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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Whoaaa this is so interesting. I was like "wtf is this guy talking about? "In a system?" Now you and Frost's conversation makes a lot more sense to me. Thank you!
Yeah it's SUPER cool!! I was fascinated before finding out we were plural ourselves and I'm still fascinated, honestly. :3
Yeah we're pretty much siblings that happen to share a brain! It's weird and cool and awesome.
We personally have shared memories, so if someone else does stuff and then I switch back in, I remember everything they did as if I did it. Which can be... disconcerting sometimes, to say the least. You get used to it though. Just gotta remember who was doing what...
Not everyone has shared memories though, there are other systems where everyone has separate memories walled off from each other. It's gotta be awkward to switch into front and not know what's been going on over the past hour/day/month or however long it's been! But on the other paw that means it's at least theoretically possible to keep secrets from your headmates, which hah, that would NOT work for us. No surprise birthday parties or anything!
"headspace" is kind of orthogonal to plurality, by the way; you can have one if you're not plural, too, and not all plural systems have one. We still only kinda-sorta have one, and we didn't start with one, we had to try and make it. Anyway it's basically just like, a place to imagine yourself in, I think. Like a VR-social space type thing but in-head.
(We had virtual bodies before getting the virtual space to exist in, though. In fact that's how I found my first headmate, getting little mental flashes of her in my mind's eye. When we're doing virtual bodies but not picturing ourselves in headspace we're usually either in nothing in particular (you know how in dreams, anything you're not focusing on isn't there? like that) or situated in the physical world, with whoever's "in front" (controlling the body and everything) "seeing" other people around, on furniture or whatever (not literally seeing, more like imagining them there).)
-- Frost
PLEASE, I only came here to be mildly interested, and now you've got my heart rate pumping with overly interesting knowledge!
I have a bunch of questions I'd like to ask (thanks for the edit, btw, it clarified things before I asked), but I'll just stick to one quick one that popped up in my head.
You mentioned birthdays. Do you and your headmate ever discuss, or even argue, who was "there" first? You mentioned you found your first headmate from mental flashes of her. How do you know she didn't find you?
I mean, I know I found her 'cause I was there, heh!
I think I'd been, as far as we know, the only one fronting for... a really long time, and 99% of our life (there's times we suspect a different person was fronting for a couple weeks but then it went back to me, or at least it would explain some things, but of course we had no idea plurality was a thing then let alone that we were, and it was years before we'd find out).
The first sign that she existed was I was getting these feelings of wanting to be a fox. I'm not a fox, I'm a wolf!! It was super distressing and I hated it... I was so relieved when I found out that wasn't me and I was still what I thought I was.
When she showed up she was extremely skittish, like a wild animal (and I mean, she's a fox). Even after that, she stayed nonverbal for months, long after other people'd shown up and were able to talk. She eventually suddenly got front and gained the ability to talk one day, which was a bit of a shock! So she has a name now. But she's still super quiet and reserved and doesn't tend to talk much at all, even in-head let alone outside of it.
When I said 'birthdays' I really meant more 'discovery days', the day we found out someone existed. A lot of us just popped into existence one day, so it's also their birthday, but a few of us were there before; the fox feels started a few weeks before we found out, I think, and we suspect a different person who showed up soon after was actually there our whole life and we just never knew. But we don't actually know for sure, because even if he was there, he didn't know he was there or that he was his own person, and we don't actually remember our childhood very well (...for other reasons, we think, not plurality-related).
-- Frost
[Ylfingr] *woofs* I'm the 'showed up soon after' person. Been awake and knowing I'm me for... 5, almost 6 years now? Wow. When I first showed up, I was absolutely terrified I was just going to go to sleep one day and never come back, and just not exist anymore. Things singlets (non-plural people) don't have to worry about...
But somehow, I'm still here. (It's actually totally normal that I'm still here, but that didn't stop me from worrying at the start. I didn't know I was going to be fine, heh.)
-- Ylfingr