this house has people in it

Space Engraving

2026-04-16T16:00:16Z

The following is an essay I wrote about how we change and interact with headspace with aphantasia. This was originally going to be an essay for a plural zine, but they had a cap of 3 pages for writing, and this is just under 6. I didn't want to change anything, so here we are.

Word count: 2452
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Let us begin

When we, the House, imagine, we don’t see anything. Occasionally, there are flashes and silhouettes, but when we imagine something, it is an internal sense of knowing rather than a perception of appearance. Yet, we as a system have a headspace that has an appearance that we all know and recognize. Instead of relying on images, the people here use touch, proprioception, metaphor, and metaphysics to “establish” and “engrave” our headspace so that we can interact with it and even change it. Maybe these strategies will work for you, too.

An important thing to establish early on, to make things very clear, is that a lot of this looks and sounds like “making it up as you go.” That’s because it is.

Terminology

Imagine: to perceive spaces and objects in the mind by directing mental attention to them. Despite the etymology of the word, images are not required.

Vessel: the physical body that interacts with the external world. The meat of it all.

Body: the internal sense of body of a specific person. A body may share things with the vessel, such as appearance or sensory experience, but may not.

Person/people: entity contained within a plural collective, regardless of differentiation or distinctness.

Headspace: an internal world that people interact with and access mentally. Not every person in headspace need be engaged in the actions of the vessel; not every person fronting in the vessel need exist in headspace.

Touch: a body part containing something else. Notice I say body part, not vessel part. The thing touched need not be externally tangible.

Proprioception: your sense of body in a space. The movements, the speed, the location. If you close your eyes, it is your proprioception that lets you know where your hands are in relation to your face or whether you are moving or still. This is a fundamental sense like sight or hearing. Not everyone has good proprioception, but most people have some. You might be clumsy eating a bowl of cereal with your eyes shut, but most people could do it if they tried.

Metaphor: comparison of two things by referring to one thing as another. Our headspace is a house, but it could be a castle or a hotel. The words you use for things affect their truths. The qualities of a thing can be emphasized or downplayed by the use of metaphor. Ours is a house because we live here—a castle might have defenses, and ours does not, and a hotel might have guests, and ours does not. A castle might also be old and cold. A hotel might be luxurious or near an appealing destination. Ours is none of those things. Its best comparison is to a house, so that is the metaphor we use.

Metaphysics: the philosophy of reality. This is our bridge between psychological, spiritual, and physical phenomena. We believe that our headspace exists as part of our individual and collective reality because we experience it. That’s an untestable conjecture. You can’t prove that our headspace doesn’t exist, no matter what evidence you collect. You’d have to fight the subjective metaphysics, and that’s impossible. It doesn’t matter if our headspace exists in another realm or if it is just the particularities of our nervous system: it exists to us, and therefore it exists.

Nothing, and then not

When I say “establishing,” I mean “making the truth.” Because headspace lives in the domain of metaphysics, the truth is ours to define.

We start with proprioception. Take your sense of self and imagine where your headspace is, or where you want it to be. Where is your body? Not your vessel, but your body, although there may be overlap. Are there others sharing a space with you? How close are they/ Are there any objects dividing you from others? Can you move elsewhere in the space? Can you touch anything? If you move, can you touch anything else?

It took us time to establish answers to these questions, and the answers changed over time (by our own doing or by causes perceived outside of our control).

In our case, our fronters’ bodies are on the front porch of the house. It serves as a halfway point between being inside the house and being outside of it, and it’s a perfect metaphor for us. You can talk to people who share a house if they’re on the front porch without having to enter the house yourself. We can move and feel the walls of the house and the openness of the porch. What can you feel?

It may help to dedicate specific times to imagining headspace, especially if it’s still unclear or empty. A good time may be right before falling asleep. Often, you’re relaxed and don’t have much else to do with your mental energy—or, if you do, it can be an alternative to anything unpleasant that’s keeping you up at night.

