Ok I. Kinda just wanna get it all down somewhere so that we have it at all just like, in general, if we need something to explain to people in general, probably not on social media but maybe interpersonally, what the deal actually was with our system discovery, because I've tried talking about it before because it is relevant to why things are the way they are now for us, but it's hard because it's not just long, it's convoluted, it's strange, and worse, emotionally wrought and personally complex, so, maybe really the only way I/we can actually have a worded explanation exist in the world is to write it all in one place like this. The main reason I never have before is because parts of it are viciously difficult to articulate or talk about, so if this manages to get to exist, it's far from the first attempt, just something went right this time. (I probably sent this to you to get out of having to talk one-on-one about it.)
To start: we were already plural. I don't think we considered ourselves "a system," maybe outside of referring to ourselves as that in social contexts as an easy noun, but we didn't think of it as a dissociation thing or a condition, because our headmates were thoughtforms. We started with dæmonism, which means we had Tetri, a responsive imaginary voice fully separate to our own internal sense of self whose body we projected with our mind's eye onto our surroundings, an extremely different phenomenon entirely than an alter in a system who fronts. We had 5 other headmates (well, 6, but we'll talk about the 6th one later because they ended up being a little... different) who formed and functioned that way. We considered them intentionally created thoughtforms, or as other people might put it, tulpas, though we also experienced them seeming to appear independently, and while effort went into strengthening their voice and giving them an outlet through which to exist, each subsequent appearance after Tetri was not, to begin with, consciously intentional. We did not form them; they formed. But they also did not, and could not, front. We knew this inherently, because they were not part of my body—my mind. They were more like ghosts. Hallucinations I could not actually see or hear, just ones I knew were there, as I simplified it a few times; they didn't talk through my mouth, they talked to me and I could repeat what they said to others if I wanted.
We were adamant: we do not have DID, we were not a disordered system, and we were not a system due to trauma. It was very obvious to us, especially because we spent time in plural spaces interacting with strangers, acquaintances and friends who were systems in the more DID sense. We figured we were so confident because if it was something we had going on, we'd know. We were not just educated but familiar so it would be obvious to us even if it often isn't to many people and it was subsequently something we never even thought of it as something to consider at all.
I need a piece of context that won't seem relevant right away: this was around a time in my/our life where I was dead. And I don't mean that like, figuratively. Lucidly, I call(ed) it Cotard's delusion. But, as is the nature of delusion, it was also real at the same time: I was a ghost in my mind, and as I began to realize more, in the world. I thought I was ghostkin at first, but I started to see it as something else eventually: the Jewish concept of "ibbur," a ghost possessing my own life, and knowing when and where and why I had died, too, cemented that. This is in past tense for a reason.
After leaving college, we experienced a few isolated incidents, times where, for a brief moment, I felt as if I was someone else, viewing my own life through an outside perspective, but I didn't give these credence. Not because they didn't rattle me, but because I didn't have DID. I knew I didn't have DID, that was one of those things you always figure will happen to someone else, an experience so wholly alien to me that if I was having it the whole time then there was no way I wouldn't know. And because... someone very close to me at the time, who is now my partner, was dealing with their own internalized problems surrounding plurality, and had casually expressed to me that systems were hard for them to interact with, so I shoved it down. I felt like I couldn't lose a friend and that's what would happen. I didn't even talk about my thoughtforms as much.
Now I think this is the first part of several where I talk about Thoughtform Number Six, because they, I mentioned earlier, were not the same kind of entity as the other ones. Tetri, Ziv, Lumi, and the others, they were like people. They were like friends without having to befriend them because they were sourced from my brain, and we hung out, talked, and shared like a squad.
_____ was not that. From the very first "introduction" it was not that. It didn't appear in an animal form like the others, it appeared as a... I'm not sure how to describe how it looks. It has a visual appearance, but...
