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iiterativecw: internalized ableism, self-abuse, in-system abuse, unpersoning as a form of violence
there's a lot of things that you have to consider when you're in a multiple system that's just a hair from 200 known members and definitely more than 200 members total. (even the unknown people have weight at this point, seeing as we know they're there, we just don't know who they are or how many they are or anything other than that there are more.) i think it's safe to say i haven't considered most of the things you have to consider in these circumstances. like timesharing. timesharing seems like a pretty big one to think about, if you're trying to cram 200+ worth of people's interests and desires into one malfunctioning fleshbag that can't even accomplish a single person's worth of ADLs. it's certainly one other people ask about.
the funny thing about timesharing is, it was actually harder when we were just finding out we were a system, only aware of 2, then 3, then 4, then 10, people. because trying to develop a system for timesharing made sense, then. we didn't have a developed headspace, we were unused to applying this whole concept of plurality to ourselves, and so it just seemed like access to the outer world was probably important, so we wanted to prioritize it. we did poorly, and there was a lot of time-stealing and time-shirking, because we were trying to create a system of timesharing and feed ourselves through it, rather than being flexible and adapting to individual preferences and needs in any given moment. but don't worry! we soon had a new problem that was based on some of the same faulty mechanics and assumptions, but also several additional bad ideas.
in the process of discovering we were plural, and that there were a lot of us, we pretty quickly started trying to silence each other and ourselves, to push back against people it seemed too 'cringe' for us to have in our system. we tried to be aware of who was fronting all the time and panicked if we weren't sure, panicked if we switched accidentally, panicked about being caught. because we knew we had something to hide, we started trying to hide it, and this only got worse the more people we became aware of. this meant a homogenization of hobbies, styles, interests. sometimes we would magnanimously allow ourselves an indulgence or two - a book only one person cared about, a shirt that one person really liked. but for the most part, if only one person wanted something, they didn't get it. if only one person could promise to maintain and keep up with something (a hobby, an interest, a friendship), they didn't get it. we couldn't let whoever was fronting deviate too far from the singlet persona we'd constructed. we thought, somehow, that to allow that would be somehow unfair. to other people in the system, and to people not in our system. why let an outside-system person befriend a specific someone who wouldn't always be fronting? why not form a generic personality that any of us could maintain (and if someone couldn't, well then, they just didn't get to front)?
this sounds pretty messed up. or at least, it sounds pretty messed up to me, having lived with and participated in this regime for years. there were plenty of justifications. we couldn't let ourselves be caught. the people who weren't allowed to front weren't safe, or wouldn't enjoy it. it wasn't even like they weren't allowed to front, there were just certain standards that had to be met. and it wasn't like it was a bad thing to keep the most untrustworthy, violent, impulsive, murder-happy, noncompliant people out of society. they could ruin everything for all of us, and potentially for people outside of our system, too, depending on what those specific system members ended up doing. and the people who were allowed to front, well, wouldn't it make them sad to own something or do something or know someone in the outerworld and then not have it/them the next time they fronted? we had to make sure we only did things we could keep up. never mind that's literally not how it works for individual people, let alone entire systems. people try things that they don't do for the rest of their lives all the time. people grow and change. but we couldn't allow ourselves to.
we couldn't allow ourselves to stay the same, either. or, more specifically, we couldn't let our individual selves stay the same. we pushed against picking up our hobbies and interests from our native timelines. a lot of us used swords, for example, but we absolutely could not try to learn to use swords again, because that was cringe. we couldn't style our hair the way we did in our native timelines, because that was cringe (we all did it anyway, we just tried not to be TOO obvious and we felt really bad about it). acknowledging ourselves, acting too much like we really believed in our own existences, like we really believed we are who we are, like we really thought we were "fictional characters" and had lived lives outside of this universe, was cringe, and anything that gestured to individual identity was therefore also cringe
so this all made timesharing super simple, because we tried to make it so it functionally didn't matter who was fronting!
don't do this.
this was not a good idea.
