Intro

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I'm not really good with intros, but I'll try.

I am a great many things. Pagan, transgendered (but not transsexual), Otherkin, strange age identity issues, and now, apparently, multiplicitous.

Actually, I've known I was multiplicitous for years now. But I think I may be unique here in that I'm fairly sure I was one being until about 1999. That was my year from hell, in which (among other things) I tried to rid myself of something I didn't like about myself through denial, and ended up fracturing myself. But unlike MPD or DID, I don't have blackouts. My personalities all seem to share both mind and body (including memories) equally, almost like a nation of telepaths. I think that we share so much because the attempted removal of said aspect of self was a complete failure... we created an agressive personality from that experience, but it was an incomplete personality (I would call it a frankie, which is a term from "Kiln People" by David Brin... a frankenstein copy of one's self, a chimera of sorts). Luckily, through acceptance and love, we re-integrated it into the whole... but continued to be "fractured."

Up until a few days ago, I tried convincing myself that they were like imaginary friends in my head. And they are, in a way... in that, I can create new ones when I want to. But the old ones tend to stick around unless they decide to "die." One in particular, my Goddess of many names (sometimes Shao'Kehn, other times Djao'Kain or Shoikin or Zyao'HKehn, etc), seems to have nested permanently in my head, and is always there for advice giving and reminders and to answer questions.

But there are others:

1. Alexander (or Tristan, which is my given name), my masculine side. (I am a male, but I feel much more female.)
2. Fayanora (Fay), my feminine side.
3. Molly Elizabeth - my inner child, a blond haired little girl who says she's seven and affects a younger voice than that. (Replacing many l's and r's with w's.)
4. Various others who talk or argue (usually amicably) amongst themselves, but have not given themselves names. (Who, by the way, have made me take ten minutes to figure out if there's anything I left out of this list, constantly editing and re-editing it before... okay, we get the picture!)

Yet, because we share so much, we tend to not care what names we're addressed by. This is probably because most of us blend together so much that it's often hard to tell which one is speaking at any given time, and often we speak collectively. The only exception being that Molly Elizabeth jealously guards her name... and has her own way of speaking. :-)

Does anyone have anything similar?

Bright Blessings;
---Tristan Alexander Arts/Fayanora

Comments

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Maxim is one of your selves? Oh, I thought you meant the magazine. LOL!

Cool, about Max.

Heh

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

That had crossed my mind too. I was wondering if we were discussing a specific fetish.

--Me

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Looking at the info page, I'm not sure what I think of adultchild. I don't understand why exactly the concept being used in connection with PTSD. I don't notice any references to it simply being the way it is for a person.

I highly doubt that all adults who collect dolls, or comics for crying out loud, all have trauma in their background.

--Me

[pengke.livejournal.com]

I highly doubt that all adults who collect dolls or comics or play on swings are adult children.

Agreed

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm an unrepentant comic book dork awaiting the chance to buy some new issues of Evil Ernie. He's the guy in my current lj-icon. I collect Resident Evil action figures, and have a Venom plush. I wouldn't consider myself an adult child however. She also doesn't consider herself a child, although she might behave in a manner that would be considered childlike.

Personally, I get tired of the limitations society insists on placing upon adults. There's nothing wrong with an adult playing and having fun. Adults should be able to play on swingsets without receiving criticism from his peers. What kind of deal is that? You get loaded with all these responsibilities, and at the same time, limitations are placed on your ability to kick back and relax. Is it any wonder so many people go through midlife crises?

--Me

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Or, specifically, do doll or comic book collecting (or whatever) because they have trauma in their background.

*nods*

[spookshow-girl.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Nevermind the fact that some of these "correlations" may only indicate that people with trauma in their background are more common than people assume. People tend to not look for it when the person seems "normal", but once they deviate from a social norm, their history is gone over with a fine toothed comb. All the dirty laundry comes out to play.

It kind of reminds me of when people look for "roots" with gay people.

--Me

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Yeah, some of what you said is how I found out my ha ha "imaginary friends" were people, and we have always had communication, which is why I didn't believe for years that they could be. I believed all the Sybil tripe.

Read back through the archived posts, several other people on this community have had the same thing or close to it. Welcome.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I believed the Sybil stuff too. Read the book, never saw the movie. But we've always been very open minded, never taking anything for what it's said to be. There isn't a thing someone could say about anything that we'd take as our own truth without first doing our own investigations.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

We did the whole "oh, there are other people in my head, but they're just imaginary friends" business for a while. It was the same old thing-- we figured if it was "real" multiplicity then the "host" wouldn't have known about them, and even if she did, they ought to be constantly fighting for dominance rather than being friendly with each other, and keeping memories of trauma that the "host" knew nothing about. Etcetera.

One in particular, my Goddess of many names (sometimes Shao'Kehn, other times Djao'Kain or Shoikin or Zyao'HKehn, etc), seems to have nested permanently in my head, and is always there for advice giving and reminders and to answer questions.

...Out of curiosity, have you ever read the book I Never Promised You A Rose Garden? I disagreed only with the author's conclusion (it was really her own story, fictionalised a bit to obscure identifying details) that the others were a form of 'insanity' that she had to give up in order to live a stable life.

