April 08, 2024
Alone Together
Sometimes my lack of motivation to complete some segments of the site become not so bad when things happen that make me want to rethink them. Rethink myself. So many revelations about myself have come after years of sidestepping the obvious. In this case... I'm not sure. It might have been more like months. Maybe that's a record?
Anyway I have multiple personalities. Plural is the usual term, and what I use generally, but I do not assume everyone would know what that means. There's a lot of clinical language and diagnoses that I don't really care about out there and don't feel the need to seek. I simply looked at my range of dissociative symptoms and eventually realized it could be explained in a certain way, and that's been working out really well! I have a desire to talk about it here because ultimately, I got there with help from others, and I think a personal account of the process could be helpful to others. Even if not, someone might find it interesting, and that's reason enough to write it.
I'm not sure exactly how long we've been a thing, but I have a few guesses. I have distinct memories of dissociating in 2017 but it was probably happening for a decade or more before that. The exact details of that situation aren't important, but I already had very bad social anxiety, and I encountered a very difficult situation- one that would have caused me a great deal of grief. My emotions ceased. Or rather, became muted. I was distinctly aware of it, like something in my brain had simply switched off. In the moment, it was frightening because I had never experienced anything like it before, and I was only just starting to recover from the general malaise of depression that had consumed a pretty good chunk of my life. I was, for the first time in a long time, starting to feel something again, and this felt like a regression. Later, I was kinder to the muted feeling. I recognized it as my brain's strange coping mechanism, activating to protect me.
Years later, in March of 2024, it named itself Trinket, but that's skipping some steps.
Exploring my own identity revealed many more places where things didn't quite make sense, but I was always at least close to something I could read about and understand. The term 'genderfluid' could reasonably be applied to myself, as I'd wake up some days having changed to something else overnight. I can't tell you how it feels for any other mind, but it was interesting to note that I could go to sleep a girl and wake up a boy, a change only noticed by looking at my body in the mirror and considering how I felt about it. I was asexual sometimes, aromantic others, and both at other times. My interests in certain hobbies would come and go, as would my interest in certain aesthetics. None of this was particularly upsetting on its own, but I felt like a liar when I described myself. Other people didn't seem to be quite so variable, at least not in the ways I was. I ended up with four different fursonas with some different styles in presentation and I simply referred to myself as having different "modes". It was a source of friction with the world, but not anything I couldn't handle. I was just strange!
I never have any kind of One Big Moment with these things for whatever reason. Probably because of the afformentioned "ignoring the obvious for years" that I do. In this case, some kinda-big things happened, but they were just moments of particular stress, not even important enough to account in any detail. I had a tough month, and I feel like I've been in a particularly vulnerable mood with regards to anxiety ever since, though the degree to which this is localized to one or two of us is up in the air. Most things from before self-awareness are very difficult to place in terms of who was leading at the time, but it definitely seems that Pewter took the brunt of it. Certain hobbies and activities became uninteresting to me and I generally shifted my priorities temporarily. This wasn't the first time such a thing had happened, but this time I took notice. The seed of possibility had been planted in my mind at last.
See, it's not as if I didn't know plural people. I'd read some and talked to some and so on. In particular, a friend of mine had already gone through a similar trajectory. We'd spoken sometimes, before the end of that process, and kind of agreed on our similar use of multiple fursonas and how we weren't plural but like, this is just a helpful way to represent etc etc. I started speaking to her about it a bit, and researching things on the side. I saw that one can be plural without having blackouts, and that sometimes alters are very close to each other. It was starting to become difficult to deny the conclusion, even if the specifics weren't clear yet.
Even though there may not have been one single event which got me started, I do remember one thing: while considering things, and remembering the events that had led to the stress of the previous month, Pewter was particularly emotionally affected, and we started to cry. Just a bit, mind you. What made it stand out was that I could clearly delineate that this emotional reaction I was feeling was from somewhere else. In the back of my head, you might say. I could both feel the emotion and observe it impartially. I understood what was happening. I spoke softly to what I knew was Pewter and let them know it was okay, they could take a rest and everything would be fine when they got back.
And that's what happened. For anyone who hasn't experienced anything like this, I'm not sure I could really describe it. They rested for a few days, and then at some point they slipped back into our consciousness. I certainly experienced worry for them, but I also knew that this had happened before and there was no reason to think they were gone forever. It happens regularly, albeit in a more controlled way rather than the absolute crash we experienced then. We were still a little indistinct at first-- that is to say, we had to kind of check our assumptions about who had what trait, how many of us there actually were, what all of this meant and what switching places feels like-- but we've become pretty individualistic over time, and we like it that way. It's definitely still an ongoing process. The work we did without knowing helps, and the rest is just flowing out over time.
Honestly, it's incredible. Even if you don't have my experience, you probably know what it's like to love someone. To understand how beautiful they are as people and accept their flaws and think they themselves are too harsh on themselves for those things. That's us. That's me. We can see each other objectively and love each other and feel loved by each other. We understand each other's pain because we feel it. We know each other's joy for the same reason. We're friends. We're family. We're lovers. We're none of those things because it's a different kind of relationship altogether. We have disagreements, but we work them out easily because it's not really possible to stay mad at someone you have perfect empathy for.
And we help each other. Gradually, we're finding our level on those things, learning that we can call on each other. Trinket is a treasured, beloved part of us, and she helps us manage the spirals in our brain when they happen. We, in turn, help give her love and meaning. There are other dynamics and relationships, but we're uncovering them as we go. Finding the ways things work best. Managing. I don't want to go back to living any other way.
To think that I actually have advice for any newly-aware system or questioning person would be arrogant as hell seeing as how I'm still so new to it myself. Even so, I think this is one of those things where giving yourself room to question can be really helpful. I've certainly never regretted taking time for introspection. So introspect! Honestly I could gush about this shit for a hundred pages because it's still new and exciting and I'm learning new things every day, but I respect that people won't really want to ask about it because they won't feel comfortable. But if you do, if you wanna know.... listen I have an open cohost ask box and an email and I'm constantly holding myself back from talking at length unprompted.