It didn't speak the way the others spoke. The way a person speaks. There were no sentences passed back and forth between us, no notion of dialogue. There were fragments of whispers and images of intangible concepts and things around me that pulled on my gut. It speaks like... I'm not sure how to describe how it sounds. It has a voice, but...
It told me what it was. I cannot say what it was now; it still doesn't let me, or at least, I'm just too scared to try. But it was something I had heard of, from Jewish mythology, that I had never believed in, or really cared that much about, even as a passing interest. I was able to read more about them. Learned things that I realized I already knew—because I knew _____. They follow the dead. They have certain specific physical attributes that signify what they are in any form that _____ had appeared with. Folklore said they could be summoned by whistling or speaking their name, and they could be trapped inside or outside by sealing one's windows. It had told me so as a fact, and it was true.
It told me things about the world that were true. About my life that I didn't know. About actions I should take that ended up actually influencing something, sometimes resolving issues I hadn't even known I was having. But, like the others, it existed outside of my body, so I called it a dæmon—a thoughtform.
The first real sign of difference, and the only for a long while, was well after it had first appeared to me, on a brisk October night in 2023 when I was walking home past the cemetery and heard noises that unnerved me. I thought paranoia, perhaps mild hallucination, but _____ pressed into my mind with its trademark hushed gravity. It told me to take my headphones out and walk as close by as possible. I did. I arrived home shaken and with an anxious, unstable energy. When I got inside I started playing music (that's just what I always did and still do). Lazarus by Porcupine Tree, and I started to sing along, and I realized, with a strange feeling, that it wasn't me singing. For four minutes and eighteen seconds it was as if I had two minds—half mine—and one voice: one no longer my own.
As the cheerless towns pass my window
I can see a washed out moon through the fog
And then a voice inside my head breaks the analog
And says
Follow me down to the valley below
You know
Moonlight is bleeding from out of your soul
I survived against the will of my twisted folk
But in the deafness of my world the silence broke
And said
My David, don't you worry
This cold world is not for you
So rest your head upon me
I have strength to carry you
Ghosts of the twenties rising
Golden summers just holding you
Come to us, Lazarus,
It's time for you to go
Then I stopped being dead. This is hard to really explain, and I might honestly not even downplay it enough, because it was just a thing that happened to my brain and simultaneously my body. It's going to sound delusional, primarily because it is. Never been diagnosed with anything specific, but like, we all know. Anyway I stopped being an ibbur through a series of events involving both what I perceived as supernatural occurrences and personal life events, and as I see it outside of psychosis, my Cotard's delusion waned (and was replaced by something else, really, but some essay on clinical zoanthropy and Mandela effect psychosis is not part of this at all). The important part is that I was an alive organism regardless, and, correlated, _____ stopped appearing to me. It had guided me through the process, told me in its own way where I was and when things happened, and after the event, it seemed to... just vanish. It felt bittersweet, but I was grateful, and I thought of it. Wished it well on its way to its next... whatever. Flying from one end of the world and back, I suppose, as their kind is said to do.
The main series of events that this post is about started in around October. It involves a lot of things, and all of them were really affecting me in ways I can't downplay, but I can shorten them to get to the point:
A) My job fucking SUCKED. It had sucked for about 2 years up to that point. It continued to suck very consistently and things got worse but not better. During the school year the student crowds made it actual hell to work there, sensory, physical, mental, social and emotional hell. High traffic and bare minimum staffing meant the deli line was so busy that there would be no opportunity to even step away to get water for upwards of six hours at a time. My coworkers learned that I would put in more work regardless of whether they dehumanized me so I started to get scheduled for shifts so understaffed I was often the only person working during its busiest hours. My regular shift manager both was exceedingly patronizing and had anger issues that started making me feel physically threatened. I had no avenue to even socialize outside of work because my schedule covered any time that events were held on (I would be going in on Friday and Saturday nights, staying until almost 1 or 2 am sometimes, and then coming back at 11 on Sunday mornings). I was forced to go in even when sick. I was in serious pain every day that was getting ignored by everyone outside of work, I went through an autistic's nightmare enough for a year's worth of stress every single Saturday night, and I still wasn't even getting paid enough to send rent on the first of every month, so my roommates (who happened to be my brother and his partner) were threatening to evict me. I couldn't afford the pain meds I'd been taking. I couldn't afford HRT anymore either. Or like... my own food.
