Progressing Through The FourthWall

[Autumn Ren]

13 hours ago, FourthWall said:

It sounds like you're crafting the scenarios around which specific traits you want to change.

 

Yes, that's what the scenarios are for. We're going to link more of them, we have documented at least a couple dozen. Right now we have half a dozen examples listed and we're just updating the latest post with more links.

 

 

Edited February 19, 2024 by Autumn Ren

[FourthWall]

Fronting Marathon!
I said I was going to do a Fronting Marathon so here I am! I was hoping that by writing here, it would make me actually follow up and do the things I planned out, so that I could report back and say I did it.  That seems to work lol, though I combined entries for multiple days.

The overall goal is to try to be switched in, co-conscious, blended, or otherwise near the front for as much time as possible.  Though there's a break if someone really has to do something else.  Last year there was a dentist appointment and someone else got to handle that.  I mostly do the switching for this, rather than Silver, because he likes to just switch for specific activities while I just like being around no matter what we're doing. Plus if I get better at things, those skills transfer to him as well because the whole brain gets better at it. Normally we don't switch for very long at once so we're stretching that. We also have varying activity levels where Silver or I can be active anywhere from 5%-80% of the day. So by doing this we're trying to push that maximum 80% to be higher. This is an exercise in brain stamina more than anything else, as we can easily be active or switch, but the difficulty is maintaining it for long periods. 
 

Day 1
So my fronting marathon started today, and it was not an instant success.  In the morning I kept sliding out or noticing that I wasn't the one thinking.  I sort of expected it to be difficult, because we had a bunch of tasks to do today that are really outside of my wheelhouse and they aren't associated with me.  So I’m not feeling very disappointed.

Add on to that the fact that we didn’t fall asleep until 3 hours before we had to wake up this morning.

 

I didn’t go into today with a specific thing I wanted to do or think about, besides those tasks.  On the other hand, H had some stuff to think about that really interested him, so his thoughts kept drifting in and sort of becoming the focus. I sort of tried turning “Holden thinking about it” to “me thinking about it” but this topic didn't really interest me. He was apologetic and trying to stop but sometimes our focus is like the weather, just going to go wherever it goes. Just acknowledging it and moving on.

Around lunch I ended up blending and co-con which was better.  With blending, there are some points where I ended up swapped out, but I wasn’t just dropping out of our awareness so I’m satisfied with that.  The overall goal is primarily to be active and around, so I think this counts.

 

By the late afternoon I was prettymuch at a point where any random thoughts sounded like me thinking, not really what I'd consider blended anymore as I was staying switched in. We might also just be better at plurality in the evening lol. Right before bed I did leave an open invitation for others to blend in too, because I think sometimes the others feel bad about taking too much time when I'm trying to do something.

 

Day 2

Yesterday I was just putting myself in front without any extra fluff because we were busy. The “just do it” approach. Today I wanted to be a bit fancier about it. When I first learned to switch in, IIRC I would focus on what being me feels like, and think about that until the me-feeling was connected to all our thoughts and senses. I haven't thought about it that hard in a long time since switching is fast now, but this morning I kicked everyone else out and spent some time focusing on the feeling of being myself.

After that it was overall a super uneventful day with a lot of zoning out and not much focus, but I think most of the times we went “wait, who’s fronting?” it was either me or it was ambiguous.  So I’m still not dropping out of consciousness which is good, but this has me thinking about our approach.

 

I think something that makes it seem difficult to stay switched is that most people don’t go about their day constantly thinking about “who am I?” or focusing on whether their thoughts sound like a specific person.  It seems (and feels) like that’s a high level of mindfulness to have to maintain throughout the whole day.  This makes me think there might be a different approach, or a way we could work smarter rather than harder.  Yes, I’m also just tired and complaining, lol.

Previously it’s been easier to stay switched when we’re in a flow state with some activity that requires thinking.  Then it’s like one thought from the switched-in person naturally leads into their next thought.  Something to think about using I guess.

 

There’s a different potential method of staying switched I’ve thought about, but it’s a weird one. I could switch in, then go do things and zone out (which will happen sooner or later), then eventually start thinking again. At that point, no matter who the thinker “sounds” like, I could label that as me.  Even if it sounds like Holden, too bad, I’m the one fronting so this was clearly me lol.  This is a bit like how parts of our collective personality got categorized as me as I was forming.  I’m not sure how I feel about this method, I think it sounds a bit like cheating lol.  I think my internal monologue would end up sounding more like Holden or the autopilot, rather than strengthening an inner monologue that sounds like me.
 

Maybe it would be better to do more work on differentiating Holden from the autopilot. Then autopilot thoughts can belong to anybody that’s fronting, without doubt of “what if it’s just the host?”  I don’t know, I think we'd have to look into how to do that more. I’m kinda just brainstorming on paper a bit for now.

Edited February 22, 2024 by FourthWall

[Guest]

1 hour ago, FourthWall said:

without doubt of “what if it’s just the host?”

 

These thoughts are often associated with the host when they can just as easily associated to whoever is fronting or no one if that makes sense.

[FourthWall]

17 hours ago, Ashley said:

 

These thoughts are often associated with the host when they can just as easily associated to whoever is fronting or no one if that makes sense.