this was actually a nightmarish campaign to undo ourselves, and we didn't realize that's what we were doing, and we wouldn't have stopped even if that was pointed out to us, because we were so convinced that us existing too much was bad. so us existing less? existing not at all? sure, that would be bad to do to other people, but... did we really count as people. any of us. did we really count as things that got to exist. could we ever get to exist? was existence, individuation, something we could have, or would we just make everything worse by striving for it? we were fine the way we were. it made the most sense.
it's not that we were actually okay with the way things were. it's not like we didn't care about each other. we just couldn't actually see and respect each other as long as we were suppressing ourselves. i didn't take my relationships with my systemmates seriously, because those relationships didn't count. they were all in my head, so why did anyone else need to hear about them? why did i need to give them any thought at all? i had a sense of kinship and camaraderie with some of my systemmates from other universes, but it didn't occur to me that we might actually be friends, that we might even be spending time together when we weren't fronting (we do have a fairly significant level of amnesia between fronting and not-fronting, though this is beginning to lessen the more we acknowledge the innerworld as real). i have maintained relationships with people in my system who are also from my native timeline, and we would sit near each other, we would hold each other, we would talk to each other when one of us was fronting, we'd even cofront, and there would still be this distance, this unspoken awareness of not counting, not mattering. i love my husband. i love my niece. i love my boyfriend and my 'not [my] girlfriend' and my niece's friends. and because they're in my system, it wasn't allowed to count. it wasn't allowed to mean anything. i couldn't take it too seriously. and i did that, i acted that way, because i couldn't take anything about myself seriously. i couldn't acknowledge my past with substance use, because that happened in another timeline. (but i could refuse to even use cooking wine, because i didn't trust myself, but i couldn't be honest with myself about why, couldn't take it too seriously, but couldn't let myself slip either). i couldn't acknowledge how i prefer to wear my facial hair or how i felt about my gender or the fact that i really want to relearn how to use a sword, because that was taking this whole thing too far. i could know who i was, but it couldn't matter.
and this feeling was hugely informed by being a fictive. by all of us being fictives. there's a culture, in some plural spaces (or at least, this was our takeaway,) of 'accepting' fictives and introjects and soulbonds and all the other names for people from universes that have become narratives that sometimes some people think they're fictional characters, or they were patterned off fictional characters, or maybe even had been fictional characters, but to indulge too much in this belief was embarrassing or outright obscene. doing anything that indicated you thought you were too real was a cardinal sin. discussing having something best described as 'muscle memory' for the things you did in your native timeline despite the body's lack of experience? discussing the impacts of exotrauma? believing that anything you had experienced or done or been in your native timeline could in any way carry over to this life, this universe? absolutely unacceptable. acknowledging the fullness of your existence was an assault on decency. you apologized for your "source," if it was problematic. you distanced yourself from it. you spent your time not talking about yourself and what you'd experienced. god forbid you acknowledged being too different from the body you now inhabited, a different race or ability or culture or religion or gender or sexuality that didn't "match" the body, even if what you are isn't something that exists in this universe. people would say these wildly awful, dismissive things without a second thought, because of the underlying assumption that none of this was real. obviously people would be able to change to be nonproblematic, because it's not like our identities meant anything.
so yeah. we sucked that shit up like sponges and proceeded to treat ourselves and each other like hell. we didn't mean to do it to each other. not exactly. we all thought we were making sacrifices for the good of the system and didn't notice that we were also sacrificing each other. we didn't notice that it mattered that we were sacrificing ourselves. we didn't know how to think of ourselves as anything other than inconveniences and barriers to someone else living a happy life. it felt like we were trying to use our own flesh to build a home none of us would be allowed to live in. it felt like that's what we were supposed to do, in order to be good.
and this completely nuked a lot of the logistical issues of our system size, because we were all miserable and stifled and refused to act like a system of 200+! and we thought 'wow, this solves so many problems, we are so functional.' and we were completely dead fucking wrong. we didn't actually solve any problems, we just created worse, more pressing problems. and as we work on detangling that, we're probably going to have to address some of those logistical questions, like timesharing, in a real way.
thank god.
