very much a textbook DID system, and while I had to move past the DID framework into other forms of plurality (which can function in very different ways), their videos helped me a lot during the early syscovery days. Coincidentally, they achieved their final fusion goal right as I started watching them. [2]: One of the fun ones is that Ace is chronically sleepy as hell, due to being really badly understimulated. He needs a lot of physical activity, so recently I've started just fucking wrestling with him whenever he shows up. It is like night and day, how much happier and energetic he gets afterward. And even though I can't actually beat him, or get tired before he does, it's still just Fun to do. At the old apartment, he'd also sometimes just fuck off for an hour long walk, to basically the same effect. [3]: A particularly affectionate member once had to be "picked up like a puppy dog and dragged 10 ft back" after they stole someone else's designated cuddle time. It was extremely endearing [4]: I knew folks who broke up with partners because their exes couldn't adequately handle their mental health challenges. If you have frequent panic attacks, and your partner tends to spiral out instead of being able to calm you down, that's a major incompatibility even if this person is otherwise perfectly lovely

[convoy-system]

talking about my origins today and the journey ive gone on with them because its been rather winding:

so, i discovered my system in august of 2021. i dont have much record of what labels i used for the first few months of syscovery, but in november 2021 i made my first ever tumblr blog. this blog actually still exists, and i recently refound it! sadly i dont have access to it anymore, thatd be cool.

on that blog from november to december 2021, i mainly used the labels of traumaendo and (this one is so silly) OSDD 2. SAS actually corrected me at the time on using OSDD 2 as a system label, but i think i ignored the correction because i was 15 and didnt know what i was talking about lol.

that blog got abandoned sometime in december of 2021, because i ended up joining a DID/OSDD amino. that amino was anti endo, but it was the only active DID amino at the time, so i joined and opted out of mentioning that i was pro endo. after a few months in that amino, i actually did become anti endo. hearing the rhetoric day-in day-out from people i was becoming friends with eventually wore me down, and i adopted the anti endo label.

i spent 2, maybe almost 3 years on that amino. thats a story for another day, but during that time i stuck with the OSDD1b label for my system origin. i didnt think my amnesia was severe enough to be DID.

i believe towards the end of my time on the amino, or maybe slightly after, i finally started using the label DID when i was around 16. id spent a few years fairly convinced i had hundreds of alters, so at some point i also started calling myself polyfragmented. i later discovered that i was mislabelling my alters over and over again, creating dozens of duplicate profiles for the same alters because i was trying too hard to box in their traits perfectly instead of letting them be fluid and multifaceted.

towards the tail end of 2023, i actually had a period of questioning if i was a programmed system. this came from a bad combo of me having severe paranoia episodes, and some friends i had at the time who were programmed and tried to convince me i was too. the questioning stopped when i stopped having those paranoia episodes, and i was able to see myself more clearly again.

at the start of 2024, i went through a big life change (/neg) and i was off the internet for a month or two, against my will. i had no distractions from what was happening to me irl, so i spent a lot of time sitting with myself and thinking. that was when i started noticing the duplicate alter profiles and i started the process of narrowing down which of my alters were really there, and which profiles were mislabels on my part. after id figured out i was comprised of maybe a dozen alters, probably less, i dropped the polyfrag label and went back to just DID.

fast forward to a few months ago, and i have my big "it clicked" moment where i become pro endo again. now that other origin labels besides traumagenic were on the table of possibilities, i started researching them and wondering if i was mixed origins. this mainly came from me having started out calling myself traumaendo, and wondering if there was any truth to it. i started using multiple origin labels, including one i coined, but after a while i started feeling like it was inaccurate.

i finished my alter split timeline, which really helped me iron out when and why each of my alters had formed. doing that was the thing that made me realize the origins labels i was using werent as accurate as id thought they were, and once again i found myself at the DID label.

thats where im at now. im fairly confident my origins are fully traumagenic and that i have DID. could that conclusion change in the future? sure, possibly. i dont want to close the door to change out of fear of looking inconsistant.

- zain

[sophieinwonderland]

Sophie! We got some more plural headcannon!

Disney's Dreamlight Valley is a story of a fictive heavy P-DID system going through a syscovery and exploring their headspace while working through some of their trauma and amnesia.

Idk where this verges into spoiler territory, so I'll just preempt this with "Spoilers ahead"

Okay so, this life sim game starts off with the classic "You quit your job and go off to live a simpler life." You find a place you used to daydream in your childhood and get transported to the titular Dreamlight Valley.

The place is in shambles because of The Forgetting that has caused everyone to struggle with memory issues and cut off various locations and characters. It's revealed in relatively short order that you used to spend a lot of time here with all of these disney characters. You uncover memories as you do stuff to help these folks out.

Eventually the villain shows up known as the Forgotten who's eventually revealed to be your "inner child" and otherwise described as a part or version of yourself. Eventually you free them from the dark place where they're trapped through things like, reliving the Forgotten's memories, and showing them that they are loved, accepted, and safe.

