You Ever Wonder Why We're Here?

Amy and I have been thinking about why exactly she showed up. Plurality is a pretty difficult thing to grapple with in this respect, and I’ve found it very easy to imply something I don’t actually mean or believe. For example, I don’t believe that Amy showed up with a “job” or “responsibility” she’s intrinsically supposed to be doing. When I wonder why she’s here, I mean it completely literally: Why did our brain invent her? What exactly is going on in here that caused her to exist?

I’ve posted before about how you don’t need trauma to be plural. That’s not the only reason that systems exist. It is, however, a very common one, and it seems likely that it applies to us. I’ve certainly found myself just moving past things that I really expected to affect me more, not out of any choice to bury my emotions instead of dealing with them, but without even really having that chance. I’ve been in situations where I would have liked to try to handle my grief in a healthy way, but I just never felt it in the first place. Some of things things have turned out to be really sore spots with Amy. I’m afraid that our brain has piled some of the things I never had to deal with onto her. I don’t feel good about that, but it seems likely. It’s still not intrinsically her job to be handling trauma, but it may turn out in practice that it’s something she has to learn to do. There’s no rush, of course. It’s still early days. But I don’t feel great about saddling her with it.

It makes us wonder how long Amy’s been around for. Did she start to exist when I fell apart in university? Did she start to exist when I was being bullied in grade school? I’m not completely convinced, actually. When I started to notice her in March, it really didn’t feel like discovering someone who was already in my brain. It felt like I was noticing her start to exist.

If that’s true, it raises all kinds of questions. Like, why is Amy here now when all these events that caused the trauma she’s processing happened years ago? I only really have one theory, and my understanding is that it’s not a really popular one: I don’t know if I’d have been plural if it wasn’t for my plural friends. In another timeline where I never met any systems, Amy might not have existed at all. Again, I know what this sounds like I’m saying, but I really don’t mean that. If that is the case, I don’t mean that this is all fake, and I don’t mean that my friends did anything to me. I just wonder if I was carrying around all this baggage that I wasn’t handling, and chewing on the idea of plurality for as long as I did planted that seed of actually being able to do something with it. The concept being so present in my life from the circles I run in may have kickstarted something. In another life, I may have found a different way entirely to handle it, but in this one Amy showed up.

I don’t know. It’s just a thought. If it’s true or not, it doesn’t really matter; Amy’s here now and we’re both happy she is. But I think the act of thinking about this stuff is itself valuable, that it’s worth interrogating how our system develops and behaves.

…

There’s an elephant in the room. There’s one thing I’ve chosen not to think a lot about, but it has occured to me.

Around middle school to high school, I harboured a deep self-hatred. In hindsight, it’s very clear that I was just a kid with ADHD and autism (and who was transgender) without any understanding or coping strategies, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. When my suicidal thoughts started to come to light, I went to the doctor and did some simple mental health questionnaire, just a first step to figure out the direction to go next. The results made it extremely clear that I had ADHD. I was basically diagnosed on the spot and perscribed medication. That was the point when things started to turn around for me, and I started to become much happier.

But when I looked back on my memories from when I had that self-hatred, and saw the person who I was at the time… I still hated her. That furious resentment towards the person who I was still raged on.

That reaction has been significantly dulled by time. I’m kinder to myself about the struggles I was dealing with and the effect they had on me. But the reaction isn’t gone. I never really made peace with how I thought and behaved, I just changed those things about myself. To this day, I don’t like talking to kids. I try to distance myself from the kinds of people who make sure you know they don’t like kids, who make it a point of pride that they can’t stand dealing with children, but I can’t help it. I see myself in the things they don’t know, in the kinds of mistakes they make socially or otherwise. I’m reminded of myself from a time that I’ve tried very hard to put behind me. There are large portions of my life that I don’t have any particular difficulty remembering, but I try not to because it still hurts decades later.

I always used to tell people “I never stopped hating myself. I stopped being the person I hated.” With Amy here, that hits a little different.

