How many of us are in here?

‘I’ have a number of friends who are ‘plural’; they comprise, or are part of, ‘plural systems’.

How to exactly explicate what that means is quite contentious. A simple, intuitive description is ‘there are multiple people in there’. A somewhat more medical definition, reflecting the psychiatric model defined in manuals like the DSM-V, is helpfully summarised by did-research.org:

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the disorder that was previously recognized as multiple personality disorder. It’s characterized by the presence of two or more dissociated self states, known as alters, that have the ability to take executive control and are associated with some degree of inter-identity amnesia. DID is caused by chronic childhood trauma and is highly associated with posttraumatic stress disorder.

Of course, whether the medical diagnosis of ‘DID’ is equivalent to the broader concept of ‘plurality’ is one of many contentious questions. There is no real consensus on much of anything in the various small and large groups of people who understand themselves under this umbrella term ‘plural’. Even the choice of language like ‘plural system’ is contentious. But that should hopefully give an idea of the basic concept we’re dealing with.

Phenomenologically, ‘from the outside’, plurality may be observed by seeing someone ‘switch’: this may be accompanied by a change in their accent, preferences, memories, affect etc. Switching can be very sudden, even happen abruptly in the middle of a conversation. For some people, the switch is quite noticeable. Some people experience ‘co-consciousness’, i.e. when another alter is fronting they may experience a sort of dissociated state of observing their actions as if from the ‘passenger seat’. For other people, there is a greater continuity of consciousness and it may take time to realise they’ve switched.

Am I plural? // Are we plural?

[My?] [Our?] reason for writing this essay is to try and draw together recurrent thoughts on the question of ‘am I plural’/’are we plural’. This is a question that has been latent in other writing on this website, for example The Maniple (which considers the theme of plurality in The Tyrant Baru Cormorant) and analogistically (which attempts to draw together thoughts and observations on consciousness after my first time using LSD.)

Unfortunately in English, which distinguishes first person pronouns by plurality, it’s impossible to even ask that question without biasing towards one or another answer, except by passive-voice constructions like ‘is this body inhabited by a plural system?’.

It would be reasonable to think that, by age 34, there would be a pretty clear answer to this question for any stream of consciousness inhabiting this particular body, but as will probably become apparent, every line of inquiry just leads to more questions. A helpful suggestion, provided by some plural friends, is to view it as a set of metaphors for understanding the self, which can exist on a continuum. To quote my friend Z.:

It’s a way of understanding yourself that’s self reinforcing. As I see it, the idea that we’re a consciousness that’s making decisions using logic and emotions is, as much as anything, a simplified model to make ourself more parsable to both ourself and others. We’re a complex biomachine pretending really hard to be a soul in a meatsuit. We need to be able to simplify our model of self/others or we wouldn’t be able to run internal simulations that have people in them, which is a pretty damn useful thing for a brain to do.

It’s a model that’s most useful if it’s accurate, and so our brains put no small amount of effort into both making the model fit the data and also trying to make our behavior fit the model. When the latter effort becomes too hard, folks end up having an identity crisis or similar, and reforming the model wholesale.

For some folks “I’m just me responding to different situations” is sufficiently coherent to function. For others “there’s one me, but I have facets like a cut gemstone - I appear different in different situations/from different angles in coherent/consistent ways that are worth noting and labelling” is what works best, and for others the entire attempt to cram all of the things their mind does into one identity just falls apart

Z. identifies a pretty important aspect of any effort towards introspection: it’s absolutely replete with observer effects. Every theory you might have can be confirmed by the brain ‘playing up to the model’. So it’s hard to just look inwards.

Nevertheless, the question remains. With this menu of potential self-metaphors, which ones do ‘I’ find most helpful?

I’ll probably end up using the word ‘I’ throughout the essay, as in this sentence, but it should be taken to mean only the ‘facet of self’ or ‘thread’ that is currently engaged in writing and not necessarily the ‘whole system’. Or, perhaps there will be a ‘we’ here and there; this isn’t necessarily a concession of plurality but may be the ‘mathematical we’. More on that later though.