So like, it strikes us as immediately plural coded. Obviously the protag and the Forgotten are plural, being split from each other (bonus points that they don't make you and the Forgotten fuse/merge/integrate). The Valley strikes us as their headspace. The protag goes through a major life change, which, can be a trigger for overt symptoms of DID in adulthood. And of course, all of the themes around amnesia and memories fit right in.

More speculatively, the various disney characters are non-fronting fictives. Interestingly, these characters eventually remember spending time with the protagonist as a child, or to have been around before the Forgetting (implied to happen years ago). However, one of these characters is Moana who's movie was in 2016 and Mirabel from 2021's Encanto. Which reminds us of a phenomenon of fictives existing in their systems before prior to the discovery or even creation of their source.

I'm sure that there's more we could go into, but those are the most solid points we can think of at the moment.

Anyways, good job Disney for accidentally making a great little plural video game. Or hey, maybe it wasn't an accident. This game hit our little pretty hard right in the feels regarding our own trauma so like, maybe this was all intentional!

This sounds so fascinating! Thanks for the description! 💖

I'm surprised to hear something with lore this deep coming from what amounts to a Disney lifesim!

[77ngiez-archive]

transmasc hajime is powerful but not as powerful as transfem izuru.

[the-indigo-symphony]

One common sentiment we had before our syscovery was "Why can't I make myself do x faster?!", because some of our headmates are just really fast at certain activities and when they weren't fronting, the change in speed was noticeable (plus, dissociation can make it hard to process things at the actual speed at which they're happening, so things felt slower than they actually were sometimes). It was a very frustrating sentiment, to be sure – nobody likes to feel like they're falling behind or becoming worse at something (so far as slowing down can be considered "becoming worse"), which was something both fronting and those in co-con went through, but also, we have the slightest suspicion that this may have been one of those pre-syscovery situations where our internal communication actually worked... What an experience, to get yelled at by your own brain because you're not chewing your food fast enough. Patience, brain. The food will get in the mouth hole eventually.

[the-indigo-symphony]

Depending on which sidesystem and headmate you ask, we've had a couple different syscoveries, but I'll talk about the biggest one that eventually led to us exploring system spaces as a system (as opposed to a system that presented and acted as a singlet).

So, there's two sides to this story – Side A, and Side B. Side A leads into Side B, so I'll start there.

So for a long time, we masked our switching and pretended to be one person with one consistent personality. Jay started to notice that the way we acted sometimes wasn't exactly like how he acted – rather, it was like someone else was imitating him. Through investigating (not sure how, he always leaves it vague), he discovered CJay, the one who was imitating him, and then a few others over time. We already knew about systems at the time, so they came to the conclusion that we were one, and set about working on an innerworld and improving communication.

Enter Side B, which focuses on our former host, Nicky. Now, the exact sequence of events is a little jumbled, but what we know definitely happened first is this: Jay popped into the front one day and started talking to Nicky about... fruit snacks, of all things. Nicky didn't notice anything was off, at first, but once the topic of conversation was over and they noticed "that voice" was very distinct from them, they panicked.

We don't remember the order of what happened next. Our best guess is this:

Nicky went into denial, and CJay tried to break that denial by forcing a switch. This did not work and only resulted in an anxiety attack when Nicky found themself suddenly not in control of their body.

We reached out to another system we knew, who did their best to teach us some methods of communication. It helped a lot, but Nicky was still swinging wildly between denial and belief in the system.

The swinging continued for a few months until a trip where Nicky woke up with someone else fronting, and the two had a conversation about everything. We chose our Syscovery Day (the day we celebrate discovering we're a system) based on this trip.

Nicky worked on their denial (although they still had periods of it for months afterwards) and we improved our understanding of and communication throughout our system.

If you go back to the very beginning of this blog, you can see some of our posts from when we were just beginning to understand our system. Though, I don't expect you to do that just for a fanfiction, of course! This is the basic story, and there's really not much else (at least, that we remember or want to share).

Hope this helps you, OP! I'd be interested in reading your work once you've published it!

How did you find out that you were plural? We're writing a story on Wattpad which has several plural characters and want to include many ways. Stories welcome from all origins and it doesn't matter if you're disordered or Nondisordered

~~This post is safe for all origins~~

[ablednt]

Did you ever get any tips on leaving front for a frontstuck host? I’m still struggling with that

A few people tried to help/pos but unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be many alternate methods out there. We've been looking into this pretty intensely since our syscovery but as far as we can tell everyone either just stumbles into something that works and can't explain it after the fact or their member wasn't especially front stuck they just needed to learn how to switch out in the first place.

The main methods all use some form of visualization (imagining a door and leaving front with it, imagining control of the body as an object and passing that to someone else) these methods are entirely abstract and serve no purpose other than to give the brain some signal to let the switch take place. They very rarely work for frontstuck members.

A few more direct methods include using the opposite of grounding techniques to loosen your control of the body and having someone near the front switch in. This is a lot easier to replicate because it's a physical process however it makes the assumption that your system will switch you out once your headmate switches in rather than just forcing you into cocon instead.

