The sequel to everyones favorite therian-centered blog post, Rabbit! You don’t need to read that one, but you can if you’d like!
Something funny happened at the very end of last year (2024.) And I do mean, on the 30th or 31st. Well, it all really starts earlier in the year, september or thereabouts. The end of last year was a wild time for us, within 365 days we went from greiving a lost love to being surrounded by a support circle of amazing people. Some of these people are plural, an identity best summed up as ‘oh theres other girls up here in the brain.’ In reality plurality is a difficult topic to discuss to someone who isn’t familiar, especially when you start getting into the semantics of plurality as it exists in people with DID and those without it. I am not an expert on anything but canned coffee drinks, so I won’t pretend I have some amazing stance on this that’ll explain it to anyone and everyone. I had known of plural people before, but not this intimamtely. I asked them a lot of questions about their experiences and how those experiences often also aligned with ΘΔ identities in fun ways.
So, very end of last year, I write this story that involves plushies (as you may know from Rabbit is sort of a thing for me) and one of the characters, Amber, sticks in my head like a catchy song. Soon, she’s having her own thoughts. Ok, weird, and not something I was expecting to happen. I mean, I’ve thought a lot about being plural but I didn’t think I actually was! Just one of those fascinations with the many forms of the human condition, just like what we thought about being trans… HEY!
Oh dear, a thesis has formed. Being plural, just like being trans and being ΘΔ, are intrinsic parts of my identity that are always changing and morphing in ways that match my personality and environment. Cool! Run with that thesis however you wish. OK back to Amber, I think the thing that cemented her as real was an interaction or lack there of with my father. He came upstairs and was loudly swearing at a box of cables while he looked for a specific adapter. While I would have shrugged it off as just another thursday in the peanut factory, Amber was fronting for the first time and went into a full panic. Oh dear, she’s her own person, rabbit, plushie isn’t she? We managed to talk and thankfully our relationship is quite good. I understand a lot of people, even people I know, struggle with a headmate with a much more pessimistic perspective that intrudes on thought. We don’t really have that (unless I’m that headmate but wow thats a different conversation.)
A few months went by, Amber and I taking turns fronting (controlling the body) and living in peace. Another thing plural people experience is memory gaps when headmates are fronting, essentially they don’t remember what someone else did in their body. It sounds scary but usually it’s pretty mundane. Melody sort of changed that. Melody just woke up fronting one day in april and started cleaning our room. Melody is a doll, a maid doll specifically, which may sound like gibberish to the uninvolved but to that special bunch of trans folks should explain itself. For accessibility, I’ll explain it here.
OK so there’s this fiction world called Empty Spaces, in which dolls, often made of porcelain with clockwork mechanisms, are animated by the love of a witch or mistresses. Those dolls exist to be polite things, often in maid-like rolls of cleaning and cooking and drinking tea. We’ve read our fair share of stories in this world, and Melody is sort of the result of that. She’s a proper lady who enjoys cleaning, listening to classical music (though she’s been branching out) and drinking bitter tea and coffee. Melody also experiences a bit of memory gap when shes fronting, meaning I don’t always recall what it does. The tea and coffee point a few sentences ago is especially fun because if you’ve been reading the Omnibus you may have seen that myself, Amber and Melody are all getting opinions on flavor in. It’s nice having different perspectives like that!
So that’s how it stands right now. I’m a plushie rabbit (or maybe a mouse?), Amber is a plushie rabbit, and Melody is a porcelain doll with a pullstring to dictate when she talks. In recent weeks we’ve been making strides towards cofronting, or having everyone front at the same time so we all can experience things together. Much more excitnig is allocating time for each other! The best example I have is a trip to the Mall of America a few days ago where we all got to spend time fronting doing things we enjoyed. That sort of collaboration isn’t universal with plural systems, in fact almost nothing is since plurality is inherently such a wildly varying thing. But I hope this post has done a decent job explaining what it is, how it works, and how it effects us.
See ya later!
P.S, We always worried about saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ in a sentence, and every time we did this clip from the big lebowski came to mind.