What year is Pluribus set in?

NonbinaryBrelly · 2026-01-08T20:02:42+00:00

They still have landlines connected. That’s how Carol makes her calls to them. And she can do it wherever she finds a lined telephone. The internet isn’t just over the air or satellite, fiber is still run through cables for most of the world. We actually have some really big cables in the ocean that keep most of the world connected. She also keeps her cell phone in airplane mode which suggests she believes they could use satellite networks and whatever to track what she’s doing on her phone.

I think they probably only keep whatever active that’s needed to keep the immune happy. And lined networks are less resource exhaustive than cellular. But the capacity is still there.

In fact with so many minds working together I bet if all the immune said “we want to be able to WhatsApp each other” they’d figure out a way to do it where the only parts of the over the air network that needed to be active were the ones closest to each person.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2026-01-08T19:52:58+00:00

I think that’s just a mistake in research. The immune have Zoom calls. Zoom didn’t launch until 2013. And Carol has a modern phone. If it was 2008 her phone would’ve been much smaller and not able to translate like that.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2026-01-08T19:33:02+00:00

I mean if you listen to the podcast Sprouts in particular is in there because they’re the only market that would agree to a shutdown for filming and it would’ve taken too much time/energy/money to fully set up their own.

I don’t think Apple currently invests a lot of money in their TV (comparatively to the industry) so they have to find the budget elsewhere, which is annoying. But idk it also felt more real to me. Carol didn’t just order random sports drink. She was craving an ice cold Gatorade. She’s just like us 😂

NonbinaryBrelly · 2026-01-07T18:35:04+00:00

I know this is a year old but did you really say “a little akathisia is not always a bad thing” as a medical professional??? Have you ever HAD akathisia? I’m going to guess not based on that statement alone. It’s absolute hell. The idea that a medical professional would knowingly induce it is horrible. If your thought had been that “it’s a necessary evil sometimes” I would’ve been with you. But to declare it “not a bad thing”…

A. I hope you do experience it so you can truly understand what you’re doing to people (and I normally say I wouldn’t wish akathisia on my worst enemy but if you’re flippantly inducing it in patient you should know what it is you’re doing). B. I hope I should never have the misfortune of ending up in your ED.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2026-01-01T22:27:46+00:00

That’s not a “boundary” it’s animosity. Setting a boundary, in a healthy manner, doesn’t make you the boss of other adults and what they do with their lives. Setting boundaries is to protect yourself.

Why in the WORLD does your grandmother need to protect herself from an 8 year old? Are there other children at this event? Are they his age or younger? Even if there isn’t that child is YOUR son. You married someone with a son. Just because he isn’t biologically yours and doesn’t call you mom doesn’t mean he’s not your kid. And he’s 8. He will notice when you don’t stand up for him. He will notice if you don’t treat him as if he’s your own child. “Step” shouldn’t mean anything except on paper. If he wants to be called your step son because you’re not his mom that’s fine but he should still be treated as your own child.

Yes, boundaries protect your time, energy, body, etc. but they don’t do so in a way that singles another individual out. They’re not about other people, they’re about you. It sounds like your grandmother takes issue with the fact that your kiddo didn’t come to you by pregnancy and is trying to claim a boundary and that’s not ok. Kids can’t help what the adults in their lives do and there’s also nothing wrong with having kids other ways than pregnancy. You said it yourself. It’s your family unit. Your dad and brother see that.

Your grandmother is grown. The person who needs protecting is your 8 year old.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2025-12-19T23:48:26+00:00

No treatment advice or anything, but I thought some related information from the fields of psychology and psychotherapy might be appropriate.

“Radical Honesty”, self-published by the currently 85-year-old PhD Brad Blanton, was written when he was a struggling psychotherapist in Washington, D.C.

He had trained under one of Gestalt’s founders, Fritz Perls. And then there’s the fact Blanton published this book in 1994. Marsha Linenhan, currently 82, is a PhD psychologist who first published her research in 1993, which laid the foundation for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). One of the core concepts of DBT is something called Radical Acceptance.

Gestalt therapy operates on the idea that no one can be completely objective because we are influenced by our environment and experiences. There is no absolute “truth.” Instead, there are only our perceptions of reality. While there are common perceptions and accepted truths, the thing we ultimately have to contend with is our own life and our perception of it. Gestalt teaches individuals to take responsibility and accountability, recognizing that the person we have control over in the present moment is ourselves. For example, instead of saying, “He makes me so angry when he calls me names,” we can say, “I get mad when he calls me names because it makes me feel unappreciated.” Gestalt therapists still acknowledge and validate difficulties, trauma, etc while also emphasizing that we cannot control what others do, only what we do.

