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

[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.

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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.