I Would Recommend Just Taking Your Time. You Have A Lifetime To Figure Things Out, And From My Experience

The sucky thing about being plural and trans is that not everyone inside has figured out my pronouns and some still unintentionally default to feminine terms and she/her pronouns for me and some of the other guys, which just really sucks. I know one or two headmates use she/her pronouns but boy do I want the one caretaker I don’t know well to stop calling me a girl when comforting me :((

by niiloi

If you don't know your order, find out here!

Ohhhh I feel this. A lot.

I’m still pretty bad at being supportive since I have a tendency to shut down communication and forget the progress we’ve made when being plural feels too overwhelming, which I’m working on, but it makes things complicated. I think we might be getting an introject and I am probably being really unhelpful since I don’t want to “encourage” him to coalesce, but like. It’s not fair to smother him either?? And I don’t want to set off my panic response, but I want to do better at being happy for the new guy if he is forming. I don’t know, it’s rough.

Y'know... We've realized smth and I dunno how to feel about it.

Everyone makes the "*sigh* p;m new" jokes, and "uh oh new introject" and etc. etc. and that's fun!! It's genuinely an okay joke to make, we have no issues with these jokes. We join in on them often, they're silly and most plurals probably experience them as 100% harmless.

But lately we've noticed we... don't experience them as harmless. Actually we've realized that, personally, there's an underlying truth there. Admitting a new headmate is real is seen as admitting defeat. We feel the need to question and interrogate ourselves at the possibility, and we feel like we're not allowed to express any want for a specific introject or headmate for reasons I can't articulate. To the point that one of our new headmates, love him, has literally told us "I won't force this. A lot is happening at once, I can be the one to step back and wait until you're ready to believe that I'm here."

LIKE THANKS I GUESS BUT??? GODDAMN. We're realizing that we don't let things develop in our collective, as much as we wish we were a collective that welcomes new headmates with open arms; we tend to fight it until we can't deny it and then we welcome them. But they have to truly fight to get us to believe them, because "what if that's just me." It's a lot worse if it's a sourcemate, or someone that we'd want to be there.

There's no real point to this post other than maybe to offer up our experiences in case someone feels the same way. Not a vent so much as something I hope someone out there might relate to.

-Travis

Plural POV #32

You find that most of your headmates are excellent company for toddlers - afterall, most of you are aquainted very well with people who are only now taking their first steps in this world, and have lots and lots and lots of simple, or annoying, or difficult, or complex questions to ask, and you know how to easily explain a lot of seemingly hard to grasp concepts because of that. Moreover, your sixth sense for when the littles are plotting trouble is really useful in such situations.

Autumn in the Scottish Highlands

ellisreed

When you’re mid sentence and suddenly forget literally everything you were talking about

PAIN PROTECTOR

An alter who's role is to protect the body from pain, typically by fronting to endure or relieve the pain themself; A combination of a protector and a pain holder. Flag base by @/gorefix

F2U -> credit is appreciated but not required!

You’re welcome, glad I could be of help!

Need to start working on getting better communication with the other's cause I'm getting anxious about not being able to have a full conversation with them and having a hard time contacting them.

I don't quite know where to start so any advice would be nice :)

Shout out to headmates who are sourced but aren't introjects!

This could mean kin identities or even just deciding that you are/look like/are sourced from a thing you like now, just because you said so!

Maybe you are an introject and decided to have another source.★