How We Knew, and System Name

(Repost & reformat of an oldie but goldie from Tumblr. Which will keep happening until we catch them all lol.)

Somesys asked us on an ask game awhile back how we chose our polyplex name, how long we've been a system or how long we've known, and the process behind our (re)discovery.

For starters: we're protogenic-endogenic, that is to say, we have always been a system, we were born-as, so it was never really a matter of "how long we have been a system" and always a matter of finding the words to describe our experiences, honestly.

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Anyways, the post/ask we received on the other site ended up unlocking what we call The Infodump, and so we figured we might as well share The Infodump on here as well lol. Good luck. xD

What’s your system name if you have one, and how did you choose it?

Pffft. This one isn't very creative lol.

Anyways. Our system name is Rusanya (short for "The Rusanya Collective," which happens to be short for "The Rusanya[n] Collective/Federation of Subsystems and Sidesystems" lol) and we actually came up with it when we were much smaller than this on the assumption we would not stay as small as we were as "a" system at the time. We had to have been like....twenty-five people, at maximum, back then.

~ Initially signed off by: Hailey (Admin), Zhongli, Nagisa

How long have you been a system and/or known of your system? and How did you discover your system? What was the process?

We will just answer these together as they kind of segway into each other honestly. We've been a system since birth and, well...we think we've just never had the words to describe it we guess. There's a lot of things that kind of point us in that direction. We have talked about it several times in many places, but if we may do a quick review for the class:

• We could "see ghosts" in preschool through first grade that may have actually been headmates. Which is further proven by Ricky (he/him) never being in our yearbooks for elementary school, like, at all.
• We had a headmate, or something at least. He name was Christopher. He was this like, extremely immature middle school boy who we swear to god was literally just out there to hurt us when we were in preschool. Blonde dude with bright blue eyes and a buzzcut LOL. The teacher would always pull him to the side to "talk to" him about the bullying, but their responses made no sense in the context of the things Christopher would say to her. Like, that seems very blatantly plural to us especially since he was one of the most clearly autonomous folks in the little system group we had at the time in our headspace or whatever.
• Also from first grade: we went from BBQ sauce being spicy and burning our tongue once to it not being spicy at all, like, literally, as it was as soon as the teacher stated there's no way for it to be spicy. Which sort of makes us think we were already either splitting by then or just straight up had multiple selves already and we just never fucking thought about it. Like, we didn't know that was Not Normal. We did not have any spectacularly traumatic events that we can recall in our life until late middle first grade to very late first grade, and this was an incident from maybe our first month or so being in first grade.
• The projection thing happened a lot at home too, but it was one specific squirtle (pokemon) instead of Christina, Kelli, and Ricky, and they really just seemed to like dance? Or stereotypical mariachi bands? Anyways, that squirtle and then Christina and Kelli kind of fused into one individual, while Raymond and Ricky stayed their own separate people.
• Raymond has described before the unintentional process of creating a second person to control the body when it left the realm of our consciousness. Many times -- it's actually a little horrific how much this man remembers of our childhood and how well everything he as said thus far fits together with Just Everything.
• Our fascination with like, "possession" and stuff that was similar to it through a conceptual lens, even though we HATED horror movies. On that note, the plot/justification to the plot for The Crucible never made sense to us either when we were in high school, because of the same thing. The accusations that kicked off the entire plot did not make sense, and we fixated on it pretty much the entire assignment. Like...we could tell there was some kind of Super Secret Special Bigotry surrounding possession that nobody talked about, and then we realized that bigotry was plurmisia and the reason nobody talked about it is because they were complicit in said bigotry, even if they believed they caught everything.
  
