System Information

When I was a child, I had quite a rough upbringing primarily due to my father. I often heard voices in my head—come critial, some comforting, and some brutal and sadistic—that felt like different identities or personalities. At the time, I interpreted such internal activity as having a “light side” or “good side,” and a “dark side” or “evil side.” I simplified it in my childlike mind, but the concept was still there; the two were distinct and separate identites that were able to control my thoughts and behavior. The light vs. dark side never explained why one of these “voices” was constantly criticizing me for every wrong move I made. I wasn’t able to understand or explain what was going on in my head until years later.

Signs Showing

As time passed, I realized that some of those voices in my head contorted, disappeared, or got louder. Despite all of the changes, there was one constant: the amount of voices was growing, and they were becoming more distinct the older I grew and the more I endured in my adolescence.

At about Spring of 2020, I discovered a practice called “tulpamancy,” and I thought that perfectly explained what was going on in my head with the voices and differing identities. I said to myself that I was in control of these voices, and that I was the one just “making them up” so I wouldn’t be lonely, or some similar excuse. However, my “tulpas” sure seemed to have minds of their own, and they were able to take the wheel whenever they wanted. The more I looked into tulpamancy, the less confident I felt about it being applicable to my case. The nail in the coffin was learning that it was actually a Buddhist religious practice, and as I was (and still am) a practicing theistic Satanist, I opted to avoid appropriating anything that isn’t for me.

I found some time to get into a place to deeply ponder the state of my mind come autumn 2020, and I concluded that I definitely don’t have DID, or any other dissociative identity disorder. For a long while, I strongly believed that wasn’t what was going on. However, with the gift of retrospect, I can clearly observe that the signs are there. Instead of calling my “different identities” alters, I opted to call them “personas” and “vessels,” in order to avoid appropriating plural language. These “vessels” had different names, personalities, ages, hobbies, and even voices. Despite this, I adamantly fought any suggestions from peers that I may have had DID. I made it clear that these were voluntary varying expressions of myself based off of “mood swings,” however that may be interpreted.

In spring of 2021, I finally became fully aware of the fact and accepted that these “vessels” were not personas, but they were alters of a DID system I was hosting. Please note that for some time, I did in fact experience amnesia between alters fronting, but it’s become much foggier over the years, so that’s why I prefer to label us as OSDD-1b present day instead of DID. I felt quite happy and accomplished to have cracked the code for that puzzle, actually. It was a bit nice to feel like I got closure for these confusing symptoms I had been confronted with for so long.

In the early months of the Nocturne System, there were from 5 to 7 active alters at the time. As time lumbered by, our system accumulated more alters, some of which feel brand new, and some feel like they’ve always been around and waiting to be welcomed.

Not long after collecting ourselves, I started to get the itch to dump all of our info somewhere for archival and social purposes. We started with a Carrd, and we even branched out to separate Instagram pages at one point (since deactivated). However, once I learned more about the Discord bot PluralKit, I knew that would be perfect for our system expression and information. I immediately got to work making cute profile templates and trying to squeeze information about my headmates out of them for the bot in case they’re fronting and want to appear as themselves.

We created a private Discord server for our system information, to which we would only invite very close and trusted friends. The server was initially created to simply be a private space for me to tinker with the PluralKit bot and configure my system settings without spamming other public chats, but I was easily inspired by the useful functions enabled by PluralKit in Discord to use it more often and publicly! It took off, and I found it very useful and fun. So did the system! Not everybody was on board or even used Discord if ever online, but some of us were huge fans of dwelling around on it. It was super fun to have all alters given the opportunity to speak as themselves to our friends, too!

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Upon reviewing some experiences I had with “fictive alters”, I realized that some fictive alters of my system are not fictive alters, but likely just fictional characters I kinned at the time. I had mistaken kin experiences as having fictive alters as system alters, I believe.

Even if they were actual alters, they have not been active in a very long time. On top of that, I am unsure as to why and how they were formed in the first place. This also applies to very few non-fictive alters that have also been removed from the complete list.

I am including a section about this headcount because it is quite jarring for the overall headcount to seemingly plummet from 28 to 20. In summary, I independently determined that some “alter” experiences were not strong or distinct enough to qualify as that of an actual alter.