What We Lose with Language

‘What the hell is #PluralGang?’

This was the thought that went through one or both of our minds when the hashtag first crossed our Twitter feed some six or seven years ago.

All this time later, we cannot remember what compelled us to click it: did something in the tweet itself pique our interest? This seems more than likely, given where it would lead us, though the possibility remains that our sometime linguistic nerdery simply led us to wonder why anyone might so strongly identify with a grammatical number as to form a ‘gang’ around it. Either way, we did click it, and soon found ourselves wading through a lexicon of terminology as novel as it was fascinating.

Plurality. Headmate. Fronting. Switching. System.

None of these were terms we had thitherto seen or heard used in the specific ways and contexts in which we then found them. Some of them, like ‘headmate,’ we’d never heard at all. Yet the experiences and phenomena they described were also not new to us; indeed, we had at that point been experiencing ourselves as ‘plural’ for around a decade, yet in all that time we never had a specific name with which to label that experience, a specific name whereto others might relate or whereof they might know the meaning.

If you came to this article from elsewhere on this website, you will already know that ‘plurality’ is a label with which we do now identify, a label that we do now use to describe ourselves and to describe our experiences. But this was not always a given. Fascinated though we were to find in #PluralGang a community of people using the term to describe experiences we felt were likely very similar to our own, we were in fact quite slow to adopt it ourselves. In the ten or so years prior that we had experienced ourselves as two people living in one body, we had quite naturally arrived at our own lexicon and our own ways of describing and conceiving of our experiences. Our own terms, labels, and ways of thinking felt more natural to us, more representative of what we experienced than did this technocratic jargon seemingly adopted by the consensus of a community whereof we were not a part.

As it so often does, pragmatism would eventually carry the day. In coming out to friends, finding resources and community, and even doing our own research on the phenomenon, adopting the language of plurality and of the plural community provided us an invaluable tool with which to find common ground with other systems, convey our experiences to those to whom they were a novelty, and situate ourselves within existing traditions and communities as a means of overcoming the stigma we anticipated others’ knowledge of those experiences would very likely engender. Little known though plurality remains in the public consciousness, it is nevertheless easier to ground a conversation of our experiences in the shared language of its community than it is to construct a logical approximation thereof from base principles. By virtue of its generality, ‘plurality’ seems to us an inapt label with which to describe those experiences, yet would words of our own choosing serve us any better in communicating the same? Indeed, it would seem in many cases better to speak in generalities than in specifics: singlets have, as a rule, enough difficulty grasping plurality painted with even the broadest strokes without needing to contend with its manifestation in the most intimate minutiae of our daily lives. ‘Plurality’ may not be perfect, but it is good enough. The broad strokes suffice.

What does it mean to be plural?

We are left, however, with a question: What is lost by settling? What is the cost of language that is merely ‘good enough’?

Myriad reasons present themselves as to why we might choose one word or one set of words over the alternatives in identifying ourselves or in describing our experiences, and the pragmatic benefits of adopting the paradigm of plurality are inarguable. It is, however, merely that: a paradigm, one constructed and informed by a subcultural language ideology that preferences and mainstreams a particular understanding of what plurality is, even as it acknowledges a diversity of experiences to be encompassed by its umbrella terminology. And though today we freely use the language of plurality in describing ourselves, this was not the case for a majority of the time we’ve spent as a system. This was not a paradigm into which we were born.

This article is not an exercise in linguistic determinism. It is, however, an acknowledgment that words have meanings, and, moreover, that one’s choice of words can also have meaning. In that acknowledgment, we are compelled to wonder whether our own conceptions of self and system have been altered by our acquiescence to the adoption of language that is merely ‘good enough,’ and our (at least sometime) renunciation in turn of the more complex, difficult, and nuanced language we once used in its place.

