(no subject)

[pthalo]

I think I hog the body too much. Or at least our journal. I went through and added tags to our entries since May 1st so that you can view only the entries a certain person posted in our journal easily if you want and at least if who updates most is a reliable indicator, I'm really hogging the body. But then, we don't update the journal everytime we switch because that would be stupid and friends page spammy. So the others are out more than the journal would indicate but...still, I'm out a lot. Too much I think. Don't want to take more than my fair share. Any ideas on how I can knock it off?

Pthalo.

Comments

[kasiya-system.livejournal.com]

I (Kasia) actually "hog" the body alot too.. I do it mainly to try and keep things consistent with a physical significant other.. but alot of others of us do use it as well too.. but I guess I'm the hogger one.. *sigh*

before me, it was Suz who used the body the most.. much more than any of the rest of ever have.. there are about 12 or so of us who use the body quite a bit and some of the others do from time to time and the rest don't at all.. by choice.. we do try to share when we can, but we have time management problems sometimes..

I honestly would prefer not to be here with the body as much as I am.. but that's all a long whiney story.. blah..

kasia

[pthalo]

I don't know too much about the history, but I know I there were times in childhood and as a teenager when I wasn't the main front. I have vivid memories of a year or two I spent in the kids only other world (as opposed to the regular inner world all of us use. I'd name it, but I made this entry public... long story.) Jo knows a lot about history. I went down to her nest one night to get her to babysit The Little One because Marissa and I wanted some time alone together in her room and wound up staying for a long time just listening to her stories of who came from where, who split off of whom. She says I'm not the original one here but I did split off from her.

I don't count the inhabitants of the kids only other world when I say how many we are because that world seems more outside of us than the other and because it's a planet with a large population and we can go there (well, I can't anymore, the border guard told me when I was 15, not unkindly, that I wasn't a little kid anymore but The Little One still goes there.) but they can't come here. As for those of us who could theoretically inhabit the body, I've met 20ish?

But after me, The Little One uses the body the most and she comes out for a while most days it seems. Marissa shows up every now and then. Others will blend up into me when fronting sometimes. Lydia's curious but mostly frustrated by her limitations in this world. She's mute, which isn't a problem inside because we know ASL, but outside none of my friends know it. And others are out somewhat too, I see entries in the offline journal or notes or my friends tell me about things from half an hour ago that I have to pretend that I remember. I don't keep tabs on the body when I'm not in it really. It might be by choice, but I don't know. I just feel like there's too much of me out here.

And I hear you on preferring you weren't in the body as much. I was the one who took the final exams and studied for them, I'm the one trying to squeeze water out of stone when money's tight, and I'm probably going to have to spend a good deal of time with my mother this summer (flying home in four days) because no one else wants to do it.

Pthalo

[thehumangame.livejournal.com]

Tags are fun. I was so bored yesterday that I went back and tagged all 215 entries with a variety of subjects, and then wrote a nifty auto-updating tags list in the sidebar using Page.visible_tag_list(), which will even not display tags that are solely on entries the viewer doesn't have permission to see. (That's what happens when I try to click on your 'authors' list: it displays an ugly "This tag doesn't exist!" error page. Because people who don't have permission to view any entries a tag is on are prevented from even knowing the tag exists.)

...sorry, no advice about not being out so much. That's the sort of thing that takes us months of dogged determination to make a noticeable change and years to make a significant change. If you look at our journal, the ratio of posts is 90/10 me/Sophie, but that doesn't take into account recent advances and her periodic disinterest in the internet; if you check the last 25 entries it's more like 85/15. OK, that isn't that much better, but still.

[pthalo]

Tags are fun. I don't really know all that much about S2, though I could learn it if I had the time. I'm using a style my friend isabeau made for the styles contest. I assume she'll add tag support eventually but I mainly just wanted the authors so I just put them in the links list.

I got bored after tagging through May (I have tons of entries) and the journal was mostly me before than anyway as I was fairly separated from the others. Looking back at old journals, the body was a lot more shared when it was a teenager/child than now and even spending large amounts of time on the kids only other world, hearing the voices of the others for years didn't clue me in. denial is nifty. anyway I came out of denial and got to know them and since they'd pretty much sorted themselves out and have been managing all this time I figured I shouldn't throw my weight around and have been actively getting to know them and learning about them. But I know my writing style and I can tell that before Marissa's entry it was either me or unknown (I've found stuff that looking back doesn't seem like me, even given that I've changed over the years.) But I think the ideal state would be what was represented in the offline journal when then body was 12, back in 1996. Entries by dozens of different people, some of them named, some of them not, different handwritings, communicating equally. Very little of that was me. (This also should have clued me in but I was happy to ignore it for quite a while.) I want my place in this world too, though sometimes I wonder how much of a place I do have, but I don't want so large of a place.

Pthalo

[echthros.livejournal.com]

Unless other people are complaining, I wouldn't worry about it.

[pthalo]

Oh, okay. I haven't gotten any complaints, but I'll ask about it inside. Thanks

Pthalo

[saturniakitty.livejournal.com]

I've got that problem too - ever since I took over as the main front it's been difficult to "step back" and allow others to have more complete control.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

This can take a while. A lot of it is a matter of unlearning learned reflexes. For us, it was very important early in life to not switch, or at least to not behave differently when we did, because we were bound to land ourselves in trouble for behaving strangely or 'not understanding what's fantasy and what's real' (if someone absolutely insisted they were someone other than the person who bore the body name). So, we went through most of our life with the unwritten rule that one person should stay up front all the time. This actually proved to be unworkable, and every few years we'd change over, causing people to say "you used to be so different, I just don't know what happened!"-- but the important thing was that we keep up an image of consistency.

That was -very- hard to break, when we first started letting others spend long periods of time up front. For one, until just recently we were still surrounded by people who had no idea about our multiplicity and we were required to show consistent behaviour for them. For another, having one person 'hog the body' had just kind of become a reflex, pretty much-- we had to work consciously towards changing that. We found that finding things that would encourage people to come to the front-- music, books, etc.-- was very useful, as we could use those things to 'draw them out' and keep them around for long periods of time.

The brain remembers patterns, but is not inflexible-- if it's used to processing a single frontrunner at all times, it'll take a while before it can adapt to processing more switching. I suspect this may be at least partly responsible for the headaches some newbie multiples experience-- we used to get them every time we tried to switch; I think it was because we were trying to make the switching take place more often and more quickly than we were used to dealing with. Over several years, though, we got to the point where we could handle fairly rapid switching.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

I think it was because we were trying to make the switching take place more often and more quickly than we were used to dealing with.

--I should probably clarify that that refers to trying to deliberately switch, or encourage it to happen 'faster.' We did still get automatic switching sometimes.

[shatterstorm.livejournal.com]

Ask your crew if they're concerned. They might be fine with you taking most of the fronting duties.