not quite whole

My corner to talk about experiences that might be plural. Or might not be. Adult, any pronouns

[lilemamag]

pinned post:

Adult, any pronouns. Suspecting I might be plural in some way. Using plurality language like "fronting", "system" etc. as a shorthand but with the understanding that my experiences are not exactly fitting in those lines.

Headmates/facets:

-Lily – the "host", the main one, any pronouns;

-Maya – the "protector", rarely is in the "front" but lurks, any pronouns;

-Leah – the emotional core, she/her mainly;

-Magnus – the newest one, still figuring it out, he/him mainly.

Not interested in discourse and not qualified to speak on it anyway. This is a personal blog so anyone is welcome as long as you're respectful.

[lilemamag]

1) something broke through re:my traumatic experiences that formed us, so now i think the others are reeling a bit from the aftermath. in a good way, but. Leah in particular was the hopeless romantic and now she may feel a bit lost in the world where we no longer feel that way towards [redacted]. we'll see.

2) there might be. a fifth one. whose name i've known since i was thirteen, probably. i thought she was Maya but she is. someone new and someone on her own. again, we'll see.

[lilemamag]

anyway. can we say that it's very lonely to be a reflection of someone you hate so much that you started existing for the sole purpose of defying their influence and power. or, as one might say, "being an introject of our ex sucks and i hate it".

[lilemamag]

this thing is not abandoned, for the record (thing being. gestures vaguely at the fragments of my past). i just tend to bury myself in work and just like with previous important revelations, unless i take significant time regularly to work on considering them, it's going to simmer in the background until something snaps.

[lilemamag]

today's observation:

there's a very interesting thing where Leah is, I think, yearning to be more out in the "front" (quotes because it's less of a fronting situation for me but it's also a quick shorthand for the type of feeling she's being), but she's also the one who's least developed? she's pure yearning and if I were to assign us mental ages she'd be a high school teen. meanwhile Maya, arguably the most developed part outside of Lily, hates being at the "front" and overall would prefer to go "dormant" again I think. but she's also the self-assigned protector and she "awoke" only because she felt like we were in danger, and we can't seem to shake that feeling off regardless of if it's actually true. so we cope.

[lilemamag]

My history undercut, I feel like I need to write this iut to understand it better.

The gist of it is this: hypothetically, 2018 personal events led me (Lily) to having a lot of emotional turmoil, reacting in two diameteically opposed ways to the same things. Out of that, came two distinct fragments of my psyche (I call those fragments Leah and Maya). They went dormant in following years as I put the events of 2018 behind me, but 2021 to 2023 caused me to overall get very dissociated and withdrawn from my body and my life. When in 2023 another personal event caused me to "wake up", Leah and Maya also came out of their dormant state because the catalyst of 2018 came back into my life as well. I did not get my catharsis, so instead of working it out and sort of putting myself back together, they now try to co-exist. In addition, as a queer person having to stay almost completely closeted, I couldn't express my masculinity and genderqueerness in an open way so it eventually solidified in a hidden corner of my heart into a part I call Magnus (not related to any fictional characters). He's someone/something new I'm navigating around, I suspect that part of me is the cause of my occasional sporadic dysphoria but also source of a lot of my queer joy.

I wouldn't call us a system, but a lot of my experiences feel plurality-related in that I often refer to myself as "we", refer to parts of me when talking about my feelings and sometimes feel like I'm becoming different distinct personalities that are quite often diametrically opposed to each other. I don't really switch, rather I become more or less one of my parts. Notably, I'm Lily most days; I'm Leah or Maya usually when those events of 2018 come up or I'm reminded of them via associations. Magnus is still a new part of me so it's hard to discern most days when he comes out.