Today, on impulse, I began looking through previous posts I and others have written here, going back as far as 2018. In reading them, I was struck by how far we’ve come in our journey, both in terms of understanding ourselves and getting better acquainted with the causes of our then chronic internal instability, which has seemingly settled in the intervening years. Many of the day-to-day struggles we had back then have largely resolved, thanks, in no small part, to quality therapy and a strong support system outside of sessions, which, while entirely online, nonetheless has helped pull me into this world enough that I can appreciate going inside more fully than I have since 2016. In reading those posts, however, I also noticed there were things that I said I or the others would cover which were subsequently left unaddressed, a situation I plan to rectify starting with this post. I also noticed that there were many things we’d written about that could, given the passage of time, use some new information, even if we hadn’t said we would be providing it back then. Certainly, we feel more able to talk freely about many of the things we feel contributed to our plurality in childhood and beyond, whether they were traumatic or not, due to having lived physically alone for the past three years and having been able to, as we call it, play catch-up. We’ve used that time to be social in ways we never could with high school peers, start learning about the world beyond our state’s current political leanings, and do the things we might have gotten to do as a teenager had people around us been less focused on our conformity during that time of our lives, and we’re still doing all of those things, but there’s a more intentional focus to all of them now, as if something that is a part of many of us or a very strongly blended, but as yet otherwise unknown, person inside has reawakened after being asleep for a while. Those of us who want to front more often, or who plan to lead the charge, as it were, to live openly as a plural/system, are going to make good use of that newfound passion, regardless of where it comes from; we’ve learned, over the past year, that the less we question something that comes to us, the less likely we are to discover that it was unwillingly or accidentally given, or that we weren’t meant to have access to it for some other reason, and emotions are no exception.
From that place of clarity, then, the first thing some of us would like to shed some figurative light on is the situation with maria and myself. We are separate now, and have been since 2019. I credit that separation to the divergent paths we were pressured into by therapy with regards to the subject of integration, in particular of others in this system into a primary fronter/host person with the goal of us no longer being plural. As soon as we moved into our own apartment and separated ourselves from S, and were also no longer reminded on a daily basis that we would be more favorable in the eyes of others around us if we were no longer a system, I was able to reassert myself, blending with Maria and gradually coming further and further forward as she went further and further inside. To be clear, this shift was very much unintentional, and I only knew it had happened when she came forward in therapy, blending with me to the point that I felt as though I was her, which is how I experience switches anyway, and announcing her presence by saying her name in my mind, again a normal experience in what constitutes others coming to front since moving to a more neutral physical environment. We aren’t keeping her from coming out, but as of September she’s stayed mostly inside after blending with me, inducing a denial spike during which I wrote an entire article recanting plurality as a valid framework for the experiences I’d had over the past several years, and generally thrashing around in traumatized confusion before someone else I don’t know yet came forward and used their anger at societal expectations to remind me exactly why we’ve held onto our identities for as long as we have. I do, of course, want to connect with Maria, but I feel no desire to become one with her; the pro-integration urges I had while she was blended with me revolved around everyone else inside in that latest instance, and have in all others as well. When it comes to where Maria is in terms of that subject, my sense is that she now has no view either way, and only held the opinion that being a singlet was best in the long run because that’s what she’d been told by family members and other local people we talked to at the time of her splitting from me.
As far as the ritualistically facilitated integration of her and I that we may or may not have talked about here before, I think there are aspects of it that might have caried over even as we separated, but I’m not sure what those are yet, and haven’t had the focused desire to try to find out with everything else that’s been going on up to this point. I do feel like my name was, at one time, associated with older energies in isolation and that this has shifted since the ritual, as though, perhaps, another aspect of me was brought into being that could interface more successfully with this world, and I also feel like, at the time of the ritual itself, there was something added to my overall identity that has never left, even when Maria has blended with me during denial spikes or therapy sessions. My best guess, then, is that she and I were one in 2017, split in 2019 and can most likely take comfortable ownership of memories we made as one during the intervening time period. It’s not a neat answer, to be sure, and I can hear people inside grumbling at how much of a gray area I’m living in where that’s concerned, but I, personally, am content with that resolution. If they want to seek out more information, I’m not going to stop them. I won’t be able to join in that search, though, because when I have before, I’ve been left exhausted and unable to think of much else.