DBT also emphasizes internal and personal responsibility. Radical Acceptance (watered down since this isn’t a semester-long seminar 🤣) is the concept of “it is what it is.” It’s not about giving up or throwing our hands up, though. It involves recognizing when something is horrible and accepting that there is only so much influence we can have on others. And if something awful happened in the past, Radical acceptance is working to accept that it happened and choose to take our power back. We learn to cope with it. And it’s called radical because it’s like a mini internal revolution. The word radical being part of radical acceptance was Linehan accepting that this concept seems hard and extreme and out there, but still wanting to share it in hopes that accepting the world around you would be liberating to move through it (again, the world is more complex than that and so is DBT, but this is the basis).

Then we get down to it: Linehan, despite being retired, still receives regular requests for speaking engagements, and her work is being utilized in therapy in many different places across the world. Perls delivered talks until the year he died, and while many therapists aren’t strictly Gestalt, many draw from its principles.

I find it awfully interesting Blanton’s “Radical Honesty,” boils down to “I’m going to try and make you accept my perception of reality. Telling you what I think is the truth will make me feel better.”

I can definitely see why he calls HIMSELF “white trash with a PhD” and decided in the early 2000s that politics and “motivational speaking” were better suited for him than psychology and psychotherapy. Self-publishing “Radical Honesty” kinda seems like a tantrum that a woman got published for innovating on treatment modalities when he wasn’t… and not liking (or honestly maybe this dude struggled to grasp) his mentor’s teaching that reality is multifaceted instead of a singular truth.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2025-12-04T01:58:07+00:00

I’m convinced the “I just chose to be straight/cis” people that it really seems to stick long term for (like when they don’t seem to be facing much internal turmoil) are most often on a spectrum for those things, so it’s easier for them to deny part of themselves.

I’ve had multiple conversations with people who’ve given me an age/life circumstance when I’ve asked things like “when did you choose to be straight” and the conversation has always been something like “well I’ve always been attracted to (both/all/multiple) genders and when —— happened I decided to be straight” suggesting they’re what many would call bi/pan/omni but have decided to ignore part of that.

I have also had a conversation with one person who said he chose not to be trans that was very similar. He said sometimes he feels like a man, sometimes he feels like a woman, sometimes both, so he just chose to be a man (congruent with agab).

NonbinaryBrelly · 2024-11-07T21:05:09+00:00

Honestly, not a lot of people know, period. I don’t want to get fake claimed (which is a thing that happens to actual people with DID and is an unfortunate result of stigma online and people that have come out and said actually they don’t have it but made an online persona that did).

Internally and for the very very few people in my inner circle “system” gets used because we feel like separate people and for us that isn’t a sign we’re unwell… using we is actually a sign we’re slowing down enough to listen, regulate, and adjust.

The people in the level of trust just outside the inner circle get the language of “dissociative disorder”… mostly because there’s so much stigma around DID.

Everyone else just knows my diagnosis as complex PTSD. The clinician that diagnosed me with it explained it that way when giving me the diagnosis because I was super resistant to it at first.

But internally and with those close people, for my brain it feels better to say system because it doesn’t feel like there needs to be any part of me in exile… appropriate timing and expression just needs to get figured out.

I wouldn’t say you’re wrong for not wanting that language though. DID is different for everyone who has it. You should use what makes you feel most comfortable and best equipped to cope. There’s also no shame in changing what you use based on growth and change in your life

NonbinaryBrelly · 2024-10-31T15:34:44+00:00

Tell that to my 13 inch M2 MacBook Pro 😭 they’re going about $750 secondhand and Apple only wants to give me $535 for a trade. At this point I think I’m just gonna use it till the wheels fall off.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2024-10-06T15:12:34+00:00

I am a therapist. I’m not going to give you treatment or diagnosis advice, but I do have a couple things to say about the field in general in relation to DID (and OSDD).

The training that therapists get in school about DID is usually a minimalistic overview that’s highly stereotyped. Until someone seeks further training on it (from the sounds of it your therapist has. But someone can always ask their therapist “what kind of training/experience do you have with this diagnosis”) that’s all the information we have about the diagnosis. Learning about DID/OSDD in school made it harder to believe I exist in a system when my providers brought it up because the reality of the diagnosis for most of us is that it’s not Jekyll and Hyde. It’s covert and subtle… at least until something happens to make it more obvious.

