A few months ago, I started becoming more aware that I have multiple
personalities. Since then, I've been observing myself, my thoughts and
actions, much more closely, so I could understand better what's going on
within myself. I still haven't got everything figured out, and I'm not as
clear as I want to be about how the various personalities relate to each
other, but I have discovered many interesting things about myself.
I don't know how many personalities there are using this body, but to the ones
writing this message, there seems to be very very many. Generally, several of
them seem to be active at any one time, and various personalities will become
active, depending on what's being done and what's happening around us. For
example, if the piano is being played, certain personalities will become
active; although which ones become active change each time we sit down to
play. Some groups of personalities are better than others, and so the quality
of playing is somewhat unpredictable, but they are all learning from each
other.
It seems like it's a whole society in here. There's a great deal of
communication among the various personalities, and fortunately, everyone gets
along pretty well, most of the time. We all have different things that we're
good at and different things that we like, and we're learning how to assign
tasks more appropriately, so that we each do what we're good at and enjoy
doing.
It seems like access to the body and certain kinds of thinking functions are
limited, in the sense that some of us can't play the piano while another group
is cooking lunch, so we're working out mutually agreeable ways of letting
everyone have their turn and finding ways of working together for everyone's
mutual benefit. Many of our goals overlap, and we often find creative ways of
doing things that accomplish parts of several different goals at once. We're
also learning how to expand our cognitive resources so that more of us can be
active at once. We're making a lot of progress.
We're developing theories about how the various personalities have deveoped.
Our most favorite one is that by watching other people, in real life and in TV
and the movies, and in reading books, different personality traits were
internalized by the mind and various traits which went well together, formed
around some sort of basin of attraction, to form a coherent personality. It's
as though we've observed society and internalized it, forming our own society.
Some of the personalities are more developed than others, but we're all
becoming more developed and differentiated all the time.
Our society could be considered a meta-personality, with many different
personalities as members. This meta-society we call "David Musick". Among
ourselves, though, we have no names.
Our internal culture is actually quite different than the culture between
humans, because our methods of communication are quite different. The types
of language used varies, depending which personalities are communicating.
Some know each other well enough and are similar enough that their
communication is basically telepathy, while others have to translate ideas
into mutually understandable thoughts. And some are so alien to each other,
that they can't communicate at all. Some are so alien that the Interface
Committee (those of us that interface with other humans, such as the group
writing this message) can't understand them at all and thus can't tell other
humans about them. But we're working on developing more effective means of
communication among everyone here, and we're learning how to translate among
various thinking styles with greater fidelity.
It seems that the more attention that is being given to ourselves and how we
work, the more the personalities develop and differentiate. A few months ago,
it was difficult to notice the different personalities, but it keeps getting
easier, and the personalities are all becoming much more independent and
well-defined very quickly.
Of course, we don't consider multiple personalities to be a "disorder".
That's just the way things are for us. If our internal organization
interfered with our goals, then it could be considered a "disorder", but we
find that we can accomplish our goals much better by working together than any
of us could working alone, and the more personalities that develop here and
learn to cooperate effectively, the better we're getting at accomoplishing our
goals.
The mind is very interesting, to say the least.
- David Musick
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