Elaborating on each point for the curious.
There is older art in a sketchbook somewhere of what one of us thought were "kintypes" at the time, but I couldn't find those sketchbooks to use in the background of the comic. I used the oldest post-discovery work that I could find instead.
It turns out that feeling unable to control what your "kintypes" do, holding full conversations with them, being confused or upset by their actions, and literally calling them "me but not me" or outright feeling possessed when "shifted" is not typical.
It's notable that none of us are fictional introjects. We were just wholesale drawing ourselves from what we felt we should look like while "in a mental shift". Those "mental shifts" were switches.
There's other old art with themes of feeling out of control, locked away, conflicting, or fragmented.
Arguing with My Characters
We regularly opened text files to ask our characters for their opinions on things. Talking to characters in itself isn't inherently plural, but in retrospect, some of those characters were likely being "talked through" by the folks here.
On the topic of writing: I could also dig out old work around our first persona, who is just straight-up plural. Multiple occupancy brain. The same goes for the 3-4 other plural characters we wrote without knowing what plurality even was yet. We had no idea why that was so oddly compelling in a "I wish that were me" way at the time.
It would be something like four more years before anyone here started figuring out that we already were plural, and about another year before that realization could actually stick.
Our gender changed, seemingly at random. Along with our preferences and baseline mood. In patterns.
I'm raising an eyebrow at my past self thinking "oh, I have different interests, preferences, worldviews, tolerances, etc. when I'm a girl." Again, not inherently plural, but raising an eyebrow.
Constantly Losing Things Despite Putting Them in Very Obvious Places
Important context: we do not have ADHD.
The reason this kept (and keeps) happening is that we have different ideas of what the "obvious" place to put something is. I might think that putting it in a designated drawer is obvious. Someone else might think putting it on the desk in plain sight is obvious, then be very confused as to where it is when they look for my "obvious place".
We've had to learn how to point each other in the right direction from the back, and to find some consensus on where important objects should go. We'd never find things otherwise.
"Oh huh, apparently I already did that."
This is how memory issues tend to show up for us. It's not an obvious gap. It's spending all day thinking that we need to do something, then getting up to do it and finding that it's apparently already been done with no memory of doing it. Or finding something missing because someone else used or ate it. Etc.
It's very rare that I can point to a clear gap in memory, though nightly journaling on "what happened today" sometimes points out a span of time where I have no idea what we did. Asking inside for what happened helps.
Feelings Suddenly "Disappearing"
Somewhere in late elementary school, we lost the ability to feel anger altogether save for some very extreme and sudden bouts if pushed unusually far. Those bouts went away a few years later. Sadness went away next. Fear hung on, but we learned that it would "go away" if it got too bad, along with just about any other emotion.
Turns out that all of those feelings went away because we learned to dissociate from them. They didn't actually go away. They just got taken up and buried by folks we couldn't be aware of yet. It wasn't safe to feel them outwardly.
Some emotions were impossible to feel. Other times, we would have an emotion, but it would suddenly go away if it got too large, leaving behind a numb and disoriented feeling. Most of the time, we felt either acceptably happy or unpleasantly bored/neutral. Adults tended to praise us for this when we were growing up. We were an "easy child" or "mature for our age".
Sometimes, it was like a wave of terror or rage would come over us from out of nowhere, and we'd shut down or snap for no apparent reason.
Ever heard of emotional flashbacks in CPTSD?
After discovery, we found out where all the missing feelings went. Some folks here had taken them up and been shoved down as far as possible to get rid of the emotions. They were all still there, piled on top of each other. It took a very long time to start unloading those feelings and letting them be felt without feeling like it meant impending doom. We're still working on that years later.
Wildly Inconsistent Ability to Do Things
Again: we probably don't have ADHD. This refers to literal skill loss. We would sit down to do something and suddenly find that we could only do it poorly or not at all. It felt like a coin toss decided whether we could do a given task that we knew we'd done before.
The clearest examples I have are around art and cooking. Often, we would sit down to draw and find that our art skills had backslid by a few years. What usually felt easy was hard and frustrating in a way that went beyond "I can't draw the other eye". Likewise for cooking. We would forget well-known recipes, make basic mistakes that we should have known not to make, and generally not have full access to that skill.
We've found ways to share skills better since, but it was very frustrating at the time.
Came Out to Several People 3 Times
We forgot that we'd told them about our gender. Repeatedly. Without being aware that we'd forgotten it.
They found it funny, at least, but it was more than a little alarming to us (but also a relief- it was stressful every single time because we didn't know they would react well).
Constantly Talking to Self and Being Surprised by Responses
Self-explanatory. Some of us had a very busy inner dialogue when we sat down to really think, especially in a journal, and oftentimes a thought would come out of nowhere. We've laughed at internal conversations, been upset at them, been scared by them, and found comfort in them in ways that seemed to go beyond what was normal.
Other times, that dialogue disappeared entirely, though we didn't know it existed at the time. That person was just alone without knowing they were alone.
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