zmeydros
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I'm Plural (have Headmates)
🕑 Added 2023-10-30 14:52:47 +0000 UTCTL;DR is that my childhood was full of trauma and I recently figured out that it fractured me. I've had three personalities all trying to chatter in my brain since I was somewhere between six and eleven years old and now that I've identified this, I'm finally actually able to relax. The other two alters are named Ramda and Sadie. Both got those names by being a lot like the characters they're named after. They also closely associate with the anthro bodies of those characters. Ramda wants to write some kinks/stories that I couldn't write myself and that's likely going to broaden what you see from me in the future.
If you want to know a lot about who I am and what I've been through, this post is for you. This is the most personal post I may ever make. I'm glad I wrote it and that I feel good sharing it, but it was a lot of work and I had to dig around in my past, something I avoid for a reason. Processing all this is why I've been rather inactive the last third of this month.
(Trigger warnings: Childhood trauma [mostly not explicitly described], emotional instability, one instance of physical Injury, mention of life-threatening anorexia/bulimia in a family member.)
Long Version:
When I was young, I was disabled and had a lot of trauma. It was many things from peers, my parents, and mentors. The adults were pretty much trying to do their best but were often operating on misguided principles, but the peers were vicious. There was so much trauma that I don't know if I'll ever write a memoir. It would make a terrible story.
One of these traumatic happenings, my friends abandoning me because I couldn't ride a bike, led me to decide that I was only as good to others as I was useful to them. A very not good way to live one's life.
My whole family was extremely emotional and chaotic. I always had an inner calmness to me despite being just as emotional as all of them. That put me in the position of joining the hurricane of emotions in my family or finding a way to be the calm stoic one.
Mom was pretty functional, but she was constantly concerned about what others would think of us. Keeping up appearances was an obsession for her that was more important than her children, my father, and her own sense of well being. She also was extremely critical of people's appearances and couldn't resist commenting on every single overweight person she saw. She still has anorexia and bulimia perfectly balanced so she's somehow healthy. Her fixation on people's looks led my sister to have both eating disorders as well and my sister would've died of self-starvation if she hadn't gone to a treatment center (her heart nearly gave out).
Honestly, I have no idea how I didn't end up like my sister, but my mom still screwed me up in other ways. Whenever I talked to myself around her, she'd tell me to stop. Whenever I was effeminate and excited, she asked me to stop. When I made silly voices, tried to be a kid, or put utensils on the wrong side of the plate (I'm dyslexic), she had a problem with it. She was never overtly mean, but she could not chill when it came to "what other people might think." There was no time when she was around where I could express the truly eccentric and feminine being I was.
My dad was very wise, had a wonderful silly side, and was effeminate in many ways. He was the healthiest of all of us, but he had rage attacks. He only ever hurt me once during one, but I will never ever forget it. It led us to go to therapy immediately. Other than the time he hurt me, he yelled so much and his anger burned so hot it felt like being in an angry tiger's cage. He also felt "called" to be a pastor and going to seminary is why we moved from Hawaii to Minnesota when I was nine years old. Being a pastor's kid put the spotlight on us more and forced me into social situations where I definitely couldn't be myself. Especially because us being in the spotlight emboldened my mom's dysfunctional obsession about keeping up appearances.
My sister was the worst of all of us. She still can't accept the idea that she can be wrong. Her outbursts were so numerous and severe that it became normal. Normal for her to grab a handful of a chocolate cake we just baked and throw it on the floor because she didn't like something about it or say the most hurtful things she could think of just to see if she could get a reaction from one of us. One time, she was mad at me in the car and clawed my face with her fingernails. My parents pleaded with me to fight back because they realized that day that they couldn't protect me.People couldn't recognize me for a month after that. I had scabs everywhere.
Basically, my childhood left me with the idea that I couldn't trust anyone to not suddenly snap and claw my face while also giving me the idea that showing any weakness would get me abandoned. So I created a facade.
I became the calmest, most unflappable, and most logical person anyone would ever meet while, deep down, I was a roiling mess of insecurity and fear. I kept this facade up for thirty or more years and people often told me they couldn't read how I was feeling or what I thought unless I told them. It worked on everyone in my life, except my lovers who got to know me well enough that they started to see through the hairline cracks in it.
When someone started seeing through my facade, my first instinct was to run away as far and as fast as I could.
To maintain that facade, I paid a terrible price.
My fear of abandonment had to go somewhere.
My feminine feelings and instincts linked to me being trans had to go somewhere.
My anger got locked away much more thoroughly than my other emotions because I found I was capable of having rage attacks like my father and I was afraid of my own strength.
Every strong emotion I had needed to go somewhere or my facade would break.
There are three huge problems with this:
1. Whenever a strong emotion was shoved away, an imprint was left over: anxiety. Before recently, I was anxious every moment of every day to the point that caffeine had 10X the effect on me that it had on anyone else. Now it's more like 2X, which is probably normal for me. I finally know what it's like to live without pervasive, all-encompassing anxiety.
