Switching

Viper here. Well, this one isn't personal but it's me.

We always hope people will ask about things, but the singlets either resign themselves to never understanding or are simply too afraid to do it. That's fine, I understand that. I'm just going to start typing regardless, because we just think about this sometimes: trying to explain and piece together the experience of being us. Part of this is that we know for a fact that our experience as a system is far from universal. It's different for everyone, and those differences are really interesting!

So anyway, the unasked question is this: "What does it feel like to switch control from one personality to the other?"

And the answer is that it's different every time, so there's no one answer, but there are patterns.

We have a good sense of our own rhythms, so it's not a surprise very often anymore. I know, right now, that I'm pretty likely to hand things over to July tomorrow evening or the morning after. We haven't met any other systems that are as organized and structural about this as we are, but this is just how we've turned out. We get tired at a certain cadence and take a break, and we cycle in a certain direction until there's a reason to switch up the order. That's speaking of the three of us who front most-- Trinket is a special case. Most commonly, that change will be something we see coming, as if the next in line knocked and asked to be let in. It's a feeling that could be described as "being tired" but not quite the same as being sleepy. It might be best described as dissociating, feeling just a bit apart from consciousness. In those cases, we'll generally finish up any thought we're on, find a quiet moment, and relax and let things flow to the next. You can kind of pinpoint the exact second it happens with enough attention: a person's ambient mood, or the feeling of "being you," is unique to them. I'm sure this is true for you singlets, too. It took a lot of sensitivity to understand those feelings, and they're still modified by mood, but they exist. Also, if we keep our eyes open then there's a certain quality of the light that might change. Sound, too. I can't describe it in concrete terms. If we're listening to music, it will sound different, but only in that each of us has our own way of listening and emphasizing one instrument or another. The change is so subtle that we didn't notice it until we knew to look.

It's not always a long process, though. It can happen without us noticing if we're concentrating enough on something, in which case it can take a bit of time before some errant thought or feeling clues us into the fact that it happened. This has happened while Mira was streaming, where we didn't notice it was me until after shutting things down for the evening. In those cases, it's simply happened without much of the normal warning feelings. I think, in some ways, that concentrating on some tasks is a very... unified activity. We aren't really as aware of our individuality because we're absorbed in the task, which makes the change flow smoothly without us feeling it. Also, it's been quite a while since this has happened, but switching while asleep happens too. In that case, there was never any chance to feel it and we just notice when we notice, usually within an hour or so.

Now, there are some very sudden and unexpected switches that we can feel almost physically. I don't have a great way to describe when this happens. I think it's usually associated with us being tired or confused, but it's also happened when we're lying in bed feeling pretty good, so maybe it's got some connected to the kind of brain impulses that make exploding head syndrome happen given that we have that too. Regardless, it's been happening since way before we figured ourselves out. I can actually describe how this one feels, though: have you ever bolted awake? Just like... you wake up suddenly and violently. Deep breath. No tiredness at all. Probably because a loud noise shook you out of it. That's how this feels. We'll just be lying back, resting because we're sleepy, and then bam. Not tired at all anymore, but we're awake. It's an interesting flavor.

I mentioned Trinket is a special case. She can kind of take control whenever, which feels like a sort of evolutionary advantage for how she's able to help us out of panic situations. When she's up, it happens in the space of a few seconds, and usually, if we're talking to people or listening to anything when it happens, we can tell because the noise becomes harsher and difficult to listen to. Trinket has difficulty with audio processing like that, but it's roughest as she's switching in and then tapers off a bit. She'll typically turn off anything super abrasive, but voices are usually fine.

And that's the answer to that question nobody asked. Thank you for listening XOXO