With regards to our past, there are several dates we’ve found we’d inaccurately indicated as being those on which certain events happened, and this inaccurate reporting started as far back as 2017. Through reading old emails we’d sent around the beginning of our conscious plurality journey, for instance, we discovered that the first of us was not created by Maria in December of 2015, as we’d originally written here and believed, but in November of that year, which lines up with the six-week period between the first of us being consciously created and S’s involvement with the system. Likewise, though we’ve stated it already, we learned from the records kept about the behavior program we were put in as a child that its involvement started in the summer of 2008 and ended in the winter of 2013, not 2009 to 2011 as we’d remembered. Some of this can be attributed to the fallibility of memory in humans, but I think some of it, particularly the misremembering of the behavior program’s end, has its cause in someone new coming forward or being formed who simply accepted constant adult supervision, observation, and dependence as the norm and no longer tried to resist it because it took the form of helping with homework when our family couldn’t. I’ve tried to go through and find other inaccuracies, and have found no others, which does not necessarily mean that they don’t exist. If one of you finds something, feel free to let me know in the comments and I’ll correct it in some way as soon as I get the right information about whatever was pointed out.
Over the years, things that we’ve written about, particularly memories of past life events, have been shown to be either fragmentary, or lacking in key details that have surfaced after the pieces were posted. Adding to this was the fact that we were relatively inexperienced when it came to writing in this style, which resulted in things appearing to be missing when they were not. This post is not the place to go into all of those details; we’re thinking about writing out those particular stories in other posts as they become clear to us, but we did want to let whoever still reads our work know that some of the earlier accountings might be missing some elements, and that we plan to fill in gaps where we’re able to. The same goes for creative works; while those aren’t exactly imperfect, given what they were intended to be, we realize we’ve been neglecting that side of writing in general, and hope to change that as well. While I still hold that the primary purpose of this blog is to fight stigma associated with plurality as a way of being, I don’t think there’s a reason for us not to have fun in the process of doing so. Life’s not all bad, never was, and should not have to be viewed as such because of what this place’s bottom-line intention is, so I won’t perpetuate that view. I say this lightheartedly.
We view being plural, or sharing a single physical body between multiple beings, as an identity, out of which flows a lifestyle. We do not view ourselves, our experiences, or our origins as a sign of an illness, and painful life lessons have shown us that living as though they are only opens us up to being made victims of an industry designed to keep us coming back again and again while it makes money off of our suffering. We are in therapy to work on internal communication, healing the underlying traumas that caused many of us to form, and eventually, when the time is right, confidently and openly being ourselves. We consider ourselves to be individuals first and members of a system second, which does not mean we reject the consequences of doing things in this world; we simply view having to pretend to be one person, claim ownership of actions one did but that another did not participate in, and generally act as though we are not us to be rage-inducing. We care for one another, and if someone did something dangerous in some way we would do what we needed to in order for that thing not to happen again, but the idea of having to tell the outside world, “Yes, it was me,” while having an experience not in alignment with those words is disturbing on a level none of us can accurately describe or attempt to explain. To be clear, we don’t want to throw the fact that we’re plural in everyone’s faces. What we want is to feel OK with the idea of doing so, prepared for any anxiety acting on it might lead to, and ready with an escape plan should things go wrong in some way, assuming we get to the point where being open about ourselves is an option we can choose without becoming literally paralyzed with fear. We’re working toward that goal, but given the slow progress of therapy thus far, it’s going to be a while before we see any improvement on that front.
While we wait, we’re going to work on the things we’ve pointed out above. We’re also going to start applying the plan we’d posted previously and writing about that. By no means am I saying that there will be new content every day – we don’t live enough life for that – but those of us who want to write here intend to do more of said thing than we have been. Next year is a new beginning, as corny as that sounds, and we plan to make good use of it. Let’s get started, shall we?