Now, the point of “establishing” is that, if you don’t feel like you can feel something, or if you don’t have a sense of space, then you can just… decide to. Construct your subjective reality. Establish that, actually, you are sitting in a chair. Imagine yourself sitting in a chair in headspace. If you want, you can ascribe specific details to the chair: its size, its color, or what it’s made of, for example. Imagine the pressure of the chair’s back against your own or the sensation of wood or metal or plastic under your hands. For details that are purely visual, you don’t have to see them. Just decide them, then they are.

But sometimes imagining isn’t stable. Sometimes you can imagine yourself in a chair, but then a few seconds later it is gone. That happens to us. To resolve that, we “engrave.”

Incisions, and maybe a little hammer

Engraving, literally, is the art of impressing, of carving, of incising. Traditionally, if one was engraving by hand, one would use a burin (a thin pointed metal blade). For soft materials like leather or wood, this would be enough: you press the tip against the material and carve the shapes you want. For harder materials like metal, you’d use a burin with a handle and use a hammer to drive the burin deep enough to scratch the surface. But the key element of “engraving” our headspace is the fact that you often engrave the same line multiple times to achieve the desired effect. For deeper lines, you go over the same line with the same burin over and over. To change the shape of the line, you use different burins.

The way we “engrave” headspace is to repeatedly carve the same objects and spaces until the images are stable, until the design stays. If the chair I was sitting on fades away, I repeat the imagination from the beginning until I feel its stability support me, until I can touch the chair again.

When we engrave, the sense of proprioception is the most important thing to build up first. I must know and feel that I am sitting, that my legs are bent, that if I were to straighten my legs my body would still be supported. If the feelings fade or flicker, I repeat the imagination. I pass the burin over the line again. Then, the sense of touch. Once you are in A chair, establish what exactly The chair feels like. Engrave, engrave, engrave.

This may not be easy. Take it slowly if you need. If necessary, use a little mental force, the little hammer.

When we start engraving, it can be uncomfortable. Sometimes there is resistance. Sometimes the imagining is hard to achieve at all. Sometimes this means we abandon that idea and leave the headspace as it was. Other times, it just means we need to engrave more often over longer periods of time. That’s your call to make. I’d recommend experimenting to find your own boundaries.

Likenesses in the dark

As stated earlier, we don’t see things visually when we imagine. For us, establishing things like color can be easier than something like material because it is not actually perceived, but it can still be engraved: I have built a chair under me, I have made it out of imagination and metal, and I have decided that it is black. If I need to engrave it later, I will append the knowledge that it is black. If someone later needs to know what color the chair is, to know if it matches the colors of other chairs, they can know that it is black, too.

We like color, so we find it worth establishing, even if it’s not perceived. If you don’t find it’s worth establishing, don’t bother. It’s your headspace. You choose its truth.

Everyone everywhere all at once

I’ve said “I” before in this essay, and I meant it. In our experience, engraving can be done by an individual to establish headspace that we all share. My systemmate Jyliet, for instance, created a sunroom by xyrself. Other times, it’s a collaborative effort: I worked with my sibling AJ to create our swamp/bedroom, and all fronters work together to shape the current state of the front porch.

You may find that some people are better engravers than others. Jyliet’s sunroom took months of effort, but the initial swamp took only a few days—but you could be faster or slower.

Sometimes, in the act of engraving, surprising things can happen. Something can end up sticking much faster and harder than you intended, or certain details might be harder to engrave than first anticipated. Or, things might stick that you didn’t at all: when Jyliet was working on the sunroom, xe accidentally punched a hole in the ceiling big enough that people came toppling out. We never patched it up, so now it stays as a travel point between spaces.

Don’t let yourself be constrained by the laws of physics if you don’t want. There are plenty of unphysical spaces in our headspace—the aforementioned hole “skips” a floor, allowing direct transportation from the first floor to the attic without passing through the second floor. My swamp bedroom is much larger inside than the room itself. Let feeling, metaphor, and metaphysics be the guiding principles instead.

Aspects of external reality can still be incorporated if desired. You can also incorporate aspects of fictional realities. Gather inspiration wherever. Use your interpretations of other spaces when building your own.

