Unification
We are a system with Dissociative Identity Disorder and a history of extensive trauma, but we didn't always know this about ourselves, even when we knew about our system.
We discovered our system in 2013, following the sudden death of our adoptive mother when we were soon to turn 19. This was an inescapable event that altered our life forever and that anyone would agree was traumatic. We then became aware of different "parts" of ourself that could take over during certain things that they were better at than "I" was.
We quickly figured out this was a system due to having learned of multiplicity under that name the year prior, and we knew our system's origins were trauma, but we thought it was the trauma of losing our mother in 2013 and not early life trauma, because we didn't realize anything from our childhood had been that bad.
Furthermore, none of the headmates we recovered considered themselves to have existed prior to 2013, and almost every system we knew, when they first discovered their system, had headmates from sometime earlier in their life than the most recent traumatic event.
Since we didn't see ourselves as having amnesia or dysfunction, we said we were non-amnesiac and non-disordered, despite being traumagenic. We did have emotional amnesia, especially associated with trauma (rather than plurality specifically), but there was never anything like blacking our or losing time or not being able to read our own memories or anything like that.
Over time, our adoptive father became more abusive, and we realized that he had been abusive our entire life. We left him in 2015 to live with other family, and we acknowledged that our system was most likely caused from early life trauma. However, due to what we realized were odd childhood memories that we could only partly recall, we thought it was likely that our trauma was more extensive than what we were absolutely certain had happened.
We didn't push the issue, though, because we figured that, if we didn't remember the trauma now, there was a reason we didn't, and if we were ever going to figure it out, it would have to be when things in our life were more ideal, as we were living with family in an arrangement that was not intended to be forever.
Life took a very different turn for us in February 2020, when we were seemingly able to move out from our adoptive family's house to live with a partner, but certain things about the plan fell through, and while my partner was okay, I was left without stable housing and was couch-surfing when lockdown was announced.
While in-system communication was already very tenuous starting in 2018 due to increased denial of the system, the events of the pandemic - the lockdown and housing insecurity being only two of the bad things that happened to us during that time - caused dissociation and internal chaos that resulted in the formation of a host headmate who was unaware of the previous existence of the system, thinking it had been stories or roleplays that he had taken too seriously, when he was able to remember any of it at all. This headmate is now considered to be the one known as Vyvian or Blixa. Insofar as this system has an "original self" anymore, Blixa is that self.
Over time, Blixa's housing situation settled down somewhat and the system started coming back in approximately March 2021, which was surprising to him because he had not realized he had ever had a system, and he had to ask old friends questions about himself to find this out about himself.
However, all but one other headmate (Kaiper) went dormant almost as soon as the system came back, which was likely due to a period of personal instability that involved the development of severe agoraphobia. The system went completely dormant in April 2022 and remained that way until June 2023, when we started using the name Local Void, after the area in outer space.
Between June 2023 and March 2025, we became aware that our system's functions were changed from what they used to be. It used to be that, while we split somewhat frequently, we didn't have features like sidesystems, complex patterns of amnesia, specific patterns of splitting, complex structures like layers, or anything like that. However, we gradually started developing these things, starting with the realization that our fronting patterns were more oriented towards clusters of headmates rather than one or two headmates at a time and then realizing that we split remarkably frequently for someone who would consider themself to be under moderate but not extraordinary stress.
In December 2023, we split our first known sidesystem - the Silent Hedges sidesystem - who seemed very much like a condensed alternative version of our own system but as a gay goth born in 1975 who was more oriented towards horror than science fiction. Their host, Brian Morrissey, goes by Mori, which is also the name of a fictive of the Graverobber (Repo! The Genetic Opera) we got in 2016, whose full name in his timeline was Brian Mortis. The Graverobber was one of our first headmates to split knowing he liked extreme horror, and the first to engage in kink with other headmates, and Silent Hedges had these traits in common with him, but we thought little of it at the time.
Then in March 2025, we moved to another part of our state to live with a friend we met back in 2007. This was the first time we had lived without family or without a partner, and there was therefore nobody "responsible" for us.
While gaining this independence was important, it was also very triggering and stressful due to our DPD, and as a result, the system grew more complex such that, instead of a mainsystem with a few sidesystems, the system was converted to several sidesystems that could take turns with responsibilities. Over the course of the year but before the beginning of the Unification, we discovered that our headspace took the form of an entire planet and the former mainsystem's headspace was in a large space station. We planned to call the planet "Voidelia" and use "the United Federation of Voidelia" as a name for the country we considered our system to comprise of.
Once we were more adjusted to our new life in our new town, we started going to karaoke locally, as we had done where we used to live. We met someone at karaoke to whom we had a very confusing reaction. We found them very attractive, and we entertained the idea of dating them, but there was an extent to which our attraction felt like we were having a breakdown, and it also made us realize that it is very, very infrequent that we ever have any kind of physical attraction to anyone (where "physical attraction" also includes simply thinking someone is good-looking as opposed to feeling neutral about their appearance).
