(fallen london stamps by the thing about us is, we don't use origin labels (traumagenic, endogenic, etc) but that doesn't mean that we don't have theories and personal narratives about how we each came to be. Bast and I both originated as shards of The Girl, but from very different parts of her personality; the seen and the secret, the adored and the feared. and Lark has been here as long as we can remember, clad in the flesh of a story given life.
it's less about not knowing, and more about a profound reluctance to file these narratives under a label that more often than not flattens all of the richness of an individual experience to fit into a Convenient Box, complete with no shortage of Assumptions
also, to be clear, my disdain for origins/-genic terms doesn't mean that I think it's pointless to think about where you came from. on the contrary, I feel like having some kind of "origin story" can be tremendously meaningful for a lot of folks.
see, for example, the understanding that I began as The Social And People-Pleasing Shard of The Girl while Bast began as All The Repressed Anger And Socially Unacceptable Thoughts And Feelings shard. I have no doubt that the real story is a wee bit more complicated than that, but this framing still helped us reconcile our differences. I empathized with being feared and unwanted; he saw me for myself and not the perfection I tried to emulate. I taught him that other people were worth it; in turn, he taught me that it was okay to be a person, rather than a paragon.
thinking about your roots can help you construct a narrative about yourself that lets you contextualize the present through the lens of the past - or to use less fancy words, what is the self but a story? (full credit to Lark for that, btw.) knowing what happened in the story earlier can help you understand - and change! - what is happening now, and what will happen later. even singlets have self-stories that include their births and early lives in them
it's just that the way the community treats the concept of origin and how they use -genic terms... misses the point of that, in favor of trying to fit super individual experiences into other people's boxes. "is this experience traumagenic or endogenic" is just so much less useful and interesting a question than "what was the context around how I came to be? what was the system like when I showed up, and how have I affected our collective life? how does knowing where I came from change my understanding of myself? do I now see my problems in a different light?"* and let's not get into all the essentialist assumptions: "if you're traumagenic you must be miserable. if you're endogenic you have never had any problems ever." it's basically asking people to trap themselves in the past. imagine if people went "if your birth had difficulties you will always be sickly."
*(and of course, if none of those questions are helpful at all, you can drop the matter of where you came from altogether.)
