Plurality [12/11/2022]

[1443 words/6min read]

I'm not a DID or OSDD system. In fact, I don't really consider myself a system at all. But for years of my life, I was plural, as in, there was several sentient, or at least to my perspective sentient, persons in this body I inhabit. However, as I discovered when I got on antipsychotic to treat some other symptoms of mild psychosis, the "internal voices" I heard, who had their own personalities and names, were in fact psychosis symptoms, and they disappeared. I had planned to do this entry before they were gone, and this website is in fact named after one of the most recurrent voices I had and fellow nonhuman, Sunabi. I'll still talk about my plurality here, but with the information I have now that it's psychosis born.

I think I started to be plural, instead of simply a kid with overactive imagination and brain characters, when my mind steered toward maladaptive daydreaming. In fact, I was until 18yo more or less schizoid, living in my daydreams more than real life, with restrained ability to bond with people and no feeling of sexual or romantic attraction (romantic attraction still seems nebulous to me, but I now am able to care still to an extent that parallels some people's romantic feelings, so I don't mention it much and consider myself some sort of demiromantic person). While in that "schizoid split" where my external self did not matter and everything was internal, I, for my early teenagehood, regarded the (often fictional characters based from media) persons I interacted with in my daydreams as real, as tied to a sort of delusions I had that I was an astral beast having taken possession of a human child. I think most of the voices I've heard over the years were born from what I experienced in those daydreams, in a way or another.

Sunabi was the easiest to tie to them, as he is the beast I thought I was, only taking it's own voice and blaming me for what I put him, beforehand myself, through during my daydreams. He's the one with most ties to me, almost a sort of twin in the mindscape in how we are both from the same origin. Our history is a bit complex and I'd rather not share the details, especially the disturbing ones, but as much as he was a constant presence almost comforting in that way, he is also the voice that has harmed me the most, intentionally and sadistically to punish me for what he had lived and thought of as my fault. He's at fault for starting a few of my worst coping mechanisms, although it feels wrong to blame something entirely on him, considering I'm still always in control of my own body. Still, I do not despise him, and we had gotten a lot more cordial in the last few years although our relationship still was rocky. He appeared probably when I was 14-15 as an independant voice? it's hard to pinpoint.

As for what he is, he appeared as a sort of feathered black dragon with a skull like head, as represented in my header, but often took a more eldritch and gaseous form. His seven eyes were probably the only thing that was constant in the forms i've seen him take. He is genderless, and asexual by nature (I was not when I daydreamed as him, which still to this day had a tendency to set him off quite violently when reminded, and he despised any mention of something sexual). He was something born of the void. In his mind, he seemed to truly believe to be this void creature of tremendous power, but at times he faltered and accepted being called a voice simply, although he did not appreciate being called part of the human body. He was violently antisocial, nagging me to abandon most people, that it was safer to be alone, which I did not agree with. He did not seem to have much empathy, although toward me he showed it a few times, but few enough that i could count it on one hand. It's not a very pretty portrait I paint of him, and writing this it's very strange to talk so much of him without at least feeling him in the back of my mind. I wish i'd written this while he was still around, so I could have at least known his opinion on it, ahah.

Another of the most reccuring voices I had was Doc, whomst I saw as a sort of plague doctor with a Russian accent. I would say from memory that he appeared around the same time as Sunabi, but that would be a half-truth, as I think he had appeared in my daydreams. I cannot quite count him as a voice then, but he was still an independant thing that could talk to me in my mind, only at the time restricted to my daydreams. He was the only one in my last three voices that was not antagonistic to me. He took the role of a sort of caretaker, a therapist. He told me the right things to do, comforted me. At some point he disappeared when he thought I did not need him anymore, and for a long time I missed him as I in fact wished he was still here. He came back, at some point, but was never quite the same. If these voices truly had feelings, then I'd say he was wracked by guilt, or at least it appeared so, perhaps a way for my mind to cope with the fact I'd needed him for so long and he wasn't there.

From then on he was on and off, helping where he could but never as active as when he first appeared. This one regarded himself as a sentient coping mechanism, or at least he'd said he felt sentient, and that it didn't matter much in the end what he was as long as he helped. Amusingly, he did not see himself as a plague doctor, but as a normal 50-60yo man. It seems my mind didn't particularly like picturing human faces, perhaps due to my own mild face blindness, and him and the last voice i'll talk about shared this trait of appearing one way to me and another way to themselves.

Lucas, or Viper as he nicknamed himself to mock the way I took the name of a bird for my own name, is the last one of the voices I had before taking antipsychotics and having them all disappear. He was also the only one of the three voices with no apparent tie to my daydreams. In fact I've been wondering while writing this if he was meant to represent the other side, the "external self" I had? But perhaps not, he did not seem to have the experience Sunabi had of memories tied to that period. He was just a dude of the same age as me, with different interests. He liked litterature, philosophy. He was standoffish, but not antisocial like Sunabi, simply a bit introverted. He liked a lot some friends I had, while having no interest in others. He had memories of high school, the period after the daydreaming but before I really was myself on the outside. There's not that much to say about him. He disliked me because he wished he was the one in control, or that's what he told me. He had asked me to do things for him a few times but i'd never really indulged him, out of disinterest for what he liked. Our relationship was not particularly good and he had a tendency to criticize things I did while I ignored or mocked him. That was about it.

I don't have any more fancy things to say about it, no mindscapes, no private jokes, no quips between us. Honestly if I have to say anything about the way this plurality worked is that we were just kind of cohexisting badly. I count myself as one of the voices often, particularly since I have a sort of... Detachment from myself from before I was 14-15yo. It's as if someone else was in my place, doing the things. I still have the same hobbies and liking as when I was a child, so it's illogical to think it wasn't me, but it's hard for me to feel like it was.