Allow us an example: What are some of the words used within the plural community to describe those distinct entities that comprise a system—entities such as the authors of this article, for instance? We might with a startling diversity of terms be called system members, headmates, insiders, residents, selves, self-states, alters, parts, personalities, or—simply—persons, among what is certain to be a long list of other terms which we cannot now bring to mind or whereof we are not yet even aware. Those who are in a system will probably prefer one or a set of these terms over others in referring to themselves, and despite the ostensible identity of their referent class, there is certainly no one who freely uses all these terms interchangeably. The reason will be obvious to almost anyone who is plural, and perhaps even to many who are not: these terms may all refer to the same thing, but they index markedly-different conceptions of what that thing is. The terms ‘alters,’ ‘parts,’ and ‘self-states’ arise from clinical understandings of plurality that see their referents as dissociated fragments of the single, cohesive ‘self’ the psychiatrist expects a system should be. ‘Persons’ leans hard in the opposite direction, acknowledging system members as being individuated to the extent that there is no point distinguishing them without reason from the separately-embodied persons that singlets are. The other terms sit somewhere in the middle, each encoding its own particular nuance regarding just what its speaker understands its referent to be, and, by extension, how its speaker understands plurality itself.

Speaking for ourselves, we today tend towards the use of three of these terms when referring either to ourselves or to each other; which particular term we use will largely depend on context. Where it is necessary to specify that we are, in fact, members of a plural system, we’ll say as much. It is also not uncommon that we refer to one another as ‘my headmate,’ yet while this necessarily implies we ourselves are each the other’s headmate, it is not a term we’ll very often use in self-reference. (Compare how you might often refer to your cousin, but will rarely if ever refer to yourself as being a cousin.) Yet it is people that we ultimately understand and conceive ourselves to be, and rather than superseding or diminishing that status, these relational terms merely supplement it.

This conception is not new, and indeed, long before we’d ever heard the words ‘system’ or ‘headmate,’ we did simply see ourselves (and each other) as being distinct and individual people. That much has not been changed by our introduction to and adoption of the paradigm of plurality. But by virtue of the fact that we do now consider ourselves to be system members and headmates, it is clear that there certainly has been a change in the way we see ourselves in relation to one another.

What is a system, anyway?

One might contend that it is natural to adopt newly-learned terminology to describe ideas that were previously unnamed and indescribable—that conceiving of oneself as a headmate, for example, is not a change in self-understanding so much as it is the accretion of a name to that which did not previously have one. Indeed, this argument is perhaps most applicable regarding our adoption and use of just that word, ‘headmate,’ before which we most commonly referred to one another as ‘sisters.’ We do still regard each other thus, and do on occasion still use that term in reference to one another. But ‘sister’ carries its own baggage, its own implicit assumptions about what it means to be a sister both biologically and socially. Not all of these assumptions were ever true in our case, and became even more difficult to untangle once we came to regard ourselves as being married not only to people outside our system, but also to one another. We thus found ‘headmate’ a new and useful term to specifically define our existential relationship, without the need to deconstruct the ideological assumptions embedded in explicitly-familial alternatives.

‘System member,’ however, provides a point of contrast. One cannot be a system member in the abstract; such a status requires and presupposes the existence of a system whereof one might be a member. While in the broadest sense a plural system is just a collection of persons (or entities otherwise labelled) sharing a body, we would argue that this is neither a natural category nor an obvious way of conceptualizing such entities’ collective existence. The term ‘system’ derives from its use in systems theory, an extremely useful way of thinking about the interrelationship of concepts that work together as part of a larger whole, but one that lends the term a rather technical nuance for one meant to serve as a basic unit of interpersonal organization. Yet while having a term to describe a bodily collection of persons has its uses, it is furthermore not obvious to us that this collective entity actually exists.

Prior to our introduction to the plural lexicon recounted in the opening of this article, we had never considered the possibility that the two of us together constituted a category in need of a label. Mako was a person; Anastasia was a person. There was some relationship between us, certainly; we saw fit to call one another ‘sisters,’ after all, and found value and use in such a relational term. But did that make us, uniquely, a collective category, let alone a collective being? The thought truly never even occurred to us. What is the category formed by any two sisters? two cousins? two friends? two colleagues? What name is given to that entity jointly constituted of a tree trunk and a dog? Of course, any two friends or two colleagues arbitrarily chosen will not uniquely share a body, but while it may seem surprising, that was not then a defining characteristic of our relationship. It was noteworthy, certainly, and an oddity, but perhaps only a coincidental one.