- qrow
there's a lot of things that you have to consider when you're in a multiple system that's just a hair from 200 known members and definitely more than 200 members total. (even the unknown people have weight at this point, seeing as we know they're there, we just don't know who they are or how many they are or anything other than that there are more.) i think it's safe to say i haven't considered most of the things you have to consider in these circumstances. like timesharing. timesharing seems like a pretty big one to think about, if you're trying to cram 200+ worth of people's interests and desires into one malfunctioning fleshbag that can't even accomplish a single person's worth of ADLs. it's certainly one other people ask about.
the funny thing about timesharing is, it was actually harder when we were just finding out we were a system, only aware of 2, then 3, then 4, then 10, people. because trying to develop a system for timesharing made sense, then. we didn't have a developed headspace, we were unused to applying this whole concept of plurality to ourselves, and so it just seemed like access to the outer world was probably important, so we wanted to prioritize it. we did poorly, and there was a lot of time-stealing and time-shirking, because we were trying to create a system of timesharing and feed ourselves through it, rather than being flexible and adapting to individual preferences and needs in any given moment. but don't worry! we soon had a new problem that was based on some of the same faulty mechanics and assumptions, but also several additional bad ideas.
in the process of discovering we were plural, and that there were a lot of us, we pretty quickly started trying to silence each other and ourselves, to push back against people it seemed too 'cringe' for us to have in our system. we tried to be aware of who was fronting all the time and panicked if we weren't sure, panicked if we switched accidentally, panicked about being caught. because we knew we had something to hide, we started trying to hide it, and this only got worse the more people we became aware of. this meant a homogenization of hobbies, styles, interests. sometimes we would magnanimously allow ourselves an indulgence or two - a book only one person cared about, a shirt that one person really liked. but for the most part, if only one person wanted something, they didn't get it. if only one person could promise to maintain and keep up with something (a hobby, an interest, a friendship), they didn't get it. we couldn't let whoever was fronting deviate too far from the singlet persona we'd constructed. we thought, somehow, that to allow that would be somehow unfair. to other people in the system, and to people not in our system. why let an outside-system person befriend a specific someone who wouldn't always be fronting? why not form a generic personality that any of us could maintain (and if someone couldn't, well then, they just didn't get to front)?
this sounds pretty messed up. or at least, it sounds pretty messed up to me, having lived with and participated in this regime for years. there were plenty of justifications. we couldn't let ourselves be caught. the people who weren't allowed to front weren't safe, or wouldn't enjoy it. it wasn't even like they weren't allowed to front, there were just certain standards that had to be met. and it wasn't like it was a bad thing to keep the most untrustworthy, violent, impulsive, murder-happy, noncompliant people out of society. they could ruin everything for all of us, and potentially for people outside of our system, too, depending on what those specific system members ended up doing. and the people who were allowed to front, well, wouldn't it make them sad to own something or do something or know someone in the outerworld and then not have it/them the next time they fronted? we had to make sure we only did things we could keep up. never mind that's literally not how it works for individual people, let alone entire systems. people try things that they don't do for the rest of their lives all the time. people grow and change. but we couldn't allow ourselves to.
we couldn't allow ourselves to stay the same, either. or, more specifically, we couldn't let our individual selves stay the same. we pushed against picking up our hobbies and interests from our native timelines. a lot of us used swords, for example, but we absolutely could not try to learn to use swords again, because that was cringe. we couldn't style our hair the way we did in our native timelines, because that was cringe (we all did it anyway, we just tried not to be TOO obvious and we felt really bad about it). acknowledging ourselves, acting too much like we really believed in our own existences, like we really believed we are who we are, like we really thought we were "fictional characters" and had lived lives outside of this universe, was cringe, and anything that gestured to individual identity was therefore also cringe
so this all made timesharing super simple, because we tried to make it so it functionally didn't matter who was fronting!
don't do this.
this was not a good idea.