2. I usually couldn't pick which strong emotions got sent away. Love, affection, and a need for closeness are all strong emotions. The only positive bonding emotion that was strong enough to break through regularly was lust and it dragged my affection and love with it. This made all my intimate relationships very strange. My lovers would often only see how deeply I felt for them before, during, and after sex.
3. The emotions, instincts, eccentricities, femininity and other things I was being constantly trained out of or trying to get rid of had to go somewhere.
Items one and two are bad, but item three is probably the most unbalancing force of my entire life.
For years, I've had odd things happen. I'd lose track of what I was doing in the middle of doing it, forget items even if they happened to be in my hand, and go on wild tangents in conversations that gave people whiplash. Consulting with myself on even the simplest of decisions would often lead to multiple second delays where I couldn't find what I actually thought or felt. On top of that, I'd change my mind about something completely randomly, without warning, often suddenly agreeing with someone when I'd already told them I was done with them trying to convince me. Sure, normal people do these things at times. I did these things incredibly frequently to the point that anything I tried to do would get interrupted and I'd keep having to refocus over and over again.
Taking estrogen finally changed this dynamic. I started to feel things more clearly and had more trouble shoving emotions into the dark. Then I wrote "Prehensile Herm Sleepover'' and channeled Sadie who was much more in touch with hir emotions than me. Then something very odd happened. Sadie stuck around in my mind, comforting me and just being kind. Even cuddled me when I cried a couple times. I began to see hir as the bouncer for my emotions because shi had more access to them than I did and would often hand them to me or just crack the door open and let me feel and process stuff.
Sadie Unlocked
While visiting my LA friends earlier this month, Sadie came to the front (sat in the driver's seat for my body/mind/etc). I knew shi wasn't the same person as me and shi cleaned up some emotional difficulties I was having with people there. Shi was way more blunt, honest, and open than I am with my emotions. Shi was also way girlier than me and spoke with a much more feminine voice.
I spent the next couple days doubting shi was actually a different person, that I was somehow being theatrical, that I'd fallen into some sort of strange mental space. None of that fit what was happening, though. Sadie is hir own dragon with hir own preferences and hir own way of doing things. They're very compatible with mine, but they are not the same. For instance, shi likes sweets and much more girly clothes than I'd normally wear.
When shi was out, shi did what I normally do by seeing hirself as hir true anthro herm dragon self even when shi was in my body moving it around. Shi also had this odd ability to take on the form of Ramda, or so we thought.
After shi was established as an alternate me, both shi and I sensed another presence in our mind. A very angry presence.
Ramda Unleashed
About a week ago, Sadie was fronting and playing around with imagining that shi was in Ramda's form. For the first few minutes, everything was normal until we realized we felt very different, that something was wrong. Our emotions had a different texture to them, our perception of our body was different, and we had different preferences.
Ramda, the place I put all my anger, the part of me that wants to protect me from people that will harm me, was inhabiting my body. Not Sadie.
There was anger, an immense ocean of fury. Ramda, having been locked away much more deeply and thoroughly than Sadie, barely knew how to walk at first. And when she did walk, she walked on the front of her feet, like she had the same digitigrade stance as Ramda the character. She walked like this so much the first two days she was out that she gave us blisters on the ends of my toes. Her motor control was off and she couldn't make baskets with bits of trash the way Sadie and I were able to. She identifies fully with being an anthro wolf and, like Sadie, finds my human body weird.
After two hours of furiously screwing and unscrewing a water bottle cap that first day, her anger finally subsided and she started to enjoy being out in the world. Later, we found out she's the least distracted of us and the best at adulting. She's also very closely linked to our engineering, science, and spatial reasoning. All this makes her a phenomenal driver. She actually enjoys driving while me and Sadie don't.
Switching between Sadie, me, and Ramda is quite easy because all we have to do is fully picture our body inhabiting the furry form of the alter we want to switch to. We don't know why it works so well, but it's been incredibly useful.
Neither she nor Sadie are really the fictional characters their names are based on. They do have very similar personalities, though. Ramda is actually a bit odd in that she sometimes remembers being on her starship, but she knows that didn't actually happen. She just identifies with it because she feels like Sadie and I were so scared of her that we fictionally sent her to space. Now we call her "big sister" because she is incredibly efficient, driven, and very good at setting and maintaining boundaries with people.
Sadie and I feel terrible about how we locked Ramda away. We're doing nice things to make up for it, like getting Ramda some clothes that better fit her punk/butch aesthetic. She's quite happy now and loves fronting. Especially now that she understands not to walk on my toes all the time. Boy did those blisters hurt!
The three of us really do feel like sisters. It's very nice.