Some existing narratives

You see ideas relating to plurality crop up in fiction plenty. In science fiction and fantasy, you might depict the spirit or ghost of someone being attached to another person’s body, and use all sorts of dramatic conventions to show conversations between these characters that happen ‘inside someone’s head’. Of course, in fiction, you can be very clear-cut on the line between two different characters. If a fictional character is depicted as holding a conversation with another mind in their head, depending on the sort of story you are reading, you may very well be able to take that as face value, as far as the ‘world’ of that story is concerned. (In another story, you of course might be wiser to take it as a metaphor.)

There are also of course depictions of characters who are explicitly plural in the terms we understand in the real world. For example, I’ve recently been reading Grant Morrison’s run of Doom Patrol, in which the character ‘Crazy Jane’ has dozens of alters with slightly different appearances and superpowers; at one point, another character descends into her mind space (the Underground) and the different alters are given distinct character designs. This story was based on the real-life account of the Troops, aka Truddi Chase, a plural writer whose autobiography was popular at the time. Here’s a nice review of Morrison’s depiction and how it relates to the Troops.

The idea of the self as being in some way multiple is also a recurring theme of psychology and related fields. Back in Freud’s day, you of course have the famous id, ego and superego, along with other categorisations of elements like desires and drives, and the conscious and unconscious. In more recent and mainstream psychiatry, you have for example schools like Internal Family Systems which attempts to categorise various elements of someone’s personality and categorise them as things like ‘exiles’, ‘managers’ and ‘firefighters’ and regarding each as serving a purpose, if sometimes one that’s misapplied. Some similar ideas exist in practices like dialectical behavioural therapy.

These accounts claim to be applicable not just to a minority of people with a specific unusual condition, but a way of modelling human minds in general—although maybe just one that is therapeutically useful rather than something like the fundamental ‘truth’ of the matter.

Deleuze and Guattari also expounded a rather plural-sounding idea in their books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus in the 70s and 80s, which is kind of hard to explain because it’s responding to the tradition of psychoanalysis and if anyone loves complicated jargon, it’d be the psychoanalysts. Still, let’s give it a go: they’re interested in the process by which we come by desires; if I’m understanding right, they claim that under capitalism, we get constantly instilled with all sorts of contradictory desires by various social processes interacting in a huge complicated network of ‘desiring-machines’ and ‘desiring-production’. I find the language used by D&G and French psychoanalytic theorists like them a bit impenetrable, but it is quite possible I will be paralleling them in what follows.

There are also various different models which look at concepts moving independent of the minds which might be carrying them. For example, semiotics speaks of signifiers (symbolic pointers to something else) which might become nebulous in what they signify, perhaps even becoming a simulacrum which points to nothing except other signs. Elsewhere, ‘memes’ are proposed as a mental analogue to ‘genes’, as atomic ideas which can be replicated, in the hope that we could analyse the replication and evolution of a population of memes in the same way we do genes, and explain culture as a matter of adaptive fitness of memes. (This didn’t really pan out.) Jung imagined that there is a collective unconscious of default, baked-in archetypes which exist across different people and cultures, and also a ‘collective consciousness’ of shared social constructs in a particular society in which things like religion would reside. (Presumably, according to Jung, the latter would be more subject to change than the former, but in any case Jung’s collective unconscious is given little credence these days.)

And of course, in the domain of magic, the world may be seen as being replete with all sorts of spirits, thoughtforms, and other entities which can be interacted with through appropriate rituals. The egregore, for example, is imagined as a ‘group mind’ which is spread across multiple bodies. The word tulpa, originating in Tibetan buddhism, was popularised by the Victorian occult movement of Theosophy to refer to a type of spirit. In the late 20th century, this came to refer to a mind cultivated inside your own, a practice called ‘tulpamancy’. In terms of the standard language of plurality, this could be seen as an attempt to create an alter out of whole cloth; whether this is a ‘legitimate’ form of plurality compared to coming by it honestly through severe trauma or child abuse is a matter of contention.

Finally we have the idea of an imaginary friend, which is generally considered a benign thing that children do and then grow out of by the wider culture. And of course, we are constantly engaged with experiencing and creating fiction; it is not uncommon for players of roleplaying games or writers of novels to imagine their characters in other contexts and describe them as taking on a ‘life of their own’.