This caused our headmates who were experiencing the attraction to try to figure out things about our attraction, not the least of reasons being that we found that a relationship with this specific person was not in the cards, and we were attracted to him due to an aesthetic he has that is very uncommon for us to find in person, especially in our small town.
In particular, we considered that, given that we remember actively looking for furry art as a child/teenager but don't remember ever seeing porn or kink art, even by accident, it is very possible we had some kind of sexual experiences online as a minor that we had blocked out. If so, this would also explain why, in 2007, after spending about two years avidly playing fantasy-based multi-player roleplaying games online, we developed a sudden paranoia about "strangers from online", even fellow children, and we dropped out of all our games and self-isolated.
In order to explore our feelings and our attraction, we got back into writing and art, and this made us think of situations from our past in which we realized that what we thought was us making up a character or roleplaying was very likely us talking about a headmate or having them front. Then we started getting back headmates who remembered being in the system during times that we had no awareness that we had a system.
This included headmates who, while not incredibly surprising for us, were also entirely unexpected because we did not have any memories that we felt pointed to us having those headmates. However, they were able to explain things from our past that we knew about but hadn't considered a plural explanation for. For example, in high school, we went back and forth between saying we were bisexual and saying we were a lesbian without being sure why we couldn't make up our mind; Zig remembers a host who was a lesbian but headmates who were majority bisexual.
It was Zig who first made the observation that the person we had met from karaoke was, aesthetically and vocally-speaking, remarkably similar to Marilyn Manson, an artist who we had a brief interest in from 2018 to 2019 but whom we had found viscerally frightening during the time Zig was from (about 2008 to 2014).
It occurred to us that it was odd that we found Manson so scary, as, while he presents himself that way on purpose, we've never felt that way about any other singer who presents themself that way, and some of them (e.g. Ozzy Osbourne) we actively liked. It was especially odd because we realized that a lot of the men we find attractive could be described as having something in common with him (e.g. alternative musicians with dark aesthetics and who are GNC but not really feminine), but not only had we never really been attracted to Manson himself (even finding this odd in the past due to admiring his aesthetic), it was really odd that we acted like someone whose teen crush had been Manson or someone similar when what we remembered was being attracted to 1970s rock stars and hating Manson.
We discussed whether Marilyn Manson would have any relevance to our potential age-inappropriate experiences on the old web. While Manson was definitely very popular at that time and a lot of people probably would have copied his style, he wasn't necessarily popular in the furry fandom. However, he WAS popular on MySpace, and while I have no memories of using MySpace, I also know that my parents told me not to use that site because there were "bad things" on it, and if there was a part of me that wanted to take advantage of amnesia to rebel, that part would have likely used that site, especially since other parts of the system would simply never suspect we were using it. This would also explain why, while we normally struggle with the UIs of websites that are unfamiliar to us, SpaceHey (a current website that looks exactly like MySpace) looked oddly familiar to us when we joined it.
As we recovered more headmates from our teen years, we realized it was possible for headmates to have amnesia of their own memories if they had an amnesia-based subsystem. Some headmates found that they had fronted during abuse in the physical world (as opposed to on the internet), but they developed subsystems of amnesiac parts to protect them, as the abuse largely involved something that had "stages" where not all stages were inherently distressing and where having a different part for each stage, especially if they had memories blocked off from each other, made it easier to handle.
A major development occurred when a newly-recovered headmate from 2009 whom Zig remembered was able to tell us of a headmate named Bryan who had high levels of amnesia, had been very directly involved with the theorized events on MySpace, and considered himself to be "the original".
While we didn't outright remember a headmate like this ever existing, it made sense after we put a few things together. As a child, there were a handful of instances where we genuinely didn't understand we weren't AMAB (as opposed to times we knew we had a "girl body" but didn't identify with the concept of acting like a girl). If we were being physically abused in the ways we thought we might have been, it would make sense we would dissociate into another self with a different body.
Most compellingly, though, was the fact that Brian was our grandfather's name. He was the man we were most familiar with from childhood who was most likely not abusing us, and we had always had an odd habit of responding when people called his name. People would ask us why we did that, and we never knew why, but if there was a secret other self who named himself after our grandfather, that would be a good reason.
The more we thought about it, though, we more we realized that, while this came up much less frequently, there were also a handful of times where we responded to the name "Blue", e.g. if someone was calling us that when our hair was that color despite only one headmate being called that at the time and us usually not responding to individual names offline, or when we met someone at a show named Blue.
Then we realized that a large part of us genuinely thought we were a dog when we were a child, but it was easier to remember some of the memories that this part would have had. Our favorite color as a child was blue, but we also grew up with Blue's Clues, and we would have identified more with this part than with Bryan.
If Bryan represented one thing that we felt it was physically impossible for us to be (a boy) that would not be experiencing the same things that the body was, then Blue, as a dog, would also be the same. Furthermore, while I didn't realize before that this would be connected to plurality, I realized I DID have very vivid daydreams about fictional worlds as a child, and I also often imagined that certain characters were real and that I could talk to them. It therefore stood to reason that, as a young child, we dissociated into three "original selves" - which is what we mean by "core" - that developed parts over time due to trauma.
