The face-thieves

[hungryghosts]

A little quirk of how our system works is that we don't get fictives of the classical sort anymore.

(Discussion of system workings. Includes discussion of in-system death and suicide(?).)

Some time ago, we figured out that we could communicate with our brain and make requests to it. One of those requests was this: "No more fictives, please. We understand that their backgrounds can be useful for certain situations, but then they have to live with the baggage of their past and missing their home and we are really not equipped to support that."

Brain said, "I can work with this." And so it did.

We have two fictives as the community understands the definition - walked in from elsewhere as they are, with memories of their old homes, and both from popular media to boot. They came in before the request. Afterwards, our acquisition of new people slowed to a trickle.

Then, our system's flavor of fictive began showing up. We call them face-wearers or (affectionately) face-thieves.

As some background information, there is a metaphorical (possibly literal, at least in the headspace sense of things) sea of primordial psychological soup underneath us. It was originally made of fragments from our original, but accumulated stuff from the rest of us as well as a heaping of external influences. All of our new system members come from the sea, and as far as we know, return to it. Poetic, I know.

The face-wearers basically start as wisps. Something in our life creates a void that needs to be filled, whether that's someone to help out inside or outside. The sea gets stirred, and some fragments condense around this purpose until they form a very wispy self, full of intent but not much else.

The need is urgent, but in this wispy form, they're not very capable of filling it. The solution? Go through the metaphorical unconscious rummage bin, and pick out something to wear that'll help them. Or rather, someone. They find a fictional character (we've marked real people and OCs off-limits) who has something in their backstory, abilities, personality, or even just significance to us that matches their task, assume their form, and come out of the sea.

Almost all of the face-wearers start as very single-minded. They are here to fulfill a goal and that is all that matters to them. They have memory of the sea and are very cognizant that they are not the character they are wearing, but cite them as "inspiration" and sometimes slip into being "in-character" to focus. A lot of them stay single-minded, and once their task is done, go back into the sea. Some of them become curious about life and people and decide they want to be individuals, too. Some of them settle down for the long term. Some of them decide that being individuals sounds more fun than it is and give themselves back to the sea.

(We've stopped counting.)

Those who stay use their character-face as a starting point for exploring. Someone whose character ran a cafe may decide to try setting one up in-world, for example. They find other things to try, parts of the character they like and parts they don't like. Gradually, they figure out who they are. As they swap out little pieces of themselves, from likes and dislikes to appearance and personality, they become someone other than the character they were wearing - although, often, they stay part of them in some way.

So, leave it to our brain to find a way to "work with" our request. We're not unhappy with this setup - it has cut out the complicated aspects of fictivity we aren't equipped to handle, which was at the core of our ask.

That being said, maybe one day, we'll stop operating like a puppy mill - headmates created to serve a task that grinds them into nothingness, thus requiring the creation of more headmates. That's the bigger goal. Or maybe our puppy-milling can enable our survival long enough that we can help build a world where no one else will have to live like this.

One can only hope.

Comments

[polyfrazzlemented]

It sounds like your current life isn't very sustainable. I always knew working wasn't sustainable for me, and I wish I'd known to prepare for the possibility of having to go on disability before it became an imminent necessity.

Robin

[hungryghosts]

It isn't, but it's perversely more sustainable than being unemployed, for us. Even during the part of our unemployment where we didn't have to fear starvation or homelessness, the despair hamster wheel in our brain wouldn't stop running, and we were far more susceptible to... well, everything. Mania, dissociative psychosis, all of that good stuff, and the headmate puppy mill was still up and running. At least now the "good stuff" is at a manageable level, and we're in a better place to look at toning down the mill.

We know our trauma and dysphoria are fundamentally connected - over half of our breakdowns, panic attacks, and suicidal episodes come from our body - so current plan is to use the resources from our job to get surgery, possibly HRT, and hope that addressing the dysphoria will give us more breathing room with our trauma.

[polyfrazzlemented]

HRT has been incredible for our mental health; it reduced a lot of dissociation, emotional anguish, and general fuzzy-headedness that we didn't even really notice. Might not do the same for you, but I think it's worth considering if you're looking at transition stuff. (If it does have that effect, most people report that you'll know very quickly, before any physical changes happen.)

Robin

[hungryghosts]

That's really encouraging to hear, actually. We're nervous about the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction, especially since being perceived as male has its own set of social shit that we really don't want to deal with, but we might try it out just to see how it treats us mentally.

[lb_lee]

Yeeeah, that sounds pretty hellish and awful. I guess now we're ocean buddies now, though. :p

--Rogan

[hungryghosts]

I wonder how many systems out there have one? On one hand it seems like an unusually specific thing to share - on the other, when you sit down and think about it, it isn't that surprising. There's more than one source that describes the unconscious (or other parts of the mind) as a sea. It's very evocative imagery, so it would make sense if several systems kinda internalized it.

[lb_lee]

The Desired Constellation, if I remember right, also have drowned architecture as part of their head-world! So that's three just off the bat.

[beepbird]

We don't call it an ocean, but we have something along this line. Not sure if it's the same but it has similarities.

We see ourselves as having three layers, one on top of the other: front-layer, which connects to the outside world; mid-layer, which contains the headspace/inner world; and deep-layer, which is a black void filled with fragments, hidden memories, sysmates stuck inside those memories, and a lot of memory loops in general. That void is sort of like an ocean, but I think it's closer to a non-Newtonian fluid than it is water. Most of our unknown sysmates seem to come up from there and a lot of mental health issues seem to be rooted in something there. We're only just starting to be able to intentionally reach it from upper layers.

Now that I think about it, calling it an ocean might be pretty apt for us despite it not being water. The contents of deep-layer feel like a seething, fluid mass of mind material if that makes sense.

- NS

[hungryghosts]

It does make sense, and gets at the gist of it very quickly. Big, deep, deeper than many on the surface may realize, filled with all sorts of things that the people on the surface also don't realize. (Also can freaking drown you if you don't respect it.)