Welp, what now?

Yesterday, we basically deleted the entirety of our Simply Plural and Plural Kit…on purpose..in order to allow ourrrselves to start over with them.

There were several reasons for this,  but the main thought process was as follows (hopefully we won’t lose our main thought with this segue):

We first became self-aware somewhere in 2020. We were on TikTok, and suddenly a lot of our feed was filled with people talking about their experiences in ways that made us think “huh…that’s weirdly similar to some things I’ve just thought were normal” (doesn’t help that, looking back, our only truly close irl friends we had were unaware systems themselves…so it really WAS the normal for us)

But we were in a LDR with a couple people we met online (our system is polyamorous, as we’re these individuals). We were also basically living at a friend’s house most of the time (rather than our own with our two roommates). I…honestly have no idea why on that one, other than we played D&D with the other friends several days out of the week, and would play videogames with them as well…so sometimes it was just easier to crash there (even though their house was maybe 5minutes away from ours…? Idk…it really doesn’t make sense to me looking back).

All in all…we were too busy to look at the whole thing super closely.

Idk if the LDR people were unhealthy and bad in general, or if our not self-aware selves is just making it seem that way in retrospect, but at the very least, for us…the situation was not healthy.

We had a really big major split happen due to the total of three relationships we were in (two long distance, and a third that was close by…the third relationship is not one we want to talk about yet. But we KNOW that one was definitely trouble all themselves, and not just our disorder…[though, do we only not believe the other two to be trouble bc we didn’t have anyone else around to back up our experiences? Maybe we are once again simply gaslighting and second guessing ourselves…)

No matter though. One of our alters who we had managed to protect for a long ass time…shattered. Due to a combination of bad things that happened in these relationships.

Our protectors stepped in and shut down those relationships. (Thank you, Alex)

We worry, especially with the LDRs, that we were unnecessarily mean or rude…but I also know we re-read the messages we sent and we had PLENTY of good reason to get ourselves out, and we only talked about such. We didn’t go into the things that we still second guess [like how us, with a VERY high tolerance for alcohol somehow “zonked out” after a single shot of whiskey in a way that was eerily similar to times we’ve been drugged previously??]

…

[ Yeah…that’s what I thought -Alex]

Anyway, we got ourselves away from the LDRs. The nearby relationship took a bit longer, as we were being manipulated in a way we couldn’t see yet. But we got away from that one too.

By the time things settled from those relationships, it was November. I still remember the day, if not the precise date. We’d been sending a bunch of the relatable D.I.D. tiktoks to our best friend (one of the unaware system friends who was our housemate) over the previous months. She/they were affirming that we did in fact have a lot of similar experiences (I also believe some of them began to recognize some of their own experiences were indications of being a system as well…but they were in the process of planning their wedding at that time iirc and had a whole bunch of stuff they had to focus on first)

But it wasn’t until November of 2020. We were in the drive-thru for Taco Bell, and our friend was driving. We weren’t to the order board yet, and the line was being slow.

That’s when Carter fronted, introduced himself to our friend, and told her that the next period (December-February) was going to be very rough on us [that period has been a rough time for us for a long time…lots of very big traumas in those months over our lifetime], and hopefully he and a couple of others would be able to pick up for the alters who wouldn’t be able to front as much in this period.

I personally feel like emerging into self-awareness at this point of the year was a terrible plan, but whatever. We created a system TikTok (I don’t remember what the username was at first, but we changed it to The Triforce System after a bit), where we made goofy videos and talked about how life was for us.

We thought we had our shit more or less together. We helped our now-partner system enter self awareness (this was also maybe not the smartest of ideas so soon…but there’s no changing that now. And Break keeps saying that the more aware we became, they were going to get caught up with it anyway…but we still have anxiety about “rushing” or “pushing” them into self awareness…especially as our two other unaware system friends took a lot longer to come along…and those two were literally living in the same house as us)

Anyway…those bits aren’t as important.

What is important is the fact that since we were about and year and a half old, we have had to be the responsible older sibling and caretaker to our little bro-unit. Now, don’t get me wrong…we love the kid. He is the only reason we didn’t off ourselves at various points in our life. But we should NOT have been responsible for taking care of him the way we were made to. We should NOT have only been allowed to move out of the house when we were 19 in order to do respite care (similar to PCA care) for him (because a respite provider cannot live at the same address as the client).

Literally…our parents would NOT let us move out except for this reason. And we were isolated and cut off from enough that we wouldn’t have known HOW to go about moving out on our own, even if we could have gotten ourselves out of dissociation long enough to actually try.

Our parental-units did things that, even under TWs, we don’t want to go into in such a public place. We might talk about it on the discord at some point…but probably not anytime soon.

We officially started respite in June of 2015, when we first moved in with our best-friend-system. Our “parental-units” continued doing the same things to us that they had always done while we were doing respite care.

