hungryghosts | Recent Entries

EDIT 9/3/21: Just as a heads-up, we don't give people access automatically, mostly because we're self-conscious about "spamming" people. If you want access, just ask in the comments - you'll likely get it as long as you're not a totally empty account or a creep.

Hi! Thanks for stopping by! Here, you'll find art, fandom chatter, stories, and the occasional bundle of thoughts. Please give this post a lookover first, though, to make doubly sure we're compatible!

Who the heck are we?
( that's a good question )

Reasons we might mesh
( fandoms! and other fun stuff )

Reasons we might not mesh
( Disk Horse Thoughts(tm) )

Content warnings
( a heads-up in advance )

Access filters
( who goes where and sees what )

Other useful posts
( if you wish to read more! )

Thanks for reading!!!

(This is the secret second half of this Tumblr post - I deemed this part too spicy for Tumblr. Discussion of flaws in leftist thinking, feat. ableism ahead.)

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(Crossposted from Reddit.)

Asian-American here. (Happy Lunar New Year!) I think I responded to one of your other threads a while back, about Buddhism.

I've been wanting to write about how our individual experience of being Asian-American has affected our plurality, but it's a surprisingly difficult topic - I think in large part because being Asian in the US has long been about invisibility, to the point that we've become habituated to ignoring our own Asianness. And Asian-American experiences are so diverse (especially when it comes to colorism, fluency, and citizen status - our experiences, being pale East Asian, US-born, and fluent in English are quite different from the experiences of a darker-skinned immigrant still learning English) that it feels fraught to write about our own experiences, out of concern that they'd be taken as Representation Of All Asian-American Experiences. But I do definitely think it has affected us, even if we can't name every way it has yet.

Off of the top of my head, our parents (who are immigrants) always had a strongly pragmatic cast to how they approached the world. Extremely resourceful folks, saw objects for what they could do rather than what they were "supposed" to do and could jury-rig anything to their needs. They didn't believe in letting their feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done (or so they liked to claim) and what needed to be done was defined by what concrete value it brought to the family, not some kind of abstract morality divorced from reality. (Or so they liked to claim.) They thought constantly in collective - what was good for the family, not just our nuclear unit but the extended group, the way people's actions reflected on said family, etc.

Make no mistake: our parents sucked in a lot of ways that left scars. But they did teach us a lot of things, some good, some that can't be neatly classified as good or bad. When I look, I can see traces of it running everywhere through our plurality. Our willingness to jury-rig and modify parts of our own functioning. Our focus on concrete advice on living plural. The relative ease with which we accept ideas like "people in systems can be both individuals and parts of a whole - singlets, too, are individuals who are parts of their communities." On a more fraught level: a tendency to stifle our feelings and efface ourselves for the good of the group. Being perhaps a little too comfortable with being unseen. Difficulty distinguishing looking okay from being okay. Generational trauma that manifests, among other ways, as a fear of scarcity and a complicated relationship with food. A need to Achieve Something and Be Successful. Things that kept us outwardly functional, even through incredibly trying circumstances, while also eroding our deeper well-being.

And also, for us, US-born to immigrant parents who were our main connection to our culture, who we are purposefully no longer in contact with - there is a perpetual sense of... not simply loss, but having been severed from a greater whole. When we cut away what was killing us, a lot of good went with it too. Something that was always with us, unnoticed in the background, until it was gone. Even those of us who don't quite see themselves as Asian can sense its absence. We look after each other, try to create our own little culture with its own little traditions within, but it can't ever be a replacement.

Oh, and of course, there's the topic of race and internal identity. Sure have a lot of feelings (and frustrations) about the ways people handle that subject, considering none of us Look Asian internally and a number of us don't even feel personally connected to Asian identity. But I won't get into it here. Not on the new year. Inauspicious, you see.

Interesting thing discovered last night - apparently there's a website for Norwegian plural systems now? I can't read Norwegian and don't know the creator, so I don't have opinions on the content, but I think this is a neat thing to exist and I thought I'd share it here in case any plural folks on this site are from Norway.

https://plural.no/

The creator's post on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/system.grdnsys.no/post/3mdvtkpuz7225

Which misconceptions about plurality (or specific types of plurality) bother you the most? (Or at all, really.)

