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

[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.