plural.blujai831.dev

If you want to refer to all of us collectively, we go by Jaime, or, online, alias blujai831.

All of us are in effect also named that individually. The names you see here instead are more like... codenames. They help us understand each other. It's always acceptable to just call us Jaime or blujai831 as if we were a singlet. Our plurality should be something we have to account for, not others.

If you want to refer to whomever is fronting, they go by Jaime or blujai831, but their codename is also okay.

If you want to refer to someone who isn't fronting, the preference order is reversed: they go by their codename, but Jaime or blujai831 is also okay. Note that due to the median way we experience our multiplicity, the converse is also true: if one of us publicly identifies themself by their codename rather than as Jaime or blujai831, it probably means they aren't fronting, but rather exerting passive influence to forward a message through internal communication.

We are co-conscious and functionally unified, but internally separate.

We share almost all day-to-day memories, allowing us to feel very much like one person, and to function accordingly as far as anyone else is concerned, but amnesia barriers prevent us from accessing each other's thoughts, emotions, and childhood trauma.

It feels like which one "I" am changes, and "I" remember being whoever I was before, but once I'm someone else, "I" can talk to "them" as if we were separate, and they respond. I fade gradiently between different participants in one collaborative effort to seem normal.

It's like "we" are a bunch of people gathered together in conversation, and "I" am one magical semi-sentient talking stick passed around between them. The talking stick is conscious, but not sapient. It consciously experiences and remembers everything that's been said through it and done with it, but it has no actual mind of its own, only that of whomever happens to be holding it, which temporarily melds with the continuous stream of consciousness stored in the stick.

Or like we're all stoned toking up a huge fuckass bong, or like, whatever, man. "In that moment I swear we were infinite," as the kids say. But only while you're the one toking. You become one with the psychedelic tie-dye warp zone, but only while it's your turn with the bong. In this metaphor, "we" are the stoners, and "I" am the warp zone.

It's like you have a sheet of colored dots arranged in a circle and you look at it through a piece of seaglass that you slide around across the page. If you hold the seaglass over the border between two dots, they look like one blotch through the seaglass. But anywhere the seaglass isn't, the dots just look like separate dots. Put an ant on top of the seaglass and move the seaglass all around the circle of dots, and the ant will look down through the seaglass and think it's moving along one continuous unbroken brush stroke on the page. Yet it looks up from the seaglass and across the page and sees the other dots clearly as it passes them by.

Maybe the most concise way I could put it is that being us feels almost exactly like playing Disco Elysium or Slay the Princess. A little more like the latter than the prior. Somewhere between. Add to that most of the voices being girls, several of them being kids, having a lot of trouble hearing them properly, and periodically they just speak gibberish or ask inane questions like "wait, which one of us said that just now, was it me."

We think and feel in parallel, but have anterograde amnesia for any thoughts or feelings that belong to someone else. Most of the time, each of us has no awareness at all of what any of the others are thinking or feeling. Exceptions can be manufactured intentionally, with limitations; see "internal communication."

We share most past memories, but specifically do not share childhood trauma. Each traumatic experience is remembered by only one of us, and the others have been made to forget. Some of us remember multiple such experiences, but no one such experience is remembered by multiple headmates. Which experiences we each recall has heavily colored our self-images and life outlooks, which in turn informs our respective thought patterns and emotional baselines, which is probably why we can't access each other's thoughts and emotions (because they would be reminders).

With some effort, we can consciously exchange intrusive thoughts, which serves as our means of internal communication. For this reason, when describing our multiplicity to professionals who aren't trauma-informed, we've taken to describing one another as "intrusive thought entities."

Only intentional injection of intrusive thoughts, not intentional extraction, is feasible and safe. Intrusively extracting thoughts from one another is possible, but challenging, and even if done successfully, it almost guarantees severe mental reinjury and anguish. We're talking setbacks lasting months, sometimes years. We've learned the hard way that it's really, really not worth the effort. It's better—essential, even—to just respect one another's boundaries. Listen, but don't interrogate.

Thus, when I say we can consciously exchange intrusive thoughts, I mean the headmate sending the thought can do it consciously. "I" can talk to "them" whenever I want, but I don't decide when "they" talk to "me." It just happens.

No one of us can control the content of the others' internal communication. We can rewind and replay it, but we can't modify it on replay. What they said is what they said. That's what makes them headmates and not puppets.

When an internal message features emotional content, it tends to be overwhelming and impossible to ignore, and there is the sense that the emotion the recipient suddenly finds themself feeling is old, ancient even, like they had already been feeling it, for a very long time, and just didn't know.

We've taken the DES-II, MID-60, and DDIS, and are currently under professional evaluation via the SCID-D. So far, all signs point to OSDD. The administering psychiatrist agrees. Presentation seems to fall between OSDD-1a and OSDD-1b, with features of both.

Evaluation is still in progress, and is unfortunately complicated somewhat by the fact that our subclinical covert narcissism has compelled us to adopt imitative symptoms on top of our genuine symptoms. We have tried our best to set these aside and be as honest as possible.

To elaborate: We are not clinically narcissistic and have almost no overt / grandiose narcissistic traits, but our covert / vulnerable narcissistic traits show a concerning subclinical high. This is relevant because it makes us glorify our suffering and act melodramatic about it, which we believe has in turn compelled us to fool ourselves into thinking whatever we have is worse than it really is.

We put a lot more weight in diagnostic labels than we should. Multiplicity is not an inherently pathological experience, and not inherently something that should be medicalized. Non-disordered systems are valid. So are endogenic or other non-traumagenic systems, and so is non-disordered trauma. If they try to tell us we have non-disordered trauma, I'll have to invoke lived experience and disagree: the unfortunate but undeniable reality for us is that we are at present fucked up and miserable. But it's not like it actually matters nearly as much as I feel like it does. I am being completely unreasonable to want our pain to be acknowledged by a professional. Our pain does not deserve to be acknowledged by anyone. We should just suck it up and suffer. Okay that's not where I was trying to go with that but the point is, no matter what the evaluation says, our experience of multiplicity is valid, and so is yours if you experience it too.

Many systems feel okay with themselves as they are. They feel happy being plural. It soothes them.

I don't know how the rest of us in here feel about it necessarily, but as for me, I respect happy systems but it seems to me that we are not one at all. I want us to attain integration. I've wanted that all along. I can feel that we were supposed to be a singlet and it kills me inside every single day of my life. The only thing I find soothing about being part of a system is that I'm happier having finally found my headmates than I was when I felt I had lost them entirely—when something felt missing, something huge that was supposed to be there, and I didn't even know what. In other words, the only thing I find soothing about being part of a system is that finally knowing I am is closer to integration than not knowing.

That being said, the continuing syscovery process is also painful, and every step feels shaky and uncertain. They were already there. Learning they're there is getting closer to integration. But it's hard to tell the difference between learning they're there and splitting them off, so I'm constantly worrying I'm actually getting farther away from integration because more of them keep showing up. It's incredibly frustrating.