Gaining Familiarity

Becoming familiar with plurality is a strange, intuitive, and counterintuitive process that rewires the brain.
Here's what some of those oft-alluded plural experiences tend to be, to a system or to an observer.

Switching

At first, switches can feel strange. The sensations are unfamiliar, be it like "waking up", a new pair of glasses, or a sliding-into-place sensation inside your head. They can look strange, too - daydreamy eye-glazing, sudden adjustments in posture, wincing, and so on. It's not necessarily accidental, mind - stretching, yawning, scrunching your nose, and clearing your throat can all help deliberately settle in a new front. This works because different headmates tend to utilize the body differently: posture, gait, voice, expression, or even "resting" face.

Over time, you become accustomed to these differences between fronts. As a system, this may help fronts settle, foster acceptance for your own differences, and possibly help you learn to switch deliberately. As an observer, recognising fronts by sight and sound becomes easier – which while not infallible, may help you understand a system more.

Of course, a system may instead choose to signal a change of front explicitly. The obvious "hi, it's [name]" is functional, but can feel objectifying. Instead, swapping name tags or accessories, signatures in chat messages, or even just polling for guesses can help keep friends in the loop.

Switching and fronts also help to inform a system’s internal configuration model. Rapid switching, co-fronts, blurred/empty-feeling fronts, and front ‘variations’ can all challenge a “system of residents” model – but another model (e.g. a system of aspects combining into fronts) might accommodate this easily.

Through acceptance of strange experiences and new interpretations, systems are able to stay familiar to others and themselves. Models change, systems mature, and plurality surprises us with unexpected experiences – but by keeping eyes and minds open, it’s recognisable all the same.

Discovery

Encountering your own systemhood and choosing to accept it can make interacting with world feel suddenly clumsy, messy, and distressing. Over time, you learn to navigate each experience, resolve early-system internal conflicts, and develop functional masking and unmasking skills to face challenges and form connections.

Feeling new to an already settled system can be scary too. You naturally worry over the existing expectations of the system and its friends – and the ways you might push the boundaries of what’s acceptably normal. Being new feels uniquely strange, too - like tasting something you've never imagined before. For some, that’s a nice feeling - freeing, a new experience that the system is capable of. But it's intimidating, and isolating, too. You rely on others, within and outside the system, to accept your place in it.

Settling as a system or headmate is a unique process of connecting the old with the new. This begins with a period of exploration, where you can find - or as a friend, can provide - sufficient space to feel out what feels right: in identity, language, self-expression, tastes, and so on.

In the process of discovering the new, you often begin to recognize the old - from outside and in, parts of that ‘new taste’ start to seem familiar. You might remember points in your past that felt just like it, or a friend might recall a mannerism or interest from long ago that's returned somehow.

Through this process, we (and others) re-meet new parts of ourselves like old friends, and only occasionally encounter entirely new aspects to express and embrace.

Intimacy

Within a system, the ability to communicate between headmates varies wildly. Some systems can converse in their head, some leave eachother notes, and some can’t do either!

Without direct communication, one assumes there's no way to foster positive bonds. However, by observing how others interact with the world, system members still develop opinions of eachother – the foundation of non-verbal intra-system relationships.

Without a word, system members can still do things their headmates struggle with, speak to friends about how they feel about eachother, or even bubble up their feelings and thoughts without being in the front - like ears burning when someone says your name.

Intrasystem relationships are quite unlike a relationship between two bodies, but as you've likely realised, they simply do not need to be.

Of course, plurality adds layers to forming extra-system relationships, too. Over time, friends can come to understand the workings of a system, and recognize its inhabitants fondly. Through this process, friends outside the system can provide better support - shifting unhappy fronts, perceiving subtle differences, and even helping to mediate conflict/feelings between system members.

The tolerance of a friend towards the strangeness of plural existence can provide a system with a rare moment to relax and let their guard down - front less popular headmates, be less cautious over speech patterns and body language, and talk openly about their own experiences and feelings.

As systems, to be known is often a source of terror - but it can also a source of peace.