(Untitled)

[gileonnen]

This is a Curious Post.

During the past few months or so, my circles on the internet have come increasingly into contact with the notion of ' plurality' of personae in one body. I've been working to understand what the concept means and why other people feel that it describes them, so this post isn't an 'explain to me what plurals are, I don't know

Comments

I think I love you

[dejablue7]

Just yay! that singlets aside from myself are talking about it... sometimes I wonder if people look at my posts and think I'm just a crazy person or something ._.

On your having negative experiences with a plural system though--this is probably a completely inappropriate response, but my first thought at reading that line was THANK GOD, I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE.

sob sob sob ;_;

No, I mean, gosh darn it, I had posts on LJ a few weeks ago with me being angry and upset because of certain aspects of actually meeting a plural system in real life, and then me being angry and upset at myself for being angry and upset, and feeling really alone because I didn't have anyone to talk to about my confusion over this episode...anyway, I deleted that post and I'm pretty sure I still haven't complete resolved and worked out that confusion and negativity...

I mean, this may be completely a different situation from yours. But on the one hand, I think I personally had problems interacting in RL with a plural system because it set off personal fears involving loss of social cues (not knowing for sure who I'm talking to, basically), and having to learn an entirely new set of social cues in order to communicate in person with people who handle interaction with the world as a group... those kinds of things... plus my emotional attachment to one individual getting banged up in this confusion...

So that's the one hand. On the other hand. Feeling the need to do good things and change the world for said individual in the system. EMOTIONAL DILEMMA. ;_; Then pulling myself together and going F*** IT, I'm going to keep talking and trying to get the word out because apparently there are just as many singlets out there who get along swimmingly with interacting with plurals, and there are plenty of plurals who would really be helped by advocacy, and I should do this for them.

...I don't know if any of that came out coherent. But! THANK YOU for helping me feel like I'm not ALONE and a TERRIBLE PERSON for not having had perfect and positive interactions with a plural system, because that was really, really starting to get me down ;_;

Re: I think I love you

[gileonnen]

*squeeeeeze* My experience was a little different, because it was online and involved a roleplaying environment in which IC/OOC distinctions were already not terribly well-maintained--so in addition to trying to navigate an entirely new set of social cues having to do with people who interact with the world as a group, I also had to do so while navigating cues that were only sometimes OOC and thus only sometimes pertained to anything that I-the-player had done. This was the social equivalent of deciding, after having mastered the two-ball juggle, to move on to juggling eight viable chicken eggs and a chainsaw.

Needless to say, I wound up with egg on my face.

So--no, I wouldn't say you're terrible for having a bad experience, especially when part of that badness comes from a place of needing fairly specific social cues. I would say that we both have a lot to learn on this front, and that hopefully we can have the kinds of conversations that can help us to learn.

Re: I think I love you

[dejablue7]

*hugs back* c:
That is really interesting, concerning your being introduced to it via roleplaying. :O Definitely, it is easy to imagine where that kind of situation would get...very difficult to navigate :/ It's also interesting for me because the group I'm familiar with...well, if they have soulbonding or fictive identifying persons, I've yet to meet them or to hear any discussion of them, so that's really unfamiliar territory to me (I'm... guessing that soulbonding/fictives were involved in this experience, or something of the variation, from your comments here and below in this post). All in all though, I'm always glad to hear about how other singlets meet plurals; I think it's always really good to hear from different perspectives on that kind of thing.

Re: I think I love you

[gileonnen]

It was more an experience with a plural system advancing one of its members as an original 'character' to interact with other OCs in the game--or possibly more like a person playing the game and then realizing through the course of it that he hadn't created a character, he'd identified a headmate? In any case, a relatively new member of the system was interacting as a character with my fictional character, which was very difficult for me to manage. No soulbonding, and not reeeeally a fictive, but definitely an anxious-making social situation!

[dejablue7]

...my brain, it is breaking. (Which is not to say skepticism about the situation, and more like...it sounds like the fairgrounds for complications and misunderstanding and human drama that would make a scenario from Shakespeare seem straightforward and humdrum by comparison ...More than once though, I've had Shakespeare pop into my head while interacting with plurals, like thinking of Twelfth Night and cases of mistaken identity and people running around and completely confused as to what's really going on).

And so that's how you were introduced to plurality? ...I'm not sure I'd be even able to handle that kind of situation Orz :c That's really great that you're still trying to keep an open-minded perspective on the notion of plurality as a whole though! I'm sure a lot of people would just throw up their hands and go, I give up, the internet is crazy. Which, to be fair, can be true: there's a lot of strange things on the internet, and strange people, along with the reasonable. It's also the reason, though, that I'm all for advocating for plurality...but I'm not, for example, a member of multiplicity. I've read unflattering things about that community on plural LJ's, of groups who left that community because of drama going on. And then there's always the complaints of attention-seeker plural groups, or people who fake multiplicity for attention... and that's going to be out there with the reasonable groups and those who just want to avoid all of that drama-nonsense.

...all of that rambling, I think, was around the point though that I think it's great that you've made this post, regardless of negative past experiences.