Yet, because we share so much, we tend to not care what names we're addressed by. This is probably because most of us blend together so much that it's often hard to tell which one is speaking at any given time, and often we speak collectively.

We tend to co-run a lot, in the sense that someone is rarely wholly at front without someone else co-fronting, commenting or observing. That was an aspect of our operating system we thought was "defective" for a long time, because so many of the books we'd read made it sound like multiplicity was about people "taking turns being singlet." It's just the way we work, though-- often posts can be co-written here, but the person who's most present or closest to the front puts their name on it.

[idianshire.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, have you ever read the book I Never Promised You A Rose Garden? I disagreed only with the author's conclusion (it was really her own story, fictionalised a bit to obscure identifying details) that the others were a form of 'insanity' that she had to give up in order to live a stable life.



We so need to buy ourselves a couple of that book. We read it as a teenager, long before we had ever heard of MPD and books like Sybil. I remember feeling connected to it, like someone sort of understood what we had going on. Luckily we never brought into that whole idea that her other world was insanity, it made us sad that she gave it up, but we never thought it was a bad thing, well that never came up until we discovered multiple comminities online.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

have you ever read the book I Never Promised You A Rose Garden?

No, who's the author?

All of my selves tend to want to co-front at once, a lot of the time. Takes a lot of effort to hash out what I want to say if it's anything more complex than two or three word sentences. I think it's partly why I am as far from an impulsive speaker as one can get. :-) Writing lets me be far more impulsive, though I still tend to prefer forums to chat because it can still take a while to figure out what to say and how to say it.

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

The author is Joanne Greenberg. She originally published it under the pseudonym "Hannah Green," and you may find an older copy with that name on it instead. I'm not sure what was behind her ultimate decision to put her real name back on the book; possibly because it was instantly recognizable as her to anyone who had known her in the hospital, anyway.

Greenberg wasn't multiple, but she had her own world/dimension ("Yr" in the book; its real name was Iria) and talked to some of its gods. It's also an example of how a single person can have a subjective world, and of how some 'psychotic' people's difficulties can be fixed just with psychotherapy. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, she now believes that she was simply "insane" and was "cured" when she gave up that world.

http://www.fortda.org/fall_98/intro_intrapsychic.html

-J

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Iria sounds beautiful.

[saturniakitty.livejournal.com]

Multiplicitous <3

[saturniakitty.livejournal.com]

That was supposed to have a little heart after it ^^

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Okay.

[screamingshiva.livejournal.com]

We went through almost the same exact transformation when michael was about 15 in 1994... we didn't have any trauma or anything... just one day michael the first name given to the body decided he didn't like who he was... and put his darker self into one name... and his "good" self into another name... and thus the split was the result ... eventually the "darker" self was cast out of the body... and was only recently let back in as well... I would go into details but it could take a long time.... Anyway... ya .. all the souls are now remembering though.. that we didn't actually get created by michael.. but that we all agreed to come into the body together at birth. there are others as well.. that got discovered later.... others without names until recently. They named themselves during conversations inside the body. Everyone is pretty much introduced now and we all talk regularly.

Part of our goal now is to really start studying "multiple beingness" as we call it, and get the word out that it is not a disorder but a valid state of living.

anyway... HI!
nice to meet you...

Sage
Modris
Sera
Michael

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

eventually the "darker" self was cast out of the body... and was only recently let back in as well...

Really? The one we made we were never able to get rid of... in fact, if we hadn't changed our tune and accepted it back with love when we did, it might have gotten out of hand and gotten us in trouble.

Internal-Dichotomy-Generated Plurality

[effrenata.livejournal.com]

This is interesting. I fit the same pattern as both of you -- a deliberate and conscious "split" created to contain, express or signify a dichotomy within the original person. I don't regard myself as "shattered" or "fractured", though. I think of it more as "branching", growing in multiple directions.

It started, in my early teens, as a deliberate forking or branching of this consciousness. The first two proto-personalities, so to speak, evolved into Anomia and Marlana, representing Chaos and Order respectively. The Marlana side of me went undercover for most of my adult lifetime, and has only recently resurfaced.

I find it interesting that the so-called "Jekyll and Hyde" pattern of plurality created by an inner conflict within a single person does exist, and perhaps is less uncommon than was once thought. This adds a new model to the types of plural origins -- natural, external trauma-induced, soulbonded, walk-in, and internal-division induced. In my case, it was very strongly voluntary. The inner conflict can occur among various lines: good/evil, male/female, order/rebellion, etc. In all four cases I've seen so far -- you two, me, and one other -- the first "split" is into two polarized personalities, and further branching occurs afterwards.

We also tend to blend a lot, too. We think of ourselves as primarily sharing a consciousness and identity rather than a body.

Re: Internal-Dichotomy-Generated Plurality

[(Anonymous)]

This is really cool to know that there are others who have experienced this sort of spiritual multiplicity. I really would love to talk to you more as well... I am currently trying to find others who have undergone the same sorts of spiritual tranformational branching as you call it... I like your terminology. Please feel free to friend me... I would be very interested in comparing some notes.

