(fallen london stamps by 
wish there was more conversation in plural spaces about living as plural :c a lot of conversation seems to revolve around What Kind Of System/Headmate Am I (And What Are The Right Labels For Me To Use) and as someones who've done our time in the navelgazing mines (we've been here ten! years!) our eyes just kind of glaze over whenever someone starts bringing up Terms
like in our experience at least, all of those little differences that the terms hairsplit over... most just don't matter that much in daily life, and for the ones that do, they're better expressed in everyday language than in niche microlabels. where is the talk about like, how to overcome anxiety about talking to the system's friends as someone who doesn't come out much? figuring out who you are in the outer world when you're effectively less than a ghost to it? making friends, finding hobbies, creating your own reason for existing once you've outgrown the circumstances that created you?
there's so much discussion about being, but not about living, y'know?
this so much
i don't know where to look for help or advice with actually living as plural, not just having one person handle everything and pretending to be a weird-singlet but actually considering what it means to have multiple people share one life
and it looks like everybody i know just has to sit down and reinvent all of that from first principles. i don't think we should be doing that, i think enough of us have had relationships before to put together advice for that, i think enough of us have tried coming out to give advice for that, i think enough of us have lived lives to talk about it
and every resource i can find doesn't touch on any sort of advice. only terms, sometimes clinical, sometimes informal and fun, but only terms. am i just awful at looking, or what?
i try my best to talk about these things with friends and give advice, and in some places that means i end up being the older advice-giver - but i know nothing! only tiny scraps of experience and a lot of time thinking not doing because doing is hard and we don't know how. how is the bar so low?
really, we want to do our best to change that - sitting down to talk about plurality on our website, but when it came to "and here's how you should treat us and work with us", kind of just blanking on what to write
something i imagine is related is the way that many of the plurality resources we've seen try to be general enough to describe all possible plurality - avoiding any bias, avoiding any particular speaker or perspective - and in doing so, lose the ability to say much in particular. a lot of "you might see X", "you might do X", "some systems have Y, and Y ranges significantly in form and function" to the point that it doesn't give across a good idea of any system
it feels like we're just cataloguing eachother, like we're trying to do some kind of science on eachother.
anyways. if you know any good counterexamples or resources or something, please feel free to add it on! (ideally as a repost so other people see it)
holy dang, this post resonated with a lot of people! I'm too tired to contribute many thoughts atm but I thought I'd link The Dragonheart Collective's plural essays and LB Lee's plural essays (LB also runs Healthy Multiplicity) - I've found that both of them eschew labeling in favor of practical advice on how to get daily life together.
edit: chucking a few more things in here
Plural Etiquette Questionnaire
Living as a Fictive: How to Find, Create, and Broaden Your Identity, With and Without Canon - have not been able to sit down and read through this yet, but have heard plural folks elsewhere mention that it was helpful for identity-building even as non-fictives
