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