I, Elara, had a problem after knowing all three of us existed: I wondered what the point of me was. I felt like I wasn't as whole of a person as they were, like something was missing. I still didn't really feel things as clearly as they did and felt kinda fake, like a facade. That changed very recently.
Feeling Things
On October 26, having fully established Ramda and Sadie's existences, something very odd happened. They could no longer store my emotions because they were fully realized people.
Suddenly, I started feeling EVERYTHING. Regret, anger, love, joy, fear, dysphoria, and five thousand other things. It was the first time in decades I'd felt emotions full-on and without a cushion or way to divert them elsewhere.
I broke down crying randomly, for hours, I cried harder than I'd cried in over two decades, and I started reconnecting with reality, emotions, the people I love, and myself. Even though it was terrible, scary, and overwhelming, I was so happy because I felt like a person again, I felt alive the way Ramda and Sadie feel alive. Sarah helped me through it, comforting me over and over, and somehow because she's so nurturing, she enjoyed it.
And after all that, after me breaking down, she said she finally felt I was there, fully present, and she wants to spend more time with me than she used to. Before this happened, I would tire her out at times because I was anxious every single second of every single day.
I'm still learning how to deal with all these emotions. I have Sarah, Echo, Akiko, Secretskunk, Ramda, and Sadie to help me. This is the first time in my life that I've felt like I was living it since I was very young.
Speaking of helping me, I am thankful to Ramda because I was too overwhelmed to write this all from my own perspective. Ramda fronted and let me write this through her. Otherwise, I would've felt everything while I was trying to explain it and been too overwhelmed. So, thanks Ramda, you don't deserve what happened to you and I don't deserve the depths of kindness you show me, but I appreciate every single bit of it.
So yes, I'm plural and it's nothing like what you see in movies and TV shows. We're just three personalities in one head that can share skills, ideas, emotions, memories, and adulting tasks. We all see the world a bit differently, but each perspective is valid and useful. Though we're fairly integrated and we can often front together, there's definite, noticeable differences between us. In future posts, I'll detail some of their quirks and some amusing things they've done.
It's not all perfect, there's times when whoever's fronting can't make everyone happy, we all share some of my worst traits, and sometimes we temporarily lose stuff in short term memory when we switch. Tomorrow, we have our first therapy appointment as a plural system. We're being proactive about making sure our previous state of dysfunction stays in the past.
Finally, Some Very Good News for Y'all
Ramda is very dominant, Sadie is a huge switch and I...I think I'm actually a sub now that I'm not mixed with the other two.
Ramda has ideas for writing hypno and Korps stories. She's every bit as good a writer as I am and we've figured out that she's the part of me that did most of the worldbuilding and a lot of other work for Remiel's Fall From Grace.
Sadie isn't much of a story writer, but shi is an extremely good songwriter. That's because shi has a knack for wordplay and rhymes/poems. Shi is also amazing at humor. Ramda has a crude sense of humor (loves South Park), Sadie has a very clever and horny sense of humor. I think y'all probably caught glimpses of hir over the years. Shi also is very keyed into emotions and character arcs. Shi wants to help me and Ramda write better stories with more humor and emotional development.
Due to me finding out I'm plural, y'all are going to get a bigger variety of stories from me with even better storytelling and prose.
For the first time in my life, there isn't a rotten web of anxiety pervading every waking moment of my life. I'm sleeping better even though I don't always get enough, I'm happier, and I love my headmates.
Thanks for your time, thanks for trying to understand me, and thanks for letting me throw you in the deep end. This is some crazy stuff, but for once in my life, it's the good kind of crazy.
Comments
Zmeydros
🐺 We're a lot more fluid than most plural systems and have less defined roles. It's often about being able to see things from different perspectives and leverage different aspects of our skills and abilities in different ways. The ability to switch from one to the other is almost always there and we can do it pretty quickly and it works great as long as we remember to focus on what's in our short term memory so we don't have issues. There are definite differences in our tastes and what we like to do. I, Ramda, like driving, coffee, and being dominant way more than the other two. Sadie loves sweets way more than Elara and I do and is much better at just enjoying what ever's happening in the moment. Elara's the most artistic and analytical. She has patience for things Sadie and I don't have patience for.
Arkona Kothe
This was quite an emotional ride you took us on, but I'm glad that you're able to start working through things! I have a friend in a discord who discovered they are plural earlier this year, and it's been interesting to see their discoveries about their system. I believe they're up to 7 different persons now, all with a clear and defined role. I'm glad that you're starting to be able to make sense of everything, and I welcome Ramda and Sadie into the fray!
Zmeydros
Yeah, it's nice to have my mind be actually quiet most of the time and not have three separate personalities all throwing their ideas out at the same time. The personalities take turns now and it's not like a giant mosh pit of impulses and ideas.
Lupusvir
All of this is very strange to me. But if it makes you happy. Go for it. Everyone has a different way of living life. It's awesome to see someone come to terms with themselves.
