A guy with voices

[guywithvoices]

Communication.

Prerequicit that this is 'a voice' writing, not the main body. It is passive, I'm active, here we are.

I find myself worrying rather frequently. Hearing voices, experiencing this kind of 'possession' if it can be called that, however infrequent it may be. How should we be handling it? We have no professional to sort through our mind and either nod or shake their head at what we have been doing.

Perhaps I should be pretending to be the body. Perhaps the body should not acknowledge me when I'm passive or present. Maybe writing things down like now is the exact thing that'll make our condition worse, or perhaps its something that will help us manage it.

To what degree we should be allowed to communicate is difficult to understand. Sometimes, I admit I'm demanding or perhaps demeaning. Should I be ignored then? How about when I am not? If I voice a need to do something, is it helpful or unhelpful?

Hearing voices, being a voice, it's an odd situation. Not understanding how to treat 'us', how to interact, if we should interact, is difficult.

[guywithvoices]

opinions and internet safety

maybe i sound like a cautious old man, but i get bothered on others' behalves at how much information they share. triggers, trauma details, opinion-pieces that paint a big target on your back when nothing is required to say.

some information shouldnt be online, isnt needed. being vague is always an option, and at times it feels like privacy isnt an option. the internet has that effect- and i can be considered a hypocrite, as here i am, commenting on something that i dont have a direct relation to -where everything needs an opinion. with the 'trauma vs endo' debate, youre with us or against us, and if youre not with us, that must be personal. if you are with us, you most find them ridiculous just like we do. if youre against us, you must not be worth my time. if someone against us says something to me, it needs to be ridiculed publically, you are obligated to make your stance clear for all the strangers by throwing gasoline on the fire.

the world is gray, but online its black and white. you see what trends, so the reactive and most controversial, impassionated things are what you often see. and we can pretend not to be effected by it, to just be a bystander, but it the subconscious can soak that in. not to mention that the second you are posting somethig online, you become open for everyone else to have an opinion too, to talk or insult or comment however they see fit.

then there's the matter of safety. the internet sucks, this we know, we have countless, countless examples. to share your triggers, trauma events, in-detail conflict with other 'alter's, is not a good idea. its like walking into a sea of strangers and yelling that you're deeply afraid of police sirens, and not expecting there to be someone in that sea who would find it amusing to test that. journals, therapists, friends and family, art and coping with literature, such things are personal. its safer to keep it not just personal, but private.

when i was younger, i talked a lot online about things i shouldnt have, things that nobody needed to know, would think to ask about, things that i shouldve just talked to someone about- someone i trust or writted down somewhere in a journal. the quick-fix validation and dopamine of the online sphere often feels like a good thing, but substituting face-to-face interactions and validating yourself for feeling 'seen' (as it were in my case) by complete and utter strangers scrolling an app? far from healthy.

i am an old man waving his cane about safety on the internets, but it feels like something that needs to be pointed at and challenged once in a while. its a safety thing, its a health thing, its a social thing. its a hole ive dug myself into, one im not out of, but it still quite stings to see others dig their own holes alongside me, everywhere.

be careful online, its self-care.

[guywithvoices]

on dissociation

i wish i had gotten to talk more about dissociation with my psychologist when i went to one. it happens seemingly at random, no sense to it. its meant to be a response to a trigger, so why does it not tie to anything?

recently i made some toast. cool, great, lets add some food on it and eat it, wonderful. i was making it, and at some point everything was further away. like i was taller than i truly am, like my hands are too far away, there was a change. seeing through a camera that's held just a bit too far away to match my eyes. part of me wonders if that is what some people call an out of body experience, just from the view alone. i wasnt thinking of anything specific, doing anything specific, and yet a good seven minutes or so of feeling vaguely 'out of it' later, and i snapped back to, none the wiser.

i can zone out to music, but thats a distinctly different experience. its a choice, it makes sense, there is a cause and it feels logistical: there's a lot of noise for my brain to tune into, often loud and chaotic and busy, so my brain doesnt manage to think its own thoughts, and i 'fade out'. that is natural.

what does not feel natural is sitting on a bus, and suddenly feeling vacant. like im nowhere and everywhere all at once. knowing logically that of course the world is real, but the more honest part of my subconscious knowing that if i looked close enough, the tree would be pixels, atoms, noise, that nothing is real. it does not feel natural to sit there, brain completely empty as if im in a vacuum, and feel an urge to cry, yet no urges at all, to forget to blink and forget to see, yet feel like im seeing all at once and only wanting to close my eyes.