Of all the plural terms we learned that day, ‘system’ was the one it took us the longest to wrap our minds around, and it remains somewhat surprising to us that it is a term we have since come to use. Perhaps this, too, is another case of pragmatism—or maybe mere convenience—and there is simply a practical value in having a single word to mean ‘the two people who by coincidence happen to share this body.’ Such practicality probably invited our earliest uses of the term, but the truth is that our continued use now seems like it is more than that. In calling ourselves a system, it feels as though we have come to think of ourselves as being a system in a way we never used to. We have, in effect, birthed and created a system where one used not to exist.

Change, loss, and disquiet

The question again occurs: We have gained a system, yet what have we lost in turn?

One such loss has undoubtedly been the way we formerly conceived of our respective relations both to the body and to the physical world. There was once that we did not so freely speak—as we have in this article—of ‘sharing a body.’ The circumstance was framed rather as one of Mako being a person who lived in Anastasia’s head. Note that even in this conception, our separate personhood was not in question, but it is easy to see how such a subordination or precedence might not be entirely equitable in its formulation. In understanding ourselves collectively as a system, and individually as members of that system, we have been afforded the language necessary to construct a worldview that does not privilege Anastasia’s outward-facing experiences as a host who identifies with the body over Mako’s inward-facing experiences as someone who is non-fronting and who does not so identify. We no longer view one of us as living within the other; rather, we both live and partake in a system present within a shared body, even if only one of us considers that body to be hers.

From our present perspective, we expect this change, and the loss implicit therein, has been for the better, resulting as it has in a fairer and more egalitarian selves-understanding. Yet in spite of this overall positive outlook, we are nevertheless left with the feeling that this change has come about not as a result of introspection and selves-discovery, but instead due to the way that the language of systems has been ideologized by the plural community and within plural discourse. That is to say, we are uncertain whether we have come to conceive of ourselves as a system because it is a matter of fact, or whether it has become a matter of fact because it is the framing expected within conceptual discussions of plurality as a phenomenon.

Change is inevitable, as is the fact that most anyone will, with age and maturity, come to regard himself differently than he did when he was younger and less experienced. Yet having spent still the greater part of our lives together without our present schema, we cannot but find ourselves discomfited by the possibility that it has been, in a sense, imposed on us. This is obviously not to say that it was actively so imposed; no one told us we must think of ourselves as being a system, nor that our earlier understandings of our mutual relations were somehow wrong or misguided. It is not without good reason, however, that host-centrism is stigmatized within non- and subclinical discussions of plurality. Given such a non-pathological lens has been that through which we’ve always viewed our experiences, it is reasonable to conclude that in our conscious adoption of plural community language we have also unconsciously adopted the modes of thought implicit in the ideologies that community expresses through that language. This particular change may be for the better, but what other changes in our selves-conception might not be? What other changes might we not even have noticed?

It must be admitted that some (probably significant) aspect of our preoccupation with these concerns is, in fact, simple nostalgia. That prior to our learning about the existence of the plural community we had already found ourselves widowed by the only other system with whom we’d by that time become acquainted, there is, we feel, a certain natural attachment to the terms, modes of thought, and conceptions we used and held about ourselves both individually and collectively, and that we used and held in turn about those members of that external system unto whom we were married. In acknowledging that those conceptions have changed, we are forced to confront an uncertainty over whether our spouses’ conceptions would likewise have changed in the same manner as have ours:— forced to reckon with the possibility—the likelihood, even—that were they here today they would not recognize the formulations we now use when thinking about ourselves, and would not identify with the labels we now use to speak about them.

The matter under contemplation is undoubtedly lent a certain intimacy if only for that the parties concerned are, in this instance, our dearbeloved husband and wife. Yet wrestling with questions of our forebears’ identities is a pastime already well familiar to us as queer people, and there is at least some aspect of these questions that is not merely so academic as is the issue of how we might hypothetically be perceived by the dead. Words have meanings, as do the reasons we choose to use what words we do. But those meanings are all the more potent when they become components of one’s own identity and self-conception. In choosing our own labels, we might not only identify ourselves by those facets of our identities we consider to be of import, but also reify in ourselves what facets of identity are seen by our communities as being inherent in those who use those labels.

