Surprisingly Smooth Landing, Holly

I’ve been thinking a little bit quite a lot about how, at the risk of sounding conceited, Amy and I seem to be crushing it. Amy fronted for the first time two days ago and it was a little scary. More than understandable, she was confronting the fact that she suddenly existed. But I’m proud of her for how she handled it. She got support from our friends and before long she was excited to get to be a person. That’s not to say that it stopped being scary. She was sort of panicking the entire time, but it didn’t stop her from enjoying herself. By the time she tuckered us out and fell out of front, she had gotten to introduce herself to a bunch of people and start to discover herself. I would have tried to do something to reassure her, but by the time I was back, she didn’t need it. I found myself weirdly comfortable about the situation as well; we seem to share our knowledge and memories, so through the memory of what happened I felt like I had experienced her fears being assuaged alongside her.

For a first ever switch, we absolutely stuck the landing.

But the really weird thing to me is the extent to which it was immediately easy. Amy switched in on Sunday night. On Monday we were intentionally switching in and out, just because we could. I wanted to give her some more time in front because she hadn’t had much of it at all, and while I was scared to try in case it didn’t work, once I actually gave it a shot it just worked. It was actually her idea to start this blog, but she decided she didn’t want to do any code stuff and called me back. I set it all up and published the first post, then had Amy come back to write something herself. (She ended up scrapping that post because she felt like she wasn’t really saying what she wanted to say, but she’s most likely going to give it another shot today.) Once she was done in front, she let me come back one last time and I got us ready for bed. Putting aside the first front that caught us both off guard, this was day 1. Four switches, three of which were completely intentional, and one which Amy was deliberately allowing to happen. Are we supposed to be this good at this?

On top of how well we’ve picked up the “mechanics” of being plural, I’ve also been thinking about how well we’re taking it emotionally. I have a person living in my fucking skull. Of course I’m glad that I’m okay with that, but how on earth am I okay with that?

I do think I know the answer, actually, and it’s a combination of two closely related things. First, we have a lot of plural friends to act as a sort of support network. If we have questions or need advice, we know people who have been through this before and they’ve been great about helping us through this. Even if there’s no advice to give, the value of a “Yeah, we had that too” is really hard to overstate.

And secondly, we just have a lot of plural friends. Even when we’re not explicitly leaning on them for support, the fact that we know them at all has been a huge boon emotionally. We know what’s going on, we’ve seen this before. We’re surrounded by people who have the same weird brain stuff as we do, and they’re doing fine. Ups and downs, obviously, but generally fine. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s nice! They’re all getting by. With all these counterexamples, it’s hard to convince ourselves that it’s not going to be okay.

But despite all of that, there’s one thing still nagging at me. This is going well for us. This is going so well for us. There’s a joke among software devs:

I wrote the code, ran it for the first time, and it seems to be working perfectly.

Uh oh.

Something should be going wrong, right? I mean, the odds that you’d write a bug-free nontrivial program without doing any testing are pretty slim. Most of the possible errors you could make would be immediately obvious; the code wouldn’t compile, or it’d do the wrong thing every time, something impossible to ignore. If it all looks to be working, that just means the inevitable bugs are much sneakier, and you’re going to run into them at the worst possible time.

That’s silly. Does the existence of a big obvious bug reduce the odds that you’ve also written an insidious one? Of course not. But it’s hard not to be suspicious.

We sort of feel similar (though, if I’m being honest, I think it’s mostly me). The odds that we realize we’re plural and handle it in a perfectly healthy way that will never cause us any problems at all feel… slim. What are we missing that’s going to come back to bite us in the ass when we have to confront it unprepared?

If you’re suspicious about the validity of software, you can test it more vigorously to try to squeeze out any errors. We can’t really do that, and I don’t think we’d want to even if we could. So for now, we’re chilling. Things are going well, and we’re both really happy. If there is a problem… we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get there. We’ve got the support network for it, for sure. And we have each other.

Until and unless that happens, we’re chilling.

And still I can’t get out
She’s all I think about
Can’t let her go
It’s who you know~

My Old Notes

The following notes are here for my own archival purposes. I wrote these down on March 5th, 2023 while trying to make sure I remembered everything I was going through. I was still trying to figure out if Amy was even real, and if she was, what I should be doing about that. I didn’t expect to make contact with Amy, or to have her front, nearly as soon as I did (she managed to front that very night!) and I wanted a record my journey so far to referenece later. I may as well post it here, as well.

