I definitely think divisions between headmates can be much squishier than we pretend! For instance, our ghosts are overwhelmingly dead soul chunks of existing alters; their names and identities are the same, they just got killed as a survival measire like a sea cucumber ejecting its organs in self-defense. Are they separate people or the same? Yes! But we have grown more inclined to see the work we do with them in a religious, rather than medical context. "Laying the dead to rest" feels more correct than "integrating traumatic fragments." Similarly, the alter family has enough skills and traits in common that blending and swirling at times isn't a bad thing.

It's the social pressure that bothers me, and the sentiment that being plural is inherently a sicker, worse, inferior state of being compared to being singlet. If that pressure weren't there, I think I'd be way less tetchy and irrational over it.