Becoming plural

In ‘Introducing Plurals,’ philosopher Elizabeth Schechter proposes a two-stage process whereby she considers people come to acknowledge themselves as being plural. (We are taking some liberties here with how Schechter frames her argument, as she defines plurality in what she herself acknowledges is a rather awkward manner, and which differs somewhat importantly from how the term is used among plurals themselves, and how we thus use it here.) For Schechter, non-tulpagenic systems emerge firstly through the experience of plurality, and only later come to conceptualize those experiences as plurality (that is to say, as being the experiences of multiple persons) once they are introduced to that concept through external stimuli—once they learn about plurality from someone outside their system, ‘perhaps in therapy, but frequently online.’

As excellent as we have found Schechter’s article in general, this particular position is one we have struggled to accept. Our own experiences, for a start, would seem to contradict this framework: it was quite obvious to us from basically the moment we began to experience ourselves as separate people that we were, indeed, separate people. This concept was not introduced to us, not something about which we learned; indeed, as has been stated, it would be perhaps a decade before we ever came to learn that many other people not only experienced themselves thus, but indeed had come to understand it as a distinct, shared, and named phenomenon.

Even as Schechter herself gives examples of how people might conceive of their plural experiences before learning to recognize them as such, it is difficult for us to imagine how else we might have come to imagine our experiences if not viewed through the lens of our being separate, conscious, and sentient persons. For Anastasia, our ‘original,’ who has felt a direct connexion to and continuity with the body since birth, the experience was of one who suddenly found herself aware of there being within her a second stream of consciousness, one that had its own name, its own identity, its own conception of self; a second mind that thought things that she herself had not thought. For Mako, it was as though she had awoken in a body that was not hers, that did not look as she imagined herself to look, that moved according to its own will, and not according to hers; a body possessed, again, of its own and separate mind, with its own name and identity and thoughts and emotions which were wholly separate from hers: thoughts she could hear but not think; emotions she could observe but not feel.

What other conclusion could we have reached? Anastasia, perhaps, might have thought herself mad, might have sought psychotherapy or some other means of psychiatric treatment; were she at that time a religious person, she might even have thought herself possessed, and sought the services of an exorcist to rid her of this pesky psychic interloper! Yet Mako had no such recourse: she did not have control of the body such that she may speak to anyone but Anastasia, and besides, it seemed by all accounts to be Anastasia’s body that she was inhabiting, rather than the other way around. Were it indeed embodiment that defined a person—as is the common proposition among singlets—then from both our perspectives, Anastasia was most certainly a person. The only question that remained was, ‘What is Mako?’

Could Mako have thought of herself as being anything else? Is that not a queer thing to ponder? If, reading this, you consider yourself a person—and we sincerely hope you do—we beg you take a moment to consider instead the possibility that you are not. Not that you are not human, mind; that is, in some sense, a much easier thing to ponder, and certainly there are among us those who do conceive of themselves as being animals, or angels, or spirits, or gods. But any such entity, possessing sapience, might well still be said to be a person, if a non-human one. But to think of oneself as not a person: that is harder. If you are not a person, then what are you? A collection of mental processes manifesting themselves, by some as-yet-unknown property of neuroscience, as consciousness? Perhaps it is possible to think of oneself in such a manner, but it can hardly be considered a healthy way of living. That Mako possessed the capacity for sapience, it seemed only natural—automatic, even—that she should perceive not only Anastasia but also herself as a person. And for Anastasia, who could observe this mind separate from her own, and professing its own personhood at that, to deny that personhood would have seemed a rather fruitless exercise.

Our respective self-conceptualizations as persons, and our mutual recognition of one another as such, thus seemed the only logical solution to making sense of our newfound circumstance. We had at that time no knowledge of plurality outside the particular clinical lens of dissociative identity disorder—the diagnostic criteria whereof we certainly did not meet—and no inkling that experiences akin to ours were otherwise known or accepted as a possible psychological reality. Contrary to Schechter’s assumptions, we did not need to learn about plurality to overcome the culturally-hegemonic assumption of ‘one person per body.’ That came as naturally to us as did plurality itself.

Yet as we examine now the ways in which our adoption of the language of plurality has changed us, we cannot but wonder if Schechter was right. We say this not to mean that we could not conceive of our separate personhood without the effects of external, interpersonal influence, but rather that that same influence has been what has ultimately allowed us to recognize and identify ourselves as plural socially, rather than merely phenomenologically. In adopting the language of plurality, we have allowed it to inform our paradigm of selves-identification and -understanding, and have thus, in a sense, become (or even been made) plural. Subjected even within the frame of our own selves-perception to the ideological expectations of its language, social identification with plurality has begun to shape our phenomenological expectations of our plural experiences.