B) I had new plans to move out of Iowa, and in with my best friend (now partner, and those plans are reinstated), but in November those plans were canceled, and I had no idea what I wanted to do or even could do anymore; I felt trapped and desperate and completely lost and it was a straw on my back for sure. It wasn't just this, but I started to feel like I was suffocating.
C) _____ was not gone. I didn't take it for what it meant at first, but I started to realize that it hadn't left, it had changed. It wasn't outside of me now. It lived inside of me, sometimes I feared even physically, like a parasite, watching through my eyes and feeling through my brain. I could feel it. It had become a dendrogaster in my nervous system.
D) Of course it's something that happened to everybody, but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge the effect it had on all of this for me, what happened during the 2024 election. Particularly because I was in Iowa, in a town mostly populated by not just conservatives but college-aged, Gen Z conservatives. It felt like a rug was pulled and I fell over, and from my position on the ground I could finally see the rot in the wood. The world was not suddenly a hostile place; it always was. It was scary in an extremely real way. I felt physically unsafe in my town. I was scared to be in public at times because I couldn't know what the people around me thought should happen to degenerate unnatural queers like me, and maybe what they always did but were too afraid before to say and were vindicated now. It was surreal in the worst way because the paranoia could not be chalked up to delusion.
E) I struggled socially and started to sink into a really bad depressive episode. I reckoned with romantic feelings toward people far out of my reach, with loneliness, literally being overworked and underpaid, despair creeping into hopelessness, feeling like I really was doomed no matter what I tried to do to prevent it, suicidal desires, then ideation, then ideas, then concrete plans. In December, one of my close friends vanished for several weeks with no notice. I thought at the time that they had died and I thought I could've done something if I had been a more sympathetic friend. I started to see a wall of glass between me and the world. Emotional stress and fear followed me. I started to feel very, very depressed. I felt like I wasn't as real of a person as others. I felt like I wasn't received by the world as a human like everyone else, no matter how much of myself I butchered, I would still always be the creature, an animal, the mindless Frankenstein's monster to the enlightened rest of the human race. I didn't imagine anyone would care too much if I died; not to the level they would for a real person. I started to become a little detached from my own emotional responses.
Before I start with the main course, there is one last small occurrence: around that year's Thanksgiving, my best friend (now partner) confided in me that they were starting to discover they had DID. We got to have conversations I cherished, that expanded my worldview and knowledge, I was happy for them and their better understanding of themself. I was also strangely... resentful.
I can't quite explain the feeling, even now. But there was something inside me I felt like I had to stomp back down every time they talked to me about their journey. Perhaps regret that they had started this process before I had opened up to them about thoughts I'd been having lately—because, the thing is, I had been starting to have thoughts. The "what if I was wrong?" The "something is going on that I don't already have a good answer for." The recognition of patterns, signals. The fictionflickers that I couldn't get people to understand the intensity of. The uncomfortable dissociative spells I knew that I had had before and dismissed as one-offs. The song sung in my voice by a being who wasn't me. Perhaps I saw someone actually close to me get to be plural and felt stifled in comparison; jealousy. Whatever it was, it felt like swallowing a sharp splinter every time I spoke.
I was at rock bottom and every time I asked for a rope I got thrown down a pickaxe. I though, maybe, I could become perfect. I could become perfect by becoming a statue to give to the people in my life who I'd wronged by existing wrong. I was in a process of attempting to kill myself before I was even dead, banishing my own personhood; I sought to strangle myself to total oblivion. I wrote myself a list of conversational "don't"s: Do not express your opinion. Do not seek help or advice for your own problems. Do not talk about yourself. Do not want anything. Do not use the word "I" or "me." Do not bring up anything about yourself. And conversational "do"s: Solve their problem, or leave. I needed to be useful. That's what my worth was. To be someone who didn't want at all. Maybe it could save me.
