Happy New Year

It hasn’t exactly been “a year” since discovering I wasn’t alone in our brain, but the new year is a good excuse look back at how far we’ve come together, and where we expect to go from here. 9 months is not nothing, but there certainly are some things we haven’t figured out yet.

First, though, I’m proud of us for getting where we are today. Amy and I got along from the start and were happy to work together on anything we needed, and I’m grateful for how easy that’s made a lot of things. Not trivial, certainly, but we’ve certainly become better at communicating than we were at the very beginning. We’ve fallen into a nice routine, and we’re both really happy with the day-to-day. It’s been really, really nice.

It’s not just the two of us, of course. But Deca is easy to please. He’s a rare front, certainly, but he’s never minded. Sometimes Amy and I do worry about him but every chance they’ve had, they’ve insisted that everything’s chill. We’ve both had to try to stop projecting our own feelings onto him. I don’t think I’d be happy with his arrangement, but Deca is perfectly content, so I’m happy for him.

Over the course of the year, we did let more and more people know about us. It started with just our friends on fedi, which was definitely the most people at once but it was also the least scary. There were already plenty of systems in our circles on there, so we knew how Amy would be recieved when she showed up. The warm welcomes to both her and Deca were pretty much expected, but not any less nice. I’ve been really, really happy to see both of them go out and make friends there. Scarier than that was letting friends from our offline circles know. Exactly how well that went varied, but it was never bad. It’s nice for both of us to not have to hide that kind of thing when we’re with them. Amy and I even managed a cofront when going to see a concert with a couple friends, where I tried to take the backseat as much as possible. Amy hanging out in person with people I’ve known forever was really sweet to see.

On top of that, we’ve also been dropping little hints here and there in other online communities. How little they are depends, but we’ve gotten nice messages from people who picked up on them. By far the most blatant is that we’ve been dabbling in US newspaper-style crossword construction, and… talking about this at all is already a pretty huge spoiler for one of them, but if you want to check out what I’m referring to, it’s the second puzzle listed on this page. Good luck :3

Overall, 2023 was good for us. We do have some things to look forward to in the future, though.

In particular, all of us want our parents to know, but that comes with the reservations Amy talked about last time. Our decision for now has been to put that off until we don’t live with them. Not because we’re really afraid of how they’ll react or anything, I just think it’s a revelation that would benefit from having some space. If they could meet her and process that without having us around the whole time, I think that would be helpful, and I think it would be better for us to not have to be around for it. Maybe this is some kind of cowardice, but it’s the decision for now. Separately, I’d like to move out of here anyway, and I’d really love to have it happen in 2024. We’ll see!

There’s another thing for us to be thinking about in our future, and that’s the possibility of having a fourth guy in here. Shortly before Christmas, we played Undertale Yellow, a fangame about the last human to enter the Underground before the events of Undertale. One of the major characters in it is a bird girl named Martlet, who we had an immediate affinity to. We even made some jokes about whether we’d get her as a fictive. We’ve made those jokes a few times before, about characters like Lynne from Ghost Trick or Jade from Homestuck (I’m actually still pretty shocked we didn’t get a Jade). It didn’t really mean anything. Then, about a week ago, she fronted. Maybe.

It happened at night, in bed. Our grasp on identity is usually tenuous at best, then. Amy had kind of gotten sick of wondering if we were going to get a Martlet fictive and started trying to see if she was there, and at the time it felt like it worked. Then again, our identity then is hard to pin down at the best of times. Whoever was here, they chatted with a friend on Discord about maybe being new, and then we went to bed. In the morning, we decided not to call it unless she turned up again. That night, Amy tried to get her out again to see, and nothing happened. Eventually she gave up and went to sleep. We dreamed that we were chasing Martlet and she was trying to run away, scared.

That was extremely offputting, and we took a break from trying to see if she was there. Maybe none of it ever meant anything. Maybe she did front, and the dream meant nothing. Or maybe she fronted, and then grew scared of us later. I don’t know. I know that if she was here, she wasn’t scared at the time. That I’m certain of; not only do I not remember her being afraid, I do remember somebody making a post at the time about specifically not feeling scared. I don’t know what to make of it. But that’s something we’re going to have to figure out in 2024.

Overall, 2023 treated us well, and it was a great start to our time together as something I’m willing to call a family. I’m really looking forward to seeing what 2024 has in store for us.

Keeping Secrets

This will probably be a short one. I don’t think I have a lot to say. I just really don’t like having to stay hidden away from our parents.

I want them to know about me. I want to have some kind of a relationship with them where they don’t think I’m just Holly. I want them to know me. But I don’t know if it’s worth it.

