I'm not much for giving out info willy-nilly online, but I figure an introduction of some flavor is in order: We're the Inoperating System. Unless you're referring to a specific one of us, you can use any pronouns for us (including it/its and neos) and call us Inoperable, In, or some other variation of our username.
A few things that may be relevant about us:
We use we and I more or less interchangeably, so if the personal pronouns get confusing then assume it's an instance of that
While anyone is welcome to ask for clarification about who is speaking or being referred to at any given time, we do not promise to actually give it
If someone says they're plural, we believe they're plural. If you have a problem with this, know that bothering us about it will get you blocked
We often block for nonpersonal reasons like posting a lot of repetitive content in a tag we scroll. If you're blocked and don't know why, you can generally assume this is the case and that we have nothing against you
No headmate introductions on our intro post for now (possibly forever). We look forward to meeting you when we meet you.
happy make a terrible comic day. i decided to try making a comic using an inkwell pen for the first time with no sketch on a subject that's boring to everyone except me
If it's not an invasive question, could I curiously inquire what switches look like or feel like for you guys? Do you feel them coming or do they hit suddenly? Can you coordinate switches?
If you experience any changes in body control (switching, possession, etc.), then establish some form of consistent, asynchronous external communication with your system. External communication has a major benefit: you can still talk to each other across switches (asynchronously) even if the inside of your mind is a mess.
You might set up a journal, whiteboard, calendar, a "single user, multi-account" app like Mytter or Antar, sticky notes, etc. Anything goes as long as your system knows to check it occasionally (or at the least, in an emergency).
We recommend choosing an analog method for your fallback communication method if possible, as a power outage could take out a lot of digital methods. A spur-of-the-moment piece of paper left on a table is better than nothing, but it's less likely to work than a pocket notebook or bulletin board that every system member knows to use for communication if needed. You can always add an app or program once everyone knows where to go for your analog fallback.
Discuss how you want to treat each other. Keep it loose and informal for now- don't make any absolute Laws just yet. Think of it more like the quick agreements that roommates make with each other for practical reasons: "I'll do the dishes if you do the laundry".
A few classics: "try not to die, don't kill anyone else, don't get any tattoos as an impulse decision, and don't throw out things that don't belong to you."
Don't force agreements on anyone. If someone disagrees, then stop and discuss their concerns to find a better agreement. See: Consensus Decision Making.
Map your system, if it feels right. This can help you learn about each other, but it can also be soothing to feel like you have some understanding of who's in your head when you're being flooded with new system members.
Again, keep it simple. What do you actually need to know? What would help you in a practical sense? Start there, then branch out if you'd like to get to know each other better.
Consider making a simple guide to your life. If someone had to handle a day in your life with little to no prior knowledge of it, then what would they need to know?
Where should they check to see if you have any appointments? Are they responsible for feeding any pets? Where can they find money if they need it, and how do they know how much to spend? Do you have a job, and do they need to work it? Etc.
Hopefully you never need this guide, but it's a lifesaver for any unexpectedly amnesiac system members.
Focus on building bridges and trust. Get to know the folks in your head. Find ways to talk and just get to know them. Listen as much as you talk, if not more.
Learn to lean on each other for support, if you can. Trust is one of the most valuable things that you can have in a system. Trust gets you through a lot of tough situations. Give your system members every reason to trust you, and try to learn to trust them in turn.
If someone is hostile, then ask what's driving the hostility. Do they feel under-represented in your life? Does peace make them feel unsafe because they don't know where the threats are? Are they bored, scared, frustrated, or routinely unhappy?
What can you do to support them? What do they need to feel comfortable?
Don't worry about knowing everything. You're just figuring this out- give yourselves some grace for not knowing as much as everyone else seems to. (Besides, they know less than you think. I've yet to meet a system without a single mystery left in it, including folks who've known for decades, and many systems are forever figuring things out in one way or another.)
Ask for information when you need it and let your system explain itself over time; let your system set the pace. You'll get better information that way, and your system will learn that they can trust you to respect them when they say "no, don't touch that yet."