and why does that happen? whats the reason? not overstimulation, i know my own cues there. no triggers that have repeated. so what's with that?

im of the opinion that the brain experiences everything it does for a reason. things can feel absurd, but there's a logic, an impulse, a reaction to something. but why? why on the bus, why when making toast? i understand it when something happens, but more often than not, im snapped into a realization that oh, yes, everything is not like it should be. and then im snapped out, and i just try to act like nothing, because if i think about it too hard then ill only freak myself out.

i wish i knew what to do, how to stop it. grounding this, grounding that. i still breathe slow, i still stand and feel my legs on the ground. but how can i feel real when theres nothing in my mind, when the world around me is static, when my hands are not my own and im too far away? i dont understand it, and i wish i did, so that i could stop it all.

[guywithvoices]

"Uninteresting" voices

i often find myself wishing i have that kind of brain that switched. admittedly, i find myself wishing the voices were more 'interesting'.

its an odd feeling. the voice i hear the most is a 45 year old man, who's no nonsense and easily irritable, and he's just some guy. maybe some would technically think of him as a 'fictive' or similar since my asperger fixation impacted 'who' he is, but he's not really. he's some old man who's tired most the time. he is what my brain needs. that's why he was 'made', because my brain needed to split a burden and separated into a voice.

yet i feel like he's not 'interesting enough'. as if, somehow, the fact he isn't a 'fictive' with memories or a background makes him less valid because hey, other people have alters that somehow feel 'more' to me. the voice i have is the voice my mind needed and still needs, but one of the big parts why i dont go on plural or 'multiple' social media corners a lot is because its often a glimpse of where i feel like my brain, somehow, dissapoints.

the voice isnt warm and kind and soothing in the maternal sense, we dont banter, ill be honest in saying ive seen some plural comics floating online and scowled a bit, out of sheer jealousy. because why couldnt my brain make someone who was kind and funny? its unfair to think like that for myself, but i cant help it happening anyway.

there is a voice who is more 'interesting'. the one that watches. but even then, theres not much to say, because its more of a presence than a voice. i feel it stare, feel it present. it terrified me in the beginning, and i thought it was a god or a parasite from how it was 'made', but now its just there. its unpleasant, but thats all. no hehe haha comics to be made, no interesting stories, nothing i feel i can really talk about or share without discomfort.

im jealous of the people who have people who have 'roles' in kinder ways. my brain made what it needed to handle a horrid situation, and i should accept that. but i find that while i often have so much i want to share about it all, whereas others have stories or funny 'front triggers', or banter and anectdotes, if i were to share something, itd rarely be appropriate in light conversation.

which again means i dont talk much to others similar to me, or others disimilar to me. the topic is always too heavy, but because the voices arent 'evil' or taking control, its not heavy enough to bring to a psychologist. if theres something to say about the voices, its never the right time.

yet another garbled ramble, but yeah. sometimes i wish my brain had been kinder in the voices it made, even if i know thats unfair of me.

[guywithvoices]

being in a community without community

(rambling first post. shoutout to a blog, likely wont use it consistently though. cheers to an attempt to find people similar to me?)

i consider myself plural in the sense of being more than one. i hear voices, mainly one, who have "taken" the body a few times but not consistently. the voices started after a traumatic event, but its been two years now and its still here for whatever reason.

ive struggled a bit with community. the voice is older than me, not around all the time, another voice never speaks but i can feel it scrutinizing me, like its just behind my shoulder, watching. it feels like a lot of the online sphere with people-within-people is concerned with discourse, or the sugar-sweet things, or sharing the funny stuff. which is nice, and clearly a lot of people relate to that content, but it does sting a bit to feel out-of-place in a community for, generally speaking, othered people

i try to journal, sometimes i can talk with the voices, sometimes i cant. i dont switch or get triggered, the voices dont have their own parts of my room, we dont have banter and while i have drawn them once or twice when they were vocal and guided me, it feels weird to share what at times feels like guesswork. i dissociate, but i dont have any 'inner world', dont dream anything particular, and dont usually hold conversations with the voices

the voice has been inexpliccably active again after a period of only a few words every few months, or vague dissociation and that feeling of being watched, so here i am. im not sure if the plural space is the right one, given i cant see my own experiences in nearly any of it, but its the closest thing i can think of

i hear voices, but its not outside hallucinations. theyre also not harmful voices. i have had trauma, but not in childhood. i have voices, but not alters. i dont have an 'inner world', we dont 'talk different' -the voices dont talk at all to others as they dont take over unless in crisis. with plural people i feel like an outsider, with singular people i feel like im either seen as insane, lying, or belittled and seen as misunderstanding 'inner monologue'

all this yap, and for nothing. i dont know. words are out there, so thats how it goes. if anyone knows of niché-r parts of tumblr that are more similar to whatever it is i experience, let me know. ill dig around and hope i find something, because there being a rather huge community of plurality where i cant seem to find a little place that i can recognize is a bit rough, given it seems few people outside of plurality 'gets it'