• Our first trauma-based incident where we can discern an actual person coming from it was late elementary school. "Late Elementary School," here means fourth and fifth grade, specifically fifth grade. There were certainly things before that but nobody had really split off from us at that point. We can literally figure out where Silva came from, and possibly Grapefrost, down to the time period because of it. Grapefrost has a literal clay mask they made of herself in fifth grade of elementary. Like, we have been around for Forever. We just had zero clues.
• Our first soulbonding experiences were likely in middle school. We had very weird obsessions with "what if X character were in OUR WORLD???" and even had this Secret Thing where we would let them "see through my/our eyes," which in all honesty is probably how we learned to switch. Like.
• We literally learned to switch without the help of other systems. That probably sounds absolutely insane to plurals these days, but even back in the early 2000s, 2010s, unless you were like, explicitly aware of plurality -- which was often assumed to be heavily medicalized and called MPD; maybe DID and DD-NOS later on. Honestly we think this is kind of a miracle. In that nobody noticed and in that we learned to switch in the first place. (Insert comment here about "kids these days" but like, in a positive way.)
• We actually ended up running into the concept of endogenic systems specifically in high school. And then subsequently forgetting about it LOL. We made an account specifically to ask a (now-defunct) tumblr blog if "curious singlets" could follow to learn to be better allies. LMAO. Nobody creates a tumblr account solely to send a question like that unless they were already endogenic, sorry. Meanwhile we also had Gon and Killua from HunterxHunter projecting themselves in the middle of our speech classroom and being completely self-autonomous, with the rest of us trying our best to not get distracted. We thought this was just what everyone meant by having characters running through your head.
• We don't exactly know where this lies in the spectrum of our timeline yet, but there was definitely a one-time event where a SHITTON of plural stuff happened all at once: we were on the swings at the park at [REDACTED] -> we were sitting there and we were talking to ourselves internally while on the swings. some people near us has been talking about the USian flag for some reason. -> not only did we have a whole discussion about how fucked up the us is internally, as a system, we had several Hetalia fictives who had just been Sick Of This Shit(TM), with the This Shit(TM) being sick of their canon and how its unfolded just in general as well as "in realtime" as we jokingly put it these days. So someone LITERALLY sent out little aura strings to bring them back to our system, because why the fuck not? -> Anyways, our headmate Ghost switched to front right after that and gave their piece on the USian flag just to be informed that discussion was "five minutes ago," and it took literally EVERYTHING in us to not have an Autistic meltdown and scream at them that they were lying. We don't normally look at or even think about body language if we can help it but there was just...an atmosphere of confusion from these people even when we pushed it even a bit that was Very Different than our experiences with gaslighting, so we just...did not poke the bear more than that. We think this is maybe when some of us made that promise to never be separated again as a system? But like everyone who lives here in our head is very aware of the promise regardless of if they were there or not back then haha. Like it's a whole discussed and disseminated thing.
• When we were teeny tiny little things we thought Yu-Gi-Oh! was fucking stupid as a premise because we just thought Everyone Was Like That(TM). We fucking despised it and avoided it like the plague because it was uncomfortable how much of a caricature it felt like things were, but, y'know. Toddlers and elementary schoolers probably can't explain that very well.
• The reason we were thinking about Yu-Gi-Oh years later was because we once again ran into the system community at university and started doing some basic looking-things-up. Sysmedicalists and anti-endogenics in particular were extremely uncomfortable for us to look at. We mainly just ignored them tbh.
• When writing our university essays in our earlier years, some of us would literally type in different colors, fonts, and use different brackets when giving ourselves input on rough drafts. Yeah, sure, that's totally a thing singlets do arewerite????
• Pretty sure the reason we found out we were a system was because Nagisa from Assassination Classroom decided to talk back to us about our headcanons, actually, at least from the perspective of whoever typed this all up at the timw. Which is fucking funny because soulbonding isn't even inherently plural, but there's a large association between the two and whoever was fronting at the time just went: "HOLY SHIT THAT'S POSSIBLE??" lol. If we recall correctly, we found the idea of soulbonding alongside/close to a mention/discussion of endogenic systems. Like if it wasn't right next to each other, then we must have looked at one first and then the other in quick succession and then something clicked. If we ever find our exact trail ever again, we will definitely try to put it back together.
  
• We think we came out online about a year or so later from the word endogenic a second time, and offline followed a couple of months after that. We are now pretty blatant about it. Online we make it a big deal and offline we don't like, make it a huge thing unless you're fucking annoying, but like, we don't try to hide it either.