Hello everyone,
I’m writing this article having made a final decision about this blog. I know that, over the years, I’ve vacillated between whether or not I want to keep it, and have said numerous times that I’m letting it go only to pick back up where I left off with pages upon pages of reasons why what I said in my prior post was inaccurate. That isn’t going to happen this time.
9 years ago, I started to write publicly in an attempt to break the stigma surrounding the experiences I was having related to plurality. I enjoyed some of that work, and I felt a lot of pressure with the vast majority of it, mostly, to be understandable to as many as possible. I was sixteen when I started this project, and I’m 25 now. It hasn’t grown with me, and with wordpress’s interface continuing to go to shit, I don’t feel like dealing with making it do so. The objective of the project, at least in terms of my own experience in the world, failed massively. My writing did nothing to change the way I was being treated as a teenager, merely serving as documentation that I was in distress while offering very little in the form of concrete details about the things that were causing that distress. That was deliberate; I was so afraid of legal action, even though I could verify the vast majority of the claims I would have made had I been in a less fearful state, that I played it safe and chose not to speak my truth. That’s a decision a part of me will regret for the rest of my life.
I’m no longer in the same situations about which I was trying to write. I live independently, have a support system in the form of friends and solid services for day-to-day life, and don’t require ongoing mental health treatment in the way I once did. I’ve changed as a person, in ways that, if I were to maintain the approach I have been to this blog and its content, would require article after article before I felt I had explained all of those shifts properly. I fully believe that the pressure I was putting on myself to be understandable to as many as possible resulted in a kind of obsessive perfectionism that has stolen the joy from writing. I’d like to get that joy back, and I’m going to. The first step is to put this down.
With regards to plurality, I have reason to believe that a lot of the chaotic nature of the system, which was arguably this blog’s central focus, was brought about by spiritual attack from entities not of this world, but in it nonetheless via their interactions with me. Some of you may remember Cooperland, who wrote about such things as elusions of unity, the causing of insiders to believe that they were all parts of me. I have reason to believe that this entity in particular was behind a lot of the things that started happening when I let go of my original hope for the system in 2015. I believe that badly done therapy also played a large role in contributing to that chaos, and that my maintaining the beliefs brought about by my time in it combined with Cooperland’s actions to create something that, frankly, wasn’t worth the energy I spent on it.
I also have reason to believe that the parts of that chaos which were not caused spiritually were a direct result of my own belief that they would happen, or distrust that they wouldn’t. I’ve tried, multiple times over the past decade, to mitigate that doubt, and to have faith that things would calm down if I believed enough that they would and acted accordingly. Cooperland’s actions often convinced me that I was wrong by their results, and I fell back into the trap repeatedly regardless of how determined I was not to with every new instance of trying to escape it. At this point, it’s such a tangle of mental associations that I’ve concluded the only thing I can do is walk away from the entire thing for a while, find things I enjoy and can concretely strive for, and possibly come back to being a system after more time stable without one than I think I need. This may seem like a drastic step to those who are plural have found ways around such experiences, and I’m not recommending it as a course of action, because I can’t and that would be very unfair and quite frankly, unethical, of me to do. I know that it is the right thing to do in my situation, and my situation is all I can speak on. There were many times as a system that I enjoyed, and there were more that I didn’t. If and when I decide to open myself up to that experience again, I hope that the joyful times will outweigh the painful ones. At this point, that’s all I can do while I wait and heal.
In some ways, I regret the ten years I’ve spent as a plural. In other ways, though, I don’t. Cooperland has been dealt with in a spiritual fashion, as fits his origin and his nature as a being. Now I need time to heal, and learn who I am without all of that stress.
I am deeply upset with Beth for not listening to me as a teenager and imposing the things she did on me as I was attempting to grow into being a tulpamancer. I don’t blame myself for upholding the trauma narrative she instilled in me, however. That blame does not rest on my shoulders and shouldn’t, though it did for a while until I realized what had happened. I’m 10 years out from that first session, or at least close enough to that that I want nothing more than to throw the entire harmful framework out and start over. That’s what I’m doing by writing this.
I don’t know what the future holds. At this point, I don’t think I want to try to predict it. Things could go in any number of directions, and I am bound and determined that they go in positive ones. Whether that looks like me returning to plurality after some time to recover from the past 10 years of chaos and pain, or whether that looks like me moving on from the whole thing because I’ve decided it’s not a helpful way to conceptualize myself, I don’t know. What I am certain of, however, is that I made the right decision, and am making another one in concluding this chapter of my life.
It's been a wonderful 10 years. For those of you who have stuck by me and read about our Journey, thank you. To those who’ve just arrived or are unfamiliar with my work, you’ve stumbled on an archive. Hopefully it provides you with something useful.
By the way, the link to our website can be found here: https://www.thehavenistexperience.com
We hope that, if you do decide to go there, you enjoy what you find. It’s not going to be the same type of content that you found here, but it’s where my focus is, and will likely continue to be where my focus is for some time.
This is not an ending. This is a continuation of my life, and a recognition that these shoes no longer fit.