When You are an Outlier among Outliers.
We warmly welcome the Unfiltered Universe, a poly-fragmented system, our friends, and now also co-hosts joining us on this podcast project! In this episode they will introduce themselves, and tell us about the difficulties that come with introductions and explanations, when your system structure is so complex and unlike any other..
How would you& introduce yourselves?
Hi everybody, everymany! We are the Unfiltered Universe System. We are a pretty big system, we’re poly-fragmented, and we house a lot of subsystems and a lot of different layers to how we’re organized. It’s hard for us to talk on individual headmate basis, we will just generally talk about a headmate or trends between headmates rather than talk about individual headmates. We are a really big mixed bag, we have all kinds of entities that we exist as within our very large system.
I don’t know, it’s hard to explain really. We always have trouble with that part, the introduction. It’s like for the most part we just relate as a conglomeration rather than how other systems often talk about what headmate is fronting. It’s like, well, we’re never fronting alone so that doesn’t really apply. What’s funny is, until we met other people that could tell who was in front, it never bothered us at all. We just shifted from fronter to fronter without really noticing the difference, because it’s just like passing a microphone between team members. Everyone who was fronting was already fronting together, it’s just now the nuance has shifted a little bit. Meanwhile we know that the fronters are only part of the picture. So yeah I guess it’s rougher to try and explain than it is to experience, let’s put it that way.
Are there any concepts that you might use to describe your system to other people or to yourselves?
The thing that we’re finding most helpful right now, and this has shifted several times throughout, you know, uhm I guess this section is often called “system mapping”. We’ve been trying to do system mapping since syscovery, which for us began I guess really in late 2018 and extended into 2020. I mean it was a really long process and I would argue that it’s still ongoing. And we find that most of the ways people talk about mapping just really don’t suit us at all. We’re liking the term “layered”, because we’re finding that every entity or headmate/person in our system has different roles and different cultural ways of being, compared to every other.
One of the things that happens with us that we haven’t heard of from other systems is the way we relate to our body. Because none of us completely identify, well, I won’t say none of us, but none of us present right at the moment identify with the body like as an ownership thing. I don’t think pretty much almost any of us feel like we own the body when we’re fronting. It’s not our body personally, but a lot of us have specialties within the body itself. Like we have left side people and right side people, and we have some hand specific headmates, a leftand and a right hand basically specialist. But they’re not always the same one, it turns out that almost every headmate that we meet on a level that interfaces with other people in the physical world has counterparts that do the same thing in a little different flavor. So just because you’ve met one or met somebody one time, doesn’t mean you’ve met like their whole family or like their whole working team.
We also have layers of time, like we have people that are seasonal. Like we have spring people and summer people and winter people and they all have like different needs and different tendencies, and there’s just a very different systemic culture around seasons. Mostly it’s winter people right now and winter culture is, you know, homebody, most of us are not really super social, not that we’re antisocial, but we’re not like looking to go hang out. That’s more spring and fall. Except at night and it’s so funny that we have like day people and night people. I guess summer people are kind of pretty active in the morning, which is of course due to time difference, we’re American and you guys are Europeans, so there’s a big time difference, so you guys only get to really talk to our morning people.
I guess it’s so difficult to just explain yourselves to somebody else who probably does not have this plural experience?
Oh yeah. I mean that’s one of the first things that was really a shock to us and very hard to know is that the way we talk to ourselves in the headspace relies a lot on passive influence. So we give so much more information than we could possibly put into words when we communicate with one another. We did not understand that for a while, that we didn’t have the ability to communicate with other embodied people in that same way and, you know, it’s like “oh wow”. It’s just, it was a shock and there was a grief involved in that where it’s like “oh my goodness, I will never be able to communicate with another person from a different body in the same way that I communicate with my headmates.”