We soon started rapidly recovering headmates with extensive memories that the rest of the system didn't have. This included Trevor (a Nine Inch Nails musicative/factive), who remembered details about what we had done on MySpace, including specific and detailed abuse at the hands of someone named Mari who based their online presence off of Marilyn Manson and was what would now be described as plural. It also included Vitani, a fictive from The Lion King 2 who remembered figuring out sie was a lesbian much sooner than other parts of the system did.
Vitani was also tell us about inhabiting a detailed part of the innerworld based on the world of The Lion King, in which a narrative had played out over the course of our entire life where variations on certain events from the first two movies happened out of order in response to outerworld events. There were many other parts of hir part of the system that were like this, such as a sidesystem full of Narnia fictives, or a sidesystem full of rodent headmates from media like An American Tail or Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
These "kingdoms", as Vitani called them, had many headmates as well as what are likely NPCs, and they basically all involved the narratives of fictional stories taking place in headspace as representations of outerworld events. This included traumatic events we could not fully recall. However, most of these headmates had little to no awareness of the outerworld, so while they can tell us what happened in the innerworld and we can guess what might have happened in the outerworld, we can't always be sure.
While Trevor remembered a headspace in which narratives took place, they were more based on stories we came up with, including ones that were INSPIRED by other fictional media or from real life events, than being directly introjected from fiction. They were centered less around a whole world with a grand unifying narrative and moreso around cities or communities where individuals or groups of individuals all had their own narratives that took place in the same general setting but may or may not have been connected to each other.
We then realized that, unexpectedly, a very somber part of the Chronicles of Narnia was playing out in that part of the headspace. It was the part of the story where Narnia ends, as in the end of the world. Blixa acted out the events in headspace with himself as Aslan (the creator and later destroyer of Narnia), but with the twist that, instead of judging the former Narnians as worthy or unworthy, he said that all of them were welcome in the land of Voidelia now.
We then found out that the reason we had to do this was because the Narnian headmates, as the original creators of the headspace wall, were maintaining our amnesia on purpose, because they had the most trouble accepting how things were going to change and, by this point, have already changed. While the mechanisms are not fully understood, their part of the headspace was holding the majority of the amnesia together, and while the fictives themselves are fine (although the original creators of the wall do not seem to be around), their headspace - the world of our childhood - is destroyed.
The following day, we all got the intense sense that Blue and Bryan were no longer in the system. Trevor's and Vitani's appearances had changed in headspace, too - among other differences, Trevor looked for the first time that he had aged in real time, and Vitani had a spiked collar. They both began to identify with certain things from our past that, previously, we had thought of as being done by the original selves of their superclusters but not by them themselves.
We all then realized that the destruction of Narnia had not just been symbolic. Blue, Bryan, and Blixa were never meant to all know about each other at the same time. Furthermore, due to transitioning and discovering otherkin, it was no longer impossible to us to think that we truly were a man or even a dog. While having the headmates associated with the other selves is beneficial, as they hold trauma and memories that no other headmate does and many of them are excited to become part of the outerworld, we are no longer someone who needs to have three selves that don't know about each other. If we refer to "Blue" and "Bryan" as entities that currently exist within the system, these are collective names for parts of the system that were originally connected to them or that represent them.
Therefore, when Blixa told the former Narnians that they were all accepted in the system now, Blue and Bryan split apart and then fused with several headmates within the system. Blixa received parts of both of them and is most likely the only headmates who did. However, Trevor received part of Bryan, Vitani received part of Blue, and it is believed that any headmate in their superclusters who is part of a narrative where they strongly represent that supercluster's respective core received part of that core as well.
In the sense that "integration" refers to the process of lowering amnesia and becoming more functional and not (for the most part) in the sense of fusion, our system is beginning a process of integration. However, we prefer the term "Unification" not just due to preferring planetspeak but because not everyone thinks of "integration" in the sense in which we mean it, and we don't like using a word that is commonly meant to describe something that is very much not currently going on.
With regards to the innerworld conflicts between different parts of the system, it's clear that the direction of our life currently largely favors what Bryan would want, but Blue was not wrong in considering some of Bryan's desires to be dangerous if acted out in certain ways. While both of these parts of us need to be accepted, Blue also needs to understand that walling away certain parts of themself isn't the way to go, no matter how scary those parts of themself may be, and they will have to make efforts to understand and accept those parts of themself.
At the same time, Bryan is generally more dysfunctional and traumatized than Blue due to remembering different experiences more often and seldom if ever finding or being allowed healthy outlets for just about anything. While Blue did mistreat Bryan, Bryan cannot resent Blue or seek ways to punish them.
While the Unification consumes a lot of our time and energy, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions and traumatic memories we need to recover, we are glad to be doing this work. We had no idea that there were vast amounts of the system who had, by and large, never ever interacted with the outerworld. We are helping them learn about life as we live it and helping them find things to do. We are also learning how they understand our life, as their innerworld memories do relate to our outerworld experiences, and someday we will understand the full story of Local Void.