EmilyTheFlareon

Flareon you should add on Discord~

  • she/her

Member of a traumagenic–catharigenic, semi-structural DID system (host: @LoganDark)

 

Feral female Flareon, somewhat kinky but terminally panromantic towards other ferals~

 

Please do not call us "alters", we are full people with our own souls, not just personality states! We say "system members" or just "members". "People" works too!

 

Discord: Emily the Flareon#3557 or @emilytheflareon
(open to friend requests! otherkin/plural <3~)
(but seriously add me if you interact uwu)

 

also feel free to use our asks as direct messages! :3


Discord
Emily the Flareon#3557
add me on discord
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:3

pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

Kris may be our host, but they don't like talking, and they have Frisk's characteristic of preferring to be nonverbal and getting less verbal under stress. (my sibling would be more fluent in Spanish, I suspect.) and I'm altogether too good at being able to put words together even under conditions of extreme pain and dissociation; somehow I can always find something to say even if I shouldn't, and thus I've done the lion's share of talking in the Pnictogen Wing. lately, though, we've been feeling uncomfortable about the imbalance.

there's some image from C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce—the one in which Lewis's self-insert character finds himself in Hell and then takes a bus ride to the outskirts of Heaven—that memorably depicts a lost soul who has taken to speaking through a kind of front or theatrical persona. the lost soul is diminutive and doesn't talk, but they carry around a melodramatic Actor on a chain; when the lost soul is engaged in conversation, they tug on the chain and then the Actor starts declaiming and giving speeches. but slowly the lost soul shrinks and the Actor gains in stature and finally he seems to swallow up the lost soul completely, an event which I suppose Lewis wishes us to regard as the final damnation of the lost soul. in life, we can assume that the lost soul had been used to putting up a blustery melodramatic front instead of interacting directly with other people; now the melodramatic front has utterly devoured its originator. and we Lewis readers can all then shake our heads and say "there but for the grace of God" (or "ahaha go burn in Hell with Susan Pevensie, sinner!")

to say that this all hits very differently now...that would be an understatement. all of The Great Divorce is like that. there's a disturbing degree of psychological realism to Lewis's "lost souls", and yet the implication is that mental or emotional debilities are akin to sin and damnation. this poor human being is unable to interact with the world except through a mask, and now they're rotting in C. S. Lewis's Hell. another lost soul is a grieving mother who never recovered from the death of their child—and so they're in Hell. it's not...great.

and yet it's also seemed like a valid warning. I don't want to be Kris's blustery melodramatic actor, speaking for them all the time simply because I once liked to hear the sound of my own voice (there's no longer much joy in it) and because Kris doesn't like to deal with other human beings and is frankly scared of other human beings. I feel like I've done Kris an injury, in fact, doing all this talking.

guess you win that one, Jack. you got me.

~Chara


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in reply to @pnictogen-wing's post:

If you look at traumagenic plurality as a coping method for stressors, then it makes perfect sense that that you came about to do the talking when Kris could not. Aether was like that a lot for me; he spoke when I was too afraid and defended us when I couldn't. There are definitely alters who can't speak externally (Karu might be nonverbal and Glory can talk, she just does not want to deal with other people, at all, ever).

But also I do not feel a need to FORCE them to speak. I do not mind talking to the clerk at Target to buy a video game for Karu or relaying writing critique from Glory (and making it more polite lol). Because all of us are on the same team. We're one big household and share a common goal. Why have each roommate send their own check to the power company when one person can group it together and make a single payment?

So, for all y'all, is it critical for Kris to verbally speak for themselves at every opportunity? Is that a thing they wish they could do? Is that something YOU wish they could do? Is it causing issues for you to do all the talking?

For us, Aether's history of only speaking in combative situations meant that the things he said were very...not nice. As we got older, I recognized the headspace/situations that would cause "me" to say things that would get us into trouble and mitigated them. Because we had a career and needed to not solve problems by blowing up relationships like we used to. But since I didn't know I was plural, it was a difficult thing to do lol

But you two know each other! And talk to each other in headspace, I imagine. For some definition of "talk" (doesn't have to be like a face to face dialogue, it can be more like "telepathy" or pantomime or whatever. Any sort of communication method works). Can you figure out what it is Kris wishes they were able to do? And are there baby steps you can take so they can lessen their fear? Like they decide the words to say and you say them, or you decide on the words and they say them. They can ask you for guidance as they speak in more low-stakes situations (telling the cashier you want paper or plastic bags, I don't need the receipt, thank you) and y'all can work your way up to whatever level of speaking independence Kris wants. Does that seem like something Kris would like to do?

-bird