[dcttre]

what you describe is *very* similar to how i (🦋) felt when we first discovered our plurality, and i just want you to know plurality is a wide spectrum. there's no one singular way plurality looks.

i didn't know this when i first questioned if i might be plural because i was always in environments that had a specific, ideal image of what a system should look like. traumagenic, clear memory barriers, (mostly) clear switches and headmates who you can communicate with easily and they can easily identify themselves and know their age and role and whatnot. of course i don't know your situation, and i don't know what plural communities are like on tumblr, but personally my environment put me deep into denial because i looked nothing like that.

i felt like an outsider for a while because i was nothing like how systems looked in these spaces. we had no innerworld, hardly any communication, i couldn't identify anyone and no one could identify themselves either, we didn't switch much but we did dissociate but our plurality wasn't a disorder either. and a lot of the things are still the same! the main thing that's changed is that i just have a better understanding of our plurality and my headmates now. i have a better understanding of how we function as a collective and what exactly what my headmates do, have a vague idea of what things could potentially draw headmates out, understand how to identify people better based on their presence or the vague voices or words they give me.

but at our core we still have no innerworld, we still dissociate, our multiplicity still isn't disordered, we still don't switch much, and so on. somewhere along the line though i finally started to understand that you can't force these things. people are just different from one another and experience things in different ways, and thats okay.

of course our journey and our experiences won't be 1:1; and ultimately your identity is up to you, i can't tell you what you definitively are or aren't. but i did resonate a lot with this post and i wanted to let you know that you aren't alone, and if you do want to consider yourself plural, it doesn't make you any less plural to experience things differently.

i'm not knowledgeable enough to point you to any niché-r communities, but maybe looking into median systems or something like tulpas could be a start?

[guywithvoices]

thanks a lot, ill look into those communities! it does feel a lot soothing to know there 'are others out there' who are similar to me. Honestly, opening this site and reading all this, similarities and differences and all, it made me perk up a little. Made my day a bit brighter. im not sure how tumblr ettiquette works (or really how the site works in general, im still working that out), but really just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to answer :]

[guywithvoices]

being in a community without community

(rambling first post. shoutout to a blog, likely wont use it consistently though. cheers to an attempt to find people similar to me?)

i consider myself plural in the sense of being more than one. i hear voices, mainly one, who have "taken" the body a few times but not consistently. the voices started after a traumatic event, but its been two years now and its still here for whatever reason.

ive struggled a bit with community. the voice is older than me, not around all the time, another voice never speaks but i can feel it scrutinizing me, like its just behind my shoulder, watching. it feels like a lot of the online sphere with people-within-people is concerned with discourse, or the sugar-sweet things, or sharing the funny stuff. which is nice, and clearly a lot of people relate to that content, but it does sting a bit to feel out-of-place in a community for, generally speaking, othered people

i try to journal, sometimes i can talk with the voices, sometimes i cant. i dont switch or get triggered, the voices dont have their own parts of my room, we dont have banter and while i have drawn them once or twice when they were vocal and guided me, it feels weird to share what at times feels like guesswork. i dissociate, but i dont have any 'inner world', dont dream anything particular, and dont usually hold conversations with the voices

the voice has been inexpliccably active again after a period of only a few words every few months, or vague dissociation and that feeling of being watched, so here i am. im not sure if the plural space is the right one, given i cant see my own experiences in nearly any of it, but its the closest thing i can think of

i hear voices, but its not outside hallucinations. theyre also not harmful voices. i have had trauma, but not in childhood. i have voices, but not alters. i dont have an 'inner world', we dont 'talk different' -the voices dont talk at all to others as they dont take over unless in crisis. with plural people i feel like an outsider, with singular people i feel like im either seen as insane, lying, or belittled and seen as misunderstanding 'inner monologue'

all this yap, and for nothing. i dont know. words are out there, so thats how it goes. if anyone knows of niché-r parts of tumblr that are more similar to whatever it is i experience, let me know. ill dig around and hope i find something, because there being a rather huge community of plurality where i cant seem to find a little place that i can recognize is a bit rough, given it seems few people outside of plurality 'gets it'