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~