It would probably be very interesting to drill into all these ideas and see where they are similar and different, but that isn’t the focus of this essay. All of these feel like partial models, attempts to grasp the endlessly complicated phenomena by focusing on this or that part. I guess ‘my’ purpose here is to just to draw together various things I have in the back of my mind, to plunder them for relevant concepts and also figure out what may be influencing me.

Multitudes

I think just about anyone can recognise that they exhibit different ‘personas’ in different contexts. For example, you will act, think and feel differently at work, with your family, with your partner, with different friend groups, or perhaps when writing an essay on your website. This is not considered a form of ‘plurality’, but just universal human experience. We are also familiar with ‘altered states of mind’, e.g. from taking drugs, or ‘going into state’ as e.g. a sub in BDSM. Writing has been recognised by multiple people as a technology which lets you think things which would not be possible otherwise.

This is intimately related to the question of memory. Memories are retrieved ‘associatively’, which means that if you’re thinking about or experiencing something, you will be likely to recall memories related to that thing. This can go badly awry, as in the case of traumatic flashbacks; being reminded of one upsetting thing might bring other upsetting things to mind and cause you to ‘spiral’ into a much greater state of distress. Evidently there is some sort of escape hatch to this sort of feedback loop, though, because we don’t usually get stuck thinking about the same thing forever.

‘I’ have personally been formally diagnosed with ADHD and autism. This is a category that has been undergoing some revision in the last couple of decades, but it describes a pattern of difficulties with attention, memory and ‘executive function’. For ‘me’, it manifests as existing in one of two extreme states: an unfocused state where I can’t do much of anything that takes effort but randomly wander between whatever catches my interest, and a hard-to-direct ‘hyperfocus’ state in which I ‘lock in’ so hard that I forget to eat. Coming out of a state of hyperfocus can almost feel like ‘surfacing’ from beneath an ocean: suddenly, all the things I’ve been shoving out of my field of attention flood back in, and I remember everything else that is going on.

Autism is another condition that brings together a lot of different phenomena: intense passionate interests, difficulty reading faces or understanding social dynamics particularly among allistic (non-autistic) people, a tendency to ‘stim’ and echo nonverbal noises, sensitivity to texture and noisy environments, and the possibility to ‘overload’ and perhaps become nonverbal (unable to speak, but potentially able to write) when sensory stimulation gets too much. It’s also sometimes associated with a facility with manipulating formal systems and collecting information, or unusual ‘savant’ skills.

All of these are very likely to co-occur, and it seems that current thinking is that ‘ADHD’ and ‘autism’ are closely linked, but even so I admit I’m pretty skeptical that ADHD and autism are categories that successfully ‘carve reality at its joints’. There are of course various attempts to come up with a grand unified theory of autism etc., such as monotropism which puts a ‘cognitive strategy’ of focusing attention narrowly at the heart of it. I’m also not sure that’s right.

ADHD is sometimes associated with short-term memory issues; it is as if I have a small buffer to work with (like a CPU’s cache) and things I’m supposed to be holding onto can get accidentally overwritten by other things that are going on. Autism, as mentioned, is also associated with unusual memory stuff, like remembering loads of information about your special interest, and conversely, ‘faceblindness’ where you struggle to remember other peoples’ faces.

Along with these formally diagnosed issues, I am personally aware of a distressing feeling of an inconsistent ‘will’, which may or may not fall under ADHD. This is not just juggling a lot of different interests (science and art and programming and so on), though this is definitely a big part of it: one part wants to be an artist, another a mathematician or graphics programmer or learning a language and so on. For me, these tend to come in intense bursts where I will obsess about one thing and then may suddenly lose interest as something else eclipses it.

But it is also that at different times I will feel contradictory attitudes: I will find someone endearing or annoying, have different thoughts on an artwork, obsess over something that feels unimportant later, and so on. I think this is on the ‘normal human experience’ end of the scale, although there have definitely been pretty drastic cases of ‘what the hell was I even on about, why was this so important to me’ where past me feels somewhat alien. However, this variability, and its context-dependence, does seem relevant to the broader question, right?

I also have a tendency to be thinking about or doing multiple things at once, at least when I’m not in the state of hyperfocus. If I’m in a voice chat, it helps me a lot to draw a picture or do something else non-linguistic with my hands and eyes, so that I’m not tempted to start reading text which will distract me from the conversation I’m having and cause me to miss what people are saying. It’s as if these faculties—language processing and the process of making art—are performed by separate ‘modules’ of the brain. (By contrast, it would be nearly impossible to do something like coding, which requires me to read and write text.)

