Totally unrelated but are you all really experiencing life as a collective of multiple identities? That’s absolutely fascinating. In particular it seems one/some/all of you are fairly intelligent and self aware about the situation.
I've always been self-aware in terms of knowing that I had 'multiple personalities' (at least once there was indeed more than one), but knowledge of "plurality", "systems" and dissociative disorders is far more recent (last couple years at most).
How clear is the divide between each of you? Similarly, individual identities experience memory loss depending on the level of control of a given person? As in, do any of you have recall from when another of you is at the forefront?
I notice you all also appreciate the collective identification. Does that mean there are times when many of you are actively perceiving the world simultaneously?
Finally, how hard is it to get by with normal life, job, loved ones, etc? It sounds incredibly challenging, but you also seem to have a very positive outlook.
It used to be a lot clearer, but right now it's not. Almost all of the personalities that existed a few months ago do not anymore. As a result, what used to make up those identities is now mixed together into some big, confused, dissociative soup. Occasionally the soup comes out, and there are still parts in there that have their own personalities, but they can't tell each other apart, or which one they are at any given time.
The rest of us that managed to not be part of the soup (I am one, hi) are not as separate as we were before the event, probably because our structure is unstable enough that being completely separate would be detrimental right now.
Back then, each personality had separate memories from each other, and would experience blackouts whenever they're not around. A bit like going to sleep and then waking up weeks or months into the future, if you had no dream. It would also be described as a "time skip", feeling like you just got suddenly teleported into the future with no real warning or control over it. You would remember the last moment you were just awake, but that moment would actually have been weeks or months into the past, and you wouldn't remember anything in between; it wouldn't even feel like any time had passed.
Now, we don't really experience that, and our memories aren't very separate. There's still a little separation, but we are largely monoconscious at the moment, and most of our switches just change our current identity rather than having another personality take control. This is known as non-possessive switching, as opposed to possessive switching, which is what used to happen most often.
> Similarly, individual identities experience memory loss depending on the level of control of a given person? As in, do any of you have recall from when another of you is at the forefront?
We don't experience memory loss because we don't remember something and then forget it. Someone who's not at the front simply doesn't form memories in the first place of whatever happens there. If you don't have memories, you can't recall them, but it's not forgetting.
Or at least, that's how it used to be when we had distinctly separate memories. Right now, we don't really, so when we switch, we still remember what we did, as if we had just done it. There's no "I remember someone else doing this", it just feels like "I" had done it myself, it's just that "I" had a different identity at the time, so I might have made different decisions than I would now.
> I notice you all also appreciate the collective identification. Does that mean there are times when many of you are actively perceiving the world simultaneously?
It has happened, yes. It's known as "co-fronting", when multiple personalities can perceive/interact with the world at once. There's also co-consciousness, which is when multiple of them are conscious, even if they aren't necessarily paying attention to the outside world.
Since we're primarily monoconscious right now, there's been no co-fronting or co-consciousness recently, but in the past it used to happen every now and then. Since we've gotten very efficient at context-switching, it even used to be the case that multiple personalities could hold independent online conversations at the same time. I assume that can still happen, but if it has happened, it would've had to have been with something I can't perceive (i.e. the entity "System").
> Finally, how hard is it to get by with normal life, job, loved ones, etc?
It is very hard. But that has less to do with us being multiple and more to do with our neurodivergence in general. We're autistic and have severe ADHD, so it's incredibly difficult for us to find jobs that we can actually do. It's not even a problem of employer accommodations, it's a problem of us sometimes just suddenly losing the ability to do anything, and not being able to fix it in any way. It's not burnout, because it's not that we get tired or lose efficiency or quality. It's that we can stare at a screen for 30 minutes trying to do something and not be able to do it. And we've gotten fired over that once, and it's still one of the things we regret the most.
As for loved ones, we've had modest success just telling them that we're multiple people in one body, and even the elderly ones seem to understand. They still collectively refer to us as Logan since that's our birth name, but we don't really mind since we know it refers to the body and not necessarily the person inside it.
> It sounds incredibly challenging, but you also seem to have a very positive outlook.
It's challenging in all sorts of ways, but it's fascinating, too. The sort of stuff we'll say on HN is different than the stuff we'll say in private (i.e. there's tons of terrible trauma stuff, our future is a lot less hopeful than we make it sound, the system instability is causing a lot of stress and uncertainty and we're still trying to get over the fact that 8 personalities died, because those were people to us), but... it's sort of addictive. We're addicted to the pleasure and the pain of it. Maybe that's part of what makes it a disorder, but it's who we are.
There's nothing we're more afraid of than becoming only one person. We need to be multiple... I wish I had a really good explanation why, but to be honest we haven't fully figured that out yet.
