Things to know

Here are some facts about us that might come up in conversation or interactions online. It isn't necessary to read, and anything on here that is important will probably be communicated to you privately if we are friends or becoming friends, but it might be helpful.

✧ We spend a good deal of time offline in settings where it is not convenient for us to use our phone. Furthermore, we prefer not to mix social media with our in person life. This means we are unreachable sometimes and that our online and offline lives have very little to do with each other.
✧ We also struggle with technology a good deal of the time, despite having bodily lived with it our whole lives, so we may have difficulties in situations involving technical aspects of the internet that the other people we know online might not struggle with.
✧ Many of our attitudes about how to interact with people online are influenced by our ideas about socializing offline, which is different than how many people seem to feel nowadays. We therefore do not always understand other people's attitudes towards the internet.
✧ Despite our use of microlabels, there are lots of aspects of current-day online culture, discourse, and labels that we know absolutely nothing about. Please be patient with us if we use the wrong words or aren't familiar with certain concepts.

✧ We have a limited ability to handle discussions of self-harm and suicide. If you are communicating with us in a public or semi-public setting and those topics come up, especially if the context is circumstances under which you would personally harm or kill yourself, please tag them if possible.
✧ While you do not need to tag those topics when talking about them privately with us (e.g. in direct messages), please ask if it's okay to talk about the topic first, and be aware we may need to disengage or ask for a change of topic at some point.
✧ While those topics distress us somewhat, we have mixed feelings about them, so we find it difficult to engage in discussions that assume anything either negative or positive about suicide.
✧ We are happy to be friends with people who struggle with those issues, but we cannot be the one to help them in that area.

✧ Due to our personal associations and experiences with older generations, our system gets a lot of headmates who are older than the body's age.
✧ While we try to make it clear if we're talking about headspace age or body age if we're talking about being "old enough" to remember something, we sometimes come off as sounding older than we actually are, including to actual older people from in person who know nothing about our system.
✧ A few of our headmates have complicated ages in which they are multiple ages at once, including a teenager. However, they are also an adult, so please treat them as an adult.
✧ For headmates whose age is given as teen or kid in their PluralKit proxy and it is not specified in the proxy that this is regression, that means they are not an adult at all. They are not equivalent to a bodily minor, but they see themselves differently than the rest of the system and therefore might act differently than the rest of the system. For our minor headmates, they do not wish to be treated the exact same as a bodily minor, but they do prefer to be treated differently by other members of the system, and therefore adult members of the system may talk about them differently. Marking their age is basically a disclaimer for why they're treated differently by our system.
✧ We are bodily an adult and prefer to only socialize with other people who are bodily adults. Minor headmates in systems, age regressors, and other similar demographics are not bodily minors if their bodies are 18 or older, and they are thus not included in our generalizations about minors, including our DNIs.
✧ Because we (and most of society) use the word "minor" to refer to "bodily minor" by default, and the law almost never regards bodily adults as minors, please be ABUNDANTLY clear if you mean bodily or otherwise if you are talking to us in any capacity and you describe yourself as "a minor/kid/etc."

✧ Due to our personality disorders, we occasionally struggle with anger or frustration when faced with situations that confuse or upset us, including some disagreements.
✧ Our system has a rule against the angriest headmates engaging in conversations that involve strong disagreement, so we always maintain a calm tone in these conversations unless the context involves us feeling legitimately threatened. Most disagreements we get into, however, do not involve such a context.
✧ However, we still experience frustration that requires internal self-regulation that takes a lot of energy. As a result, we sometimes need to end complicated discussions by admitting that we are struggling with phrasing things as intelligently as we would like and that we need to disengage from the topic.
✧ We additionally sometimes struggle to control our tone if we are in a situation that is triggering or legitimately unsafe. While we feel that we generally have control over our anger, that does not translate to never showing any anger whatsoever. We also don't believe anger is an emotion that needs to be demonized by locking it away completely.
✧ Therefore, while we maintain civility in direct interactions, we sometimes make posts (e.g. on our personal Tumblr blog) whose tones are more reflective of the level of distress we are in.
✧ While we try not to vent post too heavily, we also don't usually act like that in private settings or conversations. Exceptions include very private servers or very close friends who have already consented to a certain level of emotional intensity to me by virtue of what the friendship entails.
✧ Our tone can be variable when using actual vent channels in Discord servers, but we try to be mindful and not phrase things in a way that would either make other people anxious/paranoid/etc. nor feel that they have a responsibility to take care of me.