"I can’t explain to someone what it is like to look in a mirror and not recognize the face inside it. How there are some days I wake up and it takes everything inside me to put on a mask and walk through my life like someone else. I am the person that you pretend does not exist, except that is all I am, all of the time." -http://thebeehive27.blogspot.com/
Look at it this way. When there's one person who says "I'm a different person at the office than I am with my friends," that's more like one engine, just shifting gears. With multiplicity, there are several engines. (Thank you to our longtime singlet friend Steve G.) http://www.astraeasweb.net/plural/faq.html
Excerpt from The Magic Daughter by Jane Phillips:
Imagine projecting a movie to a roomful of people. Imagine that they range in age from three to thirty-eight. Imagine that some of those people are dead asleep and do not know a movie is being played. Imagine that a very young one spies on the whole thing, but pretends to be asleep. Imagine that some of them catch only a few minutes, or the parts that interest them. Imagine that at least one part watches the whole thing, but does not speak. Imagine that there are scenes some watchers interpret one way, that others interpret the opposite way, that still others do not understand at all. Imagine that some parts hear a phrase or see a gesture that repeats and repeats in their minds.
written by another multiple:
ReplyDelete"Sometimes I look at this multiple mess as a computer with multiple users. The body is our computer. One of us logs in and uses it at a time, the others may be looking over the user's shoulder and may occasionally reach down greedy little fingers and type something in, but really there is ONE user at a time. The computer itself doesn't change from user to user (mostly--I know there are often physical trait changes from alter to alter) But the way the computer interacts with the world does change. The sites accessed, the music listened to, the youtube videos watched are different from user to user, though the computer doesn't change. And each individual user has their own signature in their usage of the computer. (you can see that in the way google can target advertise to users based on their browser usage) Each individual user uses that computer for different, individual purposes, even though it is the same computer accessed by everyone in that house."