I’m recapping all this because I feel like all of this stuff about memory and different ‘states’ is going to be relevant to what I’m trying to understand about ‘me’/’us’.

Context-dynamics split

As much as I hate to admit it, the invention of language models (see heuristic bags and dodgy metaphors) has influenced me in the idea of separating ‘context’ and ‘dynamics’. Here, the weight matrices of a so-called ‘neural network’ model the way text can go to slightly longer text, storing something like the ‘physics’ of language. By loading different text in as inputs, you can easily elicit different ‘personas’ in the text sampled from a language model. Since the model has been trained to maintain consistency with the text that has been fed in, the model’s text will tend to stay ‘in-character’, but the same set of weights could easily be playing contradictory ‘characters’ in response to many queries at once (and usually is, since queries are often processed in batches).

Something similar is actually pretty fundamental to computing, really: the separation of some data passing through the machine as the ‘instructions’ and another part as ‘input data’ or ‘program state’. Under the von Neumann architecture, both are loaded from the same source, and what is ‘data’ for one program (like a compiler) can be ‘instructions’ for another. But we still draw a separation once we reach the CPU itself: instructions go in one place, register values and memory reads go in another.

It’s not hard to imagine a similar split existing in the brain (and also a similar ambiguity). We could speculate that various elements of the brain can represent ‘dynamics’ of thought, but what that will result in will depend on its inputs: what memories you happen to recall, what’s in your sensory environment, what you’ve recently been thinking about, etc. Much as a computer has a hierarchical structure of permanent storage, volatile storage (‘memory’ or ‘RAM’), cache, and registers (in order of increasing speed and decreasing capacity), it also seems that there is a similar stack of ‘readiness to thought’ in a mind: a huge ‘long-term memory’ containing whatever you’ve stored about everything that happened in your life, a ‘short-term memory’ of stuff you’ve been thinking about in the last few minutes or hours, and a current ‘execution thread’ of whatever you are thinking about ‘right now’.

At this point I should also note the distinction between ‘episodic memory’, of things that happened to you; ‘semantic memory’ of general information about the world not tied to a specific time; ‘procedural memory’ of how to do things; possibly other categories. The first two are considered explicit memory, the latter is a type of implicit memory.

Since I know the brain does a lot in parallel, and also I have a subjective sense of potential thoughts or things I might say ‘bubbling up’ from somewhere in an implicit form, one metaphor I have at the moment is to imagine my/our brain as comprising a large amount of different small ‘mechanisms’ which respond contextually to specific things. My behaviour is created by some sort of ‘chorus’ of these mechanisms; the whole is comprised of many tiny parts, like a coral reef. Different groups of mechanisms can be ‘louder’ at once, giving rise to different states of mind. Thus, I can get ‘sucked in’ to something, as more nearby elements of the chorus are activated. (I am probably influenced in this description by knowledge of cortical columns, but I am definitely not going to speculate that this metaphor is so accurate as to be directly mapped to neurological elements.)

I could speculate that the limited memory window of ADHD might make it more likely that I’d jump between more or less distinct states, with just a narrow and immediate context to hold onto that can more easily flush out other stuff and get me caught up in a bubble. In that regard, it may explain why ‘grounding exercises’ where I focus my attention to various sensory experience could work: they could help put other stuff ‘into context’ and flush the cache a little.

A simple account of one mechanism that could give rise to ‘plurality’ might be to think of these groups of related memories and small ‘pieces’ becoming isolated into ‘islands’ or (to borrow a term from machine learning) ‘basins’ of memories. ‘Who is fronting’ could act as a kind of ‘main key’ to your memory, resulting in the phenomenon of different alters having different memories. This is akin to crystal formation, where new atoms arriving from a fluid can attach themselves to one or another growing lattice.

The question then is how useful is it to take that space of variation and attempt to map it. This feels like it may be a one-way door: once I/we start committing those names to different aspects of my/our sense of self and conceiving of separate ‘parts’, they won’t readily be erased, right? But if they’re already well on their way to formation, then perhaps it would be more sensible to let them finish taking on distinct identity.