My language is always going to be my language, and I’m never going to be able to speak my mother tongue with another entity anywhere ever. And because we realize that us putting things into words, changing our internal thought talk into spoken English, which is the only language that we speak, and you know, that’s a translation for us already. And no one’s ever going to be able to translate it back, no one’s ever going to be able to speak our thought talk to us. Which makes sense and it’s a good thing, you know. It would be terrible, honestly, if anybody could. But we had thought that they could for the majority of our life, and we’ve been around for almost five decades now and that’s a lot of lived experience with all your memories and understanding relationships based on a misunderstanding about the nature of being, about the nature of communication, about the nature of connection, right?
Would you like to share what is particularly challenging for you when you try to conceptualize yourselves and bring that across to people outside your system?
I don’t know that I have a very good example. I know that almost every time we try and do it, it’s difficult. It’s like, where do you start? It’s a struggle even when we’re talking to other plurals, to try and talk about our system, because we’re so oddball, right? We feel like we’re an outlier of outliers. And the thing is once we get started though, most culturally plural people, either people that have experience with plurality, they’ve had plural friends or family members who are plural themselves or plurals, once we get started they generally pick it up right away.
But it is hard to explain. Because we know that we are an outlier of an outlier, we are not going to be representative of the community, right? So sometimes we have trouble speaking up at all about ourselves and our experience, because we don’t want to step over anyone. Like anytime we try and use a term a little bit differently for some concept in our system, in a group setting often we will be corrected, you know. I recognize when they do that it’s because that term means a lot to them, that they have some core selfhood attachment to a relationship with that concept, right? And they need it defined in a way that works for them. I’m happy to just let them have it, I don’t mind um because often that’ll be, you know.
It’s like we all should have the space and the permission to be fragile in that way, right? I mean we are trying to hold our self structures up against scrutiny from a society and a world that has consistently told us that we are not allowed to exist. Not only are we impossible, but if we show up we’re faking or we’re just throwawayable crazy, right? And, you know, we’re so easily dismissed that I don’t want anyone to feel dismissed by me misusing a term that means so much to them. When I know I’m trying to use all this stuff off-label, because there isn’t a language for what I’m trying to talk about yet. Well, at least not that I found, you know.
And when you’re an outlier of an outlier, it’s kind of hard to find community. But I’ve been trying, and the plural community has been the closest one we’ve found so far and maybe later we’ll find out that plural is the large umbrella that holds the other thing that we also are. Because I have a funny feeling that we’re also something else.
I think it’s in the nature of how we talk about poly-fragmentation, where there’s two different kind of camps of poly-fragmentation in communication within the plural community. One is a large number of headmates, and the other is headmates divided into subsystems or categories within just headmates. And for us, we fall into both. Like when we talk to anyone, and we use a headmate name, we know internally that that headmate name represents a team of headmates that are working together to present a unified front at that time. But the members of that team might change from time to time, so it’s not always the same.
So when you meet Rebel in our system, she may not be the same Rebel every time you meet her um because Rebel is a person, but she’s more a figurehead in a way. Where, you know, this is team Rebel, and if you’re on team Rebel when Rebel shows up, you know, the teammates on that team will be different depending on the circumstances. Like the people who were available on team Rebel in the summertime will be different than in the fall or especially late fall near the middle where it’s changing seasons. Then like it’s busy and everybody’s around.
I would compare it to a band. Like Pink Floyd had different members over different times, but they’ve still all been under the guise Pink Floyd, right? And the music might change over time but still following a similar vibe. It’s more like that than a sports team for us because it is a little bit supposed to be more cohesive, but it is also about the product that exists throughout time. Like our storylines we’re responsible for, you know, we’re responsible for the expressions in this body we live in. And so if we are fronting with Rebel, we have to behave like Rebel does. And Rebel also does exist too, which is so confusing.
It is a lot when we think about it but really it’s simple when you’re experiencing it. Because it’s just automatic, it’s just the way we are. It only looks weird when you dissect it. Once you take it into pieces it looks very weird, but it’s only when we’re trying to describe it to other people that it really looks that way. But also it makes sense in the other way about how it’s formed, because if our headmates are modeled off of what we thought people were, and we misunderstood we were different from other people, then especially the headmates that have been around a really long time are going to be more distorted in that way than headmates that are more recent, where we’ve been more accepted as whoever we were, rather than constantly having to adjust ourselves to a society that didn’t want to allow us to be who we were.