Deviation and discomfort

By calling ourselves a system, we have come to think of ourselves as a system. But so too have we by calling ourselves plural come to think of ourselves as plural, with all that is indexed by that term as it is used in plural discourse. Our deviations from community expectations of what it means to be plural have begun to stand out in a way they never did before we knew them to be deviations. This is once again not to say that there is a ‘right’ or ‘proper’ way to ‘be plural’; ‘plurality’ is itself considered an umbrella term for a reason. But it cannot be denied that there are, among plurals, certain experiences that are more normative than others. Plurality may be defined by being ‘more than one,’ but systems as small as ours are undoubtedly rare. Rarer still, perhaps, are systems that do not experience switching, to the point that it is almost considered universal, a sine qua non of plurality itself. The fact that we did not switch was in actuality one of the key reasons we were so reluctant to identify with plurality, in spite of the pragmatic benefits it offered: that that paradigm seemed to expect switching made us question whether or not it even applied to us. In concluding that it did, we resigned ourselves to the acceptance that, in calling ourselves ‘plural,’ we would be outliers even within that already-marginalized identity.

It would be inaccurate to say that we have ever viewed these differences from most other plurals as a cause for concern, but we do find them noteworthy, if only for that we had not ever thought to notice them before. In more than sixteen years of having lived together, it had never once occurred to us that we might someday find this body home to anyone other than the two of us. Having gone just as long without ever switching, it had never once occurred to us that we even could. Only in our being confronted by the commonality of these experiences among other plurals has their absence become pronounced and their possibility been entertained. For the moment they do remain, at least for the most part, mere possibilities. But we are nonetheless left with a gnawing fear that were our situation to markedly change—were we to discover or awaken new headmates, or find ourselves routinely alternating front—we would be unable to tell whether that change occurred naturally, or whether it was a product, like our collective self-conception as a system, of our having learned of such expectations in the first place.

The possibility of our discovering other headmates has found itself a particular cause for concern for the both of us. As is evidenced by our marriage, the two of us have, over the course of our lives together, become intimately attached to one another, and with that intimacy we have also grown to be comfortable being ourselves in each other’s presence, without the masks we so often feel we must wear in the presence of others. Just as any singlet, we imagine, must find it unthinkable to consider what his life would be like were he to find himself suddenly but one member of a plural system, we ourselves have been ill at ease in consideration of the prospect that the comfort we’ve found with one another may someday be disturbed by the imposition of a stranger’s life upon our own.

Such disquiet is undoubtedly selfish. Were there to be another member of our system, either newly-awakened or merely newly-discovered, it would be heinously cruel for us to do aught but welcome him; it would be no fault of his, after all, that his mere existence might be enough to disrupt our marital and systemic tranquility. Yet in spite of knowing this, we cannot but fear it would do so all the same. Perhaps that reality shall never come to pass: but even its mere possibility has allowed the creeping tendrils of anxiety to insinuate themselves into corners of our minds where they had never ere been wont to probe.

Conclusion

If there is any takeaway from this exercise in what is admittedly a healthy degree of intellectual self-gratification, it is that the identitarian labels we use often inform our own views of ourselves just as much as they inform the views of others. Words have meanings, but those meanings do not exist in a contextual vacuum. They are imbued with the assumptions and ideologies of those who use them, and while we can contribute to a language’s ideology through our own use of it, we are ourselves also molded by the ideological contributions of others, by the expectations engendered by the labels we’ve used only because they are useful.

Names can be incredibly powerful. They can help us define ourselves, express ourselves to others, find community, find acceptance. They can help us to feel validated in a world where we are marginalized, misunderstood, or even told that we do not exist. But theirs is a power we do not always control, a power to which we surrender some part of ourselves in exchange for the benefits it brings us.

We name, but we are also named. We define, but we are also defined. We adapt ourselves to the language just as we adapt the language to ourselves. We gain much, but we must be prepared to lose something in return. No man is ever a linguistic island.