Its been about 5 months since our last blogpost, and we've been radio silent on our website. No blogposts, no updates, nothing save for using the domain as a pluralkit image host. What gives, webmaster?
To put it simply: moving halfway across the country.
In late October/early November, a 5+ year long quest for my partner to get me out of my mother's house finally became feasible. They had a stable job, enough for an apartment security deposit, and the situation at my home had became dire.
I haven't talked about my home life publicly much in the last 3 or so years; I left that behaviour behind after I left X, the nothing app, because I realized people don't like it much when you constantly break down on social media. I struggle to talk about my relationship with my mom, partially because of dissociative memory loss and partially because abuse from someone who still loves you and treats you kindly some days makes it feel like youre faking it.
Faking it or no, I knew I desperately had to get away and start my life. I had about two months to pack everything and high-tail it out of there. By the end of preparations I was having constant panic attacks and crying spells
It's done, though. I get to begin my life with my partner at my side, finally.
Well, mostly done. I still have all my belongings at my mom's house.
Honestly, my schedule hasnt changed that much. I can't work, so I dont have a job or schedule. We dont have a desk for me yet, so I've mostly been sitting in bed on my computer or phone.
To be fair though, there's not much I can do right now.
Shortly before moving out, it became very difficult to ignore my worsening physical health. My mom is a "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" Gen Xer, and actively discouraged me from trying mobility aids and made me feel like I was making up my constant exhaustion. In the safety of someone who listened to my needs and limitations, my fatigue is harder to treat as fake.
As soon as I got to the airport to leave home for the final time, I started using mobility aids. I mostly use a cane due to lack of accessible ramps around where we live, but I own a rollator and wish I owned a wheelchair. I didn't actually realize how bad my symptoms were until I felt what it was like to be assisted with my aids.
You may have remembered our last blogpost, where we went over Lacey, Dorothy, and Penelope's integration into one median subsystem. What was the aftermath of that?
Well, it happened again.
And again.
To everyone in the entire system.
We had a long-standing goal with our blog to make a long blogpost about our experiences as a polyfrag system. To very quickly summarize it, Pre-Massive Integration Incident, our system was made up of over 500 headmates, the vast majority of them introject fragments. The actual number was probably somewhere in the thousands, because we never stopped discovering fragments from basically every single life or media experience we'd ever had. We're talking full casts of characters from shows we hadn't paid attention to in 10 years talking to each other in headspace. It was chaotic, and hectic, and a lot to deal with even on the best of days.
Something we neglected to talk about in our original blogpost was how much moving was an impact on Lacey becaming Lacey³. A large part of the reason we had so many headmates was due to the fact that since our brain was under such constant stress with no end date in sight, we needed to be dissociated 24/7 in order to get through each day. With an actual finish line approaching, the inner workings of the system felt safe enough to start consolidating some people together to better suit a life free from constant panic.
It might have felt a little too safe, though. I am not joking when I say the large bulk of the integration took place within 2-3 days. It was exponential, headmates seeing other headmates integrate with and deciding to integrate too. Of course there were a lot of fragments that made the choice, but there were also so many mainstay Vurrsys members who decided they'd feel happier integrated.
At the end of it, we were left with about 25 people we recognized, all of them median subsystems. It felt weirdly empty in our brain, and our defenses had not been prepared for the loss of dissociative barriers, especially at such a critical and stressful time. We got through it in the end, but we were genuinely having panic attacks every single day up until the plane ride.
Its hard not to feel a little sad about losing so many headmates. They're still with us in other forms, but they were family to us: people we saw constantly, talked with, cried with. They dont exist as we knew them anymore, and theres a bit of grief that comes with that.
Things eventually stabilized, though. We have a semi-new fronting lineup, with refreshed headmates made from piles of fragments. We're at 50 total members at the time of writing this, though the number of regular fronters is half of that. I'm sure it'll increase, but definitely not at the rate that it used to.
So yeah, we went from 50 members 500+ fragments to 50 median subsystems! We're still polyfrag, dont get me wrong; the amount of subsystems and subalters guarantees that. We're just polyfrag in a new and exciting way.
There's no doubting that we've officially entered the "recovery" stage of our life. It's not like life is a cakewalk now; if anything, recovering is going to be the hardest thing we've ever done. We're working hard in therapy to slowly unpack our emotions we've had to keep buried to survive.
You might be wondering what our final goal is. It's a fair question, especially for a system which was/is as fragmented as us.
To put it simply: We want to be functionally multiple, but at a much lower headmate count. It was always the plan to integrate the bulk of us, even though we love each and every one of us. We know that fully functioning with such a segmented, dissociated brain would be next to impossible.
Its not like we dont want to be plural, though. Being plural makes our life easier in many ways: We can share the load, have a shoulder to cry on in ourself, protect eachother when things go south. As headmates, though, we deserve fully fleshed out existences, and that's really hard when you have 50+ of you.
We also want to be able to feel our emotions again without putting all of the load onto a few crisis headmates. Theyre currently buried deep inside us under multiple dissociative walls, and thats not the future we want for them or us. It might seem counterintuitive to *want* to feel sad, but denying ourselves that experience only serves to leave all of that emotion unresolved and ready to burst out.
Theres lots of other things too: We have a laundry list of goals to focus on in recovery, and our work is never truly over. We've got time, though: It's only been 3 months since we've moved. Trauma doesn't heal that fast, but every little bit of progress counts.
If you've read this far: thank you, genuinely. It means a lot that anybody cares about the trials and tribulations of our lives.
Since writing this we've worked on the website a bit more; started reading manga, listening to music, and watching movies/tv again; and done loads of doodles of ourselves and our system. Nothing's perfect, but life looks like it's on the upswing. It'll be interesting reading all of this years from now, looking back at our first steps towards a happy life.