We realize that’s part of the reason that we are so fragmented and so layered is that we were not given an onus of self, we were not allowed to be ourselves. Every time we tried to be ourselves, someone would viscerally react and we’d split basically every time someone told us we were not allowed to be who we thought we were at the time. We would change, and that person who we were before would still be there trying to express themselves, trying to exist, but there also would be this new layer added on there of who now we’re supposed to be, now that we were doing that wrong. And every time it happened, it made it more complicated, and it’s just been happening to us consistently throughout our entire lives.
It happens to us now, it’s just, now we’re finally given enough personal agency to really observe the process and enough language through exposure to other plurality. And us all working together to try and create a language that allows for our experiences together to be able to articulate what’s really going on. And now that we can, we might actually be able to find some cohesiveness to try and change the inherent nature of the process and not split so much. Because that would be nice. It would be nice to be more consistent it would be nice to be able to define our needs a little better.
Would you say that since you discovered your system, you found more cohesiveness within yourselves?
Oh yeah, absolutely! And it’s funny, we were always there, of course, and we were always communicating with each other and we were always doing that, but we didn’t know that we were allowed to have voices, until we saw somebody else do it. And then we tried it and it worked, you know. See, and that’s going to sound like we made this up, but what I mean is, we’ve always been there but once we were allowed to listen, like once I was allowed to accept. I thought that would might have been a type of echolalia, the different accents that we use, and sometimes it is very similar. Like we’ll hear an accent and then that accent will give a person in our system with that accent permission to talk. It’s like, “oh we’re around someone who uses that accent, then so and so will be able to come up front and talk.”
And then of course they bring with them all the baggage that they carry, and we’re trying not to think about it that way with our headmates, because it sounds derogatory. The point is that we don’t all carry the same triggers, so we’re not all vulnerable to the same triggers. I mean that’s part of the purpose of creating a system, you know, if you’re doing it defensively. And we absolutely did. It’s like our system is here to try and keep us true to ourselves and existing in the way that we really do exist, rather than just in the ways that we’ve been “allowed” to exist. And as that became harder and harder we became more and more complicated as a result. Because you couldn’t stop us, we refuse. So we’re just gonna be who we are.
But yeah, once we really were given permission to listen, uhm you know, the fact that, yeah, I mean we just literally switched and like we can hear our voice be different now and, because we’re nervous and that kind of thing, we’re not going to know which headmate we went to, but we know it’s a different headmate, right? Which means, you know, we’re probably still in what would be called syscovery, because of that. Because there are so many of us, it almost is impossible for us ourselves to keep track of everybody in a way that makes sense to anybody else. Meanwhile we just hold on to everything the best we can, do the best we can for each other and the system and move forward anyway. Life doesn’t stop just because I’m not sure who I am right now.
Anything that you would like to share, any advice or any words of encouragement for our listeners?
Oh sure! The main thing is, believe in yourself and your system. Just because you’ve never met anyone like you, doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to exist. It’s okay if you’re bringing something unique to the whole world. Even though, when we look at it realistically, we’re probably not, there’s billions of us on the planet. We probably just won’t ever have access to the other entities, other people like us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with your existence.
That was something that was really hard for us to learn, and we still struggle with that sometimes, some of our headmates will not accept that at all. They will only accept what they see in the world, as they have trouble validating their own existence. Which is fine, I think that’s a pretty normal thing, where it’s like, “oh gosh, now that I see it in the world, I know it’s okay for it to be in the world, I can be that too.” And then you accept the parts of yourself that are like that, has been our experience.
And if it’s your experience also, one, you’re not alone, we just haven’t found each other yet, right? And the other part is, don’t let anybody else define your system or your selfhood for you. You need to relate to it in your very own way, so that way you can bring that to discussion, bring that to your relationships and then you can be your authentic self and negotiate from there. And you don’t even have to explain it to anybody, you just have to make sure that you internally accept it.