Feel free to list anything, but we're especially interested in lesser-known misconceptions and information correcting misconceptions with sources.

(Inspired in large part by this Reddit post.)

(crossposting a thing I wrote in Discord so I don't lose it)

Was working on our "am I plural" guide but now I'm distracted by the thought of writing a "this is how we do emotional regulation as a system" essay

I feel like a lot of emotional regulation in systems keeps being "designate one headmate as the Omelas kid/icky emotion holder and then suppress them" and it bothers me

Off of the top of my head, I can think of a few points that I want to cover...

Emphasizing that thoughtcrime is not real and that your actions are what matter - you are not Bad for having messy thoughts and feelings (maybe link DBT stuff on radical acceptance of emotions?)
My personal step-by-step strategy for emotional regulation: commit to not acting in the moment, identify the emotion, identify the cause of the emotion, validate the emotion, identify what the most productive action is, take the action
Maybe also a bit on harm reduction and gradual progress - emphasize that it's okay to not be able to do all of this off the bat
Ways that being plural can assist with emotional regulation: acting as "spotters" for each other (and practices to make sure everyone stays in contact during these moments), switching (but with caveats), imposed hugs
Appendix of further reading for DBT resources, social skills, IFS, and other related topics

New resource website from a system in the Western tulpamancy community: https://ratpileresource.club/

Haven't gone through all of it yet, but it seems focused on developing better communication within a system (in both the mechanical and interpersonal senses) with a sprinkling of personal experience.

Mirror of this post on our website, any updates will happen there: https://feastingwithghosts.com/creations/essays/plurality/internalsignatures

(With thanks to Pax^Wonderbeasts for suggesting the word "signature", and the Otherconnect Discord for proofreading!)

So this is a guide on a thing that my system and several other systems do that helps us a lot with intentional switching, internal communication, and so forth. We kind of cultivate for every member of the system a "bundle" of associations and sensory impressions as a way for the rest of the system to reach them or as a way for them to reach out. For ease of discussion, I'll refer to these association-bundles as "internal signatures", or simply "signatures".

As a disclaimer, this technique works well for us, but your mileage may vary. You probably won't experience everything the exact same way that we do, and that's okay! No two systems are the same - take what works and leave the rest.

( Read more... )

More current events talk: this is stuff that I consider hopeful, soul-nourishing, action-oriented stuff, but I'll still put it under a cut in case anyone needs to avoid it.

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Excerpt from a Reddit post I made. On current events, stubborn altruism, and hope.

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Got around to refining that old post into a proper essay. Mind the content warnings on this one.

A Post-Unmortem of Acute Madness: On surviving an episode of acute psychosis as a group.

(Crosspost from Tumblr)

I want to write a full thing on doubt and plurality another time, but seeing some posts around here has lit a fire under my tail to at least ramble about our experiences with it.

Long story short: we're at the point where we don't really experience doubt anymore, but it wasn't always like that. Over a decade in the making, by this point.

( Read more... )

(Crossposted from Tumblr.)

In another post I made, I spoke about a relationship I had that felt more like a Secret Third Thing than a "typical" romantic relationship.

[…]make what basically amounts to the opposite of a suicide pact with someone ("despite everything we are going to live the best that we can, and we're taking each other with us") without any particular feelings involved, only for particular feelings to get involved (to this day, despite the feelings, it still feels more like a Secret Third Thing than dating per se. probably because we don't consider the feelings the origin or foundation of our relationship)

Because I feel like rambling about in-system relationships, Secret Third Things, and their overlap today, I'll disclose that that particular relationship is with another person in my system. (The other in that post being my outerworld partners - those relationships are also unconventional in their own ways, but that's a story for another post.)

There's a bit of important context to know about us first. (It involves past trauma, particularly child abuse - I've put it under the cut.)