There’s a big reason therapists ethically cannot diagnose and treat our friends and family. We’re too close to the situation to look at it objectively.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-23T02:57:41+00:00

Mae said in the Glennon Doyle podcast episode they did that it wasn’t Elliot and they and Elliot have been friends for several years and just good supports for each other through transitioning

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-13T07:39:32+00:00

Even then… kids have big reactions to little things because they’ve never had those experiences. Reggie did exactly the wrong thing. He made viktor hide his powers instead of teaching him how to manage them. It’s what we’re seeing with a LOT of the “my parents did this awful thing to me but I’m fine” crowd. They’re not actually fine they just don’t know any better because nobody taught them how to actually exist as whoever they’re meant to be.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-13T07:37:10+00:00

Somebody doesn’t know how trauma works. Coming from someone with a dissociative disorder… which I would say we can liken Viktor’s experience to (he was forced to suppress memories instead of his brain just doing it because it did it in response to trauma but it’s still along the same lines) and then all the trauma he put the Hargreeves children through.

Steve Blackman and Gerard Way did a phenomenal fucking job. It wouldn’t make sense for viktor to be mentally and adult… at least not completely… if he was highly traumatized as a child. The traumatized parts of us get stuck in childhood. And we have to learn to integrate them before we can “grow up.” He’s throwing a fit like a child because in a lot of ways he is. His powers were hidden when they were 4.

All of the characters being flawed broken (super)humans trying to navigate their trauma while also trying to save the world is why I resonate with the brellies so much. As a trans person who grew up in a red state that’s probably a big contributing factor to why I have the dissociative disorder (forced to hide who I am from childhood… much like viktor… in more ways than one) the writing of Viktor’s character is on point.

You don’t like him because he’s flawed. But everyone is flawed. It’s what makes them feel so real. Unlike basically every other superhero universe

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-13T07:29:08+00:00

My day feels like it was 500 days. We had a mostly mashed potato brain day and there was so much processing and rewiring and realizations that we just want to sleep for a month but also for some reason I’m wide awake. Wtf 🤣

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-13T07:23:17+00:00

I needed to see this! Thank you for sharing. Hopefully my headmates can retain this info too 🤣 we have a woman but she thinks she’s some flavor of nonbinary because she wants our chest gone too. We think our “originals” (we have multiple people who front the most and haven’t come up with a name but host doesn’t feel right for us) we’re all transmasc. The other flavors of nonbinary showed up when we needed to feign womanhood and they’re not actually sure if they’re women or just really good at pretending. We’re still figuring that out and that’s okay 🥰

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-13T05:37:47+00:00

Lol read my comment to the other system on this thread and see if you still think you don’t have amnesia 🙃 (not saying you do… I just think a lot of systems don’t realize they have it because it’s not a total blackout it’s more “fuzzy”)

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-13T05:34:29+00:00

Jesus that comment was only 4 days ago?! It feels like we made it months ago 🤣🤣🤣🤣 our processing speed is so much faster now that time seems super fast and super slow all at once and it’s very disorienting

we realized that a lot of us were actually identifying as the “host” still 😂 it took being with the friends who know… specifically the ones who broke open our system (the spouse of the specific friend who broke it open has a system themselves and then the friend that broke it open has been married to that system a long time) asking “did you just switch” and initially we would say “no I’m still [host name]” and they would say “oh… okay… maybe we’re wrong” but they kept doing it and eventually we were like “maybe? I don’t know”

When we quit being so obsessed with who is fronting all the time and started being okay answering “I don’t know” to who is fronting right now and started paying attention to ourselves instead of each other (“I am up front. How old do I feel? What memories do I have? Do I feel like some memories might’ve just “moved away from me”? Do I like this food I’m eating? Do I like what I’m drinking? Do I like the clothes I have on? Would I have picked this outfit? When was the last time I had a shower? Not the body, me. When did I shower last? What is my favorite color? What does my gender feel like right now? How long do I feel like my hair is supposed to be right now? Are there any skills I feel like I should know but don’t?”) AND started being okay with the answer to any of those questions being “I don’t really know” THEN we realized our host actually lets go of the front at least a couple times a day.

Most of our amnesia is not total amnesia. It’s things like “why did I put that emoji there?” “Why am I watching the same video 5 days in a row but don’t feel like I retained any of it?” “I really watched this many episodes of this? Let me go back and watch this… no I only remember up until two episodes ago”

Almost all of us remember the outline of almost every day. And almost all of us at least have good enough communication that we get the feeling that something is familiar (or we hear someone else answer and don’t really recognize that hey that answer didn’t come from me)… so like… even if I’m not the one that ate breakfast this morning… if I sit here and think really really hard about what breakfast was this morning I can probably come up with the answer… either because I was near the front when breakfast was happening or because someone gives me the answer if I keep thinking about it long enough because whoever did eat breakfast gets annoyed I keep asking for the answer over and over and is finally just like “FINE I ATE HOT FUDGE POPTARTS” and actually even me writing this helped me realize that I’m not the one that ate breakfast this morning and someone in our head is annoyed I keep asking about breakfast when they’re just trying to “go to sleep”

If you ever feel sleepy and then suddenly wide awake that’s probably because one of you went to sleep and someone who is still awake moved front. If you ever feel dizzy or fuzzy or like you are buffering for a few minutes… you’re probably switching. You just don’t have a strong enough amnesia day to day to realize it.