Bang-addressing and temporal continuity

A common practice in media-fan subcultures is to distinguish different variations of a fictional character with a notation like ‘player!Battler’, where some description is prefixed to the name with an exclamation mark (aka bang). Apparently it dates back to ‘bang paths’ on the early internet.

This is a simple way to refer to different facets of self without necessarily assigning them distinct names or assuming they’ll stick around. For example, I might distinguish ‘introspective!Bryn’, ‘defensive!Bryn’, ‘physicist!Bryn’ and so on to describe specific modes I recognise myself existing in; then I could say something like ‘introspective!Bryn tends to come out late at night’. I can also describe modes I tend to speak or write in: punctuation!Bryn vs. lowercase!Bryn for example may represent different ways of thinking. (This essay is evidently written by a punctuation!Bryn.) Is this a description of plurality/fronting or merely a description of different modes of a singular entity? Well, mu, I guess.

What even is a person? Besides, of course, a miserable little pile of secrets.

In a Newgrounds cartoon, Tide of Tears Ep. 2: Yesterday’s Booty, a pirate captain digs up buried treasure he’d left before, only to realise he’d already gone back and dug it up and even left a message for his future self.

Past Pete (letter): Good luck explaining this to the crew! Hahahahaha.

Pete: Arrr. Past Pete always exploits me lack of temporal self-continuity.

A less jokey version of this idea forms the basis for Existential Comics #1, in which the thought experiment of a Star Trek-like teleporter inspires a character to conceive of each sleep as a death, conceiving of a different person waking up in his body each day. As a result, he (or, if we prefer, the successive inhabitants of his body) go on a philosophical journey: first hedonism, then suicidality, and at last finding a new, humble and selfless life, founded on the same concept of self-discontinuity:

What little money he had he gave away, for he knew he had no claim to it. No one can possibly deserve the money they have, for it isn’t them who earned it, but a past self. Anyone else has an equal right to it.

Something of this accords with the experiences of plural friends who switch frequently, and thus have had to come to terms with every creative project they pursue being a group project that must be handed off to another alter.

Even if I don’t have the distinct sense of ‘switching’ moment to moment, I still share something of this sense of ‘handing off’ to past or future selves, and the longer the temporal horizon the more dramatic this gets. At various times in life ‘I’ have felt intense feelings of shame over different past versions of me, and even in one or two cases gone back to insert contradictory commentary in something the past version of me wrote. There are certain projects I do not feel I can ‘honestly’ finish, since I’m so far removed from the mindset that produced the original work. For really long-term projects like the Umineko liveblog project, it feels hard not to regard them as collaborations between difference instances of ‘Bryn’.

This is compounded when I will sometimes come across, in a dusty corner of my hard drive, works that I do not even remember making, roleplaying games I do not remember playing in, etc. I’m sure most people have that experience, of finding things they made as a kid and encountering them anew. But when primed with questions regarding different variations of self, all that takes on a new significance. Sometimes I find myself wishing I could talk with 2017!Bryn, or what she would think of what I became.

And of course, for trans people, it is common to experience a pretty dramatic personal rupture in how we view ourselves. Inevitably there is a lot of variation in how we conceive of who we were pre-transition. Some people may feel it was always a false shell or mask. For some, it might be something we view with shame. This is of course compounded by the common experience of having people in our lives feel grief at the loss of the version they thought they knew. Others may find this talk frustrating, and feel that they are fundamentally the same as ever, just more honest with themselves or others.

Of course, ruptures are not just the domain of trans people! In normie society, my society constructs a life stage of ‘teenager’ in which people are expected to try out different personas to ‘figure out who they are’; later, the experience of trying to take on a new direction in life at a certain age is common enough to get disparagingly called a ‘mid-life crisis’. Different societies will mark different rituals to transition between different phases of life in general; at this point, people are expected to take on different responsibilities and ways of existing. Though, most of that gets thrown out the window for everyone over here in the autistic weirdo corner.

In any case, I suppose, if a plural self-conception is on the cards, that suggests another rupture in the making. I have no regrets whatsoever about transitioning, regardless of what struggles followed. Back in the day, I wrote essays agonising over whether I’m bi etc.; in retrospect it is easy to say that I was working my way to the real question of gender by the stepping stone of sexuality, but it can also be said that introspection comes to me with difficulty and requires working things out almost like a mathematical problem. Or, alternatively, that this mode of introspective writing is something I have been recurrently drawn to generate. Anyway, if it’s like that, there is no resisting it. The next Bryns are already forming. But what forms?