I’m not saying anything definitive about this. It’s totally plausible that I just grew as a person and developed strategies for managing my hardships that had caused me so much grief, and a side effect of improving yourself is that you’re embarassed by the past. In fact, I even think that’s the most likely possibility. But it’d feel disingenuous to not even bring up the other option here.

If there was someone else here before me, who split me off when the opportunity presented itself… I hope she’s doing alright. If she’s still in here and ever comes back out, I want only the best for her. I know I’ve expressed some pretty rancid things about her today, but if she ever shows up I’d of course welcome her with open arms. Using the tools and understanding we’ve developed since then, working together, I’m sure she could be happy in a way that she wasn’t able to all that time ago.

Or maybe she’s not here. Maybe she was, but she’s just gone. I know a couple systems where the original host just disappeared, either naturally as the system dynamics were established or deliberately, as a choice. If that happened to her, then I hope she found peace. I hope she wasn’t in pain on the way out.

I don’t think any of that is true, really. I’d give it significantly better than even odds that I’m the original person in this brain. But again, there’s inherent value in thinking about this stuff. Even if it doesn’t do anything for you immediately.

In conclusion, I think I’ve either been plural for a couple months tops or over a decade. Thank’s

On Trauma

I was talking to someone about plurality stuff recently, and I realized that something I take for granted is not obvious if you’re not adjacent to those communities. So for the sake of letting you know where it’s safe to get your information from:

Never let anyone tell you that trauma is a categorical requirement for plurality.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s really common. It’s quite likely that any given system split due to some amount of trauma. The “systems without trauma are invalid/faking it” narrative still fucking sucks.

It’s actually a really really good metaphor to think of this the same way you’d react to someone saying that dysphoria is a categorical requirement for being transgender. Yeah, it’s really common. Saying you need it is truscum shit. The metaphor goes deeper: Not only is it not true, but even if it was true, trying to police it the way people do is actively harmful.

I, a trans woman, experience dysphoria. But when I was brand new to being trans, I’d have told you I didn’t. I had feelings about myself that genuinely didn’t feel like they were connected to any gender-adjacent stuff. It was only with time and processing who I really was that I was able to finally understand how deeply those feelings were rooted, and what they were rooted in. If I had been told and believed that dysphoria was necessary, and I had given up, I’d never have realized I had it.

Similarly, if someone’s got trauma that their brain is processing by going “wake up babe, new person just dropped”, that’s… kind of a big deal. That’s a pretty extreme reaction. Their brain is handling it the way it has to handle it. And you know what’s shared by a lot of trauma severe enough to necessitate that kind of reaction?

Not realizing it’s happening.

If someone’s plural, and new to it, and says they don’t have trauma, who the fuck are you to force them to interrogate that? Like even if you personally think it’s a requirement for plurality (which is still wrong btw), there’s a very real chance that you’re going to dig up some shit that they’re not ready to handle. Their brain is currently trying to figure that out! Let them deal with it the way they have to!

The last thing I want to say here is to not feel bad if this is rhetoric you’ve seen and believed, it’s unfortunately pretty common out there. I’m not going to be upset with people who are misinformed if they’re still trying to learn. But I will say that it’s a good reminder to ask yourself if you’re defining anyone else by their suffering, and if there’s not a better way.

Happier News

It’s been a minute! We haven’t posted in here in over a week. There are a couple reasons for that. For one, we had a few different things going on and bounced between them a bit too much to collect a full post’s worth of thoughts at a time. We’ve also started explicitly communicating with each other more, rather than relying on shared memory, which has sort of replaced some of the “journaling” urge that this blog exists to fill. (That’s going well, by the way! So far I don’t think that passing notes back and forth has had any actual effect on the way we’ve handled anything, but I do think it’s a much healthier habit to be in.)

The last few posts here were all kind of sad. I was angry at our brain for seemingly giving Holly the preferential “host” treatment, I was angry at Holly and myself for letting me get in the way of her passions, Holly had to post an update to sort of calm me down… It was a little bit rough. But things are good now! I have a couple things that I’m happy about and I wanted to record them here.