Screw plural community labels for now. Seriously. Screw figuring out origins or consciousness or whatever the linguistic dividing line of the month is. Don't worry about it. These words come and go. Get to know yourselves first.
Why am I suggesting this? Community labels will still be there when you've figured out how to work with each other in a practical sense, and your stronger understanding of each other will make it much easier to find whatever words you wind up needing. Hunting for words now is likely to get you stuck trying to cram a bunch of shifting unknowns into someone else's categorization system, and it might cloud your situation more than it clears it.
Given that you're still settling into the idea of sharing a head at all, getting into the nitty-gritty of labels is probably going to be less helpful than figuring out how to handle doubt and denial issues (or getting communication going, or learning to manage switching, or...), hence the recommendation not to worry about it.
That said: do use labels if you need them. Just remember that labels are tools. Don't let the tools use you.
Also, screw the discourse. If you listen to any one item on this list, make it this one.
Plural community discourse tends to be a little bit rancid in the "debating whether your experiences exist meaningfully in our spaces" way, and it will fuck you up as a new system. Get past the worst of your denial or doubt issues first to avoid worsening the "oh my god, am I faking without knowing it" hell brainworms. Please. I am actually begging you. Avoid the discourse until you've dealt with your own existential doubts.
None of these things are obligations, nor is there any rush to do them. It's just a cluster of things that I tend to suggest to newly discovered systems, and I realized that I don't think we've actually rattled these off on this blog yet.
while innerworlds are talked about plenty, the experiences and lives of the very real systems with no innerworld are just as valuable to discuss. some by choice, others just naturally being that way, and with some having lost their innerworld. regardless, having no innerworld is a very normal experience for a system to have. an innerworld is not and has never been mandatory to be a system.
#9: "Inworld." I always do enjoy hearing other plural people's experiences, but I wanted to share my own experience. The limit of each of our interactions with one another are hearing voices, and even that's pretty uncommon... which leads to some of my difficulties with cooking. :P
I’m curious about something, I know with systems sometimes parts are unable to communicate with one another, but what about switching? Is it possible, for example, Part A being unable to switch to Part C? But can switch to Part B and Part D?
Not sure if this counts since we can communicate with eachother just fine, but we definitely have some switching difficulties between specific parts. The most demonstrative example is that we have a part (alias not yet chosen) who only shows up specifically when switching from Zag. As far as we're aware, it can't take front in any other way. Switching away from the unspecified headmate, though, doesn't seem to have any headmate-specific limitations.
The less concrete example is that we've realized that I (alias not yet chosen either, although we just made a comic about me getting called Corn so... Corn for now, I suppose) act as a bit of a "switch hub." It's much easier for me to purposely switch to any of our other main fronters (Cress in particular) than it is for anyone else in the system, likely because I don't tend to be a very "strong" fronter. I slip into cofronts, coconsciousness, and blends much easier and more frequently than the others seem to with one another, and I tend to accidentally fall off front more easily as well.
We haven't really heard of anyone else having "switch hubs" like me, but I feel as if it's got to be somewhat common and just not talked about or consciously noticed too frequently. We only realized a lot of our headmate-specific switching tendencies when we did a switching map (map where each system member was written down and arrows were drawn from people who had fronted to people who they had switched to directly)
On Water (people wonder what a hivemind would be like)
Content warnings: general unreality, vague discussion about egocide, musing about (mostly childhood) memories both pleasant and unpleasant, alcohol use, nausea, bad trip description
I catch her between the river and the sea, sit down next to her in the grass. "You been hiding out here the whole time?"
"I wouldn't call it hiding," she says, and she leans back to look up at the sky, hands behind her head. For a second, the air is brilliantly baby blue, but then it's the deep teals and grays of a lake's surface seen from underneath. Clouded with plant matter, it looms.
"What else would you call this?" she asks for me, words ghosting an echo before I can speak it into existence. "Searching, maybe. I don't know."
She pauses. "I can't move when you look at me like that. Why did you have to come looking?"
