Animism, Plurality, and Compost: What Our Brain Has Been Like Lately

[renelfchild]

So... I don't really know where else to put this, and I'm going to brave the waters of dreamwidth just to see how it goes. I just withdrew from basically all of my online presences Because Of Reasons, and now I'm figuring out where to start again. This is just a rambling, unstructured little piece about the formation of new headmates and the nature of fictives in my system. Maybe it'll be helpful for you, maybe it won't. Either way, please know that my system is very spiritual and I don't consider my plurality to be disordered, at least not always, so if that's not for you, you'll want to look elsewhere.

I won’t give a name or really much of a description, because the headmate I’m talking about isn’t comfortable being publicly viewed. It’s written a fair bit about itself in more private, closely moderated spaces, but you can only ask so much of one person, even when the definition of “one” and “person” is a little blurry. And this person has chosen to tackle hard real-world social and self-care tasks while remaining more secretive in “the plural community,” whatever that is.

I’ll admit none of us have ever publicly posted much about plurality at all, and we all feel some level of trepidation about it. I mean, syscourse is too exhausting to be worth engaging in, as far as I’m concerned. I have been strongarmed into resting and letting other headmates, like the one I alluded to above, do a lot of things for me until I’ve recovered from some recent overwhelming events.

But I like analyzing metaphysical phenomena and trying to put words to my experiences. I’ve found that, frequently enough to be notable, I can slip past other people’s insecurities and help them feel a little more balanced by giving them a new tool that they might not have considered before. Sometimes, this backfires and I just end up telling myself and others a story that isn’t helpful or true, so I’m trying to be more deliberate and thoughtful about what I post these days.

So, this one headmate, who I will give approximately no identifying details about in this post, at its request. I would say it wasn’t created intentionally, per se, but that I realized I had been acting like a completely different person for a while in order to cope with a situation. Eventually I, the person who’s writing right now, started to poke my head around the corner again and feel like maybe everything wasn’t so bad, maybe I could backseat drive a little bit and start to engage with the world around me again. But I had grown extremely attached to this “other me,” and I couldn’t bear to just let it go.

So I drew an outline around it, instead of trying to subsume it into some greater whole. I understand that the latter is often referred to as “integrating,” and the term comes with a lot of baggage and anxieties attached. For me, for us, it’s something that happens slowly and without anyone ever really noticing until it’s more or less over. A longstanding spiritual structure that prioritizes the importance of death and decay has really helped us all in understanding this process.

Integration is sometimes seen as frightening, and sometimes it’s seen as a desirable goal. For some systems, it’s both. For us, it’s not worth worrying about because it’ll just happen when it happens. Sometimes, though, the opposite of integration is an action worth taking. “Creating a headmate,” you could call it, but like I said before, the process of creation extends far, far beyond my choice to take a bold marker and draw an outline around part of myself.

That part was already in the process of being born, I just chose to differentiate it in a way that made sense to me, because sometimes two heads are better than one. Sometimes a degree of – and just stay with me here, please – dissociation, measured and directed and applied to a particular area, can support your collective health instead of worsening it.

I needed to remove myself from the equation to get a better look at what I had become in order to deal with the aforementioned stressors. Why did I choose those methods for dealing with them? Did they work? Why or why not? It would be nice to sit down with that part of myself and have a conversation. It would be nice to get to know it a little bit better. I don’t know if this will be a forever thing, because I can’t see the future. Often, it’s not. Often, the parts of me that really feel like “parts of me” are subsumed back into the compost of my core identity once they reach a certain point in their life cycle.

I have never ended up with a headmate who didn’t know who they were or how they got here, even though I’ve seen that very frequently in other systems. I once experienced a temporary state of dissociation and regression that made me feel like a younger version of myself who’d been thrown forward in time, but that was a one-time phenomenon for me, and it did not result in a long-term headmate. It took me a very long time to realize things worked differently for us, and that I shouldn’t be superimposing the experiences of other systems onto my own.

The presence of fictives is something a bit different for me, as a Pop Culture Pagan who fundamentally, instinctively engages with fictional characters in an animistic sense. That is, they may be objects, but they are objects that can have a spirit, and their designation as “objects” doesn’t mean I’m responsible for everything they think and do and feel. And, yes, I believe they do think and feel and take action, even if it’s in ways that most of us in meat bodies would not immediately understand as such.

I begin to see these movements through long, careful observation in the realm of “inconsequential,” regular” fandom activity. There is always a strong tether between the version of a character in my head and their canon-self outside, and if they want to climb across it and leave, they can. My closest, dearest spirit companions who I’ve come to consider long-term headspace residents and even family members will sometimes just take off and do their own thing, and I won’t know exactly where they are or what they’re doing unless they fill me in.

While fandom activity is something some people choose to avoid when they have or are a fictive, I find it’s central and crucial for me. It might not always look respectful on the outside, but I have to think about what this not-me being actually needs and wants based on the type of entity they are, not how I personally would feel in their place. When I look at my engagement in a particular fandom space, I think: “How can I improve the health of this space? Which needs can I fulfill? Which characters do I resonate with enough to have a healthy muse relationship with them?” Sometimes, this leads to what we often term a fictive appearing in headspace. Sometimes, it doesn’t.

I don’t really know how to wrap this little essay-ish thing up. I guess I’ve just seen other people posting about their atypical experiences with plurality, and I thought maybe I should outline a bit of how things work for my system. Please don’t take any of what I’ve said here as rules or even necessarily advice – sometimes, I read what other people, even my friends, have said about their own plurality and think “yikes, I could NEVER do that,” and that’s okay! Every brain is different, and every plural brain supports a slightly different version of plurality.

However, I also find it extremely helpful to read about experiences similar to my own when I’m struggling, and hear how other people navigate their plurality in ways that work for them. Maybe you’ll want to pick up a couple pieces of what I said and see if they’re applicable to your situation, maybe you won’t. Either way, thanks for reading.