Realizing I was multiple, and existed, meant having to go, "Oh my god, I was such an asshole," making amends, and actually changing myself into a decent human being. Obviously, that was a lot to take in, so it took me longer to come around to being multiple, even though I insisted that my reasons were pure emotionless logic.
One thing we've sometimes talked about over the years, but not as much as we'd like to, is how much we didn't resemble the stereotype of "the host is weak, fearful, and has no memory of what the others do." I guess I would've been seen as the "host" when we first really became selves-aware, because I was the one driving our public presentation, although I had been blending and blurring with others without realising that was what I was doing. And I was a control freak. An asshole control freak. I was an asshole to myself and everyone else in here, telling myself/ourselves that "I just want to think I'm multiple so I can feel special, and I should be punished for that." Even when I decided to start consciously trying to let others front, I would shove them out of the way and decide they "weren't real, just me play-acting" if we didn't switch perfectly and completely and if I remembered too much about what they had done. (Never mind that being able to remember what we had done, after a certain point in our life, was BETTER for avoiding abuse than being amnesiac of it. We'd feel more like "I know I did that thing, but it was like I was a completely different person when I did it.")
I know on some level I was trying to save myself from potential disappointment and humiliation. From putting my faith in the others as real persons who could support and help me, because I was so afraid it would turn out not to be true. I thought it was for my own good, and the good of whoever else might be in here with me, and I also somehow framed it to myself as the epitome of cold hard logic (even though I was also doing things like constantly moving the goalposts for what constituted being "real enough"; like "well, you're not real if you can't do this... okay, well, scratch that, you're not real if you can't do THIS, ignore previous.")
Would recognizing you're plural mean you have to do something about it? Well, that's scary and requires life changes, sooooo claim you're not plural! Claim nobody's plural! Anyone who says otherwise is lying, delusional, or brainwashed, and surely that will never, ever bite you in the ass.
Yeah, this was me when we were 19-20, as surprising as it might sound now. Admittedly, part of it was having read one too many toaster stories and claims of superhuman abilities ("we never get tired/hungry/etc, because we can just switch!"), which was why we wrote Sour Grapes. (Please excuse the terrible page design. Our ex wanted us to pay them for web design, and their sense of design is firmly stuck in the 90s.)
A lot of it describes our own thought processes around these things (well, we aren't as uniformly skeptical as we made it out to sound there, but we were still in "we must convince the debunkers" mindset), and it's something we've... pretty much never seen anyone else talk about. That to us, magical toaster powers weren't wish-fulfilment, but terrifying, and "sorry, you missed the cut-off age to be special" felt like just more "you missed your chance to be great." We don't regret writing it, but all the same, looking back, focusing on issues of toaster powers and cutoff ages was... honestly, in some ways, a way to keep ourselves focussed on abstract issues rather than concrete ones about what was actually going on in our head. As was letting other systems prompt and guide us about who and what they thought was in here, instead of trying to discover it organically on our own.
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Date: 2018-09-20 01:40 pm (UTC)One thing we've sometimes talked about over the years, but not as much as we'd like to, is how much we didn't resemble the stereotype of "the host is weak, fearful, and has no memory of what the others do." I guess I would've been seen as the "host" when we first really became selves-aware, because I was the one driving our public presentation, although I had been blending and blurring with others without realising that was what I was doing. And I was a control freak. An asshole control freak. I was an asshole to myself and everyone else in here, telling myself/ourselves that "I just want to think I'm multiple so I can feel special, and I should be punished for that." Even when I decided to start consciously trying to let others front, I would shove them out of the way and decide they "weren't real, just me play-acting" if we didn't switch perfectly and completely and if I remembered too much about what they had done. (Never mind that being able to remember what we had done, after a certain point in our life, was BETTER for avoiding abuse than being amnesiac of it. We'd feel more like "I know I did that thing, but it was like I was a completely different person when I did it.")
I know on some level I was trying to save myself from potential disappointment and humiliation. From putting my faith in the others as real persons who could support and help me, because I was so afraid it would turn out not to be true. I thought it was for my own good, and the good of whoever else might be in here with me, and I also somehow framed it to myself as the epitome of cold hard logic (even though I was also doing things like constantly moving the goalposts for what constituted being "real enough"; like "well, you're not real if you can't do this... okay, well, scratch that, you're not real if you can't do THIS, ignore previous.")
Would recognizing you're plural mean you have to do something about it? Well, that's scary and requires life changes, sooooo claim you're not plural! Claim nobody's plural! Anyone who says otherwise is lying, delusional, or brainwashed, and surely that will never, ever bite you in the ass.
Yeah, this was me when we were 19-20, as surprising as it might sound now. Admittedly, part of it was having read one too many toaster stories and claims of superhuman abilities ("we never get tired/hungry/etc, because we can just switch!"), which was why we wrote Sour Grapes. (Please excuse the terrible page design. Our ex wanted us to pay them for web design, and their sense of design is firmly stuck in the 90s.)
A lot of it describes our own thought processes around these things (well, we aren't as uniformly skeptical as we made it out to sound there, but we were still in "we must convince the debunkers" mindset), and it's something we've... pretty much never seen anyone else talk about. That to us, magical toaster powers weren't wish-fulfilment, but terrifying, and "sorry, you missed the cut-off age to be special" felt like just more "you missed your chance to be great." We don't regret writing it, but all the same, looking back, focusing on issues of toaster powers and cutoff ages was... honestly, in some ways, a way to keep ourselves focussed on abstract issues rather than concrete ones about what was actually going on in our head. As was letting other systems prompt and guide us about who and what they thought was in here, instead of trying to discover it organically on our own.
-Amaranth