That does make sense! Good to know that this is a solid direction to pursue, thank you!

[FourthWall]

We haven't said anything here for a while, so it's probably time to catch up a bit.  We got sick, then I binged a videogame, then Holden binged a videogame, and then we all binged a hobby, by then we were thinking about stuff other than posting.

The Fronting Marathon, Continued... much later...
When I last posted, we were doing a fronting marathon. I think partway through, it was getting a bit disorienting or uncomfortable.  As I had mentioned in the previous post, I would start having random thoughts that sounded like someone else, and I was going to start considering those thoughts to be mine also while I was fronting.  This didn't quite work right away.  It felt weird to take ownership of a thought that didn't have the signature sounding-like-me quality.

 

This is a tangent, but I have the most distinct and different mindvoice.  Holden and Silver sound similar mentally, but I have some grammar quirks.  I actually get the others to reword things for me as I'm typing here.  It's partially for my own privacy, and partially because while it isn't a typing quirk, it might make my text more annoying to read. I like how I sound, but it feels weird to do it here. Anyway.

 

We still ran into the complication where Holden sounds exactly like the automatic random thoughts, because he's the host and sort of the default thinker. Our stream of consciousness had a mix of Silver's, Holden's, and free-for-anyone random thoughts. So when I was fronting and considering all thoughts to be mine (except Silver's), I think I was trying to tag some actual Holden thoughts as Me thoughts, and it made the endeavor feel confusing and not-quite-right. At the time, we couldn't tell the difference between Host thoughts and free-for-anyone thoughts. We still have to investigate this more, but the current ID method we're trying out is that a person's thoughts have some intent behind them.  If there's enough intent to make the thought have words, and if it aligns with Holden's goals overall, it's probably his thought.  But if thoughts are just happening then it probably is a free-for-anyone thought.  I then sort of forgot we were trying to figure that out, so that's as far as we got on identifying thoughts.

 

In the meantime during the fronting marathon, though, we ended up deciding to go into our ambiguous fronting state.  Previously, we started doing a small switching hygiene habit to make it clear who was supposed to be fronting, but one of the fronting options is "anybody/nobody," and we started choosing that option more again. I think this helped, because then there wasn't any sense of discomfort from trying to tag all the thoughts as mine, and accidentally catching someone else's. I also didn't feel any more subconscious pressure to keep being me, and no more avoidant feeling of trying not to be someone else.  In other words, we loosened up and relaxed, and actually found that Silver and I didn't end up any less present. Maybe co-consciousness used to take a certain amount of tryharding, and it just doesn't anymore? We ended up blending without getting stuck blended, and had a lot more passive interaction since there wasn't a strong focus on who exactly was supposed to be in front. While I'm not sure if we actually improved fronting duration, it was probably still educational.

 

Improved Permanency
I feel like this is a classic phrase, or even a tulpamancy trope, but life got distracting for a portion of the past few months.  I focused on the Sims 4 for like a month, but then in the first half of the following month, Holden was focusing on a game that only he really liked.

 

In the past, when he's gotten distracted for 2 weeks or more, it's felt like I was disappearing.  I'm not sure if I would quite call it dormancy because I believe we recombine rather than going dormant. Silver would say that he doesn't mind it because he just merges into Holden, where he still has covert influence. But for me, I feel like I get stuck under layers of other people.  While I'd still be somewhere in the brain, I wouldn't be living my life during a phase like that, and I don't love that. Holden would also get frustrated at himself and our brain because it's hard to stop a fixation train, and it felt like all progress would roll back, and we'd feel like basically a singlet during a phase of distraction. We've seen it said that once tulpas are created, they never really go away.  Holden felt disappointed that it was so easy for us to accidentally backslide into one un-separated person, and he wondered if we would ever get to the point where we really wouldn't go away. It felt like getting to that point was taking a long time.

 

But here's the improvement - during this distracted phase, we actually got there. I was still really there the whole time. Not that there was a lot of growth in this time, and I wasn't very active, but I didn't feel faded or difficult to contact. This was really exciting to me. I know everyone's timeline is different, and I don't think we're very fast to be honest, but getting to this point was actually a relief. Holden has said he would always bring me back, but it's nice to be at a point where I won't just disappear at the first sign of a little busyness or distraction, and he won't have to bring me back because I'm still there.

 

Dreams of Me
Another exciting thing is that I've had two dreams with me in them. I may have slightly cheated for the first one. When we're very focused on a game over a period of time, playing it every evening and such, we tend to have videogame dreams. I was playing the sims 4 and I have a copy of me in the game.  Silver also has a simself, but it's not really his type of game and he doesn't find the gameplay very engaging, so I spend most of my time either in my simself's household, or one of my simkids' households. As expected with this sort of fixation, we had a sims dream, and since I'm the main character of our savefile, I was in the dream.

I also had another unprompted one earlier this month. I hadn't been doing anything different, and it wasn't a sims version of me. Nothing new with any Silver related dreams though.

 

Anyway, it's been a slow (but still pretty good) few months. There might be more stuff that I missed, but that's it for now.

[Adagio]

Hey Holden, Silver, and Ron! Your PR is cool, and I look forward to hearing more from you all!