"What, and leave you brooding out here?" I laugh, stick my hand down to her. Somehow, I am standing again.
She grasps my hand and hauls her body, dripping, out of the grass, weight heavy down the length of my arm and through my shoulder, liquid pulling down.
A laugh lights her face as she spins off my arm and through the grass in a flurry of blooming flowers. She beckons. I consider, then yield / hold firm, bifuricated as one of me takes her hand with a laugh and another stands apart, arms folded, brows drawn, sternum heavy.
I'm warm in her arms, surrounded by magnolia and daffodils, sun bright and dancing in her eyes / I watch myself fall so easily to temptation and wonder why I persist in trying / I stand beside someone else who watches like a storm watches the hill it crests over, and she looks at me without ever looking away and asks,
"Why are you here? This is mine."
"This?"
Her head swoops a fraction of a centimeter towards the dance in the grass, features rearranging. "This."
I'm too distracted by the implications of her face reshuffling itself to process her answer, and I just stare at her while her face shifts in tiny swooping twitches in my periphery, never quite straight on, the impression of cloud-formed cheekbones bleeding off into nothing. The train of thought is gone.
I feel yin meeting yin while yang meets yang off to the right, in the land where there is no weight and water cheers along in fountains and streams and sprinklers in the summertime, and I feel the weight of a still pond of fog in my chest.
"I think it's theirs, not yours," I say, and I shrug. They are still dancing. There is no pain because the pain is somewhere else, somewhere away where the dirt and grit and itches live. Unimportant, inconvenient killjoys, they might say, these realities.
I get to my knees and I'm somewhere away in a creekbed, rocks and pebbles burrowed in the dirt beneath my legs, digging into my skin where my boots don't cover me, and I couldn't care less because I'm touching more tadpoles than I've ever seen in my life. They feel firm, like raw peas covered in mucus, and their bodies slip through my fingers by the dozens.
There must be hundreds here in this little creek, hundreds of tiny bodies in the mountains halfway through a road trip- it's always been my solace, that with every haul to somewhere unpleasant, I'd get to see something precious. One year it was tadpoles.
Another two years, we saw a cabin by a little mountain lake at Christmas, one of those rare places with the genuine sort of magic, somewhere I'd never find again if I tried. All away, somewhere else, on the way to or from having my arm pried open and skewered whether I wanted it or not. Some comfort.
But still, in this moment, there are my tadpoles, and she is back and crouching over my shoulder to look at their bodies in my hand.
"Whose is this?" she asks.
"I don't know," we say, bifuricated, waiting. "Both of us. All three. I don't know." They nod. It doesn't matter. We drop it and then I see bark chips in the woods, smell the pine needles, and suddenly I'm underneath the little tree in the front yard of the Last House our parents loved each other in, hiding.
I've hidden here before, a lot. It's a good hiding place for hide and seek, at least until the other kids learn that it exists. Yet again, I wonder in retrospect whether the other kids not finding us when we sat on a rock in plain sight was because they weren't looking for the obvious or because they just wanted an excuse to ignore us for an hour or two. My fingers clench around dirt.
I see people speculate about what a hivemind might be like, and as the tree's leaves shrouding my head begin to spin and peel and bleed color through me, I see someone looking back at me in a raincoat, plushie arm slack and bear body heavy in her hand.
A moment later, I am in the hallway of the Last House looking around a corner as my sister persuades my mom to do something that I convinced my sister she wanted. For the first time, I wonder if I am a bad person. I can't be older than ten years old, small and smooth with that awful bowl cut that we used to have. I've been thinking about growing it out again. It just gets in the way.
She leans out of the scene trailing globs of midnight, a lava lamp for the void. "Did you ever want to cease to exist?" she asks.
I blink. She laughs.
"I don't want to make any plans," she reassures me, "I'm not talking about that kind of death. Did you ever want to just... be someone else?" Another laugh. "Sorry, stupid question."
