Lucinda | MyRedDice | Martin | myre | Xanthia | Flags | Graveyard | What's This?

This is where I try and explain who or what I am, why I have a bunch of names which I use liberally, and what exactly I think I'm playing at. This may take a little time. But we can start with what I'm not: I don't have Dissasociative Identity Disorder (DID), as far as I know, and I don't feel that I'm just roleplaying. The best phrase I've found to describe it is that I'm gestalt, but that's not hugely clear, is it? Pronouns and such are tricky, so I'm going to use whatever seems appropriate, which sometimes means switching between 'I' and 'we' mid-sentence. Oh well.

Here's my 'multiple code', though:

MuC N--[m] S.H+/Hf A(b-r-)O"dice"W#Cc++OF(r-o++)P#T--Jc!DoRC+++So--

Background & History

When I was at school, I got bullied. This was unpleasant, though there are plenty who've been through the same hell as me. There was a specific point when I was 14-16, which I remember vividly, where I knelt down in front of my bed, concentrated hard enough to make my head hurt, and tried to make some fairly drastic changes to my brain/mind, because I felt (wrongly?) that if I didn't do so, I'd have done something stupid. I guess I succeeded to some extent, though not 100% as aimed for, because it certainly changed stuff. I blackened my sense of humour; I got a lovely ability to be instantly happy on desire; I become less caring about other people; I became able to enjoy pain. Less dramatically and over some years, I created a mental shield for myself against insults, which kept my ferocious temper under check.

Upon leaving school at 18, these changes regressed and mutated somewhat, as testerone levels fell, and bullying was sharply reduced. The twisted sense of humour remained, as did the mental shield, and the ability to be happy at will. I do now care about other people, though I'm no empath, while the other effects were somewhat decreased. I still wasn't normal, but I'd never been normal, as long as I could remember, so it didn't bother me. About this time I read The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, and loved it to pieces. It described many things, but one of them was the destruction of the self or ego, via use of dice, to allow a multivalent, multifaceted, or just plain multiple personality to flourish, and gave tools to do this. It also suggested a view of the world as an illusion, a joke, or a game to be played. MyRedDice liked this as an idea. Or rather, the twisted humour in me liked this idea, since MRD was then unnamed. I followed it for roughly three years. It is this idea, now discarded, which slowly generated the whole gestalt thing, sometime after October 2000.

So what is it?

Essentially, it's a metaphor. Like everyone, I can act in different ways according to my mood. Sometimes I act frivolously, sometimes seriously, and so on. And I name those moods. Or rather, ways of acting, since I can change them faster than my moods change - fast enough to have conversations with myself - and laugh at my own jokes - without feeling completely weird. I do seem to have some of the characteristics of real multiples though, in terms of interaction between what they call 'alters' and I call 'names'. I don't have the differences in experiences and memory of someone with DID, though - all the names are running with the same history, same experiences, and basically the same set of skills. It is also quite clear to me, in a hard-to-explain kind of way, that all my names are still certainly 'me'. Just different 'me's. Hmm, words are a little tricky on occasion, no? I'll happilly talk about my names in the third person, though - it's just useful to do so.

It happens slowly, rather than being a fast thing. The first name to have some kind of independant existance was MyRedDice, who embodied the black humour. Lucinda was next, who spun off to be an entity for chatting and being pleasant to people. Xanthia slowly emerged as a way to deal with flame wars and self motivation, amongst other stuff. I'm not sure when myre appeared - she comes and goes so quickly... Martin is the name I have for myself as a whole, and also the person who I was pre-bullying. So it's something of a mishmash of a name, but that works kinda ok, somehow. Just as long as Martin doesn't attempt to describe himself to anyone, anyway. And there's some names which flag things, and names which are dead.

It lets me deal with all kinds of things that otherwise I might have difficulty with, empathise where otherwise I might feel cut off, and experiment with doing things and acting in ways that my singular mind would have dismissed out of hand. And, of course, it's fun. I get to hold a perfectly normal conversation with someone, while MyRedDice is laughing at his tie, and Lucinda is mentally undressing him, which can be a good diversion - especially if they're a particularly boring speaker... I can make myself single again, but it's a fair bit of effort, and tends to break down. If I'm heavily stressed I wil sometimes go single for a longer period - it always feels very cold and alone - don't like at all...

Does Anyone Else Have This?

Stuff like it, I'm sure, though everyone's unique. Here are a few links to stuff which has had some partial resonance, by people who know somewhat more what they are talking about.

• Confessions of an MP-Wannabe - an apology to real multiples that someone else wrote on h2g2. I share some of those sentiments - until meeting LeKZ here, it certainly made me feel uneasy.
• We Are Not of One Mind - a more detailed explanation by the same person, with thoughts.
• The Wonderful World of the MidContinuum! - Much related human experience is here, and it's an impressive range.
• Empowered Multiples - "multiplicity CAN be a natural state", and so forth.

Infrequently Asked Questions

How do you keep yourself together?

I might as well ask you how you manage to keep yourself apart... We're in the same body, we share the same experiences, history, memories, friends, skills, brain - and at the end of the day, it just works. There are limits to one's self-knowledge, and this is one place where mine breaks down.

How should I address you/yous?

Thank you for asking - that is the polite thing to do. As it happens, you can address me how you like, though - plural, singular, any name, whatever. If you address one of me by name, then you're likely to get responses from that name, but other names can and do break into the conversation.

However, we would prefer it if you took the time to get the genders of my various names, correct - Lucinda, Xanthia, and myre are 'she', and Martin and MyRedDice are 'he'. Alternatively, use gender-neutral pronouns and words, if you're that way inclined. But people referring to Lucinda as a 'guy' or 'he' is starting to get on her tits, and I can see her point...

Tell me more about your different selves

Further information on the bits that make up me can be found on each of my names' respective homepages: the links are a little way above. You can learn more about each of my names (plus dead names and name flags) and their purposes in life there, and ask for more, should you be curious.

What are your views on DID and multiplicity in general?

I think it's caused primarily¹ by sociocognitive factors. As such, I see spiritual guides, demonic possession, dice-living, mediums, etc, as being expressions of the same basic thing. That doesn't in any way stop it being real: I suspect that only a small fraction of people diagnosed with DID are faking. I know for myself, though I cannot prove it, that there is nothing fake about my multiplicity.

Theories are ten a penny - my own is that there is nothing to suggest that a single mind is a hard-wired concept². As such, it is entirely conceivable that one's brain could wire itself so as to split the information normally associated with the "ego" symbol into multiple symbols, and act accordingly. This could be done in response to any of the standard methods for causing the brain to rewire itself - active desire, social pressures, trauma, Pavlovian responses, cognitive dissonance, etc, etc.