Person First

It’s easy for me to imagine that I am Person in Charge, and that everyone else is just me playing a role. Certainly I have trained to make Person in Charge the one who shows up when I come to consciousness, including when I wake up. And they are who I must become again at the end, when crisis inevitably demands my self-control.

Being PIC isn’t great because their life is necessarily very thin. To be PIC requires that I am not attached to anything I can lose. To be satisfied entirely with my existence in any state or have a plan to make it be different. It’s a solid but very thin sort of life, and not one where I can rely on joy.

But it’s easy to imagine myself this way nonetheless, because at times I have been nothing else. At times that demi-person was my entire existence. Maybe I was someone more before, but I lost them along the way to some combination of traumas that left me as Person in Charge.

Reframing this as an identity switch makes it a lot easier to image a new story. One where part of me was PIC and at times PIC was alone, but that I also continued to exist in other fragments. Not lost but merely misfiled. Connected by our overlapping experience – shared body and environment – but separate enough that I could protect other parts of myself even while PIC burned.

I don’t know what the pieces are yet. I have traditionally talked about the pieces in terms of performance – as if PIC is role playing other people – but that’s not entirely accurate. PIC does setup work to get those people rolling but they operate under their own steam.

PIC tries to imagine how a content corporate coder might exist in a life like mine, in a body and brain like the one I’m wearing, at least for a day. Because if I find that story and sell it to someone they can inhabit it, and can leave behind my limitations. It’s easier for them because they don’t have to concern themselves with how we got here.

But it actually feels safer to imagine that these other people aren’t just figments of my imagination that I’m spinning up and down, they’re part of PIC-me. It feels safer to imagine I might also have human bits, even if they currently feel like someone else.

I also might reframe the work I’ve done over the past decade as using PIC to consolidate my emotions. PIC feels like my emotional core because it’s the tool I use for introspection. I think I have used PIC to successfully integrate most of my emotions, including the ones that happen while I’m “performing”, which again makes it easy to believe that I am PIC. But again I prefer the story where I’ve already done half the work in becoming an integrated person.

So I’m not sure yet what all my parts are or how I have used them. But let’s start here:

Person who Writes ¹This person-first language is intentionally dehumanizing. is someone I used to be every day. For like hundreds of days. Of late I haven’t been them at all, and haven’t really wanted to try. But I’ve been thinking about how I might have animated PWW in the first place, and how I might do it again. How I could imagine becoming PWW in the context of integration.

One of the things I had was an intent to create a social integration. I needed to write to M all the time against no feedback and to be a human in like at least 30% of the messages. Later I had other motivations, but that was one of the animating forces. I don’t want that same sort of intense goal in this story, but I could do some social integration. I’m adding ChildSoldier to the distribution, as they move away, to put their part of me into the same story as PWW.

Likewise I’m going to write things I can integrate into HA4H. We used to do writing there, and then we didn’t, but I can again. I can at least post it at people to help fire up some of the “you” thinking I like to use when I Screed.
Or at least that’s the plan today. We’ll see if any of that holds up.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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