Over the years, the frequency of our respite shifts varied. But our mom-unit kept it so that it was our primary source of income.

This respite job is the job we officially left at the end of 2023, though we significantly pulled back in mid-August when our system had surgery.

Remember the whole thing about how we thought we had our shit together back in 2020/2021? Welp…one of the FIRST THINGS with getting away from abusive and harmful situations is to make sure you are financially independent, right? Yeah…that was where we kept fucking up.

There were a few periods of time when we tried to quit respite before. But it never worked. Things would happen, and we’d have to keep with it.

But after getting married, and the things our parental-units were doing STILL not stopping or changing…we had to take a massive step and change jobs.

Our finances are an utter mess. I know we’ll somehow survive…but rn, everything looks intense and our system has constant back-of-the-mind stress about how we are going to pay our bills. (The main problem is that we had to pay over a grand in taxes with the one credit card we almost had paid off, which maxxed it out again…and we have some car and medical expenses that sprang up out of nowhere)

It’s really, really, REALLY hard not to crawl back and be like “I could pick up a couple shifts”. Just enough to make a few hundred towards the credit cards, or the car and medical bills….just enough to not be stressed about food and could actually breath a bit more.

Especially when our mom-unit keeps poking and prodding us with messages like: “oh, you’re still on there as a respite provider, in case you change your mind” and “the wage increased to almost $40/hr for respite this year!” [this last one especially stings, bc at our new job we’re making about $11.50/hr…even before the wage increase, we cut our wage to somewhere between a half and a third of what we made when we were doing respite…]

We have only truly and officially been away from this bad situation 4-8 months (depending on what point in the pull-back period you count as us getting away…i know our system keeps calculating from the start of that, but is that really an accurate reflection of things?)

Anyway, back to the inital point…we began documenting our alters on Simply Plural and with Plural-Kit near the beginning of our acceptance of self-awareness…so somewhere probably early 2021.

We’ve still been splitting repeatedly due to our parental-units and other traumas up until 4-8 months ago.

WE WERE STILL SPLITTING UP UNTIL 4-8 MONTHS AGO.

There is no way that all of the alters we documented exist anymore. There is no way that they would even all come back as we fuse/integrate with each other in the healing journey (which really only is starting NOW). I wish the Simply Plural archiving feature worked better for our system. If it had, we might have just archived everyone. But instead, we deleted everything.

It was…very cathartic, at least for most of it. There were definitely a lot of hard points. And a lot of us were arguing about things like “why do we have to do this?” and things like “but I REMEMBER that person!”

Break wasn’t giving into any of us, though. And I actually really have to respect him on that one. While he is the gatekeeper many of us can communicate the best with, he has often been seen as a flippant person who will casually avoid all responsibility that they can get away with…and just…very in-line with his source character (Xerxes Break, from Pandora Hearts)

But he was actually putting his foot down and being a High-Clearance alter yesterday. He reassured us that if anyone was angry about having to create their stuff from scratch, that they would deal with them. And thus far, Break has stayed true to her word. (note: our Break uses all pronouns. in their words, “because all of them make me happy…plus chaos!”

…it’s the next day, and as I look at our almost completely barren Simply Plural, I can’t figure out who I am.

It feels like a massive fog descended onto all of us again, and we can’t see anything anymore. {Imagine how I feel when I’m fully fronting! /hj – Break} We can hear each other a bit…but we can’t see ourselves. I can’t think “oh…i like x, y, and z things.”

I just feel…like a cloud-like entity? Heavier than one could possibly imagine, but floating along all the same.

And I know I’m not the only one.

So we’re left with the question of “what now?”

What is our next step?

We obviously have a bunch of life-stress to deal with…stupid finances =_=

The only alters who have been able to actually identify themselves so far when they’ve been around have been Alex, Break, and one of the Link fictives (I think it was 8-bit?)

I just…don’t know how to find ourselves again.

We thought we knew what we were doing before, but that turned out to be all wrong.

Honestly, I can’t even remember how we went about it that time anyway…so even if it was just a “right move, wrong time” thing…I don’t know how to do it.

I hate this.

I just want to be me.

The only thing I KNOW is that I’m one of the alters who has at least one relationship with alters in our partner system. I look at the “partner stuffies” that our system’s alters have been given by their significant others…but none of them resonate with me. So was I one of the many who didn’t have one yet? Probably…

Everything is so confusing. And I just want to know who I am…and who I’m dating/in a relationship with. And I want to just cry and be held by that person (or persons) and told that things are going to be okay…

I can’t even figure out my own gender right now. Not male. Not female. It just feels the same way everything else feels…there but not tangible.

And I hate it so, so so much.

I don’t really know how to end this post…so I guess here’s as good as any place…

Blahhhhhhhhhhhhhh