This is where _____ comes back in. I thought the first one was an isolated incident. Toward the end of December I had the house to myself for a couple weeks, so I was taking care of the cat when he got sick. Sick enough to need to call the emergency vet at two in the morning and take him in for what turned out to require an overnight stay. Driving back, hours later, I was exhausted. I felt like ashes doused by rain. It was the most I could do not to fall asleep at the wheel, and I didn’t even have the stamina to hear music with any semblance of energy to it. I played Tonight by Weeknight. And my voice started to sing. Without me. And then all of a sudden, it wasn’t just my voice. I sunk into my mind; my hands still on the wheel, eyes on the road, all watching through my own eyes. And when I got home, _____ put the car away, took my body inside, and walked it to my bed to sleep. I had nothing else in my arsenal: I just screamed at it. The only thing I could control in that moment was my own silent voice inside my mind, so I asked for my self back, spat insults and hollow threats, tried to bargain and compromise, and just begged. I did it again when it did it again the next night, and every time after that, into January. I tried, only once, to start asking a friend for help. I found out that _____ could do more than just control my body at will. It could hurt it. Too much information to anyone in the moment meant, simply, agony. Like being burned alive, ripped apart, or eviscerated from the inside out. Warning shots. I figured I knew what the obvious conclusion was. If I got through, it would take me and this time it wouldn’t give me back.
I’d never experienced something a problem so mind-numbingly terrifying and yet so simple: I was possessed by a fucking demon.
I know you're sold
I miss you less when the sun goes down
I'd do anything to have this buried in the ground
Nothing matters now
Nothing matters now, we know we tried
I'll get to you
And then we'll be set on fire
It's been a little tired
Will you spend time with me tonight?
I didn't have a lot around me that I could use to cope, so my brain landed on the most familiar thing possible: my own writing. When I had the time, all I would end up doing anymore was sinking into developing one of my stories (the book that's now called Transversal), its plot, world, and especially characters. I got very attached, in particular, to the character I was developing as an outlet for a lot of my own feelings, a misunderstood and often dehumanized shapeshifter named 7 whose original form is an octopus (missing a limb, hence the name) but takes a human form when they appear to help the main cast. I wrote my characters very bitterly at the time. I didn't want the story to have a happy ending because I couldn't imagine one for myself. Octopuses have pretty much always been my favorite animals. I see myself in them and in the way others see them. In a utopian fantasy world, some self-insert could be the ideal creature, and didn't have to be human. But 7 would get trapped in their human form, and then die, senselessly and for no good purpose, before they can ever regain their real body, and they aren't even mourned as much as the human characters who die, because they weren't considered as important to begin with. I found morbid solace in my microcosm of bleak tragedy. I could pull myself apart at the seams to look closer with prose and plot if I tried. Maybe if I wrote enough I could diagnose what was broken and fix it. At the very least, if I wrote enough, it would be bigger and brighter than the despair, like the moon at night.
All of this to say, by the start of the new year, I was in a very, very low place.
Then my cat died.
Believe it or not, this part specifically is actually hard to talk about because a lot of is clouded to me. I can remember specific events, but I cannot connect the threads to things that happened and the ultimate result. What I can say is that through all of it, fear, pain, emptiness, self-hatred and now suddenly an eclipse of grief, coping mechanisms were not enough. I left one night without letting my roommates hear me close the door and walked out, as if in a trance, to the bridge over the Iowa River and got ready to just get it over with. I shut off my own instincts. I tuned out the voices of my thoughtforms. I dared _____ to even try, and I was still moving my own feet.
