It seems that, once again, recent revelations have resulted in me returning to plurality, though it could be argued that I hadn’t left it while my last post was being written as much as I’d tried to distance myself from a particular story about how we came to be us. With the tools of Internal Family Systems, I’ve found I’m able to understand the frustration I felt then as another inside (what the model usually calls a part), and this understanding, along with an incident which highlighted what society expects of us in terms of its views on plurality, drew me out of that fixed state enough that I was able to start connecting with the rest of the system again. I can now say that, while someone inside feels that S took advantage of us, I, Rozaya, speaking as myself, am not so sure; while I debate the validity of her claim that we are plural because of trauma, I can see, from the things I’ve reread lately, that trauma is far from the only thing that can cause children to divide themselves into parts. Whether the people inside started out as, or were founded in some way, on my own parts, has yet to be determined, but I don’t really feel like investing a huge amount of energy in finding out. Maria, however, has done exactly this, blending with me in order to accomplish her mission, and as one might expect, this has resulted in a lot of contradictory and potentially confusing messages from what seems, and claims, to be me. I’m sorry about that. I can’t say it won’t happen again, but I hope that, as I grow in my understanding of who’s here, I’ll be better able to notice when it does and make the internal connections needed to prevent what could look, to some of you, like an endless back-and-forth between being committed to our healing and dismissing it entirely.
The new year is coming, and coming quickly. Eight years ago, this month saw us begin to experience the world as and for ourselves, at least to some degree. As the ninth year of our plurality journey unfolds, those of us who still have the desire to have physical experiences are going to do our best to carry out a plan we’ve created this month. The text of the plan follows.
System name: CommunityBelonging
Date created: December 20, 2023
Effective dates: January 1, 2024 – December 31, 2024
Desire: To live openly and express ourselves as a plural, with the ability to address the social repercussions of this identity as they become evident while continuing to be unmasked in this and other areas of our life (I.E. blindness, autism).
Action-specific details (this would look like):
1: establishing a stable, ongoing trauma therapy addressing past experiences of being punished in some way for expressions of plurality (I.E. switching without hiding the fact that we had done so).
2: All of those who front regularly being comfortable with switching in a variety of environments, including both public and private settings, and across a range of contexts.
3: All of those who front regularly either having or developing the ability to navigate social interactions with physical people in such a way that they can be themselves while protecting the system as a whole against unnecessary interventions and/or placements (E.G. hospitalization, being removed from a place despite no danger of harm to selves or others).
4: All of those who front regularly having and/or developing a reliable set of tools with which to manage distress associated with any part of being openly plural, including physical, emotional, mental, financial, spiritual, and social consequences of such.
Notes
In case of crisis (I.E. an unexpected event which disrupts the following of the plan as laid out above, its implementation will be suspended until the next revision period, and the remainder of the current one will be spent establishing supports with the aim of either reducing the crisis’s likelihood or impact, and/or on preventing such a crisis from happening again.
This plan will be open to revision every three months starting on January 1, 2024 and ending on December 31, 2024. The revised plan will be posted to all applicable places and will be followed as laid out in the latest revision.
Date finalized: December 22, 2023
Date of next revision: April 1, 2024
With these goals firmly established, and with a clear picture of what we’re struggling against in terms of societal expectations and potential responses to us being ourselves on their part, I, Rozaya, feel like I’m more ready than I’ve been previously to try to not only embrace plurality privately, but publicly as well. As I wrote in a journal I hope to eventually use in the service of creating future articles, I haven’t come this far in our plurality journey to be content with having to mask our distinctness as we move through the world, or having people blend with me instead of coming forward in their own right because they lack a skillset or piece of information they could get with the right external supports and community. I acknowledge, of course, that being able to approach this possibility even remotely is a result of several privileges afforded to me by race/ethnicity, location, and other external factors too numerous to list, and part of our desire to live openly as a plural/system stems from an underlying sense that doing so could perhaps pave the way for other plurals with less of these privileges to do the same should they want to. To that end, I consider 2024 to be a year of new beginnings, and, true to the stubborn nature the behavior program tried and failed to stamp out in myself and at least some of the others in this system, I plan to make good on those beginnings. Yes, people around me may not like that idea, but I’m done living under their rules. This is my life – our life – and we deserve to live it as if that has always been the case.