(We're back!)
What experiences made you realize that you were plural?
Alternatively, for those questioning: what experiences are causing you to wonder if you're plural?
My quip for the Post-Self Cycle is:
If I had a nickel for every time I wrote something with heavy plural undertones that made me question my identity, I would have two nickels! Which is not a lot, but it is weird that it happened twice.
I wrote ally in 2019-2020. It is a project structured as a conversation between myself and... something. Not my friend, but my ally. It is an entity that challenged me to be more true to myself, more earnest. Not more realistic, that was not its goal. It did not want to ground me in reality, unless the unreality I was living in was a way of keeping myself from being myself.
Shortly after it came out, it received a lengthy review that described it with the following:
I think it’s my favorite plural memoir.
Which is weird, right? I was not plural! I was well aware of plural folks and systems1, there were plenty in my life, but pff, of course not me. I was happy to sit on the sidelines and view my ally as a literary construct. I wrapped myself up in my coziest, softest blanket of impostor syndrome, told my ally to shut up, and posited a comfortable fiction.
Later that year, I released Qoheleth, what I thought would be a standalone novel (it was originally a book titled Post-Self, which included Qoheleth and a few other stories, even). This was followed some time later by three more books continuing the story of the Ode and Bălan clades.
Once more, these books were snapped up by plural folks and systems as analogues or possibilities for the future. After all, for cladists, a new personality stemming from the same uploaded mind being born from individuation when provided with a different take on reality sounds an awful lot like the formation of a headmate, alter, or aspect, yes?
Once more, I was thrown into a tailspin about who exactly I was. I was singular, right?
Right?
Finally, shortly after Mitzvot came out, I started poking around on Wolfery as Slow Hours and Beholden. They were two very different takes on myself, which.. Well it was more base than that. They were two different people who nonetheless has their roots in the same core identity. They were two forks in canon, and also perilously close to the same in reality.
I wrote in my thesis:
“I feel embarrassed (though not shamed) that what I had considered a settled and permanent part of my identity is maybe not either,” I said to Echo during those slow wriggings-toward of our early relationship, as the edges of my paper-thin self began to fray. “And I also feel embarrassed discussing that with you in particular. I don’t deal with impostor syndrome to quite the extent that I mentioned last night, but neither is it wholly absent.”
“You feel embarrassed discussing plurality with a plural person in particular?” ey replied.
“I think I am embarrassed because of the role our interactions have played in bringing this to the surface.”
There was a moment of silence as, I imagine, ey leaned back in eir chair, brow knit. “Goodness, what a tapestry.”
Some time later, after we had wound up in a relationship, during the very tail end of our evening when we were talking about going to bed and also about plurality, ey said something about how it seemed like I already was. Slow Hours and Beholden were already there, I had already been treating them as these different aspects, and it was like I was just waiting for something. Permission, maybe?
I guess so.
-
I do not like the terms 'system' or 'headmate' for myself, so permit me this dalliance of leaning on multiple terms, or avoiding them altogether for myself.
