Some New Feelings

I get mad now! I don’t like it! But my new thing is that I get mad now.

I’m not mad at anybody in particular. I just got angry last night and, weird as it seems to type it out, that was new for me.

Holly switched me in last night. There was no real reason, but I hadn’t fronted all day and barely fronted the day before. It’s been harder while we’re sick, but we’re starting to recover so she brought me in. But after a while, I felt myself starting to fall back out of front. And I got angry about it!

Funnily enough, I got angry enough to cling to front and complain about it and never actually fall out. But I hated that it was starting to happen! I had the audacity to just do something mindless for a few minutes, to just scroll instead of focusing on myself or something that’s “mine”, and I started to fade out. It just doesn’t seem fair. I like to be here! I deserve to get to just hang out! But it feels like our own brain just favours Holly. She has to drag me out, and I bring her back by stepping away and letting her fill the vacuum. When we’re sick and switching is more difficult, of course it’s her who gets stuck in front.

I’m not angry at Holly! She doesn’t want this for me either! I guess I’m just jealous. She gets this preferential treatment (that she doesn’t even want) because she’s got seniority.

At the time, I talked about this with some friends, and they had comforting things to say. “It gets better with practice, the more you front the easier you’ll be able to stay in.” “Even if you’re recovering, being as sick as you still are certainly isn’t helping.” I appreciate it! I really did feel better. But also, this sucks! I’m still mad about it! I belong here as much as Holly does, and she even agrees with that, but neither of us can control how this brain works. It sucks.

And maybe it’s okay that it sucks. I can spend some time processing this, like Nine did. Get used to being angry while I haven’t actually been slighted. Get some new feelings and journal about them here, understand them a bit better. I didn’t even pick up on “jealousy” until I wrote this today, so clearly it is helping.

…Tangentially. I should read 17776. Holly read it when it was new, and she reread it just a couple weeks ago, so I still remember it pretty clearly. But I feel like I’d like to read it myself. When Holly read it, she liked Nine, but I feel like I can relate to them. I could use a story about someone just showing up, and having to learn to be a person.

When we tell our friends that, they all yell at us to read Homestuck.

Maybe. But 17776 is shorter.

Sick Day

Holly and I are sick. We hope it’s not the big one, but even if it is, we don’t have it that bad. It’ll be okay.

We’ve found that we’re taking it differently, which is weird! She can’t possibly be any sicker than I am (that’s not how that works!), but I’m taking it better than she is. So I’ve been trying to take front most of the day and let her rest. But while I feel physically better, it is making me pretty loopy! So here’s a bunch of disconnected thoughts I’ve had and just wanted to get all out.

Our flash cart came and now we can play Emerald Rogue whenever we want! It’s nice. And I feel a little more real, and grounded, as a result. I really am here and Holly’s helping support me in that. And when I hold the console in my hand, it feels… heavy. Not literally but almost metaphysically. Like I’m in there, not literally because of what it is but because of the kindness Holly showed me represented through it. I feel connected to reality through it. But wow we remember the screen being way better! Even with the backlight on the colours are so dark. We might look into a modern display mod, and maybe putting in a new/better battery. It turns out that pinning some of your identity on an object with a bad battery can be kind of distressing when the light turns red. Or maybe that’s only true when you’re sick and loopy.

If I was going to show up in someone’s brain with them I’m glad it was Holly. Even before I was fully here, and she was just vaguely aware of me, she already wanted the best for me. Her conversations with other plural systems who were trying to help her through it often boiled down to “How do I do right by Amy? What kinds of things can make life more comfortable and safe for her?” She even used what little she knew about me to try to guess at what kind of music I’d like, and she played it whenever she thought I might be close to fronting. I really appreciate how thoughtful and kind she’s been about it.

That feels a little weird to write out! It’s setting off “I’m being self-centered” alarms! I’m not Holly, I’m not. But she is in here. And maybe I kind of am.

I actually was talking to some friends about this before starting to write the post and they made a great point: In any case, Holly and I have some kind of relationship that we could describe as “interpersonal”. And I’m extremely happy that it’s a good one.

