Some Stuff on Integration/Fusion/Becoming Singlet

[lb_lee]

We doubt we'll ever become singlet again, but other people have, temporarily or permanently, and it's information people should have. So here are some sources we've found of people discussing their experiences with and around it!

• Integration, by Abigail Collins: One woman describing her experiences becoming singlet, along with tips and advice on dealing with it. Made in 1993 for Mending Ourselves: Expressions of healing & self-integration, which itself contains a lot of people's experiences becoming singlet or trying to.
• Becoming Median, by Zyfron: About being multiple, becoming singlet, and then becoming median. Made in 2018.
• On Being Integrated, by Ricky of Gossamer&: About becoming singlet temporarily, spontaneously, and unwantedly, written for the Asylum e-zine in 2000.
• Pro-choice? or Anti-Integration? by Lesley Pierce and Larry (of the Anachronic Army): on the stigma of becoming singlet. Written for the Asylum e-zine in 2000.
• An Owl's Guide to Fusion: "Some practical advice on how to fuse based on my own experiences; mostly aimed at unification, but likely useful for smaller fusions as well." Working on reading.
• Fusion (non-GPL): "My experiences with unification and a plea to change how it's regarded in the plural community." Haven't read yet.

 
That's all the nice, informational stuff. It's more complicated and emotional behind the cut. Because I admit, I have strong, difficult emotions around becoming singlet.

I can't pretend it's a totally free, equal choice. We have met many people who were pressured to become singlet and in one case outright FORCED to attempt the process, which caused total havoc for them. It was a sobering experience for us to meet this multiple, in person, because their therapist bought our comics in a local bookstore and realized that maybe forcing them to become singlet was a shitty thing to do. We only met this multiple because of therapeutic abuse, and that abuser CONNECTED us together. How do you feel about that? How do you deal with that? We were only 22 at the time, and when I think about it, I want to cry and break a window... but I also feel this sick sense of gratitude, that the therapist changed. I hate that I feel that gratitude.

It was around this time that our parents also asked if there were medications to make us singlet, to make us go away, and tried to persuade us to institutionalize ourself. (Note: the nearest appropriate hospital was Colin Ross's. THAT Colin Ross, the dude who got run out of Canada because his patients kept suddenly dying on him under dubious circumstances. Let me tell you, when I went to IGDID and found myself in the same room as him, it was BIZARRE to be like, "that is a man I might've ended up under the care of." I laughed and made jokes about it, because how else can you deal with that?)

Every day, we wake up in a society that doesn't want me to exist, and a lot of my professional persona is based around making my plurality as nonthreatening as possible. We work hard not to switch at in-person events, because even at multi cons, switching weirds people out. We use the first person singular. Our pronouns are going to shit on this entry, and is it to protect ourself? To embrace our own fluidity and ambiguity? Both? We overwhelmingly go by a group name (LB), and we have to put that name on all our work, because otherwise we don't have enough of a catalog to get ourself off the professional ground. We go by "they" pronouns because it's easier on everyone to call us by one name and one set of pronouns, even if none of us actually USE those pronouns individually.

Our life is a compromise. We have made a profession out of being multiple in public... and that profession involves tons of emotional management, not just of ourselves but of others. People who are enraged by our existence, by our refusal to perform shame for it. People who are so ontologically troubled by our existence that they need me to not exist, for their own philosophical comfort. Concern trolls who are truly just so concerned for my mental health, and wouldn't it just be better, stabler, saner if I... you know, stopped existing? But not in a deathly way, no no! People probably think our job is "make comics, write stories." It's really, "make comics, write stories, and control everywhere we go and how we act and how we feel so as to deal with the worst plausible reactions people will have to that, which goes up to threats of violence and professional sabotage." And we feel LUCKY, because at least it's only been threats! (Well, professionally. Personally, violence has indeed happened. But this post isn't about that.)

And yet, despite all my baggage, there's no denying that becoming singlet is the right choice for some people. We know folks who've become singlet and are happier that way! This isn't some abstract hypothetical! People should be free to be themselves, to grow and change, to even (gasp) be wrong, and for some people, being multiple is wrong. They find that they are mistaken about being multi, or they were once but aren't now, and all of that should be fucking okay. How can you destigmatize a way of being if you insist on guarding the border with rifles and barbed wire? Yes, by all means, let people experiment! Let them try out being plural and then change their minds! I want to build a society where that can happen without risk! You CAN'T destigmatize being plural if you only focus on PERMANENT plurality.