And it’s isolating to be making that adjustment, you know, making those bridges all the time, realizing that there’s a gap between how other people perceive themselves and how you relate to yourself, has been our experience. And if that’s you, you’re not alone. It’s just hard to meet people. It’s hard to reach out, because, you know, life is going to smack you down and say you’re not allowed to be that.
Society needs things to be predictable and orderly and go with the flow that they have set up, rather than the flow that you actually exist in. So if you discover you’re outside that flow, it doesn’t mean it’s something wrong with their boxes they’re shoving you in, there’s nothing wrong with you. I mean we still are responsible for the ways we use this expression in our weirdness, but being weird or being, existing in a manner that other people don’t, shouldn’t be offensive to them. We’ve always been so confused why human beings get so invested in other people’s self-concepts. I’m like, how does someone else’s self-concept offend you? I mean what does that have to do with you, you know?
But as soon as we’ve tried to express deeper self-concepts with people before we met the plural community, we would get dirty looks and sometimes a friendship would end like immediately. It would be a line that people were not willing to cross and so, if that’s happened to you, I’m sorry. That grief you carry, that pain you carry is so super valid. We see you. Oh my gosh, we see you!
And all you can do is just go, well, I mean someone in the back of our headspace right now is singing “Another One Bites the Dust”. Because at some point it just becomes funny. Humor is just grease for the friction between our internal reality that we have to live in, that is our existence. We are who we are. We can’t help that, and a society that doesn’t want to accept us, the dissonance between those two things causes a lot of friction. Sometimes laughter, and being able to find the humor in the situation will grease that. We find it provides space for us to exist anyway, rather than just accepting the damage that I think people in society aren’t even necessarily trying to inflict most of the time. It’s just, they’re completely ignorant about our existence.
It’s really hard for people who identify as their bodies to handle people like us who absolutely don’t. It’s like, we collectively own this body and we use this body, but we are not this body, you know. We are collectively responsible for what happens in this body and everything, you know, we have a responsibility to the life and the body and all the relationships attached to that, big and small. But individually, that’s not us.
For some reason that idea is very scary to singlets, it doesn’t appeal to them at all and they don’t understand it, they don’t want to understand it. Which leaves us at a communication deficit we have to as plurals um translate everything we think and that we do into a singlet language culturally, so they understand and we have to pretend to be singlets, so we can try and talk like them, and we have to meet them where they are, because they’re too scared to meet us where we are, is my experience of that. But that translation factor is exhausting. Just exhausting. And for us, it leaves us with fewer resources to be cohesive, right? If we are going to pull together and make more cohesive teams, a lot of that energy is lost just trying to translate for people who are more invested in invalidating us, quite frankly.
But we have to function in the world, you know. And we want to!
Any last words you would like like to leave in this episode?
Thank you for having us! It’s very validating to have someone think that what we have to say is worth sharing with people. We hope it’s helpful to anybody who’s listening that, you know, that if you need to get more complicated in order to understand yourself better, so be it. Just keep going!
We’re all in this together, you know, we’re all gravitationally tied down to a rock that’s flinging around a roiling ball of plasma, it doesn’t make sense, you know. Life itself is so amazing and weird and precious, and you know, it’s like we are all just really weird drips in what’s possible.
And the struggles we have sometimes, when you get it into perspective, you just need space. And the truth is, there’s plenty of space in the cultural narrative for all of us. And once we give each other more space, then we can settle down and figure out exactly who we really are and meet everybody with what we’ve really got.
We love when people tell us the deepest places they can go, that they’re comfortable sharing. Because that’s our favorite places to be and to live. Like, you know, the the bodily day-to-day stuff, sure. But if we get to really resonate in our home, our home is much deeper and much more philosophical, you know. And I also say that in the morning, in the winter time, haha.
And we’re so happy to have you here on this podcast series as our co-hosts!
Thank you again so much! We look forward to having more conversations, both in person and for your podcast, this is great!
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