Hello everyone, and good evening. This post is going to be a bit more about me, my world, the people around me, and my system. My name is Renn, and I am another super-admin alter in the Ashley system. Ellie, who I work closely with, posted last time. She has taken over my mountain of paperwork. I hate paperwork, but I’m good at it. And with an influx of a thousand new alters in a very short time, the stack of paperwork we need to get through is IMMENSE.

Two words – incident reports. The vast majority of the system hates a single alter named Soryn. He’s an asshole, and we don’t mind what he does as long as he behaves himself. He rarely behaves himself, however and my headmates keep kicking his ass. Every time this happens, there are EVEN more incident reports to do. This post itself may turn into one such report.

Before I tell you too much more about my world, I need to provide some crucial pieces of context. For starters, my system is polyamorous. We have multiple partners at the same time, and currently we have a good solid baker’s dozen. We live with one of them, our spouse, Emerson* and an ex-partner, Zelda*. As you can guess, that’s complicated. Breakups are complicated enough when it’s two people breaking up, but three? That’s a whole other animal, and that animal is an asshole and a half. The three of us live in Milwaukee, up north in Wisconsin.

An Expanding World – Bitches With A Backstory

My system has lived in Wisconsin for about three years and north of the Mason-Dixon for a bit longer than that. We moved out of our birthplace in Texas in July of 2021 and have not set foot in Texas since. This is a good thing. Wisconsin may suck absolute ass, but anywhere is better than Texas, in my opinion. We were born there and wanted to get the fuck OUT from the time we were five. It’s highly unusual for a child that age to want to fuck off from the place they were raised, and we even heard comments about how weird it was growing up.

Castor, the system’s first host, never, ever got homesick even once, and only got sad upon LEAVING his paternal grandmother’s house in San Antonio, not when his parents dropped him off. Ever. Our brother, on the other hand, was always very sad to see our parents go. Castor gave zero fucks. He thought they were annoying and was glad for a fucking break.

We’ve often speculated on why we simply could not be bothered with our family of origin, especially since Castor’s lack of regard turned out to be highly justified – many of our family members on our mother’s side are proud bigots and generally not kind people. Could Castor sense that they weren’t quality individuals? Maybe. Equally likely an influence is the stroke we had at eight months old.

The Brainhole – Gift or Curse?

In 1998, when we were less than a year old, we had a massive stroke after being on heart-lung bypass for heart failure. For those unfamiliar with what heart-lung bypass is, it’s a machine that essentially breathes for a person, allowing their injured heart and/or lungs to rest. However, one night, there was a sepsis scare, and part of this procedure involves keeping the patient chemically sedated so they don’t have a fucking stroke. Well, as luck would have it, we have always been god-awful at staying down or knowing when to quit. So we fought the motherfucking sedatives, y’know, as one does. According to legend, by the time we were released, we were on enough Versed, Fentanyl, Valium, and straight up motherfucking DOPAMINE and ADRENALINE to knock every full grown male medical professional attendant taking care of us out for an untold number of hours.

When they discovered that we were awake and had pulled our breathing tube out, they called our parents, who initially thought this was a good thing, as one of our treatment goals was to be able to breathe without the use of a breathing tube. This was ABSOLUTELY NOT a good thing. By morning, when our parents came back up to the hospital, the doctors informed them that we’d had a stroke. A huge one. Preliminary scans of our brain before the swelling went down estimated that we’d lost half of our brain, but as the swelling decreased, doctors found that we were only missing an eighth of it. The stroke took out the majority of our right occipital-parietal lobe and messed with a lot of things. My world was about to get a whole lot weirder.

Things Fall Apart

From the mental records and memories I have access to, we have a theory that my fellow super-admin Eight joined the system shortly before we had the stroke. Eight’s always been a fighter and is a very old soul with a knack for showing up in the nick of time. He’s widely regarded as a seer and has been prescient from infancy, shaping my world as I know it. He’s fucking STUBBORN and will fight practically to the death to get something he wants. As one of the original members of the system from infancy, he shaped our collective ways of doing things, which our parents very much didn’t like.

Our mother was very much in favor of doing things HER way. We strongly suspect she’s just as neurodivergent as we are, and she controlled much of our life well into adulthood. She was very cold, manipulative, and after our father died, became an outright villain. Eight is absolutely his father’s child, so is our fellow super-admin, Allēna.

Lēna takes more after her mother than Eight does. However, she has just enough of our father’s side in her to piss her mother and her family the absolute fuck off. Our mother’s family despises our father’s, so having a child that took after our father was practically unforgivable. Add to this fact that we were medically difficult to take care of and were very finicky and particular as children when they longed for easy-going children (read: children who they could mold into whoever they wanted), and it was a recipe for years of loneliness, abuse, and isolation.

Want to hear what Lēna had to say about her childhood and growing up? She wrote this song about her mother. Caution: there are more swear words in this song than there probably are in this entire post..

Turn That Shit Up To 13!

The only thing that really made my world bearable was our nearly perfect visual and auditory memory and vivid imagination. We could pick up new knowledge quickly and easily (and still can), and we attribute this to the stroke damage, which we call the Brainhole. It occurred in the right occipital-parietal lobe of our brain, which controls sensory processing. As a result, all of our senses are turned up to thirteen and the knob’s broken off.

Our intuition is supercharged and we can read people like books. We often scare people with how deeply we can read them. We can accurately guess people’s formative traumas because of our pattern recognition, and we don’t mind that it scares the wrong people off. If it scares them out of our life, that’s a pretty good indicator that they have too much to hide and will likely not be honest with us. That isn’t something we tolerate. Go lie to someone else. Not me. There’s no space for anything but honesty in my world.

My World Nowadays

Things have been really hard for a long time, but they have been getting better. I’ll probably post more about our Tragic Backstory later on, but I don’t want to drone on in a single post that’s likely well over a thousand words by this point. I really want to write a post about how we got from Texas to Wisconsin and met Zelda and Emerson – because that’s some incredibly spicy drama and intrigue right there. It’s an absolute shitshow and I think you’ll like it. We’re messy bitches, but our people love us FOR that, not in spite of it.

Stay tuned for more magic!

-Renn, Master of Paperwork and Ceremonies

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*names changed for privacy