But I don't know that I will ever be able to overcome my deep, visceral feelings. I have faced too much pressure telling me to be singlet, that being singlet is healthier, saner, better. I cannot view such a decision for myself as a free choice, because you know, I DID manage to fake singlet for a few years, long enough to have a life that way, and even though it was hell, it was an internal hell. Externally, society made it so much easier on me. One name! One set of pronouns! Finding roommates and jobs so much more easily! If I were singlet (and free of trauma), I could just work in the fucking post office and NEVER EXIST ON THE INTERNET AGAIN. (God, what I'd give to never have to exist on the Internet again.) No matter how shitty plurals can be about people becoming singlet, the fact remains: existing in plural subcultures is optional. Existing in mainstream singlet culture is not. Though both forms of douchebaggery can be equally emotionally hurtful, the power of one of those douchebaggeries is far more far-reaching.

I don't envy the people who become singlet. I just want to build a society where being singlet isn't enviable in the first place. I want to help build a society where it truly is a free choice, not just, "mansion or Dumpster, what'll it be?"

Comments

[pilotsofanewsky]

Took us a while to read this because oh boy do we also have feelings about fusion. We first learned about MPD at age 14, realised the pressure to integrate, and developed a strong angry "fuck you, no" response that has never gone away. But these days, we (all) realise we're plural, rather than most of us hiding behind the denial of "this is just a really special interest", and so it's becoming personal.

We have experienced the "persona-editing" you describe, although we've only been out to people for 1.5 years, so we're still figuring it out and hopefully it'll get better. And we've been trying to figure out our system, which is a squishy, confusing process. Often we find that one person is now three people, or two people seem to have become one. Was that splitting/fusion, or were we just mistaken before?

It's been 2 years so it's probably too early to say. But we think that the borders between us might be somewhat fluid. And we always want them to be in a place that feels right. We don't want to squish two people into one box and we don't want to keep up an artificial separation that doesn't make sense anymore. We just want to be as we are, which means accepting that two people can become one, sometimes.

But if anyone suggests that we should have fusion as a therapy goal? FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF OUR FACE. We want to not be pressured, either way. We just want to let the brain do what it does. We don't see it as a voluntary thing, it just kind of seems to happen when the brain says it should happen. (But not against the wishes of the involved headmates; it has always "felt right") We trust the brain to do things that heal us (now that we're not in a shitty environment anymore, and we're able to front a bit more freely).

We just don't think that we'll end up fusing so much that we become one person. If it happens - then it must have been right, and we'll accept it, by definition. But the idea feels deeply weird.

In any case, we don't want scarcity or pressure or fear to be the driving factor there. We want to build a life for ourselves where we can front and be weird and be ourselves and be known. At least in some spaces. And I think we've gotten a pretty good start. (And it has apparently given us an aura of "it's okay to have feelings and be as you are", which we appreciate.)

And that way, if fusion happens, we'll know it was because it was good for us. Not just because it helped us deal with societal pressure.

(Also, the thing you said about internal vs. external hells feels very true to us. There is so much internal chaos. And as we externalize ourselves more [being able to do that feels like a gift], we get tidier on the inside even as our life gets more complicated on the outside. Relationships, oh my.)

[lb_lee]

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.

[pilotsofanewsky]

Mhm, those squishy details make sense to us! It also makes sense to usually avoid talking about them, even just for simplicity. A friend once told us "I think my brain might work like yours, except mine is all messy and everything you say about yours sounds really distinct and separated." That is really not true about us! We just barely have the words to talk about being a big group of people. How do you express the fluidity of existence that's actually there? (We might need to make a comic strip about it.) So whenever we talk about system stuff, we come across much more defined than we actually are...

And yeah, feel that. Constantly having to justify why we like being multi is a pain, and does weird things to our brain. It's not even that we like it - some of us do! Some of just are just like "well this is how we exist". Just like some of us celebrate being trans and others are like "yeah, this is a neutral fact about me". But in some spaces we feel pressure to perform absolute acceptance and joy, just because they're pushing against that so hard and we want to prove that we CAN be multi and happy about it. And we can! But often we're actually just neutral about it.

Sometimes (recently especially) we struggle with it. And we still don't want people to push those narratives onto us. We just want to be able to say that it's hard sometimes.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: The best way I can imagine expressing that blending or swirling is via color; Zyfron would use blue, orange, and red to communicate differences between headmates and talk about "balancing the swirl," I recall, and I feel like that idea could be used in all sorts of really interesting creative ways! (How lamentable that I work overwhelmingly in black and white. Color printing is expensive!)

[pilotsofanewsky]

Oh true, I remember that, that was really neat! Sadly we mostly just work with pencils. Though some different system members have been getting into watercolor art...maybe they'll eventually get to that. We have a visual but it's really hard to pin down. Feels like something that should be a 3d animated video, haha.