Magic circles

I have written before on the idea that large parts of culture can be viewed as roleplaying. Another useful idea from the theory of games is, of course, Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’, which I discuss here and also here. The way I summarised it in the latter piece is…

The idea of the magic circle is that a game establishes a special sub-‘world’ where different rules apply compared to everyday life. Players observe certain rituals to enter into the state of ‘playing the game’, and while the game continues to hold, acts that would not have meaning otherwise (like kicking a rubber ball into a metal rectangle) take on meanings and encode the state of this abstract system.

In Huizinga’s original work on ‘play’, he was quick to describe the special secret world created by play and extend it to other domains; for example, his comment that outlaws, revolutionaries and ‘cabbalists’ may reject one system (a ‘spoilsport’ move) only to build another for themselves.

It is pretty easy to make the move to step away from games, and view society at large as a pile of layered magic circles, at various scales, which give meaning to the actions that people take in them. I think this is helpful for me because I like to exist in a lot of different contexts, since I like to do a lot of things that have subcultures around them. If there is any habit that has described my life so far, it’s finding some niche community and learning its discourses and ways. Thus ‘physicist!Bryn’, ‘scifi!Bryn’, ‘trans woman!Bryn’, ‘demoscener!Bryn’, ‘roleplayer!Bryn’, ‘animator!Bryn’, ‘sakubuta!Bryn’, ‘gamedev!Bryn’, and so on. Each one has plenty of commonalities with the others, but also each one represents a distinct mode of thinking and different desires, right? And thus it is easy to see how they could be seen for fighting for time at the wheel.

If immersion in a magic circle brings in to the ‘context’ the ways of thinking proper to that magic circle, just as settling down to play a game summons your knowledge of strategies and etiquette and all that, it’s not surprising that reminders of a context I’ve left—visiting my family, encountering someone I knew a long time ago—could give the disturbing feeling of being possessed by the ghost of a past self, past guilts, past desire for approval, etc. etc.? Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that we tend to get increasingly distressed the longer we spend in our hometown, with the tension existing between the current Bryn and a past one.

Self-talk

When ‘I’ (a past ‘I’ here) first learned about plurality and started wondering if these ideas could possibly apply to me, one of the first things I tried was to think a ‘question’ in my head, like ‘hey is there anyone else in here?’ and hope for some phantom voice to come back and say hello. Perhaps that would work for some people, but it didn’t for me.

However, like no doubt many people, I will often hold conversations in my head. The interlocutors in such a conversation are not usually given a very distinct identity; at most they may represent two different positions that ‘I’ feel conflicted about.

When struggling with executive function, I will often find myself holding one-sided conversations with an entity I conceive of as ‘my brain’. For example, I will think in my inner monologue, ‘come on, we really need to get up and…’, and then be answered not by a voice but my body refusing to leave the warmth of my bed. Conceiving of this more explicitly as a negotiation with a separate part of me with its own ‘wants’ made it possible to conceive of other approaches to the negotiation, like offering concessions or reassurances. Sometimes this ‘worked’, but I’m not sure how much that is just roleplaying the beat in a narrative.

We have also experimented with using the pronoun ‘we’ in inner monologue. Who this ‘we’ represents is a little unclear. It’s the ‘we’ of a collective whose individual members, if they meaningfully exist still remain murky. Doing so… feels kind of OK actually? But we would hesitate to use the pronoun ‘we’ in conversation with others, or ask anyone to try to keep track of different personae. Even using ‘we’ deliberately in this paragraph as an experiment feels kind of charged, tho not in a bad way.

At this point I’m tempted to actually try writing such a dialogue with a putative other version of me. Let’s say, ‘punctuation!Bryn’ and ‘lowercase!Bryn’.

hello world

What was that?

I guess a simple answer is that that was an automatic writing exercise? I’m not sure if it was literally an alter coming to talk but also I’m not sure that it wasn’t, which is a hell of a lot closer to the idea than any version of me has ever gotten before.