( Read more... )

also to be included in a more polished essay later: old post we made about improving social skills

Well, at the risk of being pedantic, neither I nor anyone else can teach you how to make everyone like you. That's just impossible, and I'd also argue that trying for that just makes it harder to develop real social skills, since an important part of social interaction is accepting that you won't get along with everyone (even if both you and they are decent people! sometimes folks just aren't compatible)

Now that's been said, I've seen these resources recommended for improving your social skills:

https://www.succeedsocially.com/ (have not read this one myself)
https://captainawkward.com/ (read it back in the day, seems fairly sensible)

To be polished into an essay later: old posts we made about hobbies

Hobbies that one or more of us have: writing, oldschool website-making, crochet, origami, fountain pens, digital and traditional art, cello, multiplayer gaming, mechanical keyboards, lucid dreaming, indoor gardening, reading miscellaneous nonfiction.

For starting points for the more accessible of these...

Writing: everyone hypes up writing a novel. You really don't need to write a novel. Write short stories, drabbles, single scenes, sequences of words that got stuck in your head, rants about this or that. Get into the habit of writing and prioritize writing something rather than something polished.

Oldschool website-making: there's a number of hosts around, Neocities being probably the most known, Nekoweb being a newer option that's pretty good. Look up tutorials on HTML and CSS (you don't need to touch JS)

Origami: lots of patterns around the web. Look for beginner ones. You don't need fancy paper, we made stuff out of printer and notebook paper for years. Just familiarize yourself with cutting your own squares (fold edge over until flush with the other edge to make a triangle, cut off the trailing paper, unfold triangle into square, ta-da).

Traditional art: hardest part here will be mindset. You'll compare yourself to other artists and angst about how you're not where you want to be a LOT, and it sucks. Think about it like a video game - any art you draw, no matter how shitty, is EXP, while no art means no EXP. Read the "50% Rule" on Drawabox.com and do your best to keep its principles in mind.

Multiplayer gaming: bunch of free multiplayer games out there. Of the ones we play, Warframe and Sky: Children of the Light probably give you the most access to the game without paying, just be prepared to be sad about not being able to afford many things. Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV are fun, but they only give you free access to parts of the game, and then you gotta pay for expansions.
Tbh, if you have a computer that can run it + mods, I would recommend buying Minecraft if you have money to spare - the huge modding ecosystem means you'll get objectively more game for your money than buying an MMO expansion.

Lucid dreaming: "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge is probably the most comprehensive book I've found on the topic, and you might be able to read it for free on Archive.org. I've personally found that reading about lucid dreaming + keeping a dream journal is usually enough for me to lucid dream without having to dip into the more involved techniques, but your mileage may vary. Be mindful of getting into this if you have chronic nightmares - lucid dreaming can help you manage them, but ime there's a transition period where you remember dreams more vividly but aren't lucid in them yet.

Reading miscellaneous nonfiction: again, Archive.org is your friend! If you have a library card, Libby lets you borrow ebooks from your library.

Regarding web development, I fully believe that you have it in you. CSS is daunting, often arcane. But in our experience, it does not remain that way forever. Some years ago, it took us hours to center a single element; now, we delight in debugging others' CSS and have written all of the styling on our site by hand. Like fronting, there is only one way to improve, and that is practice.

As for resources, I will disclaim that we haven't used all of these. But we have seen them recommended by several others.

Free and Newbie-Friendly Static Site Hosts

Neocities (The best-known host, by far!)
Nekoweb (This is the place that our site is hosted. We began on Neocities; it is more established and populous, but we enjoy Nekoweb more.)

Resources for Learning

HTML for People (We have only taken a cursory look at this. But we liked what we saw!)
Kevin Powell's Youtube channel (We have not used this. But people speak very highly of him.)
freeCodeCamp's course on responsive web design (Once again, we have not used this. But people speak highly of freeCodeCamp.)
CSS Diner (A little game to help you learn and practice CSS selectors. We have not delved deeply into this one.)
Flexbox Froggy (Another CSS game, this time with a focus on flexbox. We have not played this, but people speak highly of it.)

Documentation

MDN Web Docs (The most comprehensive reference for HTML, CSS, and Javascript, maintained by Mozilla, Google, and many volunteers.)
w3schools (I have seen people say to take this one with a grain of salt. But it has been generally helpful to us. We prefer the MDN documentation, but we will often cross-reference the two if we're unsure how something is used.)

