I wonder why it is so hard for people to get their minds around the fact that we are a bunch of different people.  That Shire, the person they know is a collaborative effort.  And again, actually I don’t think, it doesn’t appear that this is the problem.  This friend, like others, seems really fine with the concept, they accept that we are multiple.  What they struggle with is putting that into action.  It seems like something they don’t wish to do, or can’t do.  I am not sure of what is the right word there.  Why is it easier, and in their mind acceptable that once they know of us, to return to treating us as Shire, as the one. 
 

We have always made excuses for that.  Accepted that is just the way it is.  But I think now, that maybe we were too ready to offer those excuses, too unsure and passive to demand different from people.  Is it really that hard to see us as separate, to understand that the person they are speaking to right at that moment may not be the one they had a long conversation with the day before.  This is of course after some explanation has happened, we don’t expect people to just get it, to know how we work instinctively, it is our responsibility to inform.  But when that happens, why is there no follow through.  I was speaking with a multiple friend earlier, before I started writing this and she remembered to say, hey were you the one I was joking with the other day (or words to that effect).  Now mind you she had just read a journal entry so perhaps it stuck in her mind a little more to ask.  It isn’t just remembering though that some of us are into different things, that we aren’t always aware of past conversations or connections.  It is getting to know us individually as well.
 

Now that can be a hard thing.  We accept our part in it.  For too long as a community we hid behind Shire, we would act as one and placed a lot of stock in being able to pass.  So people never really got the opportunity to know us.  Even now it is hard to work out how to delineate, when to you say, hi its so and so in a conversation.  With separate bodies its easier, I mean you hardly need to tell someone that have gone from talking to a 15 year old girl (or woman as I have been told) to a gentleman of a lot more years.  There aren’t the same cues when we all reside in this body, and since a lot of our conversations happen online even less.  So we accept it takes some effort, and for a lot of people it may be easier for them not to bother with that effort.  Friends from the past we understand sometimes put the effort into it and hit our defensive walls.  We understand why they might have eventually given up but that doesn’t count for those that face it now. Now that we make an effort to allow people to see us we find that people (most people) don’t really want to see it.
 

I do wonder why it is so hard though, not just for them, but also for us.  We find it hard to push past that ingrained learning.  We find ourselves falling so easily into pretending, into working to hide our faces. As much as we aren’t ashamed of our multiplicity, as much as we do not see it as a disorder or something wrong, we find ourselves again and again falling into the belief that it is somehow, no not inferior, but different, outside the norm.  We talk a lot about how multiplicity is simply another way of being, but faced with our own, faced with living our multiplicity again we put it into the too hard basket.  We say, why should we expect people to deal with it, and shouldn’t we also just fit in, be like all those other people.  Is it simply just conditioning?  That we live in a world designed solely for single people, one body one mind.  I would hate to think that after all the work we have done there is still that lingering sense of inferiority, and therefore we are willing to accept less from people.
 

I also think we aren’t entirely sure how to be ourselves, not fully.  As I said years of learning and hiding make it easier for us to be one, simply, less complicated.  But now faced with an overwhelming need to be recognised we don’t have a clue how to do it.  Yes we are signing things, in places where we can we put up our little icons so as to connect ourselves with our words.  But aside from that, how does one get seen as themselves, We are always who we are but we get lost in being Shire we can’t find our way out of her.
 

Michella and Shannon (which is why it got a bit disjointed in the middle there)

We have decided to write a journal about our life in our other world.  It’s just going to be like day to day stuff, relationships, work, events, rather than philosphical discussions about such things.  If you want to read it drop us a note and we will email you the address.