Question 1: Introduce Yourselves

[beepbird]

Let's get this community talking! 

Tell us about yourselves. What are your lived experiences with plurality? How do you understand yourselves?

If you're still figuring this all out (as we all are), then what do you know so far about your own experiences? What do you want to know?

Comments and posts responding to this prompt are both welcomed, though comments keep this question's answers easier to find (consider linking back to this post if you answer in your own post- it makes it easier to track!).

Comments

[hungryghosts]

[Lark] (For ease of discoverability across sites, I'll link my Reddit crossposts in the comments. Please let me know if it's obtrusive.)

https://old.reddit.com/r/plural/comments/1q80g3b/plural_questions_1_introduce_yourselves/

[lb_lee]

Sneak: THANK YOU FOR GIVING THE OLD.REDDIT LINKS! T_T The new ones are impossible to read on mobile!

[lb_lee]

We are LB Lee, and we make mental health comics, write psy-fi, and in recent years have slanted more towards archiving and digging through many-selved history. We also run healthymultiplicity.com and pluralstories, an amateur library catalog for... (ahem) multi media.

We had imaginary friends in kindergarten (possibly extending a year in either direction), became outright multi in 1999, and were probably soulbonding around the same time. At some point we ended up with a DID diagnosis, and we are on disability due to it, but trauma is only part of our experience, and we don’t like the disproportionate importance put on it. Story, imagination, and religion are all equally important here!

We tend to be comm lurkers, but who knows, maybe we’ll dump history stuff we find here if relevant!

[chameleons3]

We have known we are a system for a little over two years. We call this being a "realized" or "unfolded" system. We call the process of each of us knowing who we are in relation to the others "unfolding."

Chameleons is a self. A person. We are all Chameleons. Therefore, we are all the same person, and therefore we are all each other. Transitive property, you know. If someone called us "parts" we'd edit it to "parts of a team." In the internal family systems (IFS) sense, we each have parts, and we also have shared Chameleons parts. All of us claim our life history, our heritage, our experiences with queerness, gender, disability, religion, and so on, as our own, and all of ours.

"Three headed dog" or "three dogs in a trenchcoat" are great metaphors for us.

We'll edit this post to link to an infodump about how we're all in the same clade, when we get that posted.

Chameleons are a packaged deal. If you are in relationship of any kind with one of us, then you are in relationship with all of us. Even if you never directly interact with the other two, the Chameleon you are in relationship with is constantly impacting and impacted by the other two. We have no memory barriers that we know of, no secrets, and very little privacy.

Headmates, as a term, is one that implies a bodyless experience, for us, so we dislike it used for us. If you hear any of us using "headmate" in relation to our system, then we're talking about the neighbors, which is our side system that is not Chameleons.

Our body is us, and we are our body. We do not want our body to be referred to as "the body." Our relating to one another, understanding each other, understanding the world around us, all of that happens in our body. Switching is a somatic and neurological process, not a headspace one. While we do interact in our headspace/inner world, we don't have parallel lives there. We don't necessarily hang out there when we're not fronting. We don't have a fronting area or anything like that. Finally, we call each other "selves" and "others."

Switching doesn't happen as a mental process for us. Sure there's some visualizing sometimes, or some mental intent. But it is mostly a body process. Sometimes it's intentional, with planning and relying on the associations we've made. Usually it's unintentional, incidental, or response to some kind of stimulus. Sometimes it's almost instant, like mid-sentence. Sometimes it takes hours.

Here are our posts about embodied plurality we made a while back.
Plurality as Embodied, Part 1

Plurality as Embodied, Part 2: We Are Our Body

Plurality as Embodied, Part 3: Switching as Action

[beepbird]

Echo: We tend to go by Not Applicable online, but in practice, we prefer to use our names or the ever-useful "hey, you" when names become a problem. "Not Applicable" is a running joke about our inability to neatly fit into just about any categorization system or social expectation that we've found.

We're at least somewhat fluid inside. Folks emerge from the depths, do whatever they showed up to do, and then fade back into the dark. Some of us last longer than others. Some of us come back repeatedly. There's a core group of (roughly) 3 or 4 of us whose patterns seem to recur consistently.

A large portion of our system is "people soup" in the sense of not being anyone in particular. We like to call it the Sea, but others might conceptualize it as our subconscious or something similar. Occasionally, the Sea spits out a messenger who passes something along and then vanishes shortly after.

There's always something that falls outside of our working models ("all models are wrong, but some are useful!"). Ann appears to be doing her own thing entirely. She is arguably the 5th core group member, but as far as we know, she's never been remade in the way that the rest of us have despite being one of the oldest people here. We have also hosted external visitors a handful of times who exist by their own own rules entirely before departing.

We don't know when or how exactly we became plural. We don't particularly care to find out. We'd rather focus on learning to live better with each other right now.