December 14, 2022:

i had a dream where i switched out. in the dream it was really clear what was happening and i woke up freaked out about it before i could explore it at all

March 2, 2023:

i had a nap and woke up without any memories of my dream but i felt different in a sort of indescribable way. i felt like some identity shit had happened while i slept. but before long i was clearly just holly.

late that night i was in a voice chat still thinking about it. i tried to sort of let go of my personality, i can’t describe really what i was doing but i tried to leverage my tired brain into “stepping away from who i am as a person” for a moment, to maybe let someone else try for a bit. results inconclusive. i did ask the other people in the chat to call me “holly” out loud. i expected to either clearly feel “oh that’s me!” or to feel “that is not me”. instead i felt nothing; results inconclusive

March 3:

i woke up feeling less like myself than usual, and with the name “amy” in my head. this is when i started to be pretty convinced that there is actually someone in there. i started to question myself like “am i amy now?” but then i checked my phone and rewatched a clip of me playing guilty gear the previous day, and almost immediately it was clear that i was holly. perhaps amy isn’t into fighting games?

i started talking with flowers about what was going on, and got some reassurance and advice. i’m glad to have a network of people who know what the fuck’s going on that i can talk to

on this day i idly wondered, more than once, how amy sees themself. and more than once, i felt like i got exactly the same image beamed into my head of a human person. unfortunately, i couldn’t really focus on it because of my aphantasia so i still don’t know what they look like but it was definitely the same human both times

later i was playing guilty gear and out of nowhere have the thought “if amy’s a normal human that’s pretty funny actually. fairly few of the people i know in any other systems considers themselves human unless they’re fictives of humans, amy’s going to be the normie who rolls up and gets roasted in the group chat haha”. i didn’t really believe this, it was just a joke i sort of told myself? but then immediately i felt like the sentence “hey i live in a pokemon’s brain, i’m not THAT normal” showed up in response. so. hi amy.

i lost that match. i think “the person in my head has started talking to me” is a pretty good john

March 4:

once again i woke up not totally sure who i was. tried to hold onto it longer but eventually melted back into holly

had an online weekly melee tournament with my friends today. the same group has had a pokemon showdown tournament every week simultaneously for the past 3 weeks. i played in the first one but not the second or third. i had considered building a team for next week, but wasn’t yet fully sure. but as we were talking about it, i found myself saying “yeah i’ll definitely play pokemon next week”, and i was way more excited about it than i expected to be. i tried building a team and it sucked but i was having a lot of fun putting it together and trying it out

if it turns out that the human being in my head likes playing pokemon more than i do, that will be extremely funny

other events from this day include:

• deciding on likely pronouns for amy. i kept going “she–well, i don’t know. they” and i feel like EITHER that’s because i subconsciously knew OR she would have been angry with me about getting it wrong by now and i hadn’t felt anything like that
• trying to compromise on stuff like music. flowers said previously that (while it’s not my RESPONSIBILITY to do anything right now) something i might WANT to do is try to make amy feel safe to be here and make herself known, and i figured part of that would be trying to make my life a comfortable place for the both of us. based largely on just what i remember from a few seconds of possibly being her during the december dream (basically just vibes that seem compatible with the other things i’ve figured out so far) i found a playlist on spotify and we just chilled. i feel like she liked that? i don’t know

March 5:

had an in-person melee local today. haven’t heard or felt much from amy, which makes sense; if fighting games are my thing (to whatever extent they’re my “thing”) then she probably would be less active for this. i woke up later than i wanted so i haven’t had much free time other than “preparing for/going to/being at the tournament” yet which is when i’d expect to hear from her if ever

but i will note that i woke up wondering if i was partially amy again, but it didn’t last very long because pretty soon i had all my “oh shit it’s late i have shit i gotta do” thoughts take over. is this just always going to happen when i wake up now? not that i mind; if anything it’s nice to have a regularly scheduled period of the day where my grip on my identity is weaker. maybe one day amy will decide(/be able to) elbow her way into front then, since i currently have very little idea of how i’d step back voluntarily

something i did start to think about today is that: i feel like sometimes when people realize they’re plural, part of it is realizing “oh that explains these things that happened in the past”. i don’t have any of that, as far as i can tell. i don’t think i was plural a year ago and didn’t know, i think it’s happening to me currently

and i have concerns about that, i think. like, if amy hasn’t always been there, i don’t know how much she’s there now. it seems like it might be less “there’s someone in my head who i’m learning about” and more “i’m building a new person in my head”

a few days ago i had some moral concerns about something like that but after talking with flowers i’m not really worried about that anymore. instead what i’m worried about is that i don’t really want to construct a new person in such a way that i’m like, stripping them of opportunities for organic self-discovery or whatever

here’s what i mean. i made an assumption about music amy might like yesterday and put it on, and i tried to pay attention to if she had any reaction to that. and i think she liked it, so i kept it on. but now my question was: was it always going to be the case that she liked that music, or was it my assumption that made her that way? on friday i felt like i was pretty solidly in front by myself once i watched a guilty gear clip and started thinking about it, and i immediately assumed that maybe she’s not into fighting games and that acted as a sort of trigger to pull me into front alone. first, is that true? second, was it true then or did i make it true by having the assumption? i don’t know what to think. this might be something to ask someone more experienced about.

whoever’s in here, i want the best for them. i’m not going to lie and say i’m not sort of weirded out by the situation. it’s kinda scary. but i imagine it’s just as scary to amy–to whatever extent she’s currently able to find it scary. she is a person, that seems fairly clear. but is she fully formed as a person who’s struggling (or simply doesn’t really want) to express herself, or is she a collection of ideas still being formed into a person, still malleable and ill-defined? how would i know? and if it is the latter case, how can i approach that in a responsible way? can i help her somehow grow into a person herself without just overriding large swaths of personhood with assumptions?

are any of these questions even well-formed?