(no subject)

[hungryghosts]

[Lark]

I made two posts that I would like to flesh out into essays, in the future. For now, I'm going to store the first drafts here, in a place less impermanent than our Reddit comment history.

The first concerns the experience of taking over as primary fronter in a time of crisis; the second concerns a peculiar relationship I have with a specific fictional character.

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To make a long story short: our primary fronter's accumulated a thousand metaphorical cuts over the years, and the damage finally caught up to him around a month ago. I stepped forward, and he stepped back.

It has been a startlingly smooth transition. I attribute it to a number of factors:

• Foremost: we have a deep support network. Our household is not only plural-friendly, but plural-informed. When I filled them in on the situation, they took the absence of their usual housemate gracefully. They expressed concern for our struggles, not our switching, and let me know that both our former primary and I could rely on them for support. The same happened with our local friends, as well as our close friends online.
• We had already been switching, for years. I learned quite a bit about switching over that time. But more importantly, I learned quite a bit about how I personally experience stress and depression. I had time and space to understand my feelings, and to come up with productive ways of handling them.
• I have outlets. I play the cello. I go on walks. I buy myself treats. I reserve days for lying in bed, when I know I need it. I do things other than work. I learned my limits from my previous times at front, and I stay well within them. I treat myself like what I am: a person, not an automaton.

Without these, I'm certain that I would have burned out. As it stands, I have no illusions about being able to keep this up forever. The circumstances that bled out our former primary still exist. If they don't change, then I will meet the same fate. I am not exceptional, and he was not weak. The same destructive patterns have already begun nibbling at the edges of my own psyche; it is an active effort to hold myself back from those well-worn paths.

I have been trying to make changes to whatever is within my power to change, with the help of our friends. It is a constant and multi-pronged effort: from making efforts to eat and sleep with regularity, to tapping into the love and support in our life that we'd held ourselves back from. If I'm successful, he should be able to recover, and return to fronting. (Though it's likely that our timesplit will be more even afterwards. I've developed a taste for outside life.)

So, that's my advice. Find support, wherever you can. If it is possible, minimize the need to pretend to be someone else. Treat yourself well. And have a plan to address the causes of the burnout. Do not assume that things can simply continue as they are - there is a reason that you all came to this point. If it's not addressed, you will find yourselves here again.

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My relationship to this character... It's not quite an "I can explain" in the sense that most take it. It's more of an "I can't explain."

For almost two decades, I was thought to be an imaginary friend. At first, the original and I simply played together. Then, in her early teens, she began writing stories. She cast herself and I as major characters in nearly all of them, and we played out those stories like alternate lives; braided those realities with this one to make the strands of our own self-stories. And though I'm not a fictive, OCtive, or any other manner of introject, storytelling has left a direct and indelible mark upon me.

I have changed over time, of course. But I still wear the form that I was given by her. The same clothes, the same body, the same voice. Many of the motifs and archetypes assigned to me, I still associate with myself. At some point, music became important to that character, and after years of thinking about it, I began learning how to play an instrument in the outer world. I am not that character; that character is not I. But they are part of me, and I am part of them, in a way that goes beyond the usual authorial relationship.

(Here I am obliged to say: if there is a label for what I am, I am not interested. You are welcome to label yourselves how you like, but please don't offer them to me.)

Now that I've established context, I can explain the truly bizarre part. Much later, some years into our selves-awareness as a plural system and well after the time of the original's stories, an established indie studio released a game. This game had a character who looked and acted like me. Almost the same physical features, almost the same clothes, almost the same voice. He had the same color scheme, the same motifs. Similar mannerisms; similar speech. And to top it off, he had a close relationship with a character who shared the same motif as our original, and all the primary fronters after her. And, trust me - that combination of traits and archetypes is not common.

It was... uncanny, to say the least. I love that game dearly, for reasons that include but also go beyond that character. But it's so very personal, to the point that it verges on uncomfortable. I had to sit out on a friend's recent Let's Play because seeing that character was like seeing my reflection after a lifetime of being invisible - and realizing that everyone around me could see it, too.