Walls Can Be Demolished: On setting strict boundaries with your system and how that absolutely does not fucking work half the time, so get used to it.

I am one of approximately 40 people sharing one body.

As a child, we weren’t treated very well. Putting it that way is absolutely understating the problem, but I’m not planning on going into that matter here. Regardless, because of that treatment, our mind had trouble putting together a single identity, and still continues to struggle holding what we currently have together. This is our Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Sharing a brain with others comes with hardships, that’s for certain. While multiple people can be conscious at the same time, the truth of the matter is that we have 24 hours a day for 40 people to spend. Factor in sleeping and it’s even less. So, how do we spend our time? How do we organize boundaries, making sure that everyone gets their fair share of fronting time?

Long story short, we don’t.

For a time, we tried to be very on top of things. People who were good at certain activities were pushed to the front. People who were bad at certain activities were pushed to the back. We would each put boundaries in place, and we would try our best to adhere to them. This food belongs to King, don’t touch. Finis is playing this game, nobody else play it. Lambda is watching this show, so nobody watch it. We struggle with amnesia, so when it comes to enjoying media, we have difficulties with it. Eventually, we’ll write an essay about that. Anyway, we each have our own rules for interacting with us, assuming it would make things a bit smoother. Some of us don’t like to talk to people. Some of us dislike work, or struggle handling the environment. Some of us don’t want to talk to our parents, some people don’t want to talk to anyone at all. We tried our absolute best to respect all of these needs. Unfortunately, however… it just wasn’t sustainable. Lambda wants to watch a show, but Aira has a long MyAnimeList backlog, and Nana wants to read a book. Who gets priority? You can’t give one person more value than another. So, don’t.

Some days, an alter will go to sleep saying, “This is what I want to do tomorrow.” Then, in the morning, a different alter will wake up, and they will have to come up with their own plans. This is because we have decided to leave fronting up to chance. The additional stress from trying to make sure everyone was able to be around has hurt us greatly. One person wants to see one alter, another person wants to see another… It really, really is not sustainable. It feels like teaching a large class of children, having to manage every single alter. So, we’ve decided to let the brain decide. We do manual switches on occasion, mainly to manage distress (for example, this essay was meant to be written by Nana, but he was struggling with something, so I took the reins.), but for the most part, whatever the subconscious believes is correct is what we do (aside from when someone is called upon through front triggers, of course.) Sometimes an alter will start something and then not front for months. This happened with Io, who still needs to paint their clay sculptures from ages ago. Whether or not they will get an opportunity to do so is up to chance.

So, if we have stopped trying to schedule fronting, which, again, was never really working in the first place, what about what we do when we are fronting? Despite us agreeing to share front and leave it up to chance, we do still have our boundaries regarding our interests. Aira has a game to play. Nobody else can touch that game. After all, there’s a plot, and what’s the point if he’s not around to remember it? However… I would say that is the only boundary we really respect. We wear each other’s clothes. Yes, we each have clothes that we prefer wearing. We used to claim them, allowing nobody else to wear them. However, our rules on that have relaxed due to the simple fact that laundry sucks and sometimes you just need to wear what’s clean. Sometimes, Nana will make plans to go to a museum. However, when it is time to leave, King will show up and visit instead, meaning Nana doesn’t get to do what he planned on doing. It can be hard to make plans when you don’t control switching, so we’ve had to agree to just let it happen. Charlie wants to do a voice call with our friends, but when she gets out of work, Skye is the one on call. Even in a short time period, nothing can be controlled. Food is, again, a big issue. We do like to poke fun at each other for eating the things we planned on eating. We often get a purple monster energy drink for King whenever we visit the grocery store. However, despite being a host, sometimes he won’t front for a while. If he doesn’t front for three days, the drink is fair game. He hates this, but sometimes an alter wants a fun drink, and we’re not going to let the drink sit in the fridge for who knows how long. Same goes for food. The other day, Skye ate Nana’s dorayaki, and Nana was crushed. It’s every man for themself in this household. The fridge is fair game. It all goes to the same place, anyway.