But yeah I sat down to write that with little idea of what would happen beyond a that I’d write ‘in-character’ as ‘lowercase Bryn’ and that I’d probably want to talk about the ‘mind space’ concept. The questions and answers flowed naturally. Obviously I am a fiction writer so like, I’m probably leaning on the patterns of expression I use in that context, but yeah idk i kinda feel like all selves are fictional maybe. (Shifting to lowercase bryn for a sentence there since it somehow felt more correct.)

Haha god what is even going on. Being human is weird and confusing. I don’t entirely know why I’m fixating on this topic at the moment, or what I hoped would come out of writing this essay. Some form of answer as to what is ‘the right thing to do’ perhaps. I guess maybe I found someone? That’s pretty significant if it’s real. (Also, I notice I’ve shifted into a more conversational writing style in the aftermath of that. I don’t know whether that’s significant.)

I didn’t even talk about the concept of ‘dissociation’. It’s something I’m fairly sure I’ve experienced but not in perhaps as extreme forms as some people do. I feel like I often fall into it when I’m out in public spaces that are a bit sensory overwhelming, like a supermarket. I need to sort of engage autopilot and power through it. There have been times I’ve definitely been sorta ‘zoned out’ of a conversation, ‘off in my own head’, or even saying things without consciously thinking about it and having to replay it in my head to ‘tune back in’.

‘Dissociation’ is a really poorly defined term though. The boundaries between ‘just being kind of out of it’ and ‘actually dissociating’ are far from clear to me and it’s a pretty charged term and I’m afraid of using it in an incorrect way. I can sort of see how ‘dissociation’ in the sense of ‘being checked out’ and ‘dissociation’ in the sense of ‘another alter is in the driver’s seat’ are related concepts.

Anyway I guess I’m spending this year getting crazier, or maybe less crazy, or just differently crazy, I’m not sure. I think the main thing ‘I’ want is to just have a better handle on the different states of mind that I occupy, because of problems like…

  1. not really being able to make any meaningful plans beyond a very short time horizon, or stay focused on a project, or maintain a habit; perhaps conceiving of this as an explicit negotiation might help
  2. feeling like I get into states of mind where I’m harsh, judgemental, unfair or irrationally defensive towards people I care about and have every reason to trust; perhaps recognising that there is some part of me being expressed here might help
  3. existential shit like just not really understanding what I am or what any of this is about

I wrote three things because it felt right to have a list of three.

So, it might be time to publish this. At least to share with trusted friends, and also search/AI crawlers and whoever the hell else happens to find their way onto this corner of my website. I don’t really know what this became. Cracking of a ‘plural egg’ or talking myself into a fantasy? Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll (for some measure of ‘I’) look back on it in a few years and sigh. The answers will hopefully be clear by then. And hi, future me, I hope you’re doing good.

and with that, she melts back into the froth of neural noise.

Comments

cali (dd77279f7d325eec933f05b1672f6a1f)

i love this dialogue so so much. for attention-deficit reasons i often find myself skimming the denser sections of your non-fiction writing but the dialogue captured me. the exploratory game taking on shape and mass and doing unexpected and productive things - it IS like role-playing games, isn’t it?

the head space or inner world stuff is super interesting to me. my partner has an incredibly elaborate IW for her hundreds of parts, and i think that’s been true for years and years. before i knew i was at all plural i set myself the task of trying to build out an IW to whatever extent i could, because it seemed cool - and that has been helpful for establishing what little contact i’ve managed with my most mysterious alter (that i know about). but all my partner’s alters apparently do their own thing in the background while not fronting (i have questions about how you could possibly have that much running on brain hardware at once! but i think we know very little about how we run on brain hardware at all, and myself even less.)

anyway yeah IW visualization has been useful for me - pre-plural exercises (demon summoning, tulpamancy) have been useful - an analogy i like is tarot, right? like a tarot deck is just however many pieces of cardboard; it doesn’t know anything. but the human mind is deep and murky and we don’t know a lot about what’s going on down there, so we use symbols and pageantry to probe the depths and see what surfaces. like psychotherapy, also. plurality is a tool for conceptualizing the self/ves, and if it produces results you find useful, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re “really” plural or not.

also i feel like everyone of a certain age&experience has some part of them that is dave strider. this is normal, do not panic.

anyway yeah loved this piece, & thank you for writing & sharing it!

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