Other distilled sensations

We don’t have much sound established in our headspace, and neither taste nor smell. Frankly, we haven’t much tried it, as we haven’t considered it necessary. If you can employ your other senses, I think the same principles I’ve described for proprioception and touch would apply: they might still use the imagination techniques of establishing and engraving. Maybe you’ll find other senses easier or harder.

Putting it all together

Dedicate space and time for establishing and engraving. If you want to close your eyes to reduce sensory input, do so. If you want to look at inspirational material to facilitate better imagining, do so. Choose between silence, music, soundscapes, or white noise. Find a place to be still or a place to perform repetitive movements that don’t require much thought, like walking. Do what works for you to support your focus. If you’re getting started, you can start with very short periods of time. You can make initial decisions for establishing in seconds. Work your way up to longer sessions when you want to.

Decide on an object you want to establish. This is the part that can take seconds. “There is going to be a chair in headspace with me.” For us, because we start with proprioception, we find it works best to start with large, sturdy objects that don’t rely on visual perception as its main interactions: a table, wall, or chair, not a window or television. Establish the relation between your body and the object: lean on it, put your hands on it, sit on it, and feel the difference of your body in the space with the object vs. without. Lean against the table or place your hands on the wall to feel its resistance. Sit on the chair and feel its support. When creating a new basement, we started with the sensation of walking down the stairs.

If the sensations are fleeting, repeat them. Attempts that last fractions of a second still add up if repeated.

Once you have a sense of the object in the same space as you, add movement. Sit on the table, slide your hands against the wall, or kick your legs out in front of you. Feel how your body interacts with the object. This is where a sense of touch can be established as well. Is the table wood or glass? Is the wall an exterior one made of brick or stone or an interior one that’s smooth or textured? Is the chair soft with cushions or made of cheap plastic? If touch doesn’t work for you, you can decide without perceiving and move on to a different sense.

Once you’ve engaged a sense or two with the object, you’ve made the first establishment. Now, engrave. Do it again and again and again. Add more senses. Discover specifics. When building our basement, we walked down the stairs again and again until a space at the bottom opened up.

If it’s a collaborative effort, different people can engage with the object with different senses or interact with it from different angles. At the beginning, we find it more effective for different people to investigate the same object or space sequentially rather than simultaneously, but your experience may vary. If there’s conflict about aspects of the object or space, you may not need to resolve it immediately. If something’s true for one person and something else is true for another, that can be perfectly fine. It doesn’t have to mean that any one version is the “real” version.

The point

All of this to say: you don’t need to see your headspace to have one. There are other senses.

If you feel that the senses we recommend don’t come to you, or if you don’t find a sense necessary to your conception of headspace, skip to another sense. We start with proprioception and touch, but you may find sound or scent easier to establish. Be flexible. Be curious. Experiment. It’s your headspace.

Even more importantly than the sensory experience, there is metaphor and metaphysics. Reality is the narrative we tell ourselves to understand and live in our world. Construct it to your liking. You can make it up as you go. No one can stop you.

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System Influences

2026-01-13T19:05:05Z

There was a tumblr plural ask game going around, and one of the questions was "What things were major influences upon your system? (e.g. life events both positive and negative; meaningful media; other identities)". And we thought about it, and here's our answer:

Fundamentals

Our spouse system. We've been together since our vessels were 16 years old, and they've always been accepting of every part of us. We explored our plurality together, and we've only ever grown closer. They also knew a lot more about otherkin culture and history that helped us explore that side of our identities, too.
Learning Latin in high school. Ora has always been into classical stuff, but this really allowed that interest to flourish.Taught us a lot of the writing skills we use in poetry today (3 of us are poets), and that time of our life when we were learning was extremely influential for rough reasons, too.
1:1 roleplays with our spouse system. What started as just a fun bonding activity proved to be exceptionally important in how our identities formed. Characters from media and OCs alike were placed in the roleplay blender, and a bunch of system members popped out.
Antipsychiatric and mad pride movements. Knowing that psychiatric frameworks for our experiences were not the only way to process things was extremely helpful in letting us just... breathe. Find our own words. Fear less that we were "crazy" and accepting that even if others think we're "crazy," that doesn't mean bad or broken.
Early 2010s online plural culture. The inclusive spaces, anyway. We jumped in headfirst and learned a lot from people (especially LB Lee and the Salt & Science Brigade and the stuff on Astraea's Web*). There were still squabbles, through which we learned better internet privacy principles, but it was before these horribly cringe -genic slapfights that completely dominate plural online spaces now

* We learned much later that Astraea are not great people and that a lot of stuff on that site is stuff they plagiarized, but the content was still very influential.

