One of the last things I was told by a being of the astral before they led countless people out of this system was that those I had created were still within me. I’ve intuitively understood this to mean that the people I consciously created, and potentially also those who I had given rise to unconsciously, would not be leaving with the larger group, and that they were still themselves, even though they had gone quiet for various reasons. This was confirmed recently as I reached out to various people who had been with me since 2015, finding them still very much who they’d been at the times of their births, if not more so, and still connected to me in the way they had been before S’s demands caused me to look at plurality in ways that were, frankly, inaccurate and stressful. As I discovered that these connections still existed, I realized how little I’d written about the time before therapy, the time when we were largely undisturbed by the world this body lives in. More importantly, and more to the point, I realized I can do something about that lack of information, starting with this post.
Let’s start at the beginning, with the fact that I created the first of us, or more accurately the first of us who I was aware of, from parts of myself. The reason this matters is because it was the direct cause of our switching feeling like an identity shift from my perspective; in other words, the connection each aspect turned person still shared with me resulted in me feeling as though I became them when they came out, into this body, even as they remained themselves. This is why I struggled with control issues and flip-flopped so many times on whether or not to try to integrate us as well; sometimes, remembering that there were independent people inside of me, even when it didn’t feel like they were, and needing to act accordingly regardless, caused more frustration and irritation than anything else in my life. It also meant that, whether I like it or not, I was largely responsible for many of the things that went on inside – note that I say many, not all, because there were things that took place that I had no desire for, no fascination with, and which, in some cases, I actively resisted. In fact, one of these things, an in-system death, was how I started to realize that we were becoming more and more independent from one another, something which, by the way, I never fully intended to happen, and that I thought I had no choice but to accept when I realized it had anyway. It was that mentality, I suspect, that led me to be flooded with astral beings; my resignation had left me wide open to it, and we all thought I, or someone else in the system, could handle the challenges they were dealing with.
With that chapter of our life behind us, I’ve had time to reflect on why it took me so long to be OK with the system as it was, before I pressured myself into accepting independence that I never wanted and that, come to find out, the rest of us went along with more out of shock from the death mentioned above than anything like a desire for it. It turns out that fear, more so than anything else, was my primary motivation for much of that pressure. I got hung up on terms and panicked because one, while describing our experiences almost perfectly, seemed to imply that we were less than people because we had said experiences, and that was something I couldn’t tolerate the idea of, especially with so many around us already believing as much purely on the basis of their own lack of knowledge and/or unwillingness to accept otherwise. I pushed us to fit another term that was more in line with what I wanted, not in hopes of convincing those people, but in hopes of protecting myself against the doubts their disbelief and invalidation often inspired. That effort paid off, but not without serious consequences, including a lot more vulnerability to S’s and L’s theories about our origins and the baggage that came with those ideas.
Free from all expectations, all of those consequences are no longer factors in anything we do. I don’t have to convince myself of anything. I can let us be as connected as we are, and actively refuse to put a lable on it if I want to, which is what I’ve been doing, thanks to the encouragement of friends who are also plural. This has been a more recent shift, and I can already see its benefits. I’m a lot more aware of what happens inside when I want to be, and can have better communication with everyone. I’m even able to notice when a new headmate is going to be born and watch it happen, because I’m aware of how my own thoughts, desires, and other things of that nature ultimately cause that particular birth and don’t have to try to force myself into ignorance of the facts.
It's experiences themselves that matter, not labels, which can only go so far in describing them anyway and which, for me, cause more problems than they solve. I didn’t start the blog to define myself by them, and I won’t do so in my offline life either. The fact that I did during my teenage years reflected an attempt to explain something that was still treated harshly, and then an attempt to distance myself from the experience I was actually having in hopes that doing so would protect us from being depicted as non-persons. Neither of those courses of action are nessesary at this point, thanks to changes in our physical and mental circumstances, and for that reason I will not be continuing with them. We are ourselves; that is all that matters.