The closest I've gotten to switching out was around the time of my syscovery I was told at night before I went to sleep to mentally will myself in world to see if anything was there and that I'd most likely see a house of some kind eventually. I was able to hear the in world physically (but the sound was garbled) and i had an in world body lying on the ground according to verdict but I couldn't move or see anything. I've tried replicating this since but I haven't gotten very far with it.

The problem with being frontstuck is that it's a problem created entirely by your own brain and what your brain will respond to is going to be something specific. I know more or less what steps we need to take but not what those steps are for my brain but basically you need to:

1. Figure out why you're frontstuck. There's a reason your brain defaults to having you here and to override that you're going to need to figure out what that reason is. For me my best guess is that the brain realized we needed to be singlet passing and needed to have someone consistently up front to lessen our amnesia. This no longer benefits us though so I am unsure if there's other reasons the brain is stuck on me or if it's just maladaptive.

2. Alleviate, overwrite, or otherwise solve whatever the issue is so that your switching out is working with your brain and not against it.

3. Work on your confidence and self esteem. When you're frontstuck long enough, especially if you've never been in world/had the experiences your headmates have had, you start to feel really insecure about it and like it's an impossibility. I often feel like I'm fighting a losing battle because the more I try to get in world the more a part of me accepts that it's never going to happen and that acceptance is killing any motivation I have to try and not making me feel better about anything. This is in itself an obstacle that needs to be dealt with, not only does your brain need to be willing to switch you out but you need to allow yourself to do so as well.

I'm going to do a bit more research soon if I can because I may have heard of some new approaches but I'm not sure. If I figure out anything that especially works though I'll let you know.

[gracien-system]

Greetings. 1 and 8 for the ask game? Have a good [time of the day]! :>

Thanks for the ask!

1- Gods, that would need to be external relations. Specifically those of us who have a strong fawn response vs those of us who don't. Aka "no don't cut this person who hurt us off--" or similar

8- very... fast. Although it was split into two parts, the 2019 syscovery and the 2021 one. The 2019 syscovery happened late 2019, and we had exactly 0 resources to go off of... and managed to hit all of the boxes for headspace, plurality, and a few other things. We also got communication handled, at least pretty well. Then we fell into denial after a host switch, and in 2021, when we discovered the plural community was a thing, well

things moved very, very fast.

Thanks to the work done in 2019.

It wasn't painless not by a longshot (ever hear the phrase "curiosity killed the cat"? Most of us are catfolk, and our old headspace had the void right below the ground. Guess how many times Naomi dived in to see what it could find. Hint: it's more than once.)

But we did eventually figure out what the hell we were doing, so that's a plus.

[the-indigo-symphony]

Ask Game!

2. What are everyone's fashion tastes?

4. Who has the weirdest music taste?

8. What was the discovery process like for you (only if comfortable)?

13. Who's the most outdoorsy, if anyone? Who likes to stay inside the most, if anyone? 

-Petrichor/Telmar/Mhedaeve

Thanks for the ask!!

2. What are everyone's fashion tastes?

Well, overall we try to keep to casual fashion for day-to-day life, but if we had the opportunity to branch out to individual fashion tastes, we definitely would. There's those like Tana and Kyou who prefer a more punkish fashion, those like Apollo who prefer a more formal look, those like Tempo who would probably wear cloaks if he could, those like Nicky who really like lolita style... We're all over the place, lol.

4. Who has the weirdest music taste?

Honestly, we're not sure. But among those in front, we're voting Tana because he likes this one pop song that the rest of us are kind of "meh" about.

8. What was the discovery process like for you (only if comfortable)?

We're gonna give the same disclaimer we always try to give when talking about our syscovery: the story of how we found out about being a system will vary depending on who you ask. It was not a one-and-done deal; with many sidesystems and so many members, we all have our own story of finding out we're a system, from simply being told and accepting it to being in agonized denial for months. Some of us are still in the dark. That said, here's a simplified version of the tale we usually tell:

Before we knew much of anything about plurality, Jay figured out that he wasn't alone in the body, and that someone else was trying to mimic how he acted. That person was Charles, aka CJay, and together they started to piece together that we were a system. From there, they reached out to others in the system, oversaw the construction of an innerworld, and eventually decided to reveal everything they knew to our host at the time.

It... didn't go very well. They freaked out over it and struggled with off-and-on denial for months, during which time we found we were wrong about a lot of initial guesses about our system. I mean, wow, it's a lot bigger than we thought it was, for one. But they eventually came to accept it, we worked some things out in the process, and even marked off a day where we began being open as a (questioning) system as our "Syscovery Anniversary."

This is the syscovery story of the Gift Basket Sidesystem. Other sidesystems have their own stories... I think the Partridge Sidesystem figured it out due to some train shenanigans? I'm not sure how it happened, despite them trying to tell the tale once... All we're sure of is that they knew before the Gift Basket did. And as for Camp Festival, they found out when one of their members came to the front for the first time! So, there you have it.

13. Who's the most outdoorsy, if anyone? Who likes to stay inside the most, if anyone? 

Hm... Good question. Daylily might be our most outdoorsy member. Or perhaps Quandary. I think a lot of us would like to spend more time in nature, to be honest, but we don't have a lot of options where we live. Most of us just stay inside, whether at our house or on an outing.