someone elsewhere was posting about how they, as the person at front the majority of the time, felt forced to either
- make their entire internet existence a collective one, without ever having anything for themselves, out of fear that doing so otherwise will stifle their headmates' abilities to be themselves
- or claim every aspect of their outerworld existence for themselves, burying everything about the system in the process and forcing their headmates to pretend to be them
I kind of want to write a more organized thing on this sometime, but for now, here's the response I gave:
also, re: the "can be a valid personal statement" part, I feel like this whole subject is something that not only different systems will feel differently about (i.e. some will happily have collective everythings and others won't) but ALSO something that you can feel differently about over time... back when we were still selves-discovering and figuring out Our Whole Deal, we went the route of "collective everything" because it was valuable to us to center our group-ness. and now that we've settled comfortably into our group-ness, now that it's just another part of our life instead of the thing we are trying to figure out, we're a mix of collective- and individual-presenting
🌶️ sharing this because not only is it incredibly good advice, but also to second that point of "you can feel differently about this over time":
we've probably been trying to answer this question for ourselves ever since we started opening up about our plurality earlier this year, and a lot of our answers have fully depended on those contexts. when nidhogg and r2 set up their own pages on here, it was at a time when we were quite stably just us three, and even then we immediately started to struggle with that. so when luna showed up and we agreed on using this account that had previously been my personal one for the entire system, it was... odd? but now, knowing that we were about to more than double in headmates (all of us interested in being present in some way), it was and is, in our and my opinion, the right choice for us right now.
it was a little weird at first, partially because i was finishing up my own rebrand right when we realized we were plural and you could still smell the fresh paint on that presentation of self, but currently it's alright? maybe once sharing this body becomes routine, we might try having some of us be more individual about stuff. who knows, maybe i'll be thrown out of this account? :::3
i jest, i jest. we're lucky in that we get along well in here. it makes having a main collective account much easier on us than trying to maintain twelve different ones. this is the sort of thing that's gonna be quite different from system to system, and we know nerds here who're literally everywhere in between those two extremes and making it work.
so... yeah. the two chosts above this one are great, and i am quite capable at rambling about my own experiences with this as someone who has only known there were other creatures in here for two thirds of a year. hopefully if anyone else is struggling with this my little talk helped too. really, communication is key like always. the best way to try and figure things out starts with talking to your fellow system members and finding an agreement.