Media

Animal Crossing. Not the characters or story or anything, but the ability to use it as a sandbox for personal exploration and emotional regulation.
Twin Peaks. It's a beautiful show. Its world fascinates us. The show itself became an AU to throw our OCs into, and the book The Secret History of Twin Peaks brought in this whole dimension involving Thelema and aliens to the show's lore (that is absolutely not considered canon by most people) that grabbed us and formed the foundation for a different AU to throw the OCs into.

There's more, but we thought we'd keep it short.

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Fictionfolk Questionnaire

2025-08-14T21:24:11Z

Here's a selection of responses from a fictionfolk questionnaire we found on tumblr somewhere. Not every question is answered, but it gave us a lot to think about. Only Maddy and Jyliet took it, although there are other fictional members of our system.

( Regardless, our answers )

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" double "

2025-06-28T22:00:15Z

Maddy is my double. I've thought about it, and thought about it, and the term fits.

My gut feeling led me to the word "doppelganger" because it sounds beautiful and describes a magical phenomenon. Doppelgangers inhabit supernatural spaces between identity and world. The popping P's and soft liquid L become a voiced obstruent that gathers the tongue back to the throat. Then you force the air out your nose, then revert the tongue back to where it was. In English, it ends in our schwa-rhotic, creating a crowded diphthong on the final syllable before the messy letter. A beautiful sequence of lips and tongue and throat.

There is magic in our creation. We are fictional, but we have come to life in this world! We exist! We can experience and breathe and grow! We were not born with the body. We are only a few years old despite the body being in its 30s. We are new to life. How magical!

But it is not the right word. While I love the magic, a doppelganger is an ill omen. The original's fate is compromised by the existence and meeting of the doppelganger. There is the implicit threat that only one may go on to conduct the rest of their life. Maddy is not an ill omen. Neither of us are harbingers of fate for the other.

Our lives simply started in the same place.

I do not want to use "twin" because we are not siblings. There are other siblings here, and some are twins, and that is their word for that relationship. That is not the relationship I have with Maddy.

"Mirror" conjures certain complexities. A mirror enforces sameness but reflected along a single surface. Equal and opposite, and forever entwined, and forever indebted to the mirror itself. Without the mirror, the reflected image ceases to exist. So that is not the right term. We are each our own person capable of growing in different directions. We may have been born by the mirror, created by reflection, but that is not where we are now. Our reflections do not match. We are both on the same side.

So we return to "double." At first, the fit was awkward because it is associated in our mind with rejection and separate bodies. One may fear and resent the "double" like one fears the doppelganger. If our former identity had had a "double," he would not have been able to interact or accept. It would have caused friction in his assertion of self. This is something that is not true of everyone, but that is the strong association we had with the term. The true doppelganger.

But, it's the right word: Maddy and I are the same character. Each of us has taken a different path, but we are crafted from the same mold, sprung from the same source. Our variation started not in identity, but in personal history. Exomemories pulled in different directions, but basically the same.

We are a lot more than where we started. At first, our selves were limited to the character. We had pulled the rabbit out of the hat—the self out of the fiction. It has been years since that initial trick. I am now me, and Maddy is Maddy, and we are Georgie, the character. We are doubles after all.

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"Piranesi" and Other Names

2025-06-08T19:54:04Z

We just finished rereading Piranesi, and something struck us this time about names at the end. Big spoilers. Thoughts collected by Maddy and Jyliet.