---

Ann: Adding on from my perspective. I have no clue what the others' deal is. Maybe they're fluid, maybe they're confused and figuring it out. Not sure I even believe the Sea is a thing. I just know I'm here, have been here in parallel with someone for a long while, and don't much care for getting caught up in semantics about it. Wish everyone else would stop tangling themselves up trying to figure out details. Take it at face value, guys. It doesn't have to be hard.

Depending on who you ask, we figured out we weren't alone in here somewhere in the range of 2015-2018. It's been a while. The whole process of learning what's inside and how to live with it doesn't really stop, it just changes.

[pheonix_system]

Hi we're the Pheonix System. We're rather inactive on this site but are hoping to become more active.

We're still working on figuring out a lot stuff about ourselves, including how many of us there actually are, but feel pretty stable regardless. We recently were also told by our therapist we fit the criteria for DID but weren't given an official diagnosis, so not really sure what that means for us or whether we should consider ourselves disordered or not.

One of the things we've been working on exploring has been our innerworld, which led to the discovery of a subsystem that we didn't know about and vice versa!

[foggerss]

We are a pretty recently established system (for us at least, abt 2 yrs ago we first ‘discovered’ it). We are still trying to figure out things like our history (did we exist before first discovery?) and are still trying to put out past fires our ex-host started so there isnt much work past that atm.

To answer the 3rd(?) question, we would honestly just like to understand our history first before knowing anything ‘else’ if there is anything past that to be honest.

[cosmicwebofnoodles]

We are Rainbow Ocean. I think the biggest thing we can say about ourselves is that we are very inconsistent. In that regard, it's hard to say how we understand ourselves because our understanding is constantly changing!

We've known we're a system for under a year, but know we've been plural for a very long time. And um, what more there is to that is gonna depend on who you ask because nobody agrees on how it is or how it happened or how it even works.

But, overall our system experience has just been learning to let go of things, and be content with the lack of structure, the not knowing, and the maddening inconsistency. For, I/we think the best understanding of our systemhood is being both nothing, and everything, for those two are but the same.

Anyways! We're still very new to dreamwidth as a whole and getting the feel for things. But, we've mostly been posting random creative writing and some essay type of stuff so far. We wanna write stuff that helps people with their systemhood if we can, including us.

[lightning_beast]

Hello! We are The Thunderstorm, a system of anywhere from 3 to 7 individuals depending on how you count it. Three of us are a median subsystem known collectively as Delta. The rest are Mozzarella, our dæmon, Caeruleus, Susie, and Applesauce, who is Susie's dæmon.

We're fairly certain we've been plural since we were very young - with Comet (the one writing this!) and Stardust being the first two, and Sharpwhistle appearing some time around 2020 or so. Mozzarella was created by choice in 2024, Caeruleus and Susie both showed up in 2025, and Applesauce appeared in a dream in December of 2025.

The main fronters are The Deltas, although Susie does also front on occasion. Especially when apples are involved. Mozzarella has also fronted a few times here and there. The others are not interested.

With us Deltas, generally one of us stays in front for approximately 4 months at a time until it's the next Delta's turn. This isn't by choice, the brain just kinda does this for some reason - we call it The Cycle. Note that non-Delta headmates are not beholden to this - they can front whenever they please (as long as the current fronter is in agreement).

We didn't know we were plural for a long while partly because of The Cycle, and partly because of a lack of knowledge on median experiences. But we know now! We did identify as plural shortly before syscovery, but because of dæmonism (we also thought Caeruleus was a dæmon - he still has a dæmon - like role, but we're pretty sure he's just a normal headmate otherwise).

Because of this, we often project our headmates. Usually just the dæmons of course, but projection can also be very useful when someone wants to feel included in some way without co-fronting. Especially on walks.

We do have a headspace, we just don't use it much. We do have a main fronting room (complete with spinny office chair and jukebox!) but it's moreso a place to hang out - switching between headmates doesn't involve it at all. Switching feels like becoming someone else - there's also a feeling that the "main" thoughts are coming from you, and whoever was fronting before is just another voice around you. Not to say that whoever's currently fronting is Most Important, they're just always There for the duration of their front, always paying attention to what's going on around them to some extent. If, say, someone stubs our toe, whoever's in front will always react (if the body can feel pain currently). Usually you can also tell via phantom shifts as well, directly corresponding to the species of whoever is in front. If someone's co-fronting or we're blurry, there might be multiple traits overlapping the same spot.

Pretty much everyone in here has something they're known to like and get excited for when they see it. Comet likes fire and pretty rocks, Sharpwhistle likes early CGI and occlupanids, Stardust likes werewolves and Jurassic Park, Caeruleus likes fish and the ocean, Mozzarella likes beetles and mustelids, Susie likes apples and reptiles, Applesauce likes jazz. These can also be good fronting indicators, and are also an easy way to get someone in front (or at least close)! Music can also help as well, we all have fairly distinct music tastes.

We haven't known about our plurality very long, so many parts of this could definitely become outdated very quickly. But for now, this is us.