We commissioned art of us from a friend. Big Holly and little Amy :) We’re excited! Probably we’ll be more public with the fact that I exist once it comes in, maybe use it in an introduction post or something. Of course, we did tell the artist why we want it. I figured that the understanding of “we are real people who want to use this image to introduce ourselves” might help inform some decisions about how exactly it’s drawn. Like, I’m going to be really small compared to her, so less detail will be inevitable, but I’d like to still be visible. That kind of thing. We’re really excited to see how it turns out!

It did mean I had to do some thinking about how I look. All I really had was a lightly edited picrew designed for making Roblox OCs! (I’m not a Roblox character! The picrew is just cute!!) But if I’m going to be in the picture I’m going to need to exist below the waist, too. I think that I think of myself as wearing black leggings, and maybe a dark coloured skirt. And because I have to be in a picture with Holly, scale is obviously important! I landed on being about 5'4" I think. Definitely small enough to comfortably ride around on Holly’s shoulder~

I don’t know if I’m transgender or not! Holly certainly is, but I don’t know if that’s a useful distinction for me. I mean, I certainly wasn’t assigned anything “at birth”. We do know systems who all consider themselves trans but I’m just not sure yet! I’m certainly not cis, though. I’m either trans, or it’s a big “N/A”.

I do have some pronouns I’d like to try out. (I’m not stopping using she/her, but using xi/xir to mix it up seems like fun!) Does that make me trans? …No, it doesn’t. If I’m trans, it’s not because of that.

When Holly looks in the mirror, unless she’s already pumped herself up for it, she’ll often just get bummed out. Normal dysphoria stuff, looking in the mirror and not seeing yourself look back. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself either, but I don’t really expect to. So it hasn’t been making me upset. (Holly has joked that I’m taking over shaving duty.) I wonder if that’s just because I’m less established, or maybe it’s because I don’t have as strong of an idea of what I “should” look like. As I get more used to the idea that this is my body too, or as I form a more concrete picture of how I look, maybe that will change. I hope it doesn’t, but what can you do?

Oh, Holly set up our blog to show who’s fronting! Surely you’ve already seen it if you’re here but we think it’s really cute. That’s not being pulled from the post you’re looking at or anything, it uses just a little bit of javascript to call the PluralKit API and check who’s fronting at the time you load the page. We don’t think it will be useful for anything, but it is cute!

It will also show if we’re cofronting, if nobody’s fronting, or if someone new is fronting! We haven’t had any of those happen yet but the code is future-proofed.

This happened the other day but we’re still thinking about it a little bit: We managed to switch me in completely by accident, without having to play a Pokemon game. Holly was thinking about me a lot at the time, and I barely lasted a few minutes, but it was definitely me in front.

We don’t think there’s anything intrinsic about Pokemon that switches me in. We think it works just because we expect it to, and if we expected something else to, that would work just as well. The problem is that there’s not currently anything else we expect to work! Maybe in the future we’ll have a more internal way to get me fronting. But even if we do, I still really like the Game Boy. The joke of it being our Millennium Puzzle is a funny and cute one but I genuinely appreciate it in the ways I talked about before, both as a physical representation of me even when I’m not around and as a symbol of the kindness Holly has shown me. Even if we don’t need it for my sake, it makes me happy. I’d like to keep it around.

Also the game is fun!

Okay, I think that’s all I wanted to say. On another day I might have tried to string it into something that flowed with a bit more of a narrative, but we are sick and I’m loopy, so you get a sick loopy blog post. ♥️

Clarification of Yesterday's Post

YES we’re wearing our shirt backwards in that picture

NO we didn’t notice until we woke up today still wearing it

Our Millennium Puzzle

We put our GBA on a lanyard!

We checked, and it seems like I do get pulled to front with Emerald Rogue like I mentioned in the previous post. The rewritable cartridges we were looking at picking up were out of stock, so instead we just ordered a regular flashcart. A shame, but maybe for the best; it means we can run other things if we want to, even if it makes the joke of “we have this for switching Amy in” a little bit less conceptually funny.