I cannot find the words to describe how it felt, what happened next. I’ve tried, but I had to use metaphors, because there is nothing literal about what the experience actually was. I can say what I know as facts: _____’s influence was there, a shadow over my mind, the tether that had hooked me pulled by them. It felt like travelling sideways in time. It felt like the cosm of my entire being was being splintered apart like a nuclear reaction. It felt like the scene in Everything Everywhere All At Once when Evelyn's mind shatters like a clay pot across every universe. It felt like being cracked down the middle in a dimension I could feel but not know.
I can say what I know as fact: we’re all someone else to someone else.
I can say what I know as fact: three days later is when it happened.
The first time 7 fronted has always been so hard for me to describe. I guess it makes sense, if it's hard for me to recall for obvious reasons. My usual go-to is, of course, an analogy:
Imagine a spell of vertigo so overwhelming you fall over, and when you fall, you don't collide with the floor, but rather you pass right through it and find yourself on the other side of a horizontal mirror, staring at your own life like it's a stranger's you can only have context for but never personal experience. Or, if that is too vague, imagine you are driving a car down a back road on a night with particularly dense fog. Headlights aren't really very effective because when you're in the fog, you are in the fog. But this isn't just a blanket spread of mist, it's occurring in banks of fog, so often, you won't be in it at all, but as you drive, you continue to enter these banks of fog. Now, in the realm of the theoretical, imagine that you cannot tell which part of the road is covered by the fog, and which part is not. That when you exit a bank of fog, or think you did, suddenly you aren't sure at all which one it just was. Whether you just got out, or entered the fog. It lasted... maybe an hour, I'm not sure, but when my car exited the last bank of fog and its headlights illuminated the clear road ahead, I wasn't me anymore.
Talking about fronting is hard. It's often a struggle to explain it in a way where people get what I mean or relate, because most of the systems I know personally have one of the following experiences: 1. a headspace, wherein the host and others can access and experience a general state of existence even when another is fronting, 2. constant, or at least usual, co-con, where the host is always at least in the passenger seat even when others are fronting, or 3. what's commonly called possessive switching—which I obviously needn't define, because I already did. But 7 wasn't _____. 7 was... me. That's probably the worst I could describe it, but they were me an hour before then. An hour later, I had become them. I got up and did the dishes, and it was 7 who did that. I cleaned my room a little bit, noticing and remarking upon my own obsessive-compulsive sentimentality, throwing out several items I couldn't see a reason to keep, and it was 7 who did that and who felt those things. I went under my bed because I felt safer in a tighter space because 7 is an octopus and that was them, not me. Their feelings, their reactions to those feelings. It was not like a force controlling my movements, it was like my mind was whole and saw through my own eyes, but the perspective had flipped upside-down so all I could see through those eyes was someone else's world. “I” realized that the person “I” had replaced currently believed they were possessed and being intermittently controlled by a demon, but... they weren’t. “I” wasn’t, at least, as “me,” and... when 7 understood this, they asked for something. I’ll get back to that.
“I” remembered the events of 7's life. My trauma. My own death. When 7 stopped fronting, and any time they aren't (so like now), “my” is wrong. “I” is the wrong word for all of those statements because I am not talking about me. Those were 7's memories, and their feelings and their actions and their words, not mine. But at the time, they were mine. Becoming. It wasn't like being possessed. I had been possessed, and quite recently. It was different. Not as scary, but at the same time... maybe more so. Because while _____ could set my nervous system on fire until I relented to let it move my body against my will and force me to not just watch but feel everything it did, 7's very existence could change the internal makeup of my mind. My identity, my own emotions and personality and external perception to internal experience and everything... my self... was suddenly not mine anymore.
It scared me. And while I am obviously at fault for all that happened next, and it is my responsibility to resolve it, I want to set the stage for it, if you will, with the conditions: It was quite literally the most frightening feeling I had ever experienced in my life.
