(long & rambly & as much about the tags as the topic)
while calculating a launch trajectory to escape bed gravity today, my aspects slipped out of cohesion and started conversing over how we'd all very much like to get up but also dammit blankets comfy. Akhra unsurprisingly suggested we go fuck ourselves about it, and Lenester was immediately in on the plan which was a surprise.
(tangentially: wait, how? also, surprise to who? how much is going on in here that I haven't noticed yet? ...and who exactly is writing this paragraph? feels like Watcher commentary, but without the sterile detachment... okay, pin that for another time)
it's the second time we've had inter-aspect sex in recent months; technically the third time overall, but the first was before we understood it in that context (actually relevant to the broader topic). frankly we should do that more often, it's goddamn amazing and we wind up exploring fluidity of form and identity that we seem to habitually shy away from most of the time (also relevant).
anyway it worked for getting out of bed, and we made our way to the shower still taking about it, and then more about the whole bizarre experience of median intra-system conversation. mentally forming words (with distinct voices!) but then cutting each other off because the thoughts behind them are already shared. remembering each other's experiences in first person, but commenting on them from different perspectives. we're not usually in that state, where multiple aspects are fully and distinctly engaged and we know who's saying what; there was a consensus that maybe we should try to get there more often, but also it was probably time to recohese and stop distracting ourselves. (and then we just effortlessly did that, I have questions, ugh okay another pin-for-later)
I considered chosting about this after I finished the shower but it turns out I can get copiously distracted even without system shenanigans. then hours later out of the blue I had the flash realization that actually I used to do that all the goddamn time; in fact for several years I may have spent more time with Lenester and Akhra separately, simultaneously, fully engaged than not. because see, back in the IRC days, it was very easy to just launch two clients at once with different names. and I nearly always did, and that was my main social outlet for a while.
I've had so many thoughts brushing right up against this in the last few years! even specifically identifying this as a relative shortcoming of Discord and Slack! but it hadn't sunk in until now that this wasn't just how I expressed the distinctness of my aspects to others back then, it was also the main medium we used to interact among ourselves. we had our separate haunts but also channels we'd both hang out in, and be active simultaneously. and that first time we had sex within the system, was through adjacent IRC windows.
but at the time, I didn't think about any of this as plurality because, well, ambient sysmedicalism told me not to. I knew I didn't have DID (though I wound up gravitating toward several systems which did, unsurprising in hindsight) and while I could see the rough shape of my own system, I couldn't square it with the models available to me. drawing those lines in hindsight has been a gradual, largely manual process.
...made considerably harder by a solid decade spent actively suppressing anything that didn't square with my ex's projected anxiety (social, marital, and otherwise). hey, finally made it back to the topic! don't Be Weird in ways others might judge them for. don't socialize with people they don't know and trust (which for the most part meant not on my own at all; especially not online). they talked me into doing the work myself, and once they told me to go it was another two years before I even remembered the name Akhra, plus one more before I used it publicly again.
that huge part of myself, the hub of any gender euphoria I'd known up to then, buried so deep I forgot it was there. and now I realize right under that same plot of dirt was not just the main context of my prior social existence; but prior system explorations, entire frameworks of communication among myselves.
it's great to have found missing pieces again! but holy shit it's a little terrifying to wonder how much more there might be. might not have DID, but I seem to be a champion at other kinds of dissociation.