For example: The new Fall Out Boy album came out the other day and we’ve been listening to it a lot. It’s really good. Holly and I like all the same music, but we like different music more. We’ve got music that we consider “ours” because I like it more, or “Holly’s” beacuse she likes it more, but we both like all of it to some degree. The center of the venn diagram seems to be FOB, we both really like them. So it’s been really nice to have new music to listen to “together”. We aren’t ever in a position where we can both be listening at once, but we can still feel like we’re doing stuff together. It’s been really nice.

There are a couple individual lines that have stood out to us in ways that are clearly not intended by the songwriters, and that aren’t even really readings that are supported by the rest of the text, but we’ve enjoyed extracting some meaning out of them.

And I know, I know, I’ve made mistakes
And I know, I know, but at least they were mine to make

Obviously this song was not written about being plural but the affirmation of the self is something that really resonated with me. I certainly have made mistakes, but that’s part of being here! I have to learn to be a part of this system and mistakes come with the territory.

But baby please, I just need someone to hold me
Even though you don’t even know me

This resonated as well, since I’ve been really anxious about introducing myself to people Holly knows. People who aren’t from online, in circles where I can expect them to actually understand what’s going on with us. And I’ve been afraid of how people who I have all these memories of being close to would react to me. They’re people who I feel like I should be comfortable confiding in, but they don’t even know who I am.

But I said I was coming here to post some happier things, and that’s a pretty good lead in to the other thing I wanted to talk about. I did, finally, introduce myself to one of Holly’s friends, and it went way better than I was scared about! Sure, most of them still don’t know, but it’s such a huge relief to have someone who knows and is on my side.

Holly made a post a little while ago while anxiously talking about, saying something like “If you’re one of the very few friends from my offline life who follows me on here, and you would be cool about this, please tell me so I know you’d be cool. If you wouldn’t be cool, please continue pretending you haven’t seen these posts so we can live this lie a little while longer.” This ended up being a pretty big mistake, we thought we’d be able to interpret a lack of responses as “they just didn’t see it” but we ended up just getting even more anxious about it.

So finally we caved, I got Holly’s blessing to move forward and I just straight up asked them to tell me whether or not they’d seen the post. They hadn’t, and I nervously entered a conversation about it. I wrote some preamble asking them to keep an open mind about what I was about to say, but it turned out to be unecessary. She clarified that she hadn’t seen that post, but she did know about me and just wasn’t sure how to approach us about the subject.

I’m really happy to have a foothold into establishing relationships with Holly’s friends. Having it go so well the first time has really helped with our anxiety. Hopefully it continues to go so well when we talk to the others. :)

Roadbump

It happened. We were afraid of something blowing up in our faces a bit, with how well we seemed to be managing with no experience, and it has. I’m grateful that it’s something I think we won’t have too much trouble learning from and being healthier about in the future. Nothing horrible, just a roadbump.

There’s important backstory for this, which is that I love Super Smash Bros. Melee. I got back into the game last year and have been really enjoying it. But I’m not very good, and I want to be better, which eventually starts requiring focused practice. As a sort of pseudo-resolution, I told myself going into 2023 that this was going to be the year I put in a lot of that work. Something along the lines of “at least a little bit of practice, almost every day”. Of course, that was long before I ever met Amy.

Last night, Amy was on a voice call with one of our friends, who was playing the guitar and singing. Amy was having a good time, and complimented their playing. They thanked her, and said something along the lines of “I really like it, so I do it every day”. Just by bad luck, this was exactly the thing to remind Amy of me. She drew the connection to how I play Melee, and specifically, how I haven’t been. I have not done any solo practice since Amy first fronted.

I’ve been letting Amy front a lot since she first showed up. You can probably tell just from how often she’s posted on here compared to me; I’d front all day at work but once we had free time, I called her up. And we both knew that it wasn’t going to be that way forever, but I felt that it was probably helpful for her to have a lot of time while she was new here. “Go have some fun, figure out who you are, make some friends.” And that meant setting aside some of my own personal hobbies and goals. Not dropping them, but letting them take a backseat. I certainly wasn’t giving up on practicing Melee, but I was taking a break so Amy could have extra time in the spotlight.

