hey plural people, got a question. gonna preface it with the experience inspiring this question first.
recently (as in basically all day) one of my headmates, nix, ended up getting what is best described as "stunlocked" into fronting. she felt constantly off-kilter and unstable, but nobody else was able to stick to the front. we were all locked out in a very, very weird feeling of dissociation where somebody was there, and they could sense our presence but couldn't let us in. weird experience!
but, the thing is, what broke us out of this weird stunlock situation is a realization about our system.
we recently have been looking into potentially having borderline personality disorder, and it seems quite applicable to us. like "we took like eight different online tests and got 95-100% on all of them" applicable. so we'll talk to a doc about that for sure. but in thinking about bpd, we started panicking. the splitting, the dissociation, feeling like we lose capability for rationale, feeling empty, flipping a switch between really loving someone and then convincing ourselves they hate us, it's all very applicable to us... but these symptoms also can be easily misinterpreted as symptoms of other things. and to us, the biggest source of terror was realizing that we may have misinterpreted the existence of other people in this body as OSDD or another dissociative disorder, when all along they were just a coping mechanism designed to explain why we felt out of control during one of our mood swings.
It got worse and worse as we thought more about it. We identified moods each headmate represents, which explains who each headmate is better than the "elevator pitches" we had for everyone previously. En is when we feel confident, it likes guns and cars and wearing dresses not because it's feminine, but because men aren't supposed to wear dresses according to the cultural hegemony and it is all about sticking it to the man. Calypso is when we feel wise and wordy, using a shitload of big words and intensely cold, academia-esque language. Luz is when we feel happy, ready to be excited to ADHD excitable levels, easily distracted in the trope-y ADHD way. Mystery is when we feel extremely excited and happy, almost manic, bubbly and very huggy. Amity is when we feel calm, comfy, sorta hygge type feels. Stryx is when we feel the average, just vibin on default settings. Nix is when we feel unstable, unsure of who we are, or feel like we're on the verge of crisis. Rebecca is the intense anger we feel, the impulse to just go nuts and break shit.
As a reminder, this felt terrible to us. This wasn't how we thought plurality was supposed to be! We're not supposed to be the same person who just feels a mood, we're supposed to be splintered off! Separate individuals with our own motivations, desires, wants and needs separate from the others!
...until we had the second realization that actually, we were panicking about it because of what we thought plurality was, and we were worried we didn't fit that category because our system didn't behave the same way it does for other people. So what if we're just moods? This body still feels like control is swapped from one entity to another when it falls into these different moods. That is plural. These moods do not seem to be like moods other people have, for us they are cataclysmic shifts in rationale, decision-making, thought process. everything in our mind shifts like a deck of cards being reshuffled; the deck is all the same cards, they're just in a different order.
So, here's my question: anyone else relate to this form of plurality? I think we just want assurance that we're not alone interpreting plurality in this manner.