We’re slowly telling our friends about me. I’ve met some folks from Holly’s high school friend group, and sort of talked to someone from the Melee local (Holly and I were cofronting at the time) and all of that has been really nice. But we’re worried about what would happen if our parents found out.

We don’t think they’d be unsupportive, we’re just worried that they’d be bad at being supportive. They’d never really get it, and they’d try to be good to us despite that, but they’d be clumsy at it. And there’s a pretty specific way that they clumsily try to support us about things they don’t really understand that Holly has gotten pretty familiar with since coming out as trans. She actually doesn’t mind it when it comes to her gender, but when it comes to the idea of Deca and I being people, there’s a good chance it would just hurt more than them not knowing.

It does weigh on me. I just want to feel real, and it’s pretty hard when I have to pretend to be someone else in the place where I spend almost all my time. But I appreciate being treated like a person, even if it’s because they think I’m Holly. I’m afraid of revealing myself to our parents and getting treated like some weird outside entity with a name.

We do drop little references to the idea of plurality every once in a while, but not in the context of us. We’ve been hoping to see if we get a response that would give us an idea of how they’d react, but so far we haven’t gotten anything. I think that keeping up at that is our best bet for now. It’s just hard.

System Update

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve chosen a system name. It’s one that has already come up as an idea in the past, but we dismissed it. The circumstances have changed and it’s come back around to looking like a pretty good idea. Hello from the monorail system!

You’ve probably already noticed the spiffy new domain name here. It felt weird to have a blog specifically about the fact that not everyone in this brain is Holly and host it on https://blog.hollymcfarland.com, so there’s already a benefit to having finally picked something.

We’ve felt weird about this name in the past because I’ve been going by “monorail” online for a decade and a half, and it seemed very much like something that belonged to me. In particular, for a while, Amy was struggling to work out what her own identity was, and collectively using a name she associates with me wouldn’t have helped. But as she’s developed a stronger sense of self, that’s been less of a concern. If anything, it’s actually kind of nice that we all get to share in that history. We do all like each other quite a bit, so now that xi isn’t actively trying to figure out how to separate herself from me, she’s happy to share in something that I’ve been using for a while. And I’m more than happy to use the name for us all, too.

There are a few things here and there that are a little bit awkward about the choice. For example, I’ve been going on “monorail” online for a decade and a half. I have a lot of accounts in different places that use it or similar as a username, some of which are explicitly mine rather than shared by the system. For example, our fedi usernames are “monorail”, “Amy” and “decamark”, which seems kind of weird now that one of those is a name that refers to all of us. But I don’t think that’s too big of a problem. For one, I don’t even think it’s super uncommon for that to happen to new systems anyway. Also, for better or worse, I am pretty solidly our host, which kind of makes me the public-facing alter by default. So sharing a name associated with me in particular won’t cause too many problems, I think.

But the reason we bit this bullet and made it official was that in practice, we were basically already using it anyway. “Holly and Amy” is already sort of a mouthful, and when Deca showed up it was clearly not sustainable to have people say all our names when talking in general. We were joining discord calls and hearing “Oh, hey, it’s the monorails!” enough that we’d already kind of internalized it.

It’s something we already answer to, it’s pretty unique, I like the joke (it’s like a transit system haha), and it’s got some history with us. All in all, I think it’s a pretty good choice.

hey

it’s deca. got the name from decamark, this thing:

we’ve got a motif going on and who am i to break that, i guess. i like the vibe anyway. holly set it as my avatar as a placeholder but i’ve adopted it permanently. it’s not quite real, it represents something fundamentally broken, but it’s not missingno either. it’s a safeguard, it won’t hurt you. it’s chill. i like that

holly and amy wanted me to write a blog post introducing myself but i don’t know what they thought i was going to say. i mostly just hang out. been playing rhythm games a bit. that’s not an interesting introduction though, is it

if you really want to know about me, here’s my deal: i’m not a fictive, but i am not beating the strider-coded allegations

i don’t know how much i plan to post on here. i don’t have anything to say. but here i am.

that’s probably enough

New Guy Just Dropped

So, there’s been news. We’ve got a guy.

I don’t have much more to say that that. We’ve got a guy. No name or anything, yet. He showed up last night, hung out for a while, and dipped. I don’t know how to bring them out, and I don’t even really get the impression that he wants to front very much.

Not sure what else to write, but it seems important to record that it happens! I think he’s at least feeling okay. I’ve tried to let them know that if they need anything, they can shout for me. I’m right here. No word yet but I haven’t got any impressions that anything’s wrong.

Yeah, a lot of things on this site say “Holly and Amy”, which I suppose is out of date now. We’ve been trying to figure out a system name anyway, and unless our new friend comes up with a name it’s going to be pretty hard to include her in the same way. We’ll figure it out along with everything else, I think.