She's so close. I take a step back. She drips on me, and I try to flick it off without touching the droplet on my shirt. It's thick like oil. It stays. My spine crawls until she notices my discomfort and sucks it back.
"Who are you?" she asks. "Are you people, or not? I need an answer."
"I'm a person," I say.
"I know," she asks, "but what kind?"
"The kind who's not in the mood to be questioned by the drug woman," I snap / a wolf's maw snaps shut, narrowly missing her hand, a warning shot fired. Keep away, stay away, leave me alone. I don't want to hurt you but don't test your luck. She flinches. I back down, shrivel smaller, apologize for my physicality.
"You really don't have to do that for me," she says. An eyebrow raises. I'm not sure whose.
People wonder what a hivemind would be like, and I see them fear it or crave it, and I didn't understand the former until recently but we've always been the latter. Sometimes I'm less sure of that now that we've learned what existential terror feels like.
I'm standing at the kitchen sink, my fingers smoothly carving divots into the metal beneath them as the world wavers around me, my periphery drowned in psychedelic green and my central vision full of sweat and nausea. I retch once and nothing comes, and then the impulse is gone and I am repeating in my head, "I am at the kitchen sink" to carve this single moment back into reality and out of the hell that is everything and nothing all at once, blazing fractals stretched across the floor.
"Did you ever wish you could die?" she asks again. I pause. I nod, once, lick my lips, glance over my shoulder.
"Sometimes, I think it would be easier," I say slowly, "if we didn't bother with all the people business. And sometimes all I want is to vanish into myself and cease to exist. Implode into a naked singularity (physics)."
"Apparently we can say parentheses," laughs a third person, and in a flash I know who everyone is: the third, Echo; the goo, Gwen; myself, Red; with traces of Blue darting through the cracks and Hawthorne left home to answer the phone. But then the moment passes, and I am seated at two bars at once, and a pillar of goo serves me overlaid with the memory's bartender. Brass mug, Moscow Mule, sat on the corner of both counters to watch the room, never quite sure how a tab works but too exposed to ask.
I consider frowning in disapproval, and Echo actually does frown as I decide instead to shrug and chug my drink, not that it'll do much. It's placebo, every time.
"I can't believe you're still drinking in here," says Echo, looking down into its own swirling mug. Even then, it considers the offer before pushing the mug away, and it's left to sit on the tender's side of the bar in one place and further down our side of the bar in another. The memory-places bleed together, sometimes.
Two more bars edge in: a pizza place our mom went to as a child and a steakhouse where people threw peanut shells on the floor, the floor they left unswept all day. I don't envy whoever had to clean it to stop the shells from piling up past our ankles.
I wonder again why all our deepest memory-places involve liquid, and then I'm by the sea- not The Sea, but the Pacific ocean, Oregon coast, fingers in the sand. We found a crab, once. Large, glorious, alive. We watched and poked it for a while and then let it go in the way children sometimes do. Another time, we found jellyfish. We stayed well away.
In another moment, I am beside the river and lake near our campsite in the mountains, the one we visit most years in the summer until our parents divorce. Our mom can never afford it after that, and our dad stays busy traveling to Peru and rennovating his bathroom while our sister tries to find a second job to survive. Our mom calls him selfish. Sometimes we agree. The rest of the time, we remember how hard he worked to try to get us to be more independent, how he forced us to learn to drive, how it was always his way of trying to say he cared: he tried so hard to give the gift of success whether or not his kid actually wanted it. He won his kids both choosing to live with someone else.
I am by water, and my hands are in the ground, and water laps between my fingers as the night air cools my skin. I hear frogs, smell moss and river, remember the sound of the earth underfoot. We have never seen a firefly in person, but they flicker in the distance here, the idea of breathing lights.
People wonder what a hivemind would be like. Her hand is on my shoulder, and we look at the night. A lone car drives by in the dark.
Author(s): Mostly Red, with contribution from Gwen and Echo, and flickers of Blue darting about. Thanks to Hawthorne for facilitating this by typing all narration so that we didn't have to spend our focus finding the right letters. It's greatly appreciated.
