My Pronouns Are Not We/Us

[On personhood, archetypes, and theoretical acceptance.]

In the final hours of 2024, Piper made a very important- and very difficult- decision to shut down our friend server.

It was a community that had existed, in varying capacities, since 2020. It was theoretically private- The only way to join was to be personally invited by us- but in the end it carried the same general multitude of issues most public servers do. We had outgrown the constant drama, and it was time for us to move on.

I am not going to sit here and write an essay on the ways that place scarred us. There are several things to be said there about how people online conduct themselves and curate their social circles. That is something for another time, another place- Likely another person who cares a bit more than I do.

What mattered to me that day was that, in writing a long statement to the server explaining his decision, Piper mentioned me by name.

Quote: "Very, very few of our friends have made an active effort to get to know us as individual people and it is very obvious to us who actually has individual dynamics with us and who just knows our names and surface level archetypes. Very few of you know Halley as anything other than a stoic, analytical gatekeeper who used to be very close to [redacted] because very few of you have actually sat down and had a casual conversation with her."

Piper clearly took far more issue with this than I did at the time.

I consider myself a relatively private person. I hold my secrets close to my chest, and until recently I was very content experiencing the majority of our life observing from a distance. I still am selective in who I choose to hold close.

I am not so dense as to question the desire to be known. I am not immune to it; I do not think anybody truly is. His frustrations towards this friend group came from a place of deep pain that is not unfamiliar to me.

I did, however, spend a good few months chewing on why Piper would use me of all people as an example to convey this. Of course these people did not know me- I had no desire for them to. I had not tried. There were many easy examples of people in my system who _did_ wish to be seen by our friends who were not in the end.

So why on earth would my thread be the first he chose to pull in this situation?

I did ask him. It did not help much; He was not able to explain why it mattered so much to him that I specifically was not much more than an archetype to these people. I suspect he did have a more coherent answer for me, but was a bit embarrassed to admit to it to my face, because admitting to anything 'sappy' flusters him to the point of going nonverbal. I am not one to pry for such things; Thus, I was on my own.

I cannot tell you when exactly it clicked. I can only tell you the things that happened in between when that statement was made and when it clicked:

- I fronted for a crisis situation and it changed me.
- I allowed myself to become romantically involved with some people in the system we are engaged to.
- In doing this, they came to learn much more about me.
- In that happening, I came to learn much more about myself.
- I wore a skirt for the first time.
- I grew more comfortable existing. I found myself being considered a main fronter.
- I cried for the second time in my conscious existence. The first had been three and a half years prior.

Thus I came to the realization midway through my morning cup of coffee:

It takes a considerable amount of effort to only see the veil in which someone tries to obscure themselves when it is riddled with holes.

It should not have been so easy to hide behind an archetype when 'archetype' and 'person' are oxymorons.

It was not I who was making a choice, but them.

Part 1: The Divide

Through a very unfortunate series of mishaps involving screensharing and a crisis situation, sometime last year my system was shown a private crush confession against the will of both us and the person who had made it.

It was something we should never have seen, and none of us had any romantic feelings for this person, so we did our best to simply disregard it. But it.. bothered us, immensely. We have dealt with people confessing crushes directly to us when we did not reciprocate them and it has never particularly irked us so long as people respect our wishes- But this was something that sat with us so heavily that it was one of the main catalysts for Piper to shut down a community that had existed for almost five years.

It was the fact that this person- A friend of more than four years at the time- had told another friend privately that they had a crush on us. Sterling Manor.

Not a specific person in here, but us, as a collective.

This was after more than a year of us practically fighting to be seen as separate in our friend group- Writing an entire essay explaining why, even. Even after we had gotten engaged and were very pointed to all of our friends that, even with the collective agreement between our systems to get legally married, our relationships with each other were on an individual and paced accordingly.

Who- or what- exactly did this person have a crush on? Sterling Manor is a group of people who share a body- A group of people that had spent more than a year making their separation very abundantly clear after years of letting being dehumanized slide. To have romantic feelings for the vague idea of 'the collective' was a complete disregard of everything we had worked so hard towards- Did they even know _us_ at all, much less the individuals in here? Did they even bother, at that point?

It was not something so easily chalked up to well-meaning ignorance, because they were also part of a system- One that also spoke of benefitting from being seen as separate people.

The struggle to be seen as more than the body runs so deep in the plural community that we are far from the first to write a piece like this. If you would like another example, here is a piece two people from our fiancee system wrote together: https://system.grdnsys.no/blog/2025-01-27.html

Despite what you may think, there is no sense of continuity to who is or isn't willing to put in the effort to get to know us as we are. We had a coworker we knew for a total of six months who was a singlet- and a generally somewhat ableist and religiously conservative one at that- who did a much better job of knowing us as individuals than several of our years long system friends. It is frankly bizarre.

So.. What does one even do about that?

Part 2: The Leap

Nothing.

There is not anything you can do to convince someone to see you as a person when they do not.

There are those that do, and there are those that do not.

I see very often, in the plural community, people who fight and fight to convince their friends to see them as people. People who never quite get anywhere with it, who put so much time and energy into explaining it in so many ways, for nothing.

We have, in our years, learned to simply stop tolerating this behavior. If you are to be close to us, you are to be close to us individually. If you cling to the idea of 'the collective', the best you will ever get is being held at arm's length. Because it is not _about_ being seen as separate people.

That person that claimed to have a crush on us as a whole, in that moment, completely disregarded the one thing we _as a whole_ had spent such a long time making abundantly clear.

That person, in my opinion- Is not ableist, or medicalist, or in any way discriminatory, in that action. They are simply a bad friend.

You can help someone unlearn ableism, or medicalism, or discrimination. A fundamental lack of care towards someone as a human being is something you cannot talk someone out of. They would not know you as a person if you were a singlet either.

It is a rough truth. But it is one I feel more systems need to hear. You are worth more than friends who fundamentally will not level with you as a person, regardless of what the word 'person' means to you.

Speaking of which..

Part 3: Identity

Something I would like to analyze a bit is the mindsets of people who dehumanize systems in this regard.

It is, again, nothing to do with medicalism. That is an entire other ballpark that I do not care to tackle here. This treatment has come from many who are by all means anti-medicalist.

There is a very clear distinction, to me, between people who treat plurality as an identity and people who treat plurality as a fact of life.

To me, the idea of plurality being an identity inherently clashes with the idea of people in a system being separate people. It is still ascribing one thing to a vague idea of a collective, and reinforcing the idea that there must be a collective sense of self to be able to put an identity label to. People compartmentalize this as "This is one person whose identity is being separate people" rather than "These are separate people".

It in itself becomes an archetype, and with that comes many sub-archetypes of how people expect these people to behave. The stoic gatekeeper. The hardened protector. The vulnerable little. The violent persecutor.

I at times feel it would be much better if plural systems were seen as just simply being; Like people with red hair, or left-handedness, or scars on their skin.

It is something some are born as, it is something some develop into. It is something that happens to some. It is something some choose to become. It is not something people identify as. It is a modification to what it means to be a person at all; It comes before any identifying labels, rather than it itself being an asterisk.

I believe this is where the disconnect is, regardless of who demonstrates it. It is an entirely different framework they are presented with. Some make the choice to carve out the space for something new, and some simply shrug and toss it into the framework of 'identity' they are already familiar with.

I do not think you can ask or convince someone to do this if they do not show the willingness to do so from the start. It is like trying to talk someone who is only at a party for the free food into wanting to socialize. While it is not exactly a moral flaw, the fact of the matter is: They have made their priorities clear.

So should you.