Re: Internal-Dichotomy-Generated Plurality

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I am a Neo-Mythos (new mythology) Neo-Pagan, and two of my Deities are Ahndahn and Shao'Kehn, Order and Chaos respectively. Shao'Kehn (who has many other names as well) might be interesting to this community, as She has long had the title of The Goddess With Multiple Personality Disorder. Though I might change that title to remove the word "disorder."

Anyway, I think I'll make a new post about it.

[drakul-apollyon.livejournal.com]

First time we've ever posted (sorry for lurking so long) and honestly we wouldn't have posted now except you sound quite similar to how we are. We all blend together the majority of the time, except for when one or another has to or decides to come out. If you know us, you can tell when it's one of Us, and not simply the blend because we move a lot more (even though most of us don't feel we belong in a human body, we still enjoy how it feels when we move around on this plane. What can we say, we're strange)and although I act rather watchful and silent. The other's all like to talk and "play" a bit with the friends that are around them (yes, it's more complicated than that, but the others are all Predators by nature, so they like to play. And that's the easiest way to tell if some one else is out, it's quite harder to tell which one is out though). Typically my friends simply think I've gotten talkative and such because they try to keep it down so it's not obvious unless you know. Currently there's 4 people here(only one human in the system, if any one was wondering). Unfortunately unless we try quite hard, the communication between us all isn't that good. But we can all tell we are here and that is the important thing. Also for some odd reason, blackouts and general memory loss doesn't happen here either. Although we have a very odd sense of time. Any way's, dont know if any of that information helped you, but I thought I'd come by and leave a post since you were wondering if there were others similar.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Time... oh man, time is not my friend. Days can drag on for an eternity (when at work) but weeks seem to fly by like seconds. I get on the computer and I lose all track of time.

Some of your Selves are predators? Hmm... one of mine might be, but most seem to prefer my vegetarian lifestyle. The predator (who is one of The Nameless) seems content usually with fish or other seafood.

Thanks, y'all!

[pleiades-rising.livejournal.com]

"Multiplicitous" is an awesome word :D I first read it as "multiplicious", like delicious. Now I'll be saying that all week!

I used to think all my guys were imaginary friends. Then one day I had a weird experience where one of them thought that ME and the others were the imaginary friends! I kind of annoyed me that anyone would think I was imaginary. I'm also otherkin (a therianthrope; a cat) and also have weird gender-related issues. I'm not a guy, but I don't enjoy being a girl at all.

And the blending... I haven't heard much around here about blending, but our system experiences it quite a lot. We only have certain people that we blend with, like everyone here has compatibility issues or something :/ Sometimes I'll blend with Karr and we'll be this weird Niz/Karr combination. I'll still be me, but you can see Karr's influence in the way I'll do things, and vice versa.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I think it's a real word, though I might have made it up. I dunno.

If you like words, I have coined some words of my own and they appear here: http://fayanora.23ae.com/temple_stuff/coinedwords.htm My favorites are "metataste" and "faux poo."

I'll still be me, but you can see Karr's influence in the way I'll do things, and vice versa.

Cool!

Love your icon, BTW. I love Yughi-Oh!

[pleiades-rising.livejournal.com]

Neat! Made-up words are always the best (I love 'metataste' by the way) I made a mini-dictionary of my own made-up words once, but can't remember where it is :/ And I had a really spiffy word that meant "the word you use to describe things that are so beautiful that there are no words to describe them" :D

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Neat! Made-up words are always the best

Dey shoo aw!

(I love 'metataste' by the way) I made a mini-dictionary of my own made-up words once, but can't remember where it is :/ And I had a really spiffy word that meant "the word you use to describe things that are so beautiful that there are no words to describe them" :D

AWESOME!

I have my whole own language: http://fayanora.23ae.com/BOS/Trelli_stuff/trelli_lang.html

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

We ought to put Lauta up on line someplace.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Lauta?

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Our language.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Ah.

[shatterstorm.livejournal.com]

We usually speak as a group - there are different people active at different times, but there's rarely just one of us present. One of the nice parts about hanging around this community was learning that sharing awareness like that isn't uncommon.

Some of our kids have soft spoken r's too. :)

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

You have more than one kid in you? Neat.

Re: I'm confused nice to meet you all though

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I'm confused.

No, we're all otherkin. Otherkin just means we had past lives as something other than human. This whole soul did.

Special powers? Um... I'm not that kind of otherkin. Not an elf or something mystical like that. Just an alien soul in a human body.

Well, maybe they all existed anyway, like Molly, and just never had a name before. *Shrugs* I dunno.

Re: I'm confused nice to meet you all though

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

We're mostly otherkin as well in that we are a gateway system and our homeworld is in an alternative parallel dimension. Nothing at all distinguishes us from earth people -- no special powers and we don't look any different. The differences are cultural. The body we share is completely human and has no special traits. We have a few walk-ins who are Earth humans -- Andy and Iris are the ones you are likely to see online.