A group of people living in a single body, running on a single brain – many people will be more familiar with “multiple personalities”. ‘System’ is a pretty common word that plurals (a word to use instead of ‘multiple’) use to describe their ‘group’ as a whole. We consider ourselves ‘naturally plural’, and we weren’t created by any kind of childhood abuse, like you typically see in media portrayals (and in a lot of psych literature), that’s not the only way to be plural! We wouldn’t consider it a disorder in our case, since we feel like we function better this way… though it certainly has its own challenges!

Maybe especially so for a plural system! None of us actually self-identify as human, though we’re all plenty aware that the body we live in is. Our identities just aren’t reliant on what our body looks like, there’s a pretty big disconnect there. We’re all definitely still real people, it doesn’t make us any less legitimate as people, but it does pose some unique challenges when it comes to living in this body.

Sure, we share some interests (thank goodness!) and have some things in common, but we are all different people with our own feelings and opinions about things, our own wants and needs. Sometimes, we make collective decisions, but sometimes, we make decisions independently – like whether or not to share our real names with the world. Collectively, we decided each of us could decide for ourselves, so some of us are using our real names, and some of us are using pseudonyms, it all came down to individual comfort. 

We can pass as “singlet” (that is, non-plural) in many if not all situations, and often do. That doesn’t mean that being plural is fake for us or anything, it just means that we are well adapted to hiding, it makes things easier, as you might imagine! We’re very good at this camouflage, and if anything, it’s harder to not do it than to do it, for a number of reasons.. partly, it’s just habit.

We do sometimes call each other ‘headmates’, which is pretty common for plurals, but really, we most often call each other ‘brothers’. We absolutely hate the term ‘alters’, it really diminishes the person-hood of everyone except ‘the first one’, and makes it seem like there’s one ‘real person’ and a bunch of fakes, and that isn’t true at all! There are a few other details on our individual pages, things we might call each other as ‘nicknames’ of sorts, our pronouns (spoiler alert, it’s ‘he/him’ for all of us) all of that kind of stuff, if you’re curious.

Is honestly that we don’t really have secrets. We’re all co-conscious, that is, we all communicate really just about everything important about what’s happening ‘outside’. So it really doesn’t matter who’s ‘out’ (fronting, interacting with the world), we will all know what happened. That has its advantages – it makes it possible to pass as singlet, for example – but it also has disadvantages… nobody can talk to any of us about say, a gift for one of the others. If you tell Rhodri what you’re planning on getting Teo for Christmas, then Teo will know, it’s inevitable. Don’t tell one of us a secret you don’t want the others to know, because we all absolutely will know it!