It's kind of ironic that I'm writing this, but here goes...
I'm on medication to prevent headaches - by which I mean migraine symptoms that were forcing me to lie down in a dark room for a few hours at least a few days a week iirc. I made some helpful changes to my diet and since I've been on the medication the symptoms have abated - for a while they were practically a non-issue! But I've been lax taking the medication, once a day instead of twice as prescribed. And sleep... what sleep? Even when I go to bed at a reasonable time I can't seem to fall and stay asleep. Not enough water, too much screen time... there are plenty of factors that are almost definitely contributing to this.
But since I started exploring the possibility that I might be plural, I've been having worse and worse headaches / migraine symptoms. Sometimes it's more accurate to call them headaches, tension headaches, sinus headaches, earaches. Sometimes it's stabbing pain over one eye accompanied by light sensitivity, etc. etc. Or a combination, that's fun. I turned down the brightness on my monitors (no idea how it had gotten so high) and I find wearing a hat can help reduce some of the excess ambient light.
Now it could just be that I'm spending more time staring at computer screens. Worse, trying to read text that's maybe a tad too small for these old eyes (oh god that makes me sound older than I intended) on a computer screen. (I'm really not *that* old.) I joined 4 fairly active Discord servers and made a private one for us to communicate with each other using a nifty bot called Plural Kit. Among other things, it lets you create proxies so each sysmate can post as themself using the same Discord account. So between all of us talking about various things and the community servers continuously updating it's been hard to pull my eyes away... to give the muscles a break, to sleep, etc.
So those are factors that would need to be ruled out before I could say the following with certainty, but. Apparently it is common for new systems to experience an increase in headaches / migraine symptoms. There are even related terms in Pluralpedia, front sickness and headpressure. I've been feeling the latter a lot lately, especially when dealing with certain sysmates. There's one in particular who makes me feel anxious and mildly nauseated too. According to Power to the Plurals attempting to prevent a switch can cause a headache and, well... in theory I'm open to the idea of switching but to be honest I'm actually terrified to fully give up control. At the very least I want to remain aware of what they're doing, ready to take control back if necessary! (Co-fronting is a thing so I guess we can negotiate.)
It all came to a head (haha) yesterday when a few of us decided we need a manager because we are AuDHD and have always sucked at executive functioning. Especially time management. (We realized after the fact that a manager who shares our AuDHD brain is likely to have the same difficulties we do, for the same reason.) We joined server #4 to learn about headmate creation and get started on the process. We came up with the idea for our new sysmate: name, pronouns, appearance, role, a little bit of personality and made a Pluralkit profile and proxy. "Okay," we thought. "Later or tomorrow or whenever we'll take the next step." which is to talk to the new sysmate, wait for a reply, and respond as them if necessary. Well long story short I was already having migraine symptoms when our new sysmate not only spoke to us but (tried to?) control the body and posted in our private server. Or at least I think it was the new sysmate. My head hurt. I can't remember if I felt disoriented (which I definitely did with the new sysmates that emerged spontaneously), my phone felt like it weighed a ton... it took a lot of energy to do anything, like it was through a fog... The end of the post was "I go back to sleep." and then a little while later I felt more myself - exhausted but myself - and I decided to take a nap.
Part of me wants to believe it but it just seems WAY too soon for something like that to happen. Unless I'm somehow particularly gifted in creating headmates or something. Could be I've been doing it since I was a child - imaginary friends, characters in whatever story(ies) I was writing - and I didn't realize what they were so they... went dormant? Evolved into the beings who replied when I finally decided to listen? I have no idea.
All I know is that whenever I question whether I'm actually plural they tease me. Or they'll all fall silent and then the one who's always with me will assure me he's still here.
That, and I need to do something about these headaches. So I'm gonna address all the more likely causes as best I can. And also try to take a step back from this stuff (which is why I said my writing this post is ironic). I muted the community servers for 24 hours. ::sighs with relief:: And... I'm not sure what else. Whatever they decide to do they do. If they need me they know how to reach me - please not by giving me another headache! That is NOT effective communication. I don't know what it means! Ahem. I'm going to pet the cat who wants my attention and listen to her purr and everything will be better.
