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Hello. I'm new around these parts. I'm Elmira -- it isn't my real name or even the name I go by, but it is the name of this very specific, pared-down self. It's the name I have inside. (And when you pronounce it in your mind, pronounce it with a soft I, please.)
I'm newly becoming selves-aware (I heard that term somewhere else and I liked it). I've had such a tenuous grasp on my own identity my whole life, really, to the extent where I know I haven't been living my own life, my memories are memories of other peoples' lives. I'm pretty sure of my plurality; the thing is that it seems that we are many people sharing one consciousness. Slávka is the one inside who I know the best (and even I don't know her well enough), and when she writes it is really less her writing than me interpreting these Slávka-buzzings into thoughts and thoughts into language and language to the paper. And yet I get the feeling that when I write it is just as much Slávka interpreting my thoughts. And there is still a fairly clear Elmira and a fairly clear Slávka. I can have conversations with Slávka, but it's a very abstract sort of communication.
And also now that I'm separating us out like this, I've become a lot more clear-headed. I've been identifying as our collective consciousness and I have considerably less control over that than I do over my own self. I've also been retrieving various wonderful things from the inner life I used to have -- for instance, I can talk backwards again. I enjoy being this person and thinking this way and I'm clearing the air. So. Here I am.
I'm newly becoming selves-aware (I heard that term somewhere else and I liked it). I've had such a tenuous grasp on my own identity my whole life, really, to the extent where I know I haven't been living my own life, my memories are memories of other peoples' lives. I'm pretty sure of my plurality; the thing is that it seems that we are many people sharing one consciousness. Slávka is the one inside who I know the best (and even I don't know her well enough), and when she writes it is really less her writing than me interpreting these Slávka-buzzings into thoughts and thoughts into language and language to the paper. And yet I get the feeling that when I write it is just as much Slávka interpreting my thoughts. And there is still a fairly clear Elmira and a fairly clear Slávka. I can have conversations with Slávka, but it's a very abstract sort of communication.
And also now that I'm separating us out like this, I've become a lot more clear-headed. I've been identifying as our collective consciousness and I have considerably less control over that than I do over my own self. I've also been retrieving various wonderful things from the inner life I used to have -- for instance, I can talk backwards again. I enjoy being this person and thinking this way and I'm clearing the air. So. Here I am.
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Date: 2003-11-22 11:26 am (UTC)I can so strongly relate to this!
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Date: 2003-11-22 12:58 pm (UTC)(And aren't nonverbal selves so exciting to try to communicate with? ;} )
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Date: 2003-11-22 04:13 pm (UTC)-several of us... er, mostly Cerys, we think
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Date: 2003-11-26 06:03 am (UTC)Hello. I'm new around these parts. I'm Elmira -- it isn't my real name or even the name I go by, but it is the name of this very specific, pared-down self. It's the name I have inside. (And when you pronounce it in your mind, pronounce it with a soft I, please.)
Hey, I never thought of pronouncing it that way, but that's very pretty. We don't have anyone in here who uses or identifies with the body's legal name, except for a six-year-old, but we think of the names we use inside as being our real ones, the names of our true selves.
I'm newly becoming selves-aware (I heard that term somewhere else and I liked it). I've had such a tenuous grasp on my own identity my whole life, really, to the extent where I know I haven't been living my own life, my memories are memories of other peoples' lives.
Man, that sounds a lot like us-- we were living in confusion for a long time because of it. For the most part we've always been able to share memories, but because of it, we ended up with a lot of confused frontrunners looking back on other people's lives which had just happened to take place in the same body. (And yeah, selves-aware is a good word. We've been selves-aware for close to three years now and wouldn't trade it in for pretending to be a singlet again if you paid us.)
no subject
Date: 2003-11-26 06:10 am (UTC)Hello. I'm new around these parts. I'm Elmira -- it isn't my real name or even the name I go by, but it is the name of this very specific, pared-down self. It's the name I have inside. (And when you pronounce it in your mind, pronounce it with a soft I, please.)
Hey, I never thought of pronouncing it that way, but that's very pretty. We don't have anyone in here who uses or identifies with the body's legal name, except for a six-year-old, but we think of the names we use inside as being our real ones, the names of our true selves.
I'm newly becoming selves-aware (I heard that term somewhere else and I liked it). I've had such a tenuous grasp on my own identity my whole life, really, to the extent where I know I haven't been living my own life, my memories are memories of other peoples' lives.
Man, that sounds a lot like us-- we were living in confusion for a long time because of it. For the most part we've always been able to share memories, but because of it, we ended up with a lot of confused frontrunners looking back on other people's lives which had just happened to take place in the same body. (And yeah, selves-aware is a good word. We've been selves-aware for close to three years now and wouldn't trade it in for pretending to be a single person again if you paid us.)
The feeling of 'clearing the air' is familiar to us, too. Azusa (our primary frontrunner for three years before we became aware of us as us) was able to finally start sorting out a lot of the one-artificial-identity gunk instead of being kind of mashed together with other people's identities and traits. Our attempts to integrate when we were younger (even though we weren't thinking of it as that) ended not with one person having everyone else's individual skills but one person who couldn't do any of those things particularly well. It's kind of a "dirty secret" of psychology that integration rarely ever works, actually...
Anyway, welcome to the community! it's nice to see people in the process of selves-discovery and finding it liberating.
Shiu
no subject
Date: 2003-11-26 09:42 pm (UTC)It's definitely liberating. Up until now it's been sort of like a bunch of people all trying to drive a car, we all have one hand on the steering wheel, our limbs are all tangled up. When we identify as the common consciousness, it's hard for our separate identities not to get squeezed out of us. I'm sort of quiet and bookish, but there are plenty of exuberant people in here, and so I identified as exuberant and extroverted -- even though I'm really not. So there was this weird sort of chasm between my inside and outside identities. Things are becoming much clearer now, although there's still a lot we have to do, definitely.