Explicitly include metagenic & non-psychological plurals in your plurality posts. I don't just mean a throwaway mention; I mean actively making sure you're not excluding us.
Stop talking over us.
Stop coming into our spaces and centering your experiences and feelings.
Stop grouping us with psychological endogenic plurals, endogenic disordered plurals, and other forms of psychological plurality.
Stop telling us about how a person you spoke to said all spiritual plurals are delusional.
Stop coming to us self-flagellating about how bad seeing hate against us makes you feel.
Recognize that there is more to plurality than "systems", "headspace", "pseudomemories", "introjects", etc.
Stop treating our experiences, lives, memories, etc. as less real or just roleplaying.
Stop implying we didn't/don't "actually" experience our lives. Stop implying we're not "actually" who or what we say we are.
Use the language we tell you represents us, not what you think represents us. Listen to us when we tell you that you're being exclusionary. If your posts are for all plurals, they should be for all plurals.
So. As someone who was part of the (pre-selfshipping) soulbonding community on tumblr since 2014 or so, I'm a little... ??? by the sudden wave of soulbonding tags use by selfshippers. I don't really care if selfshippers want to be soulbonders (and understand fully what that implies), but I do feel like the term has been muddled a bit, and I can't really find any true soulbonding community on here.
Tag proposal: #actuallyanaspect and/or #actuallysoulbond, because I have a soft spot for that once-popular style of community tags. Anaspect was chosen because it's a bit more broad, encompassing soulbonds, gateways, and other metaphysical plurals. I wouldn't say you have to be a soulbond/er to use these tags; all metaphysical plurals are welcome.
The tag is intended for:
Soulbonders and soulbonds of all kinds (permanent, daytrippers, telephone bonds, etc.) with a focus on metaphysical/spiritual 'bonds
Vesselites and similar experiences
Metaphysical, spiritual, and non-psychological plurality
Soulbonds in plural collectives without a host
Involuntary and voluntary soulbonds, walk-ins, afterlifers, etc.
This tag is not intended for:
Self-shippers, yumejin, etc. without any soulbonding element
"Twin flame" "soulmate" or other romantic partner tropes
My goal with this is to bring back a little of the soulbonding community that existed before. This way, community discussions are facilitated and everyone can share their experiences, advice, opinions, etc.
As a secondary goal, I also think it would be beneficial to have some kind of community space for metaphysical plurals of all kinds, since we are very commonly ignored or exlcuded from wider plural community discussions. I think we deserve to have a space to talk about our experiences without being spoken over because we're too "difficult to understand".
I'd like it if the spirit of soulbonding was re-centered on "having a mental connection with another person" instead of "I want to date this character irl so I'm going to soulbond them". I would like to bring the focus back on the experience and actual life of it rather than aesthetics and "showing off" common in selfship communities. I'm happy for you if you're in a relationship with your 'bond, but the community has felt extremely alienating as of late. Not all of us are in or want to be in a romantic relationship, and not all of us who are feel like we fit the selfshipper label.
This is a very fascinating and confusing topic for us overall. We've been meaning to write this post but kept coming up short because the person at front just didn't have enough information about outside of their era to be comprehensive about everything we wanted to touch on.
Hi, I'm Agares (it/its) and I technically count as a system keeper so I'm technically qualified to write about this. Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Now, for the meat of the topic:
We have what is commonly called a headspace, we have an innerworld and we have realms. The following definitions are how we (very loosely!) define them within our collective and may or may not apply to others.
Headspace — a space that exists purely within the body's mind.
Innerworld — isn't necessarily a headspace or a realm, kind of like something in between? we call it inworld because, well, we have yet to find our own word for it (and *inner*world didn't feel accurate).
Realm — external/other realms/worlds. Think the multiverse. Think of shifting, maybe.
Before we continue, I'll provide further context.
We're a gateway plural with C-DID (polyfragmentation).
This means that although we have metaphysical workings (hesitant to call it spiritual outright because we don't really transcribe to any one (this reality) religion, if we do at all, we also have the psychological, fully traumagenic and dissociative parts of our plurality. They tend to have a very hard time doing...well, much of anything outside of what they were created for and we do have some very real fragmentation.
But outside of the C-DID parts of our working that does actually cause no insignificant amounts of dysfunction in day to day life, we have a metaphysical, or rather, anaspect side to our inherent workings too.
But enough of that, let's refocus on the topic at hand:
1. Headspace
Our headspace is more so for our psychological residents, but of course, people live where they want to and go where they can. Not a hard line or whatever.
We've always had a headspace. For as far as we can remember, there was always a mansion, and people were confined or only had access to parts of it pre-syscovery. As such there was rarely any overlap and it took awhile for us to bump into each other and realize that something's up. (Somehow we never questioned not being able to access other parts of our own mind palace.)
That is to say, we didn't have to consciously build it from the ground up.
It's a pretty standard mansion now that we know majority of the layout. I can't really describe it though. Around 3 floors if I'm remembering correctly.
A labyrinth for a basement (which once was a resting place for dormant residents, and fragments), and beneath all that, there was the void and a single door in the nothingness. At the time, we didn't think much of the door. It was there, and nothing could get it to open. This was around when the vessel was 8 to 11.
Our fronting/hosting groups kept on shifting, and with it, so does the headspace. This never made sense for the longest while. But we eventually learned about epochal systems and figured we fit the bill somewhat. But the previous groups didn't go dormant or necessarily inactive, we called them sidesystems for awhile before settling on our own term: era.
By this pattern, we can assume every era has their own headspace. Which is where we (also) fit the bill for layered headspace. Majority of the folks in their respective headspaces cannot access others due to well...our dissociation and compartmentalization doing its thing.
Fast forward after syscovery and learning everything we know now about ourselves, we now know our headspace is layered. And most individuals native to their own headspace cannot access others.
2. Innerworld
We later learned that we had continents, landscapes and more via the admins in our collective. Each headspace was essentially it's own land located somewhere on what we've taken to calling an entire planet. There are people that exists outside of the headspaces who live and work and play like any other normal person, going about their daily lives.
We once went with community labels, and called these non-system members NPCs but have since discarded the notion. They are very much real people. They live their own lives. Some of them are aware of our more involved residents, and in much bigger areas like cities and stuff, some of them actually assist involved residents with whatever they may need assistance with.
And, most importantly, if there is a need, and any of them are available and willing, they can front/assert executive control of the vessel. The majority is not aware of and have no interest in this vessel's life. We let them be.
Anyway, at this stage, things aren't floating places in the void, it's an entire planet. Most system members (who function under our CDD) does not actually have access outside of their little bubble, because well...baggage they gotta work on. I personnally only have access to my own layer, though I have access to the wider knowledge and memory of when these features/functions were being created.
Now, the thing we rarely see talked about anywhere: we share an inworld with another vessel on this plane of existence.
They are also a CDD system (and we both find it difficult to access each other's headspaces) but the inworld is fair game.
3. Realms
I mentioned that the inworld is essentially just one whole planet, right?
Well, actually, it's around 3 or so planets, an entire solar system. And a whole lot of multiversal travel.
We have a lot of metagenic residents, or travelers. Or spiribonds. Or walk-ins. Or soulbonds. There are a lot of terms out there, actually. They come and go. Some of them have moved in permanently, for whatever reason, some of them are recurrent visitors, some of them visit only once and never again.
Some of them we go to instead. All of that, and more basically.
Closing
Not sure how to end this so I'll just... I would've loved to go into more details, but I don't know everything, as I'm just one Keeper and not one of those all seeing Internal Deities we have. If you have specific questions, please put them forward. If I don't have an answer, I'll track down the folks who do lol.
