Phosphor [&]

so, we've been aware that we're plural for over ten years now, and aware that we were something for most of our life

as an idea of how self(s)-understanding can change, I wanted to present a vague timeline of the labels we used for our plurality throughout, and our personal history in relation to them.

(discussion of abuse and ego death ahead)

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imaginary friend

most of our memories from back then are indistinct, but we have a very clear one of the first day of first grade, riding a schoolbus for the first time. the original girl, telling the kid next to her all about her imaginary friend. we have less clear ones of presence, of huddling cozily together in makeshift forts, of invisible company on tedious outings, of daydreamed conversations.

character/muse

around we think fifth grade, the original girl got really into writing. she built an elaborate fantasy world and made a core cast of characters that her stories would revolve around. foremost among this cast was the imaginary friend from first grade, now given a name.

(this friend would be given other names over the years - many names for many stories. many, many years later, he would name himself Lark.)

she lived in her head almost all the time, daydreaming about the adventures this cast would go on, spinning up sequels and prequels and AUs, composing AMVs in her head as she paced to and fro. but in all this dreaming, it was only Lark who spoke directly to her - not as a character, but simply as a friend. about schoolwork, the writing process, parents. mundane in topic as they were, these conversations inspired her, and so she took to calling him, specifically, her muse.

tulpas

in college, Lark tried to do the thing that the stories said imaginary friends were supposed to do: say farewell and leave their human's life, because they had grown up and had no need of imaginary things anymore.

it didn't stick. there was an unfortunate relationship, and when it ended, he could feel her suffering. so he came back.

glad as she was for him, she couldn't help but wonder what he was. were adults supposed to have imaginary friends? were imaginary friends supposed to be this vivid? she googled "adults with imaginary friends." in the comments of one article, someone mentioned tulpas - other, autonomous people in your head, created through focused effort, often for the sake of companionship.

something about it tugged at her. she considered. she asked Lark if he wanted to become a tulpa. he said yes. (the irony of asking this question would not be lost on us, years later.)

she would go on to become deeply involved in the tulpamancy community, answering questions, sharing stories, passionately arguing for the personhood of tulpas. more headmates showed up around this time. they were accidental tulpas, they all would agree. we agreed, too, that Lark was an accidental tulpa from childhood - he hadn't become a tulpa, he'd just acknowledged as one.

no one in the system had been intentionally created, but we found friends and community, nonetheless.

endogenic system

back then, the wider plural community and the tulpamancy community were mostly unaware of each other. some time (a year? more? our memory is difficult) after joining the tulpamancy community, we befriended some people who were part of both communities. from them, we learned the word "plural", and discovered there were other ways to be more than one.

some time after that, a system on Tumblr proposed new plural terms. among them was the word "endogenic", for systems who just kind of spontaneously became plural, without trauma or any other external cause to point to. this term fit our understanding of ourselves as being made of headmates who just happened one day, and felt cleaner to use than "accidental tulpas." so we switched over, and at the same time, began spending more time with the wider plural community.

(some of you may be surprised to learn that that is what endogenic is intended to mean! let this be an example of the treachery of labels - how rapidly they change, how easily they are misunderstood.)

mixed-origins system with a traumagenic median subsystem

all this time, we were slowly becoming aware that the ways that our parents treated us were not okay, and that our childhood was not a kind one. this realization, combined with continued cruelty from our parents and the relentless stresses of academia, caused our original to begin fracturing.

the cracks had always been there. she had always "felt like" different people growing up, confused by her own actions, by her ever-shifting identity and desires. she'd written it off as a normal part of growing up. now, she wasn't so sure. so she tried to understand herself from a new direction. she identified common patterns-of-self. named them. tried to talk to them, and get them to talk to each other.

unfortunately, we didn't have the intrapersonal competence to really follow that approach through. realizing that she herself was a bunch of selves made things make sense. it did not make things better. we/they were more interested in blaming each other for all our troubles. we/they slapfought over who was the "real" one and who needed to go away, as if that would magically fix our childhood, our failing health, our decaying academic life. it was so painfully childish.

in any case, we changed our labels again. as far as we were concerned, Lark and the other headmates from prior (who were doing their damnedest to hold things together during all this) were not products of trauma, but the original's network of selves was. hence: mixed-origins. some endogenic headmates, and a traumagenic median subsystem.

but that wasn't the end of it...

polyfragmented DID system (with a few non-traumagenic members)

things with our family got worse. long story short: we became afraid, not without reason, that we would die if we went home.

so all of us, no matter our origin, despite our previous squabbles, came to an agreement. we would not go home. we would leave. we would uproot our education, our future, everything by doing so, but we could not go home.

some friends, an endogenic system who we'd met in the tulpamancy community, volunteered to take us in and help us get back on our feet. we packed our bags, bought a train ticket, made it to their place, and crashed. unable to work, unable to do chores, unable to do much of anything. for the multiple years it took us to escape that pit, they sheltered us, fed us, and let us cry on them, without asking anything in return. we owe them our life.

during that time period, a few things happened. torn from all she knew, having "failed" as a Good Daughter, our original allowed herself to fade away into her many facet-selves, who eventually broke apart. she would no longer exist as a person. instead, there were a handful of new individuals - many who were faceted, themselves - and a vast number of fragments.

we were still struggling with our validity then. (it did not help that we were drowned in rhetoric about how only systems with specific origins and formal diagnoses and Enough Suffering(tm) were valid whenever we tried to find help in disordered/traumagenic-specific spaces.) in an attempt to find direction, we visited a dissociative specialist. she recognized us as having a dissociative disorder, but mobility and money issues stopped us from seeing her further.

we had to take things into our own hands. so we all, finally, agreed to stop slapfighting over who was "real" and who wasn't. we agreed that even if we didn't like each other, we could at least be civil. we would have our disagreements, but we could at least agree to eat the next meal, and to take the next shower, and to not die until we absolutely had to.

we began using "DID" and "polyfragmented" and other such labels during this time, as a way to acknowledge what we were, to make it more real for ourselves. but, to be honest, I don't think it was the labels that helped us most. it wasn't paying someone hundreds of dollars to tell us what we already knew. it was the steadfast support of our friends - singlet, endogenic, traumagenic, and everything in-between and neither. it was having a safe place to recover in, a separation from the environment and people who were eating us alive. that was what made the difference.

plural

little by little, we recovered. we began doing more stuff - a min-wage job, a code bootcamp. but the biggest thing that happened for us is that we joined a virtual petsite.

most of our social spaces up to this point had revolved around plurality. this was a space that was majority singlets - but accepting singlets! we were able to just... exist. our social time was filled with game events and story discussion and roleplay, rather than discourse and navelgazing. and it was... frankly, really really good for us. we hadn't realized that places like this existed. that people like this existed - who weren't like us, but welcomed us nonetheless. who didn't care about our labels or making us justify ourselves, just what pronouns and names to use for us and what our availability was for game nights.

we realized that the world was so much bigger than we thought it was. that all the things that we thought mattered so much, origins and labels and Discourses, just... didn't matter in this bigger world.

we realized that the labels were oversimplifications of our reality. we had struggled, we had been disordered, but we had gotten better. our manyness was not solely a product of our traumas - our neurodivergences, our cultural background, and the richness of our childhood imagination played as much of a role. and besides, where each of us came from turned out to matter less than what we needed, and where we wanted to go.

the labels no longer described us. the labels no longer helped us. instead of seeking new ones, we decided to let go of the idea that we needed labels at all. we discarded them, and in the end, just one remained: we are plural.