The Plural Experience: Kinship

plurality, sort of by definition, is maybe the opposite of lonely. you have multiple people in your head and a common sort of joke about it is “you’ll never be alone again!”. but uh. you can still be lonely.

plurality is sort of fundamentally othering because of this thing called singlet normativity. essentially, it is normative to have one person in your head instead of multiple.

so i think an important part of being plural, like being queer or another form of neurodivergent, is kinship. (Relationship by nature or character; affinity.) especially for plurality. because it’s like near impossible to figure out this stuff on your own.

if you’re like me, your plurality sort of hid itself from you for many years. i only figured it out after sort of having a mental break. when you figure this stuff out, you have all of these sorts of questions about why and how to do plurality. (the answer is there’s not really any right way, and not really any normative plural experience…)

this sort of post-syscovery (system-discovery) is (or was to me) the most vulnerable period. if i recieved the wrong information here it could have set me on the wrong course for like months or years of my system life. thankfully, i had just happened to surround myself with systems (shout out to exacord, vapidposting, and all my other awesome friends) who helped me figure out a lot of this. (systems also tend to be queer, and nice people for some reason…) i know a lot of plural systems!

knowing other systems really helps you feel more accepted. if you’re not around enough systems as a system, i don’t really have any advice for finding systems really. look for the pluralkit bot on discord i guess? if you’re a system and struggling for connection my discord is @nixpkgs feel free to chat about plurality to us :)