symptoms anyone?

[idianshire.livejournal.com]

I have been wondering since a previous post what the symptoms of multiplicity (not the disordered view) actually are. I mean I know what you read on other websites, but they seem more to do with post traumatic stress than multiplicity, or someone that thinks Sybil is the only multiple known in the last 50 years. Now I don’t mean what makes someone multiple, we are fine with our definition of that, the debate here is what would be on a checklist. I hate the word symptom because it does imply illness, maybe characteristics would be a better word. Things like time loss.. which I know a lot of multiples don’t actually have, I suppose we do lose time, although as Tryall said it isn’t so much that we lose time as much as someone’s life/activities/ are so boring no one else pays any attention. We lose time by a conscious choice. We hear voices but in a study we took part in the woman running it said that hearing voices is something a large part of the population does anyway. Maybe there aren’t any clear cut symptoms/characteristics that are relevant to multiples/plurals as a group, and maybe we are all just so bored that the most exciting thing for us to do is argue amongst ourselves on this foggy day… which is more likely

Comments

[idianshire.livejournal.com]

A few of the people that know about us joke in a good way about the deer in the headlights look that comes over us when there is a switch without prior information gathering. That momentary, oh shit I should have paid more attention before stepping in. Another friend said we sometime look vague, what they knowing enough about how we work recognise as me listening to other people talking, passing along information or just being amusing (or a pain in the butt depending on who you are talking to). The way we work there is often a large "peanut gallery" around, talking amongst themselves, making inappropriate (but often amusing) comments, or if Kate is part of it, correcting my grammar.

I think for someone we have allowed into our lives enough for them to be told about our multiplicity, they can pick up signs of it pretty easily, but most people unaware of what they are seeing don't get shown much.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

LOL, I'm pretty sure Crist-Erui can see and hear what's going on with us physically when he's not corporeal, the same as Kír and I can. What I think is that he gets drawn in by the music - he loves music, and he's fast enough at 'switching' to sing duets with me - but then he gets stage fright about all those strangers looking at him. After all, he's lived most of his life with the ironclad rule of No One Must Know; it's only a year and a half since that rule was changed to allow him to make contact with a few close friends.

Looking vague... LOL, I suspect I look kinda vague a lot of the time. It was funny, this past June Faire (http://www.dragonslaire.org/Events/junefaire.htm), my dear friend had told her visiting cousin (who takes an interest in multiplicity) about my brothers, and the lady thought she'd seen one of them. Well, no, in fact she hadn't - Kír didn't take form once that whole weekend, and while Crist-Erui was corporeal a lot, he spent all his time with the dogs; the only non-canine person he spoke to was my kid. My friend's cousin thought I was 'somebody else' because I didn't seem to recognize her... LOL, I'm prosopagnosic (http://www.spidernet.nl/~martijn_dekker/otsp/prosopagnosia.html), June Faire is a huge event, and the lady in question is kinda short, kinda plump, kinda middle-aged, has kinda neutral-colored medium-short medium-curly hair, just like thousands of other women at the event. So my not-recognizing her had nothing to do with my brothers; t'was all just me.

*grins* Actually, I'm sure she did see Crist-Erui at some point - everybody must've seen him, but only as a laughing blur in green as he raced past with either the adorable golden puppy or the big black wolflike critter. He's too fast to catch, though, both in his physical running and in his ability to "flicker out" of situations he can't cope with, like having to talk to someone.