Fragmentation (the current crew, and problems therewith) & love

[azurelunatic]

ataniell93 observed that there'd been a good bit of personality issues with me lately. And, well, yeah.

Recap: We were born one soul to the customer, and all was well until school hit. Being called by one name at home and another at school, an environment I was not prepared to handle as myself, served to create a distinct but subtle personality difference. Then adolescence came, and unleashed the usual complement of hell upon my unsuspecting body chemistry. Hello, bouquet of new personalities. Nice to meet you. Things finally simmered down, and the last few years have been fairly stable. pyrogenic met the old gang at the point where things were getting very intense, so he's not likely to view anything short of complete dissolution and crying screaming rages and extreme suicidal ideation and disturbing fiction as anything entirely out of the ordinary. (Fifteen and sixteen were not good years, aside from CTY.)

We copy ourselves for protection. We create a backup personality to come out and handle the crap that life throws at us. Seems that Naomi's been having a chance to geek out more, good. Marah has either essentially gone into hibernation or merged with me most of the time. (I am not sure which it is, but she is not currently very active at all as such.) Work is such that garnetdagger feels as if she ought to be the one out, but that is not a good idea for any number of reasons, the most notable of which... well...

Those who have recently read A Wind from the South will note the rather straightforward, proactive, and forthright manner with which Mati deals with those people who are causing difficulty to her. Now. Who is garnetdagger's Patroness, again? Heh. Imagine the difficulties that the attitude could cause in a work environment.

In consequence, there are three of us active now -- me, Naomi, and Joan. Joan is the new one who's risen up in response to the work environment. She's not particularly nice. She jokes about hitting people in the face with a brick. She is very good with sarcasm. She is very good with office politics. She can organize like anything. She does not like it when people make her job more difficult. She bears a grudge like anything.

The hardest part of having a new active personality is finding what name fits her. It's sometimes a bit of a scary process. Most preferable, of course, is when she comes with a name, or names herself in some way. Marah and Naomi did that. Shanna came with a name. It was really hard with Joan, because it's been a very long time since there was a personality with the body-name. But that's how she's addressed, and that's damn well her name.

I don't want to be her. Like with Marah at first, I really don't much like her. This is because I spent so very long and hard work trying to make us nice, dammit. Ladylike. Polite. It passes in Dagger because Dagger is a Warrior and not subject to the same rules as a Lady. (It's not about "should". It's about "is".) Granted most of the foundation work for Joanie/Azz-me was laid down in response to "I like the self I am around Darkside: I want to be that self all the time, not just around him." And Darkside likes Joan. Darkside opens up to Joan. Darkside opens up to Joan far more than he opens up to me.

It's a situation. It's something that we're going to need to keep a careful eye on. Joan won't be taking over the rest of our life. Work is being encouraged to call us "Loonie", because while they aren't getting Joanie, and it would be unwise to tag myself Azz, Loonie works. It's a balancing act. It's something scary, always. Whenever there's a new situation, there's a new personality.

I just haven't had enough time to think about it, much less talk about it.

Meanwhile, I have been essentially in love with the universe. pyrogenic and ataniell93 mentioned that the Darkside thing is something that is more just accepted than understood. It started out as straightforward unrequited love as done by me, then moved into more esoteric territories. Currently it's doing a very good imitation of the Arthurian ideal of Courtly Love, the mostly-chaste adoration of an impossible Ideal Love from a safe distance. The emotion has essentially taken on a life of its own, and is rapidly coming to be a stable constant in my life second only to my rather devout and unwavering sense of what the Vulcans term a'tha.

I don't think I'm going to start arguing with it at this point in time. It's enough that I'm experiencing it and it lends an unspeakable beauty to everything around me. I wish I could share it with all of you. Sometimes it feels like a sacred charge, to experience this and to record it and report it so that people who haven't found it can taste of it through my poor words.

... and, reading that over again, I do think that Marah's merged with the main core rather than gone dormant. Marah's the one who was the devotee of Aphrodite, see, and while she was having a difficult time with it through and after the events starting in February, she -- we -- seem to have recovered a lot of our faith in love.


We are also dizzy-weaving tired, and have to be up at eight tomorrow to depart at nine. So. Bedtime for all of us.