gonna make a thread here. this gets kind of dark — I was very depressed — but it does have, if not a happy end, at least an alright present.

just to establish a timeline here — I think it was around maybe fall/winter 2018 when I decided that I was as prepared as I was going to get & that it was time to get started

it was over the previous year+ that I arrived at the decision that I wanted to make myself plural

I was not in a great place at the time: I had left (been forced out of) my unsatisfying job & had been unemployed for a year+

at this point I had been more burned out (read: doing nothing, being depressed) than on since 2014

I had moved out into an apartment with my roommate and their shitty cats, and initially I had been very excited that I would meet their other friends (they had a d&d group) buuut that basically never materialized.

we rarely talked and when we did it was often about one of their own crises — I was locked into support mode, basically, and isolated other than that. basically leaving the apartment only for groceries and medications, spending my time laying in bed or playing video games I wasn't enjoying.

I was deeply unhappy with my life, knew something needed to change, but all my efforts to change something over the previous couple of years hadn't been "successful" in the sense of

in the sense of getting me moving towards being in a healthy community, having healthy relationships, having executive function, etc. I'd try hard for a bit & it wouldn't amount to anything except more exhaustion.

(like: finally overcoming all the inertia to find an endocrinologist when hospital system I had insurance with was religious, setting up & getting through all the dr appointments to get on HRT… and then discovered they had bad interactions with my heart condition)

that's maybe a more positive example, most of the failures were more of the "unable to get started" / "giving up halfway through" variety, rather than anything external

the conclusions I was arriving at were roughly
* "I am not qualified to live/handle my own life."
* "As things are, I'm not going to find anyone else to share my life with."

sooo…

the general theory was that, if I were plural, I'd at minimum have ppl I could talk to

& a little more specifically,
* since I was better at taking care of other people than I was at taking care of myself, maybe I'd do better if myself *was* other people
* I had kind of managed to become the domme I wanted to see in the world, the kind I needed… so following the same logic as the previous point, a domme in my head that could keep me on the right track might help (& it was really that or no D for my s at all)

* I often felt that I was better suited to being in an "advisor" or "helper" position, something like a familiar or mentor, rather than being the main character. (Growing up, I was *relentlessly* the main character in my own narrative, & looking back, that hadn't been working out for me all that great.) Looking at character/party/role/plural tropes, I identified most with "wizard", "librarian", "observer" archetypes.

So maybe what I needed to do was take a back seat & become a plural system's observer/advisor, & create someone more capable of, uh, doing things to handle the day-to-day fronting.
* or, worst(?) case scenario, I create a system that can use "me" as parts for something less depressingly useless.

my perspective on identity & selfhood is/was that the "mind" is what the brain "does"; the mind is kind of like a sea of complex currents, & a/the "self" is something like a

something like a standing wave or whirl in those currents — not a "thing" that exists except as a abstraction over patterns in the sea of mind.

if the "self" is something that all of that "self's" traits and characteristics swirl around, there isn't actually anything at the center of that swirl of traits and characteristics; the "self" is a sort of theoretical average of their positions, or a confluence of characteristics that keeps happening.

& from that perspective, rearranging the sea of mind into something with a greater or lesser number of discrete focal sub-entities or identities is neither creating nor destroying in the way that giving birth or killing would be.

that is to say

the idea that "myself" could be unmade/remade or permavored/cycle-of-life'd in favor of one or more "successors", distinct from me, was considered from the beginning & a potential win condition.

**I'm doing a lot better now.**

As far as what I've actually done… the main technique I used is what the tulpamancers call "forcing", basically, imagining the headmate as if they already existed & conversing / interacting with them. At first it feels like you're playing both sides of it, but bit by bit there becomes more "someone" "not-me" behind it.

I started with [REDACTED], spending hours imagining constructing a headspace treehouse / secret base type thing with them, among other interactions.

I was expecting this to take weeks/months, but I started getting spontaneous reactions within a few days? They told me things about themself that I hadn't put into their character design document, was beginning to grow in their own direction…

…so I kind of started trying to do a whole pre-planned system all at once, imagining/forcing/observing their interactions with each other