ive been thinking about this for a few months but honestly i want to like create a headmates but like- idk
what are some pros and cons?
Hmm .. let’s see .. I think that kinda depends on your life itself, but here’s some I’ve noticed.
PROS:
— You’ll never have to be alone again. Even in the worst possible situation, you’ll always have somebody with you, there to talk to and give you support and opinions. Even if nobody else will listen, there will always be your headmates who are there to know what you have to say. You can talk to them when you get bored, get second opinions if you’re stuck, all sorts of things.
— You’ll be able to split life’s tasks between you and headmates. Life is exhausting — school/work, taking care of yourself, social life, hobbies, etc., what we’ve noticed is being able to relax and let a headmate do something we don’t want to has made it a lot easier to accomplish all the tasks we need to do on a daily basis for life maintenance. You can even just.. take breaks from life, because others can hold it up for you while you do.
— Having multiple parts of your brain that each exist as their own individuals means that those individuals each get to study themselves in their own right, which can lead to a LOT of introspection. The only reason we discovered we have HSD is because Belphegor realized the exhaustion and fatigue we felt was not normal, something I’d never even noticed, which led to doing research to find out the cause. More people there to learn about the brain and its functioning tends to mean more discoveries.
— You don’t have to do all the grueling stuff, and might even be able to form headmates that can do things you couldn’t. For example, if you’re too scared to do something you have to, another headmate can do it. You have an extremely strong emotion that’s consuming you? Another headmate can front to handle the situation, or take the emotion from you to cope with it on their own terms.
— Funny shit. Nothing like tuning into headspace conversation to hear the most unhinged conversation ever, or doing something dumb and getting a side eye from somebody in co-con, or a headmate in co-front giving a quip in a serious conversation that makes it a little more bearable. Or like, writing/reading a fanfiction and that one fictive chimes in to go “actually, I’d say this,” or “damn that’s accurate.”
— It’s kind of like a permanent ‘family’, imo. People you will never lose. Maybe dormancy, sure, but that’s not usually permanent. There might be headmates you don’t like that much, but enough time can sometimes teach that dislike to turn into affectionate annoyance. Friends, family, parents, siblings, maybe even lovers, kids (yours or otherwise) — people to take care of you, to care for you.
CONS:
— Although “you’ll never have to be alone” is one of my number one pros, it’s also.. kind of a con. As in, you’ll never truly be able to be alone ever again, even if you wanted to be. Sure, sometimes headmates are respectful and can give you alone time, or if you successfully create a headspace you can go sit in a room alone for a while, but you’re still sharing a body with others. There’s no such thing as true alone time.
— If you have any disorders or disabilities currently, then plurality might be impacted by them (or impact them, depends on how you view it.) For example, we have AuDHD, and switching can make us feel pretty brain fogged. More importantly, we have dysautonomia, which can make switching (and almost always makes front crowding) give us headaches, nausea, sometimes even makes our body sore and fatigued. We already had these symptoms, but now they happen more often with plurality-related triggers. Any disorders you have could interact with your plurality similarly.
— Most systems that start out willed will form unintentional headmates eventually. This means persecutors and prosecutors aren’t out of the question. If you have any sort of negative/“bad” thoughts, intrusive or impulsive or otherwise, it’s even more likely. But even so, we’d consider ourselves to be very mentally healthy and we still have a persecutor who despises everybody and everything and a prosecutor who has hurt the body before. Actually, I still have a pretty big scab from that. They aren’t bad headmates — I don’t think there’s a such thing — but they can do bad things, and they need care and supervision more than other headmates do so they don’t hurt us. Those types of headmates forming later down the line is never truly out of the equation.
- Unless you make an effort to create barriers between headmates — which is a dangerous undertaking for some people — there’s not a lot of privacy. We share memories, thoughts, etc., nothing anybody does is out of reach from everybody else. This wasn’t as bad a con as we thought it would be going into this— most headmates don’t care enough to judge most things I’d want private—, but it is still a con. Esp if you’re saddled with judgmental headmates.
— They are autonomous. You don’t have control over your headmates. Now, don’t get me wrong— I don’t want to control my headmates. That would ruin the whole point. But don’t forget to consider what that means. If a headmate wants to do something, then they want to do it. If they’re in front and get the chance to, they probably will, even if you would disagree. Some headmates have entirely opposing viewpoints to the rest of the system. We have a radqueer in our system who is pro-transabled/transharmed/etc., who we have to supervise to keep from condoning that behavior in others or doing anything harmful to our body, despite the fact every other person in this system is aggressively anti-radqueers or anti-transID. Him believing in all that is not a good thing, but he’s still his own person, so we can’t just force him to stop believing that ideology.
All in all — we are the type to take in and enjoy the bad in order to adore the good, so this has been a great fit for us. But willoing is definitely not for everybody. Whether you chose to or not is wholly your choice, nobody else’s, but I hope this helps put it into a stronger perspective whether something you want to do. You could even decide you will, but only later on. It’s your journey.
Don’t forget that it’s perfectly okay to regret willoing after you do it, that does not mean you’re a bad person or anything, but you cant get rid of headmates in the same way you can create them, so at least weigh the chances of how likely you are to regret it before making any choices.
Wishing you luck with whatever you choose, blessed be & good day! <3
— Atlas (and probably somebody else idk we just woke up)