What is it like with such a large system? How did you all find eachother and how do you keep track of who is who? Is it ever hard to communicate?
Sorry for so many, but i thought i’d ask since me and mine struggle with those things a bit and wanna know how a system with more headmates does those things
We wrote a post on our system blog a while ago about this, but I'll answer here as well, because why not?
We have a personal google spreadsheet that includes things like age, name, birthday, gender and other basic identity things along with any alterhuman things our headmates might have going on such as kintypes/hearttypes/etc. This helps all of us know who each other is at a glance, as well as keeps us from forgetting details about ourselves over time. Our pluralkit, simplyplural and our personal website all have similar information on them--at least the stuff we want public--so we keep those up to date too.
As for how we found each other, I guess we didn't necessarily need to go looking once we discovered that we were a system? We know a lot of systems have the experience of having to go discover their headmates, but we don’t really have that. In the beginning, it was just kind of a moment of realization, like... The knowledge that kintypes can't take over your body was enough to distinguish Archie (main host for over 10 years) from Fleety (a traumagenic walk-in we got in the beginning, one of our first headmates). The majority of us weren't always here waiting to be found and instead, they showed up quickly, either walking-in or being soulbonded. We do have a lot of splits in our system, but we've never really had to go looking for them--they always show themselves eventually, in our experience. We do have a headmate now that’s somewhat of a gatekeeper and very good at telling us when people show up, so I guess that’s partially it as well--we have something that works for us to not need to go looking.
It's definitely hard to communicate sometimes. Our headspace isn't the most realistic, it works more off of emotions/vibes than anything visual--we've always had trouble visualizing things--but it's enough for us. We have generally good communication, but like I said, sometimes we have those off-days where we can't switch or talk to anyone and it's just a whole mess. Certain headmates still have varying degrees of amnesia between them and I think with those, that’s where the system spreadsheet and our private us-only discord server come in. We can leave notes for each other in the discord server, we can chat using typing when the brain doesn’t want to cooperate, we can set reminders using the bots there... It’s pretty good.
Thank you for your questions, and if you have any more feel free to send them in! I don’t mind answering questions people have as long as they don’t mind me infodumping about how my system works, lol.