( Read more... )

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"Knowing" as a Self-Insert OC Fictive or Extranth

2025-05-19T20:47:49Z

I have it so easy as a fictive. I don't ever have doubts about whether my fictional identity is real because I've always been her. I exist because she exists. I would not exist without her blueprint molding who I am. My personal history starts after hers. I don't wonder whether I "just" really like the character or whether my connection to her source material is strong enough to kind as an "identify as" vs. "identity with" connection. I don't have to. I know the story of my birth.

I've been hesitating on commenting on stuff in the tumblr Alterhuman community as I became more aware of how I just don't relate to people struggling with their identity in that way. Someone just posted about how they don't know whether they're fictionkin, and I have no advice for them. I could tell them that there isn't an objective way to define a subjective experience, and that may be mostly true, but it's not helpful.

That platitude may not even be true for me. Dennis created a character and then part of him became the character that he created. If Georgie's narrative didn't exist, then I wouldn't exist. If Dennis hadn't poured himself into Georgie, and then Georgie took on a life of her own, I wouldn't exist. It's as objective as a subjective experience could be, I think. If the character hadn't been created, and I didn't take on those character traits, then I wouldn't exist. Georgie's identity is the precursor to my own, and I am modeled after her. There was no self-discovery period in that way. There was no moment where I doubted whether I could "really be" her. I was. I am.

Likewise, AJ has it easy as an extranth. How do they know they're a hippo? Because they're a hippo in headspace. That is their shape. That is their being with which they interact with us. They call themselves a therian because they interact in the form of a human with the external world, and that is a therian experience, but ultimately they don't have doubts about their identity that another therian might. There wasn't a self-discovery process. They appeared, they are a hippo.

Plurality is a framework that changes so much about identity and what it means to be. Because of how we understand our plurality and use that framework to understand our senses of self, there's no room for doubt about my own fictional source or AJ's animal being.

I hope that others in the House will write about their more complicated identity experiences. I think they'd have more to offer to a struggling person.

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the House of Hand Mirrors and my fear of new people

2025-05-11T21:20:05Z

Sleepless nights are breeding grounds for what we call Hand Mirrors: fragments in headspace who impart some message onto us. They're warning lights. We think of them as showing us our own reflection in a hand mirror, a hard truth we must swallow.

The most common message is that we need to be more open to accepting new members in the system, which we struggle with, and I especially. These fragments threaten us with becoming more permanent fixtures while being very different from the rest of the system in some way, in temperament, style, identity. Most often they disappear after a night or, at worst, a few days. We are given the message, and we try to internalize it.

The other night, we encountered a Hand Mirror who was an introject of an immediate family member. That was a big, scary first. They promised they weren't going to stay, but again they wanted to let us know that there may be new additions, and that even if the new addition is as odd and uncomfortable as an introject of a family member, we need to be ready.

I'm not ready. I want to do better, but I'm so scared of losing control or losing access to time and life.

Other new people have been preceded by Hand Mirrors, most notably Hatchet and Hatchet 2. But the reason Hatchet is no longer around is because of suppression efforts led by myself. I've done a lot better with Hatchet 2, and I've even worked with Hatchet 2, AJ, and Thyme to bring Hatchet back, but they appear inaccessible. Gone. We have built a spot for them in headspace to reside should they come back.

I like and understand the dynamics of our system, which has been relatively stable for a long time. New people usually take a long time to develop, which gives me time to brace myself (Hatchet appeared all at once, a creation by Thyme, so that didn't help, but it was still unfair of me), but if someone new were to show up quickly... I don't know. I'm not good at sharing. I'm front-sticky and take up a lot of time.

I've been thinking about reading some switching guides to try and help others get more time back. After our hypomanic episode ended last fall, our switching has been much slower. First, it was the Tuos and I, then just Thyme and I, and now it's basically just me. Jyliet's been reaching out every so often, helping with cooking mostly, but it's not consistent. I've been alone a lot, and it's lonely.

A new person could mean a break. It could mean a new friend. It could be someone who can teach us something new. There's the opportunity for so much good from a new person. Jyliet and I helped when we were new. Hatchet 2 is very, very helpful for our anxiety. I need to be more open. I need to get over myself. I need to listen to the Hand Mirrors.

