A little thought plonked into my brain, regarding the naming of Lunatics. The initial split was caused by having me answer to the formal form of my name that I'd never been forced to answer to before, in a new and stressful environment. It's been established that I will establish new personalities for any sufficiently stressful environment, and that there have been workplace personalities before. It's also been fairly well established that [legal name] is basically a different person than Azz.

The new little thought is: what if most workplace environments (particularly those I've been in) are inherently stressful enough to cause splits, and the fact that I am answering to my legal name at the workplace is sufficient to alienate me from my legal name, because she gets the shitwork?

It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, at home I answered to the diminutive, not the actual legal name. Really, the only person who calls me by the actual legal name and not the diminutive who I could not do without is the best friend. (I'm sure there are more I would miss eventually, but I cannot do without him.)

With that in mind, I now wonder what would happen if I got a workplace where I could in fact be Azz, and then some annoying kicked up. Would we retreat into another identity there as well?

I think it's been a Naomi night. First Dagger got to team up with Naomi and set the spammer dead to rights. Professional phrasing and venom: Dagger. Research and indignation: Naomi.

Then Naomi got to play with the words with the person with the tag problem. Such fun! She's really getting better with her words! (Read: she's gaining advanced access to the group language library.) She still doesn't have a good time with words when it's just her and things are going all weird and funky and there are too many things to be done, and talking seems like a bad idea, but at least those are now the exception rather than the norm.

In other news of the funky and bizarre, there is scent coming in the window that hits my "This is what Darkside and his clothes smell like" alert. By the Sekrit Language of Scent Omens, that means that he's thinking about me. (Why do I have the Pink-Haired Old Lady's voice narrating my words in my head? Oh, I know. Because I'm tired. [My story's not the norm.])

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.

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I'm Eve made a distinct impression on me. I was already well on my way to fragmentation, with the two separate lives of home and school, plus all the teenage personality experimentation selves I created while trying to decide what "me" I was supposed to become...

The book put a name on what I was experiencing the edges of. There were other people out there like that. Chris Costner Sizemore had an extreme case. I decided that what had happened to her was too scary, and proceeded to make sure that there was harmony throughout the Collective, once it formed. The beginning stages had already been set for serious fragmentation -- I was Joan at school, Joanie at home. Two different cultures. Two different names. Eventually, two different girls. (One boyfriend tried calling me "Joanie-Joan". I abhorred the nickname. It felt wrong. In retrospect, it may have been self-preservation, to keep my selves separate, to keep the strategy working.)

After reading the book, the outlook on the world changed in a slight but significant way. Circumstances were no longer forcing us to keep creating new selves by default, and collapsing them into one or the other of us -- we could choose to create one of us to face something, and we could keep conflicting stuff that needed to be kept isolated separate from the rest of our day-to-day operating personalities. We could choose. We could control it. We could sit and talk to ourselves, and no one else, no one outside the Collective, ever had to know.

This proved invaluable when the depression first started hitting. I would later learn that I have a family background of depression, and that Dad did not get diagnosed or treated until after I left the house. The major opinion of home on mental health professionals was that they were more nuts than the people who went to see them, they would discover problems that you didn't actually have, make any already-existing issues worse, and that if one had problems, one would do well to keep them politely to oneself. And so the little poisonous thoughts, the ones that said, "You suck. Life sucks. Why not just die?" did not get aired to my major confidante, my mother, and remained rankling inside. (My riposte to Dad's homily about "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", which would have been, "Depression is a permanent problem," was fortunately never brought up in family discussion.)

Without Mama to turn to, and it being one of the things that Wasn't Discussed In The Family, not my sister either, who did I have left? My high school buddies? Ha. I learned within the first week that some things were safe and some things were not, and something that deep and vulnerable would not have been safe to talk about. That left ... me. Myself. I. Her. Them. Us. We.

It started out as writing in a notebook to myself, stream-of-consciousness. I wrote what was on the mind, and then the words started coming out weird -- not like an alien, but like a note passed back and forth in class. Two different streams of thought intersecting, in two different handwritings. It was a delight, having a friend I could tell anything to, someone who loved me unconditionally, someone I could trust absolutely. I was fourteen.

Gradually, two handwritings became three, and more. There was a babble on the pages, writing swapping from tiny to loopy to angular to smooth and everywhere in between. There were names, self-images, a whole cast of characters, all engaged in the somewhat scary struggle to get "me" (the main front personality) through high school intact -- and most importantly, alive.

Little things, around my room. I put up the mirrors I had gotten, finally. I like the property of mirrors that they help me see things in a different angle than I would have originally considered them. I have the three black-framed oval mirrors marching diagonally down the wall by my bed, just as they should be. I moved the Darth Maul poster to make room for them.

I looked in and I saw her again, of course. It's been a long time since I've had a mirror of my own, that I could see her in. I saw her, a few times, in the window of the cafeteria in the mornings, but... it's been a long time. I may have pointed her out to Darkside, that morning. I'm rather sure I mentioned her name to him.

Bit sad right now. No particular reason. Seems like all of my single guy-friends are named David or have David somewhere in their names, or at least have their names start with a D. Well, one exception, but he might as well still be taken.

Not that I care anymore.

Dennis is right. All the single girls out there are in love with somebody, and they'll grouch about it to anyone who will listen, including the single guys who'd be more than happy to date them.

I'm a responsible, well-educated young woman who ought to have more on her mind than sex and dating. Right? Right? So then why am I so bitter about the whole thing? I had my chance to end the whole damn game and get married and never have to worry another day in my life about someone to go to sleep next to, who'd kiss me goodnight and love me forever.

So what do I do? The instant I start learning a little more about myself, like who the hell I actually am, I dump him after realizing that the me I thought I was really wasn't me anymore. I dump him in hopes of dating one of the two perfect gentlemen in the world. Of course, he chooses my sister rather than me, and I don't really blame him. Seems like guys who date me get dumped, shredded, heartbroken, and end up wishing they hadn't. I'm saner than I used to be, but tell that to the guys I've scared off within the last couple months.

He was hoping I'd be attractive. I'm still not sure what he thought of me physically. He was hoping we'd hit it off. I'm a little too religious for him. He was hoping we'd have compatible personalities. All of my personalities liked him. That was a little too scary for him.

Since then, of course, I seem to have lost them, but that begs the question, what the hell happened to them? Multiples don't just disappear like that, do they?

Well, no, not normally. But then I've never been normal. Multiples usually show up thanks to some huge childhood trauma. Mine showed up because I was bored in Biology class and started writing notes to myself. Turned out that no one in high school wanted to see me as I really was, so I made up some false faces for myself and wore those. Came to be that it was easier to maintain myself as a mishmash of multiples than to try and have one coherent personality, though there was a primary.

Then I hit college (for the second time) and found for the first time friends who cared about me no matter who I was. My others began getting more time out, and as time progressed it turned out that more than one of me could be out at once. So at one point I tried to bring everyone out at once while meditating upon the Hermit card from the Tarot deck....

It took a few days to fully integrate the fragments, but here I am.