our syscovery!

As we do have DID, and many of our memories aren’t very clear, we do struggle to explain how we realized we were a system, because there are multiple layers to this. High school, in general, is a bit of a blur. I don’t remember our specific age, and I don’t remember our specific grade, but what I do know is that I was sitting in math class one day. At the time, my strongest kintype was Letty from the game Alicemare. Letty is part of a system caused by the trauma of the abuse that he (I use the pronoun he, as talking about Letty feels like talking about myself, as that IS myself.) faced as a young child from his family. He is left alone in the forest, where he soon realizes that there is another person inside of him. This person calms him down from his panicking, helping to save him from his predicament. This person, Rick, is incredibly important to me, and I view him as a twin brother. It was while sitting in that math class, listening to my teacher talk about protractors (or something. idk i am TERRIBLE at math), that I realized there was someone else in my head. I don’t remember exactly how the realization occurred, though I assume I was already questioning a little bit. Through the kin community, I had met people also from the source Alicemare. These friends were part of a system, which is how I became exposed to the topic in a more direct way. I had always had imaginary friends my entire life, or at least, that was what I had believed. They were incredibly important to me, and I viewed them as close friends, closer than the people I knew in reality. I guess somehow that got me questioning if I was truly alone, which led to me realizing that I wasn’t. Rick was with me once again.

It was a bit rough starting out with Rick. We were both very confused as to what was going on, but knew it was something we needed to keep incredibly quiet about, because we were really scared of being labeled “crazy”. We believed our souls were bound together, to the point where we could never be apart from each other. I didn’t really want to be called a system at the time, though I knew that was, generally, what many would call us. We would draw art together (mostly me drawing pictures of us), play video games together (Rick enjoyed tasks like grinding in video games, and really got into Neptunia), and would even face problems alongside one another. Rick struggled to mask as myself, however, and we did have one moment where we were afraid we would get “found out” by our mother, as she called us while Rick was fronting. Thankfully, the second we answered the phone (after a little bit of panicking), I managed to be the one to answer. However, this first syscovery didn’t last for long. I’m unsure how it happened, but I soon forgot Rick entirely. The entire time period was lost until some time this year, when Rick came back out of dormancy.

We spent many years clearly being a system, in retrospect, but not knowing that we were. It’s normal to call yourself different names half the time, right? Gender is a complicated thing, it’s hard to pin down! Dysphoria? Well, we’re trans, so that must be the only reason we hate looking in the mirror. We struggled heavily in college, having breakdown after breakdown. I wasn’t the host at this point, I believe it was either Cheren or Io. Regardless, after we finished our associates, we began an art history degree (which wasn’t by choice, but that’s a whole other can of worms), which made us interested in libraries. This brought me back to the surface. It caused me to think about the past. I had many imaginary friends as a teenager, the strongest being someone named Maki. He had bright red hair in a ponytail, green eyes, was super loud and viewed himself as being similar to a king. I would draw art of the two of us constantly, because Maki was my best friend in the world. It was hard to talk about him, though, as again, I was afraid of being seen as “crazy”, or strange for having an imaginary friend as a 20 year old. I made a group of ocs based on the people from my imagination, as well as a self insert for myself. That was how I spoke about the “people from my imagination”. However, that fall, I began questioning things. Who exactly was Maki, anyway? Why has he been with me for so long? So I asked. And, well, he responded.

Researching what was going on with us was hard work. I was afraid of labeling us as a system, or assuming we had some kind of disorder. Our amnesia was hiding the fact that we experienced any amnesia in the first place, so we didn’t know there was a chance we were a disordered system, though we did know that we had trauma. I think what had happened was us looking up something along the lines of “imaginary friend talks back to me reddit”, which led us to a thread where someone suggested that the OP asking a very similar question to us had created a tulpa. Finally! A word! We spoke with our system friend, who said they had never seen someone accidentally create a tulpa, but they were sure it was probably possible. We lurked on the tulpa subreddit for a long time, learning things about how to have things work between us, relating to a lot of posts talking about difficulty communicating (speaking tulpish instead of any real world language), headaches when trying to communicate, and thoughts bleeding. It was a very helpful place to be, and we’re grateful! However, there were also negatives in the community. We were very uncomfortable when it came to the way many members spoke about their tulpas. They treated them like inanimate objects, or like pets. I’m sure there are many tulpamancers who are good people, and I’m sure the bad eggs we saw don’t reflect the community, but we just did not like it at the time. However, after a while, we realized we no longer felt comfortable calling ourselves a tulpa based system. We realized that that wasn’t how the system had been formed, and that Maki has been sentient for much longer than we realized. We began researching disordered plurality, connecting the fact that we had intense trauma to our newfound plurality. For months, we assumed we had OSDD-1b, as, again, our amnesia… hid the fact that we had amnesia. It hid any examples of deviating from our “singletsona”, as well, so we thought we were a very small system. However, after seeing a therapist, we realized that our poor memory was hiding these many, many blackouts. We still have not recovered all of our memory, and I’m unsure if we ever will. She, off the record, told us we probably have DID. After a bunch of research, we agreed with her. We went to doctors, by her recommendation, to rule out the possibility of anything being physically wrong with us that could cause such intense memory loss, but they came back telling us we were fine. So, we were plural, and we had DID. It was difficult to come to terms with, but we finally were able to be ourselves as a system. Over time, our system grew and grew, and we’re now in the 30-40 member range, though that’s mainly because we split easily and also fuse back on occasion to solidify many of our members. But now we’re comfortable in our plurality, and many of our friends know! We’re out on social media, but not irl! We love being plural, and we love each other very much. I couldn’t imagine a world where I didn’t have these fuckers with me, lol.

-Narancia !