There is another area where trying to hold up boundaries has hurt us. Friendships. We are a system, and we are largely fictionfolk. Because of this, we tend to respond to source calls and talk to sourcemates. However, these things can get difficult very fast. Sourcemates expect to always talk to their sourcemate. Unfortunately, due to the fact that there are, again, forty people in this system, we can never guarantee that, and it just isn’t fair to force someone out of front so someone else can talk all the time. Sometimes, it will work out. People will have multiple sources in common with us, and will be able to talk to multiple alters. Other times, well… The conversation will fade quickly upon the realization that, hey, nobody from Hypnosis Mic has fronted in a week, so what’s the point in still talking? It feels… rare for people to want to talk to all of us. We tried for a while to keep up these boundaries. X talks to Y and only Y. Z talks to A and only A. It hurt relationships. It made other alters stress about not being the alter that talks to the new friend. Even in pre-existing relationships, we would mask as our main host or ignore our friend group entirely when someone other than him was fronting. They wanted to see him. They didn’t want to see us. Eventually, though, we realized just how unhealthy this thought process was. We shouldn’t control who we are for other people. Why should other people have a say in what we do? So, in our pre-existing friend group, we pushed forward. We added PluralKit to the server, and began to proxy. Over time, they adjusted, and got to know us as individuals. Not everyone has spoken, and that’s alright. Everyone has a choice. That is one boundary we refuse to get rid of. If there is something optional, and you do not want to do it, you do not have to do it. As for source calls, well… I’ll be honest, I have zero idea why we still bother. We don’t join source discord servers anymore, because we’ll be inactive for long periods of time due to members not from those sources not feeling comfortable “invading” a server that isn’t meant for them. So, why exactly do we still respond to kin calls? I genuinely could not tell you. It never works out. I’m against it, personally, but I have been called a “huge antisocial bitch” by my brother, so. There’s that.

There’s also the issue of interests and opinions. We have completely gotten rid of our DNI. While most of us do share similar opinions, we do have some that feel slightly different about certain things. We can’t just look at each other and say DNI. We are with each other forever. So, we have to come to understand each other. This has bled into our relationships with other people, as well. We’d consider ourselves accepting of others, and uncaring of a large majority of niche discourse topics. An example of this would be our opinions on shipcourse. (Which we will not be arguing about, do not ask us about it.) Due to our OCD, a large majority of us considered ourselves an “anti” for a very long time. We had a specific alter, however, that had a fascination with things that many would call “problematic.” For ages, we felt as if we had to hate this alter. We couldn’t accept that someone with such differing opinions would be in our system. We suppressed them as much as we could, and felt discomfort when we remembered they were there. Eventually, this alter began fronting more. We began to accept them, slowly. We’ve been working on our moral scrupulosity, and generally consider shipcourse to be “none of our fucking business, if something makes us uncomfortable we will block and move on.” By accepting them, we accepted a side of ourselves that we were afraid to. Setting a boundary and shutting her away was not the right move. It was very important that she broke that boundary, as it led to us becoming a more independent person, less held back by our OCD.

If you’re a system, there are things about your day to day life that will be difficult, and that many singlets will not have to deal with. Setting boundaries with other people is important, but when those other people are inside of your head, things get a lot more complicated. Sometimes, keeping up boundaries is harmful in the long run. Sometimes, the boundaries just don’t work, and people will step on each other’s toes regardless in an attempt to live their life. If that happens, reevaluate. You share a body. Sacrifices have to be made, that’s just the nature of being plural. Make peace with that, and don’t try to fight it. In our experience, fighting it has made things worse. There is no “perfect person”, and there is no “perfect system”. Do what works best for you. You are, essentially, living with roommates for your entire life. You will not get along with your roommates all the time. Sometimes a roommate will leave a dish in the sink. Sometimes a roommate’s dog will shit on the floor. Sometimes a roommate will talk really loudly on the phone. Sometimes a roommate will eat the leftovers you left in the fridge. You’re still on the lease, though. You have to deal with it. You share a space. You will cross paths and have to deal with the things the others left behind. You just try to live the best you can.

Child alters going to work. Agoraphobic alters in crowded areas. Argumentative alters having to be quiet to survive abuse. Sometimes, you can’t control when you come out. Sometimes, just like singlets, you have to do things that you dislike, or someone else will do something you dislike. That’s just what it’s like being a person. So, set your boundaries where you can, but don’t be surprised if everything doesn’t go according to plan. That’s just the nature of being a system. You can’t plan for everything, and switching does not care about your feelings.

We are a system that likes to be honest about how we are functioning. We don’t like to sugarcoat things, and we don’t like to tell people we’re perfect. We’re a mess. We struggle, we wake up crying in the morning because we don’t remember who we are, we black out for months at a time, we interrupt each other, we take each other’s things… And we keep going, because that’s all that we can do. So, don’t be afraid if you struggle with your alters. Everyone does. No relationship is perfect, and that includes the ones between you and the alters in your system. You’re in this together, though. Try your best to make your relationship a good one, despite the hardships.