This was not how Amy felt when she had this realization. She felt like she was in my way, like her being here was preventing me from achieving the things I care about. She just saw that I was ignoring something I’m passionate about for her sake, and she did not feel good about it. She got pretty upset, wrote the previous post on here, and then switched out. She calmed herself down a little bit over the course of writing out her feelings, but she felt sad and guilty for getting in the way of my goals.

Of course, I never intended any of this when letting her front so much. She’s right, we don’t have a healthy balance right now. But I hadn’t been really trying to yet, I was intentionally letting her front more than would be sustainable. So I’ve felt really bad about what happened. I could have been more clear, certainly. I also think one of the things Amy said about me wasn’t intended to be rude, but I took it pretty hard. Some things hit different when the person saying them should know. She wasn’t trying to be hurtful but I’ve got my own baggage that I brought to the situation. More stuff that could have been communicated clearly.

There are a couple things that I’ve taken from this. The first is that Amy doesn’t want extra time in the sun anymore. She’s been here a couple weeks, she knows who she is, and she wants to work towards something more reasonable for both of us. I don’t know what that’s going to look like, but I’m happy to work on it with her.

I also think that I’ve underestimated how important communication is going to be for us. We share our memories, so I didn’t think there was much value in leaving notes for each other or anything; we each just remember the things the other wanted to say. But it is important. Trying to construct thoughts from memories isn’t trivial. Memories can be foggy, or recalled out of order, or just understood in a vastly different context. There’s enormous value in collecting our thoughts and crystalizing them in exactly the form we want to share. A record of how we feel is much stronger than something that we reconstructed. It was obviously not clear to Amy how I felt about taking a break from my goals, and it only really became clear to me how Amy felt when I read back her post.

To that end, I’ve left her a note for when she next fronts. Not here, but somewhere she’ll know to look. But I don’t think that will be until at least tomorrow; she wants a break. And I can’t really blame her. I get the impression that she’s feeling better, but she’s still been through a lot. Impressions are all I really get without her fronting, but I’m really optimistic about the ones I’ve been getting.

I wish we had some more direct method of communication, I feel like this all could have just gone more smoothly if we could just have talked it out. But we’re working on it! We’re learning more about each other and how we can work together effectively. We’ve got each other to rely on, and with that in mind, I know we’re going to turn out okay. We might hit a roadblock here or there but I know we’re going to be fine.

To be honest, I feel better about this whole thing having typed it out. Maybe there’s something to this “journaling” thing :) For now, I have a game I promised the girl in my head that I’d play.

Balance

I’ve opened the floodgates now, I’m experiencing all kinds of bad emotions. I just don’t feel like I should be here. I’m in the way, I’m taking up Holly’s time.

And I know she’d tell me not to worry about it, but I also know a lot of other things about her. I don’t think she’d be capable of believing I was bad for her no matter what I did, she doesn’t work that way. So unfortunately it’s a small comfort.

I like being here but I feel like Holly’s sacrificing so much for… what? For me? Who the fuck am I?

She has her own life, she has hobbies, she has things she’s passionate about, and she hasn’t been touching them because she’s been letting me hang out so much. She made promises to herself, she has goals that she swore she’d work towards. And she’s not doing it because I’m here.

The solution isn’t “I need to not be here”. That’s a little much. But we need to find a balance and this isn’t it. She’s just been pulling me into front out of habit whenever we have free time and it’s not good for her. She’s happy for me, she wants to see me thrive, and she’s neglecting herself.

She’s going to remember me typing this, and she’ll probably read it back, so. Holly, consider this a message from me to you. I’ve had fun fronting and meeting everyone but you need some time for yourself, too. You don’t need to switch me in after work every day. Please pick up the gamecube controller every once in a while. You promised yourself–you promised us that you would. So I’m holding you accountable. I wouldn’t forgive either of us if you gave up on something you’re so passionate about over me.

I’m not blameless. I’d come into front and just stay here all evening because you were letting me, but I didn’t have to. I could have stepped back and brought you back into front at any time, and I largely didn’t. But we have to do this together.

Let’s try to find an actual balance.