Some posts on Reddit got me compiling a few plurality-related lists, so I thought I'd share them here in case people have suggestions for additions. (Thank you to folks in the Otherconnect server for your contributions!)

Notes on curation: You'll notice that this list doesn't include (micro)label listings (e.g. Pluralpedia). This is intentional - this list was born partly out of a complaint I've seen from a lot of pluralfolk, which is that there are so many microlabel/term coining and definition posts that they bury other resources. Likewise, I've seen complaints that term/origin/etc slapfighting buries all of the other resources that are out there. Besides a brief section on unlearning Western-centric ideas about selfhood (which I think is important beyond the plural community), I'm not going to link resources specifically related to said slapfighting.

Make no mistake, though: this list is for resources that are inclusive of all plural people. Not everyone will find everything on this list applicable to their system, and we can't speak for every opinion that the creators linked here may hold, but we do draw the line at "resources" that disavow others' lived experiences. Please contact us if we link anything like that so it can be removed.

Pragmatic Advice

(improving internal communication, building headspace, etc)

Healthy Multiplicity - collection of selves-help resources
LB Lee's plural essays - LOTS OF STUFF. Highly recommended!
Dragonheart Collective's plural writings - smaller essay collection but still quite good
Being Many - site full of plural advice
Sarah K. Reece's multiplicity essays - less guides and more personal writings, but still contain a lot of good observations
Hungry Ghosts' plural essays - it's us! Some opinioning, some advice
The Tulpanomicon - site full of Western/internet tulpamancy guides - while they were made in the context of that community, many systems, even disordered ones, have found them useful
Multiplicity: The Missing Manual + United Front Boot Camp - have not read this one ourselves but often see it recommended
Healing My Parts' advice blog - disordered plurality focus. Have not read it ourselves, but often see individual articles from it linked.

Things to Consider Writing Down for Your System, Specifically

(not necessarily for sharing with others - in fact, some of these *shouldn't* be shared outside the system for safety reasons)

A guide for new members of the system: see Dragonheart Collective's guide on making one.
House rules, complaint boxes, or other internal governance things: see LB Lee's System Governments and Other Order-Keepers
Crisis plan, good to have even if your crises are "mild": see How to Make a Pocket Crisis Guide + The Psychological Badness Scale + Crisis Planning: The Hit-by-a-Bus Plan
Notes about things that make internal communication or switching easier: front triggers, useful tools, etc
List of collective outerworld responsibilities and the things needed to accomplish them
Individual wishlists and collective budget
Hobbies, interests, things people want to front for
Individual or system-wide journals
Troubleshooting guides: any useful sub-crisis supports for getting through common challenges in your system. E.G. if your system frequently loses internal communications and has to use some specific tricks to re-establish it, or if you use a specific procedure to get around memory gaps, then that might be something that you'd want to write down.
List of friends/family/etc. and which of them know about the system in cases where disclosure isn't universal and memory for who knows what is lacking. Could help avoid accidental disclosure and/or re-disclosure.
Printouts/backups of helpful articles and quotes that you wouldn't want to lose to link rot or other factors.
Sources for ideas and approaches that have worked in case you need to reference them.
When making system rosters/notes: for folks who don't find names/pronouns/pictures useful because of folks who prefer to remain unidentified, sometimes asking folks to draw a symbol to represent themselves helps because a given image doesn't have to be exclusive to someone. It can give useful information without being uniquely identifying, kind of like how some Tumblr anons will sign with emojis.
Any internal symbolism that's useful to have written down. Knowing that something in headspace or an aspect of someone's form is likely to have XYZ meanings can be surprisingly handy.

