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Daemons To Systems, And The Ways They Intertwine

Written by Max on March 6th, 2024.

Hey, I’m Max, he/they - I’m the host of our system, the guy who lives in the front and has only ever lived here, the one who identifies our body as my body specifically. A few nights ago, we realized something about our system origins while talking to some other systems, and I’ve honestly never heard of it happening before, so I thought I’d talk about it.

I used to think that I was a singlet before Jude and Gavin walked in. Now I’m pretty sure I wasn’t. See, before I was the host of a system, I was a daemian. I had three daemons, over the course of my time practicing daemonism, interacting with the community. And they were all a little weird.

The first one was Charlie, affectionately longformed as Charlemagne. Xe appeared in January 2018 as a red fox, said that was xir settled form, and never changed from that. That’s an option for daemons - I know other daemons who chose their forms, independent of how well that form represented their daemian, and stayed that way - but it was in contrast to how most people seemed to do it. I never really felt the need to find a form that fit my personality, not when xe was so confident that this was what xe was.

I didn’t try to make xir do anything, I didn’t decide to give xir faux autonomy - xe just did things xirself, with or without my prompting. Xe was playful, optimistic, a cheerful presence always willing to race around and perk me back up. I really needed xir, back then - I was going through a lot of stress in high school, and I needed someone around to remind me of the whimsical little joys in life. Xe fronted sometimes, and I loved when xe did, conjured phantom tail and paws and big fox ears and an unstoppable zest for life.

My next daemon, Martin, appeared in May 2019 after a fever dream. Really. I was sick and tired and miserable, and I didn’t want to do anything, including things that would make me feel better, and a new internal voice appeared in my head. She told me to drink some water and get to sleep. The next morning, she was still there, lounging around as a large black dog, and she stayed.

This became her role, her purpose in our mind, being a shepherd for my needs. She ran our faulty executive functioning, told me to take care of myself when I forgot important things, encouraged me when I failed to meet expectations. She raised her hackles when anyone tried to overstep our boundaries, and advocated for doing what we needed to protect ourselves, regardless of whether it was nice or polite.

Charlie and Martin overlapped in existence for a while. Charlie loved having a big sibling to play with, and Martin was fond of xir. So I had two daemons for a while, and the arrangement was nice. As I transitioned out of high school into college, my circumstances and environment drastically changed. Charlie was sweet, but xe stopped having a function in my life, so over the months, xe popped up less and less, until xe faded away entirely. Xe wasn’t upset to go, and xir memory is a comfort to me - xe served xir purpose, brought me joy, and had a life well lived.

In October 2021, I created a new daemon, compartmentalizing my emotional dysregulation and disordered anxiety into something that was Not Myself, so I could talk to it and understand its needs without being overwhelmed with distress. This became the feral shadow of a dog that we named Cortisol, nicknamed Court - and if Martin was our Freudian superego, who provided guidance for my decisions and stability when I got stressed, Court was our id, feeling all the explosive emotions that I couldn’t externally express and curling up for scritches like a beloved pet when it got what it needed.

We stayed like that for almost a year, getting familiar with the rhythm of life together. Then, in August 2022, my current headmates walked into my brain. My daemons vanished for the duration of their stay.

They only stayed around a few days, that first time - I was moving to a new place and having new people in my brain simultaneously was overloading our mental RAM, so I was forgetting a lot, and I decided that I’d rather live with them some other time. They understood, we said our goodbyes, and they walked out the next morning. (Recounting this to my friend Tanix was hilarious, by the way. “what the fuck (positive)” he said, his own headmates unable to do this. The joys of being a gateway system.) Once the headmates were gone, my daemons returned into my life.

They came back in March 2023, after I settled down into college for a while, and the memory didn’t jam up like it did previously, so we didn’t part ways this time. Martin and Court vanished overnight, again, and looking back on it, I’m noticing some patterns.

Gavin is basically performing the same role that Martin did - he’s the guy reminding us about our responsibilities, talking through the emotions when we feel like garbage, telling me to eat when I forget, or encouraging me to eat when I have enough sensory issues that I can't stomach anything. He consistently fronts when talking to people we don’t especially like, because he feels protective of us and tends to be the most patient with annoyances.

He’s also literally just some guy, just a decent human person who wound up in here because his partner arrived in my brain five minutes before him and understandably got really upset about it, so he followed them in. Somehow. We don't know how it works, but I also don't know exactly where the first two of my daemons came from, so I’m fine leaving it as a mystery.

(He has a lot of complicated feelings about the position he's in, playing a daemon’s role as a completely different person from me, and will probably write his own post about it some time.)

Jude is, unfortunately, kinda in the same role as Court. And since Court held the emotional dysregulation in my brain, Jude also holds the grand majority of the distress and anxiety that we feel on a regular basis. We all really wish it was split more evenly, because Jude tends to not only lose the ability to talk when they panic, they also get stuck in the front, completely unable to talk to me or Gavin.

(It’s not even that they feel the stress that directly affects them, it’s that on top of the stress that we get in our daily life. They regularly had panic attacks over my grades and exams last semester, and they weren’t even the one studying for it at all! It’s fucked up and I don’t love it for us.)

And there are other interesting little coincidences. You know how Court was a sketched-in sort of black dog? Jude only really realized they related to dogs upon arriving in the system with me, and the archetypal form they identify with is, again, a stylized black dog.

It’s really interesting, the ways my brain decided to be plural, because I didn’t think I was a system back then. I had a daemon, then two daemons, and they were daemons because I considered them parts of myself - no matter how autonomous they were, we were bound together in the same identity, as parts of the same person. They were reflections of me, and I loved them like I loved myself, and they loved me with the same ferocity.

With this realization, that my daemons effectively merged into my system, I did have to ask - are my headmates also parts of me, since they’re falling into the same functional compartments in my brain? We don’t think so, or at least, we don’t think it’s that simple.

They’re completely different people from me, people who arrived here with their own lives and memories and identities. They aren’t autonomous reflections of my psyche like my daemons were. They’re my weird roommates who moved in with me, and my boyfriends, and I guess you could say we’re life partners - because hey, what’s a partner if not someone you share a life with? What’s more intimate than sharing the same body, hearing each other's thoughts and feelings? They aren't parts of me, but we live the same life together, and I think that counts as something just as significant.