Compass

Overview

We have one body, and a lot of inhabitants. This is a blog for us to put out thoughts and opinions and criticisms and all sorts of things! (Especially me! Hi! I'm Jason, you'll see me making in-line notes sometimes as JVL - and I talk a hell of a lot!)

"More than one inhabitant" is something that we suspect has occurred throughout a lot of human history in a lot of different forms, and has typically gotten slapped with a "possession" or "disease" label (if it's even been acknowledged as legit all) by (largely xtian) institutions. (Part of our understanding of our own experience with this connects in some ways with trying to reconnect with some of our Jewish heritage, among other things.)

We've also always been like this, even in our earliest memories, and we are really fucking sick of pretending we aren't. We've been slapped with "diagnosis labels" a few times for it as well, but our existence has never been the problem. (I'll be writing some more on that at some point. - JVL)

We have around 6 or 7 people regularly active, but we've had over 45 people visit or pass through.

Quick terms

These are our definitions and takes on these terms; feel free to use them if you want and feel they fit, or alter them to your liking if you want - our definitions aren't supposed to be the absolute only definitions of these words. Fuck linguistic prescriptivism and long live the ability to ask questions and clarify. (We'll also be writing more about definitional mismatch and its pitfalls. That's a big one. - JVL)

Plural
Body with more than one inhabitant.

Singlet
Body with only one inhabitant.

Avatar
Bit more personal of a term that we'll sometimes use for our body than just "the body."

Outspace
Anything that isn't covered under 🔗 Internal Universe.

MS
Abbreviation of "meat-space" or "mass-side"; refers to outside space. (Not sure if this one will come up much; this is more of an internal-use term, but noting just in case.)

Internal universe / internal space / endogenous space (ES)
Internal space. Some plurals term this "headspace," and we'll use "headspace" occasionally in casual speech. It's where we live "in this head." Best singlet analogy is persistent lucid dreaming, I guess, but it's not synonymous to that, considering a number of lucid dreaming concepts aren't exactly as applicable. There's still a lot of things that are possible in internal-universe space that isn't possible in meatspace, though.
Note that "endogenous space" doesn't have jack shit to do with the badly-misused community term "endogenic." The word "endogenous" just means "originating internally." The space I am talking about here originates from inside, hence endogenous space.

Inverse, in-verse
Adjective for internal-space stuff, such as "in-verse body" meaning someone's internal/ES body. Inspired equally from the word inverse ("opposite/inverted," since ES is essentially the opposite of external space), and a shortened form of "internal universe."

Local space, headspace, house
The immediate space where the majority of the household spends their time when they're not piloting, largely managed by Maya and Jarvis, although many of us help maintain it.

ES-mate, esmate
Anybody who isn't an external meat-space person.

Household
The collective of people actively living in/near our space and sharing our body day to day.

Household member, housemate
Preferred term for individuals actively living in/near/sharing our body. (Not synonymous with ES-mate or esmate; there are esmate folks who "live further out," so to speak, and don't have anything to do with day to day life around our body and aren't really in the household.)

We aren't the same people.

Household members have our own lives. Honestly, even other plurals sometimes don't even get this, somehow, that we actually genuinely do not universally share opinions or interpretations of things uniquely more than any other friendgroup. (And I don't think this is actually as unique of a thing for plural folks as it might seem, if you're in a plural body yourself and find this odd. There is a massive amount of pressure in plural communities to adhere to a more DSM-lens presentation, even in spaces that genuinely claim to and often genuinely do seem convinced that they do not do that. "DSM-lens" takes on plurality are actually a lot more of... the common assumptions the plural community makes about a plural individual's existence in relation to trauma. A lot of these ideas and their current arrangements have come from colonial, culturally-xtian institutions within the past 60-ish years. Again... sigh will write more on that later. - JVL)

We "share a family car," so to speak, but we're not the same person, and many of us have our own internal lives in addition - we're very social with each other. We can switch who's piloting, and obviously our external body doesn't change when that happens - cool as it would be, we don't suddenly morph into a different physical appearance when we switch. We all have different mannerisms, though, and a number of our friends can frequently clock who's piloting based on that.

It can seem like we have some physical differences - alcohol tolerance is a good example, since some of us can appear to be more or less affected when switching in or out while drunk. It's impossible for our blood-alcohol content to suddenly magically change; it's just that some of us are more coordinated while drunk than others, plainly put.

Our chronological body age also obviously doesn't change (aside from adding a year to our age on each birthday like anyone else). But when it comes to internal stuff, we're... I don't know how much more plainly to put it. We're just people, and trying to describe every possible difference a person can have is near-impossible. If it's something you can have different than another person, then the answer is yes, we can also have those differences internally/in inverse space, with the caveat that, well... the experience is in inverse space. (Also gonna write on that later too. - JVL)

Some notes on something like ages, though: Our body/chronological age is early 30s, but we've got folks whose in-verse ages range from under 10 to inhumanly old, like 2500. When you're in a plural household, year-age doesn't always tell you a ton. Our "sys admin" of sorts, Jarvis, is technically turning 18 this year, but he started with full capability and maturity at "age 0," and his internal sense of his age hasn't changed a ton over those 18 years. On the other hand, we have a kiddo who's... I think she turned 7? and she acts like a 7-year-old human.

I will say, however, that whenever we have someone whose age corresponds to much older than our chronological body age, that doesn't necessarily mean they have the corresponding meatspace-age experience. We've got someone in here who's mid-60s, for example, and while he may even have his own memories corresponding to being 60+ years old and he remembers all his ES birthdays and so on, he doesn't have 60+ years of meatspace experience. He has 60+ years of in-verse/in-house experience, and that is not the same. So, regardless of what in-verse age anybody has: treat us like we're in our early 30s, because that's the only meatspace experience we can have.

Older terms

Questions?

Shoot us a message. We're @neartsua:neartsua.me on [matrix], or you can email us at household@neartsua.me.