Things to Share with Outerworld People

Name, pronouns, pictures (use Picrew, not genAI), short Twitter-esque bios
Etiquette and interaction guidelines for outerworld folks: see the Plural Etiquette Questionnaire
Frequently asked questions about your system (divided into "okay to ask," "iffy," and "just plain rude" if you feel like it)

Software for Plural Systems

(important note: we have not used all of these and cannot personally endorse each of them)

Simply Plural (app for tracking fronting and sharing fronting status, plus some tools like in-system chat)
PluralKit (Discord proxybot for posting with different names/avatars from one account, also contains tools like front tracking)
Tupperbox (another Discord proxybot)
Pronouns.cc (site where you can make profiles to share your pronouns and other handy info, but it lets you make subprofiles for headmates)
fronters.cc (site that displays fronters from PluralKit/Simply Plural)
Lighthouse (private journals, forum, and other tools for your system)
Ampersand (local-only front tracking and journaling tool)
Utter (local-only tool for having ephemeral in-sys chats)
PluralChat (also a local-only tool for ephemeral in-sys chats)
MultiChat (ditto, but it's a desktop application)
Plu/ral/ (PluralKit alternative)
Octocon (PK/SP alternative - have heard rumors that the creators are medicalist/exclusionary though?)
Twinote (Android, iOS) (like Twitter but all offline and for your system only)
Antar (can be used for in-sys chats, local-only but not ephemeral)
Perfect PK (webapp for managing switches in PluralKit)
PKswitcher (ditto)
PluralKit Switch Calendar (webapp for visualizing PluralKit switches)
Pronoun Dressing Room (site for trying out pronouns and names - could be helpful for new headmates?)
Syschat (Another offline selves-chat app, for desktop)
Switchy - Minecraft mod that allows players to create "profiles" that can be switched between. Includes PluralKit-esque chat proxies, separate skins, separate inventories, and more. Highly configurable, so specific features can be enabled or disabled.

"Unlearning Western-Centric Ideas of Selfhood" Copypasta

I recommend reading about plural history and divergent experiences of selfhood across the world. It's extremely important to realize that the concept of a static, singular self being the only "normal" and "healthy" way of being is a Western construct; same with realizing that the experience of being more-than-one transcends both clinical diagnoses and the limited ways the (very Western and very online) plural community presents it.

Here's a few links to get you started.

LB Lee's essay series on plural history

The origin of the term "endogenic" (note how its meaning when it was first coined differs from how people use it now) and the history of the use of "system" in plural spaces

Can the DSM-5 differentiate between nonpathological possession and dissociative identity disorder? A case study from an Afro-Brazilian religion (research paper, what it says on the tin)

Big Sourcedump of Nonwhite Spirit Marriage, Possession, and Many-Selvedness (1878-2022) (what it says on the tin)

The Mask As The Truest Thing (essay about the fluidity of self, by a Nigerian writer. my description does not do it justice)

The Importance of Being Real (essay on questioning the fears behind being "fake", and the maladaptive behaviors they spawn)

A Cure For Plural Piss-Fight Poisoning (very down-to-earth, concrete advice on how to detox from plural discourse. Can be applied to all kinds of online discourse tbh)

A catalog of plural stories and notes about its curation

Resources for Allies

There are many plural 101s out there, but we'd recommend More Than One (simple and has links for reading more) or Manchester Metropolitan University's Understanding Multiplicity for something from a more formal source.
"So You Want To Write A Plural Character" by Dragonheart Collective
Allies of Plurals Handbook by Partielles (original French), translated by volunteers at The Plural Association
The Plurality Playbook by FreyasSpirit and Irenes - "To help employees and managers understand dissociative disorders, as well as plurality as a whole."
Transgender Mental Health by Eric Yarbrough - clinician handbook with a section on healthcare for trans plural systems

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Hungry Ghosts

March 2026

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Hungry Ghosts

Recent Entries

Sticky: (Read me first!) About this journal

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Misconceptions

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A Guide to Internal Signatures

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Notes on Doubt

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A Big Plural Listdump

Pragmatic Advice

Things to Consider Writing Down for Your System, Specifically

Things to Share with Outerworld People

Software for Plural Systems

"Unlearning Western-Centric Ideas of Selfhood" Copypasta

Resources for Allies

Other Plural Linkdumps

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Dreamwidth Followpost

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Regarding system roles: history and commentary

A Post-Unmortem of Acute Madness

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March 2026

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