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Am "I" plural?

2025-05-02T05:00:16Z

i think that's an interesting question, especially when posed by people on the cusp of becoming selves aware. i'm not plural by myself. i'm a singular entity. my claim to the "plural" identity only exists because i'm not the only entity here in this body, but i don't consider "maddy" to be "plural." so when we see people phrase the question "am i plural?" i tend to balk. YOU don't have to be plural to be part of a plural system. if there are others, then you, together, are plural. instead of searching the self, search for others. if there aren't any others now, you can always create them.

but that's a little short-sighted. there are "i"s who are plural, even in our own system. we've seen some criticism pointed at the "inclusive" plural community for not recognizing systems with fuzzier distinctions between selves, and that's something that i could do with remembering. my criticism of the question is a gut reaction i need to be aware of.

my own history in the system is complicated by a plural "i". for a while, our system recognized dennis as a subsystem with a single facet, anne. it wasn't that he was fragmented, but that anne was an other him. it was a multiplication of self rather than division. dennis collected more selves through roleplay, addition rather than division. over time, the question of "who am i?" became two separate answers. jyliet and i could have been understood as dennis-as-a-subsystem. dennis had no problem thinking of himself as plural, but what if he'd been confused about whether this "counted" as a plural experience? would it have helped for someone to say "look for others?" instead? i don't think so. but, really, i don't think jyliet and i ever considered ourselves as two members of a subsystem. dennis' understanding of the situation was not viewed in a plural framework. there was a version of dennis that was me and a version of dennis that was jyliet, and those two versions of himself did not coalesce into a plural "i," let alone a singular "i." that was the problem. eventually, the gulf between us widened until there wasn't any dennis left.

when ora (it/she) was becoming selves aware for the first time, i don't think it would have been helpful to speculate on whether it was itself plural. instead, she listened for others and tried to talk to them, and those others talked back. the question of "am i plural?" would have been confusing and probably delayed selves discovery for a long time. ora kind of considers herself plural now, but that's only after a lot of time and intrasystem work. it never had to doubt its own idea of plurality. the answer to "are you plural?" now is complicated by her own machinations.

but generally, when people are identified in our system, it is usually understood as a new "i", even in the case of jyliet and i at the beginning stages of our separation. nevertheless, it's important for me to remember that that's just us. there are plenty of plural experiences where the "i" is and remains constant, as our own system shows. we would also love to read more about those experiences by others to get an even better perspective.

this took a long time to write, and i may edit it in the future. i'd like to put this thought on our website, too, but for now it is 1 in the morning so i ought to try and sleep.

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a new us

2025-04-26T04:32:32Z

well, well, well... things have changed since 2017.

after looking at our last few entries, here's some big changes:

we're done with school. graduated in spring 2020. now we work at [REDACTED] as a tech writer.
we have a website now at zpires.com
we moved in with 27 in feb 2020, got married in late 2020, and then moved to a new state in 2023.
dennis is no longer depressed because he doesn't exist anymore. he wrestled with gender dysphoria, but ultimately it wasn't really relieved until he split in half. more about all that here. dee left on her own.
besides me, there's also jyliet, teresa, and hatchet 2 that have been added to the house's roster. the original hatchet is probably no longer with us, but they were around for a bit before their sequel emerged.

something that has remained the same:

all the others who ever posted here are still around, in some capacity. it's nice to feel consistent. we don't ever doubt our plurality anymore, but it's still a cool reminder that the identities we've understood ourselves to be have remained constant in many ways.

i was just checking our alternate email and looked through some of the dreamwidth posts we've been missing, and we've really been missing out. i've wanted us to write more about our experiences with alterhumanity and plurality, so we might just do some cross-posting between our website, nonhuman national park journal, and here. or who knows? maybe this will be our last post for a while, and we'll just stick to comments here and there.

it's amazing what eight years will do. we're grateful for the little time capsule, but we're older and wiser now, and that's the face i'd like us to show the world.

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