Defining "I"

by Laura and Allegra

[Our response to a topic posted in one of the forums we frequent:]

[...A] number of us are interested in this sort of existential stuff. It's also gratifying to see that not only other people think about things that are important to us, but they share our basic view to some degree.

Let us first say that we mean no disrespect to anyone who identifies as a host-based system and experiences life as such. But we have strongly believed from the outset that this paradigm does not work for us. We identify as a group of people, formed at various times from the existing whole, and who experience selfhood as 47 individual "I"s sharing a body and a life.

But we have to deal with the necessity of the legal "I," the social "I," the physical "I," and any other "I"s that come with being a member of contemporary human society. The legal system, our employer, and most of the people we deal with on a daily basis don't know we're multiple, and they wouldn't care if they did know. To them, "I" is the one person, the whole person, and that's all there is to it.

The chasm between our many "I"'s and the singular "I" seen by outsiders can seem enormous to us at times--annoying, frustrating, even maddening. But the rest of the world isn't going to change to accommodate us and others like us. All we can do is the best we can, and give ourselves credit for that.
__________

[later]

First let us clarify what we meant when we said that "from the outset" we knew that the host paradigm would not work for us. It actually took a couple of years to figure this out. In an effort to conform and be a "good" multiple (whatever that is), we thought at the beginning that every system was supposed to have someone with the body name.

So in our mind we figured that there was actually a system member named (Bodyname). We also thought that there was a person named (Middlename) who was an administrator. We never actually met them, and over the course of about two years we realized that these two never really existed, and we mentally "released" each of them from the system.

Another thing we've learned is that it's counterproductive for us to think of each other in terms of roles. It pigeonholes us and creates expectations that may not necessarily match our totality as individuals. We find it more productive to recognize each other's talents and skills, and take these into consideration when deciding who handles a specific situation.

[...]Our switching has always been fluid. Sometimes we don't notice it until after it's happened--for better or for worse.[...]We're grateful that we have our T, and a couple of close friends who are aware of the real "us." And we have [...] places online where we can interact with other multiples.