On January 1, I started a plurality journal, in which I wrote down, and continue to write down, everything that I notice as far as this community/system. Lately, others have been writing there as well, filling in gaps in what I know about them, and how we work. I haven’t written here in all that time mainly because my focus has been on keeping that up-to-date and because aside from beginning trauma therapy we didn’t realize we desperately needed, nothing major has happened. All the things I’m working through have already been written about, and the ways in which the pieces are starting to come together are familiar enough that I think I might have written about them already, begun to comprehend the whole picture and then been overtaken by denial that the concept of plurality fit my experiences, only to be confronted with some new piece of evidence that made me start believing that it did again. That cycle hasn’t stopped entirely, but its fazes are much shorter now than they used to be; a denial period usually results in me sleeping rather than completely turning my back on us. Having the routine of journal writing has helped a lot with that, along with the idea that this denial and urge to push everyone away might not be mine, as supported by things revealed in therapy and conversations between us. The idea that everyone has parts and that, in my case, those parts have developed into more than such is one I have come back to again and again, but having a therapist who understands plurality and at isn’t thrown off by my now semi-frequent desires to be a singlet again turned out to be a critical piece that, once in place, allowed me to start incorporating it as truth and acknowledging the experiences I was having without pushing them away as much.
Even with those supports in place, the past four months have been harder than I thought they would be. While I’ve discovered people inside who want to do things out here, begun reconnecting with feelings I’ve last experienced in 2016 when being plural was enjoyable, and started to have hope that maybe things aren’t as chaotic in my mind as I thought they were, I’m also having to come to terms with how little control I’ve actually had over what I thought I’d created, and how much things have been hidden from me because of what I’ve tended to do in reaction to that state of affairs. There’s a lot of confusion, not just from me but from others inside, about who’s who and who did what, and every week a new aspect of that makes itself known. I can’t write about that in the way I’ve been able to write about things thus far, and I find myself wondering if perhaps it’s time to switch to a more free-flowing method of communicating these experiences, such as audio or videos uploaded to another platform. I don’t have any plans to do so as of now, however. I think it’s too soon to know for certain where things will go from this point, and aside from continuing to do what I’m doing and seeing what happens as a result I have no way around that fact. For now, then, I’ll keep writing in the journal I’ve started, and post here as I’m able to. It’s the best thing I can do for us until I know where our individual and collective comfort levels are with revealing the details we’ve been piecing together for the past while.