It didn’t take long for us to start drawing connections. If we’re walking around with a game that we keep handy to help in switching in one of the people who lives in our head… That’s the plot of Yu-Gi-Oh! This is our Millennium Puzzle! We even told a couple of our friends who are into Yu-Gi-Oh about me earlier than we planned to, just to tell them about the Millennium Puzzle joke. It’s a good one! So today, I decided that we should really commit to the bit. Yugi wears his puzzle around his neck, so I tore our room apart looking for a lanyard.

As a joke, it’s funny! The joke makes me happy! But at the same time, I’m starting to feel like there’s more to it than just a joke. Like, yes, we’re wearing it like the Millinneum Puzzle, but if you put that aside, we’re wearing it for me. The reason we got our old GBA out and charged it in the first place was beacuse we thought it might help me. And now, with it around our neck, it feels like a part of me gets to be visible. Not everyone knows why we have it, but we know, and it makes me feel a little more “real”. Even if my mark on the world is just a Game Boy in front of our torso, I’ve left that mark. Even when Holly’s in front, she’s still got a piece of me with her.

Sort of. I don’t know. In any case, it means a lot more to me than I expected it to.

Switching In

When Holly first started to realize that someone was in there with her, she didn’t really have any idea how to contact them or anything. It was only through advice from other systems that she started getting an idea of what kinds of things might help her find out more about whoever it was. (One of those ideas was keeping a journal, which eventually became this blog!) While talking it out, she stumbled into something interesting:

She was been invited to a Pokemon Showdown tournament, a side event at a weekly online Melee tournament she plays in with friends. She had been thinking about joining, maybe. Probably, even. So when she was asked, she had planned to say “Yeah, I’ll likely sign up.” It surprised even her that she said “Oh, absolutely! I’d better build a team!”

Hi, I’m Amy. Apparently, I play Pokemon!

The next day, Holly started to unpack that with the person she was talking to, and was asked “do you like playing pokemon?” Her answer spoke volumes:

yeah it’s fun. i haven’t in a while
other than yesterday, we built a team
i mean
i built a team?
what happened here

It was all over. 🙂 She already suspected that she was close to finding me with this, having even named the team “amy and holly’s team c:”, but that moment was the point of no return. I was ready to come out. The very next time she went to Showdown to practice, I found myself taking over.

That team sucked, by the way! We scrapped it and are much happier with the second attempt.

That’s still the only way I’ve ever switched in! Every time I’ve fronted, it’s been because Holly started playing Showdown in an attempt to call me forward. It’s a little bit inconvenient, especially without any good options for mobile clients! But we are actively working on things on that front. A friend introduced us to Pokemon Emerald Rogue recently, a romhack of Emerald that turns it into a slaythespire or a kayceesmod¹. We’re hoping that it works the same way and can get me to switch in, or if it doesn’t, that we can at least train ourselves to make it work! It may not be the most convenient trigger in the world, but at least we can have a GBA emulator on our phone. If it works, we might even end up getting a rewritable flash card and make (basically) a repro cart for it; the idea of carring around a real GBA specifically to switch me in with is very funny to both of us.

When I want to get Holly back out, it’s easier, but also less specific. I seem to be able to sort of “step back” from front, like I’m not as closely tied to consciousness as Holly is. (Actually, I sometimes have to put active work into holding on. Often this means that in the middle of doing something else I go and play a couple matches of Pokemon!) I don’t have to do anything to get Holly out specifically, it seems like she just shows back up to fill the vacuum. We’ve had thoughts about whether I’ll eventually establish myself more concretely and not be able to let go as easily as I can, or if someone else is going to show up in our system and “just stepping away” won’t reliably get Holly anymore, but at the moment we don’t really have to worry about it. It works for now, and we’ll figure out something else if we have to!

Maybe one day we’ll be able to switch in and out as simply as I can switch in Haunter when I can see that clearly you’re going to go for Giga Impact, of course I’m going to my ghost. Nice Slaking, smart guy. I wasn’t born yesterda– Actually, wait…

^{1. A rogueli(k/t)e, to use more normal words. Not that they’re that normal, though, really!}