this was actually a nightmarish campaign to undo ourselves, and we didn't realize that's what we were doing, and we wouldn't have stopped even if that was pointed out to us, because we were so convinced that us existing too much was bad. so us existing less? existing not at all? sure, that would be bad to do to other people, but... did we really count as people. any of us. did we really count as things that got to exist. could we ever get to exist? was existence, individuation, something we could have, or would we just make everything worse by striving for it? we were fine the way we were. it made the most sense.
it's not that we were actually okay with the way things were. it's not like we didn't care about each other. we just couldn't actually see and respect each other as long as we were suppressing ourselves. i didn't take my relationships with my systemmates seriously, because those relationships didn't count. they were all in my head, so why did anyone else need to hear about them? why did i need to give them any thought at all? i had a sense of kinship and camaraderie with some of my systemmates from other universes, but it didn't occur to me that we might actually be friends, that we might even be spending time together when we weren't fronting (we do have a fairly significant level of amnesia between fronting and not-fronting, though this is beginning to lessen the more we acknowledge the innerworld as real). i have maintained relationships with people in my system who are also from my native timeline, and we would sit near each other, we would hold each other, we would talk to each other when one of us was fronting, we'd even cofront, and there would still be this distance, this unspoken awareness of not counting, not mattering. i love my husband. i love my niece. i love my boyfriend and my 'not [my] girlfriend' and my niece's friends. and because they're in my system, it wasn't allowed to count. it wasn't allowed to mean anything. i couldn't take it too seriously. and i did that, i acted that way, because i couldn't take anything about myself seriously. i couldn't acknowledge my past with substance use, because that happened in another timeline. (but i could refuse to even use cooking wine, because i didn't trust myself, but i couldn't be honest with myself about why, couldn't take it too seriously, but couldn't let myself slip either). i couldn't acknowledge how i prefer to wear my facial hair or how i felt about my gender or the fact that i really want to relearn how to use a sword, because that was taking this whole thing too far. i could know who i was, but it couldn't matter.
and this feeling was hugely informed by being a fictive. by all of us being fictives. there's a culture, in some plural spaces (or at least, this was our takeaway,) of 'accepting' fictives and introjects and soulbonds and all the other names for people from universes that have become narratives that sometimes some people think they're fictional characters, or they were patterned off fictional characters, or maybe even had been fictional characters, but to indulge too much in this belief was embarrassing or outright obscene. doing anything that indicated you thought you were too real was a cardinal sin. discussing having something best described as 'muscle memory' for the things you did in your native timeline despite the body's lack of experience? discussing the impacts of exotrauma? believing that anything you had experienced or done or been in your native timeline could in any way carry over to this life, this universe? absolutely unacceptable. acknowledging the fullness of your existence was an assault on decency. you apologized for your "source," if it was problematic. you distanced yourself from it. you spent your time not talking about yourself and what you'd experienced. god forbid you acknowledged being too different from the body you now inhabited, a different race or ability or culture or religion or gender or sexuality that didn't "match" the body, even if what you are isn't something that exists in this universe. people would say these wildly awful, dismissive things without a second thought, because of the underlying assumption that none of this was real. obviously people would be able to change to be nonproblematic, because it's not like our identities meant anything.
so yeah. we sucked that shit up like sponges and proceeded to treat ourselves and each other like hell. we didn't mean to do it to each other. not exactly. we all thought we were making sacrifices for the good of the system and didn't notice that we were also sacrificing each other. we didn't notice that it mattered that we were sacrificing ourselves. we didn't know how to think of ourselves as anything other than inconveniences and barriers to someone else living a happy life. it felt like we were trying to use our own flesh to build a home none of us would be allowed to live in. it felt like that's what we were supposed to do, in order to be good.
and this completely nuked a lot of the logistical issues of our system size, because we were all miserable and stifled and refused to act like a system of 200+! and we thought 'wow, this solves so many problems, we are so functional.' and we were completely dead fucking wrong. we didn't actually solve any problems, we just created worse, more pressing problems. and as we work on detangling that, we're probably going to have to address some of those logistical questions, like timesharing, in a real way.
thank god.
- qrow