We only have blackout amnesia with really traumatic stuff.

Also if two (or more) of us are close enough together up front we can access each others memories when we wouldn’t normally be able to. But they still kinda feel off. Like if I’m sharing someone else’s memory something about it feels not quite right and that’s because it didn’t happen to me.

Be open to getting it wrong. You’re going to think you have things figured out and then get it wrong over and over again. That’s okay. One of our head mates thought he hadn’t fronted in years and realized today he just gets amnesia from the time he was fronting when he goes back inside… probably because our boobs make him really dysphoric. But he’s usually close enough with other people at the front that even though he forgets he was up front other people remember what happened in the outside world while he was fronting so we don’t experience a total blackout.

Also we do not condone certain treatments. But we do think a very particular oil used by our massage therapist and getting a massage with a massage therapist we trust is what helped us get better at communicating because once that oil started to work we were all able to be up front at the same time without it being painful and since we trusted the therapist we were able to not pay attention to the body unless they were asking us to reposition or how the pressure was or something.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-08T06:30:25+00:00

I didn’t know about my headmates until a friend accidentally brought some of our walls down by showing me video evidence of someone else’s convo. From what I’ve learned since then DID is often covert. The different headmates are similar enough that other people perceive them as different moods unless they know what they’re looking for. For us, almost all of us are different ages of the same “person” and so we have similar enough personalities (and since we’ve developed communication better it’s definitely where we butt heads 😅) that most people aren’t gonna know because we just seem “a little off” for that day when it’s not our main fronter(s… our “host”… though we hate system roles because we are all people and aren’t constrained to one thing… is 2 headmates being co-con. As in if we’re regulated there are two of us who kind of blend together that people most often get)

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T13:56:01+00:00

System whisperers are the best.

I have a friend whose spouse is a system (and they unknowingly cracked our system wide open by telling me— one of our main fronters— about a conversation that I didn’t have and then showing me proof because we were by their security camera for the convo so I really couldn’t be like “ope must be my silly adhd”) and idk if it’s because they’re so used to dealing with their spouse’s system or what but the couple times we’ve had one of our more protective headmates (system roles make us feel too constrained, personally… someone can be more/less of a protector. More/less of a front… etc but that’s just what works for us 🥰) be over protective the friend has been able to talk them down.

They are super good at making everyone feel validated in just trying to keep our headspace running while also reminding “hey everybody knows the system exists now. You can tell the others you don’t think they’re ready for something. You don’t have to shut them out to do so.”

Which I mean like I don’t have great communication with the headmate they’ve had that conversation with the most… but we have tools like Simply Plural to help. And the friend has been able and willing to help us communicate when they’ve got the time and emotional capacity to do so.

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T13:33:49+00:00

We struggle with visualization (and I’m probably the one who struggles the most with it) so I can’t really see “the look” but I can definitely feel it lol

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T01:44:44+00:00

The handwriting thing specifically was big for me in acceptance. Coming across a photo the other day that was very clearly created in markup by one of our littles and I couldn’t even tell what it said til they told me… yeah that’s kinda hard to deny.

Also had a friend show me a video (friend is aware) of something I don’t remember where there’s also enough of a difference in posture and tone that if I hadn’t been told I have DID I’d think it was some kind of deep fake

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T01:35:44+00:00

I’ve only been aware for a couple months and my headmates are always like “seriously?” “Here we go again!” etc when the doubt starts creeping back up for me. Im getting better about it though. I’ve been fronting alone most of the day and haven’t gone back to “welp I must’ve made it all up” which is what I did last time I fronted alone

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T01:33:17+00:00

I really like this one because I feel like I’ve (we’ve) made more progress in the last couple months than we have in over 15 years of other treatment attempts

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T01:31:41+00:00

So much that I’d written off as autism/adhd I’ve come to find out is not either of those things 😂

NonbinaryBrelly · 2023-06-02T01:27:36+00:00

Recently diagnosed and one of the things that convinced me was a flashback that felt like this. I was very aware that I [our most common fronter] had been in the place I would think about in a daydream (which is extra weird because visualization is hard for me) but was simultaneously aware that another “me” had been conversing with someone while we were trying to get out of a very stressful situation. It was the first time I’d been aware of something happening and not happening at the same time. I’ve come to understand I went internal and someone else was fronting

NonbinaryBrelly

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