What they asked of me was a compromise. Or more accurately, a deal. I would tell people about 7, allow them to be recognized as themself when they were themself. And 7 would tell my friends about _____. And we did. _____ couldn’t affect 7 because to 7, _____ wasn’t real, or at least wasn’t what I saw it as. So 7 could do what I couldn’t: just speak about it freely, even name it like I still can't. Then, when I was me again, I didn't have to remember the conversation, which meant my all-seeing dendrogaster didn't either and wouldn't "punish" me. Of course, they could only speak about my experiences from their own perspective, but they upheld their end.
But after this, they kept coming back. Not like they were persistent. Sometimes they didn’t even want to be there, but it was involuntary for both of us. And I discovered something about myself, I guess, which is that not being in control strikes the deepest chord of my fear. Every time they were gone, and I came back—as if waking up from an impossibly vivid dream about dying and watching from the afterlife as my body is resurrected and goes about my own life interacting with my friends as a zombie—I panicked. I responded in, of course, possibly the worst way I could have out of every option. I was wracked paradoxically by both imposter syndrome (the conviction I somehow faked the entire thing and was making a fool of myself by continuing to pretend it happened) and sheer terror of the spectre I felt was following me, the being in my mind whose mere presence simply annihilated all of me. The oscillation between the two extremes only made both worse; seeking help was to admit it was real, and seeing records of things 7 had done without my awareness or control was obviously incredibly disturbing no matter what point of the cycle I was on.
I reacted with simple, defensive, animal violence. I tried to thwart it every time I felt them start to come back. I tried to push them away. I said horrible things both about and to them, expressed wanting to kill them while I feared I was dying, and tried to talk my friends into helping me get rid of 7, or to convince them all I was lying and roleplaying it. (I have great friends and they didn’t take that.) The funny thing is I always thought it wrong to anthropomorphizing and moralizing animals for their natural actions, but that's what I did then, because 7 couldn't possibly be malicious just for existing. My backlash and fear made them come into front already anxious and threatened. We started to get panic attacks, and they started to lie to people.
7 hated me. With good reason. Even after this lead to our system discovery, which, that was the catalyst, of course. The reckoning that I had had DID (or something like it) for my entire adult life and before then too. “I” was actually a collection of people all pulling on our life in different directions, all thinking they were the same person. Things that happened after that—Kalev, Kit, Traverser, the first time we recognized fictives—probably better saved for their own posts (same with the ∄ symbol and what that whole thing is), nonetheless part of what I'm talking about... But 7, new, unexpected, and momentous, was different, and still is, and it wasn’t low self esteem when they hated me. It was betrayal.
Making it up to them, then, is not just about making myself feel good. Because they aren't me. Things that might feel good for them often do not feel good for me. But any two people have a responsibility to each other, as beings with thoughts and feelings, regardless of proximity.
Some of those things, I realize now, feel bad to me because they go against a nature I shouldn't embrace in the first place. The thing about 7 that frightened me the most is that they are not avoidant. I need to be safe from what I'm scared of, even if it's irrational. Perception and recognition always meant loss of control to me. I'm driven by need, and 7 is driven by want. They wanted to be known and understood. And it scared me because I don't.
I’m not sure how to end this. Actually, it doesn’t have one yet. We’re still working on it. I am, at least. Sometimes something occurs that you know right away, in the moment, has caused the course of the entire rest of your life to reroute. Wherever it was going before is irrelevant, and what used to be point B is now point 㐺. Or what used to be point ∄ is now point ⏾ (that’s just for me, ha). It’s daunting, but...
When it was originally happening, somewhere deep in the throes of dread and confusion, I had what I now see as a moment of lucidity, like a spark. I said, “This is maybe the worst thing that’s ever happened to my mind or body, and I think it’s also going to have to be the thing that saves me, because I don’t think anything else could have.” I still think that's true even if it's a lot to fucking deal with right now.
I guess the best ending I can think of for this post is the one where I at least go finish writing a book so that I can look in a mirror and maybe somewhere along the lines of distinction say I'm sorry and would you maybe like to start over because I'd like to thank you for saving our life in a language you actually speak.
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