There is no need to fear fusion (eternity is a scam)
Date published: 2024.11.10
Identity is fluid, whether you’re a singlet or a system. Fusion might sound absolutely terrifying, but it really is just a state of being – one that seems intimidating, sure, but is also reversible. Seriously, if you’re not afraid of one day realizing your pronouns don’t align with your gender identity anymore, neither should you be worried about potential fusion.
If you follow us on schlaugh (feel free to if you like seeing random incomprehensible half-thoughts every now and then) you might have already seen this post:
❝eternity is a scam meant to make you hate yourself❞
Now, that post was not, in fact, about fusion. Or any other plurality-related matter, actually. The reason why I chose to include it in this essay’s title is because a) it fits the topic I’m going to talk about anyway, and b) the post was written by Morgan. Not Len, but Morgan – the Morgan who had spent months desperately trying to fuse and finally succeeded (becoming Len); the Morgan who, since then, has been splitting and fusing whenever they believe it benefits the situation.
What I need you to understand is this: nothing lasts forever. That includes how you& perceive yourselves. That includes being separate headmates (let the one who has never blended to the point of not recognizing who they were cast the stone), and that includes being fused.
Morgan is smart, and way more experienced in fusing and splitting and fusing again than I am. Here is something they wrote for me back in July, when I was just beginning the process of fusing; the process that, as I’ve come to realize, never truly ends:
❝@ Iri: split. You think you’re being too Marcin/Kordian at the moment? Force that other fucker to show up. Split. Ask him what he thinks. Ask him what his problem is. Focus on how you feel separate, focus on the absence. Fuse again. Breathe. Repeat as needed, til the end of time, because fusion is never final – what has once been given a name will forever bear it, and it will recognize it regardless of further transformation. You will always be there for each other. Split freely whenever needed and slowly figure yourselves out.❞
They make it sound oh so easy… but to be fair, it is. Fusing is hard. Temporarily splitting after fusion? Not really. Fusing again after the temporary split? Quite easy too. That’s because our brain already recognizes both of those states and we’re already consciously familiar with how they feel: I know how it felt to be Kordian once, so I go back to that state if I so decide; both I and Marcin know how it feels to be Iri, so going back to that state is no longer troublesome either.
Admittedly, and I will say this openly: we haven’t yet managed to fuse fully. Len has, but I think I and Marcin are always going to be a bit of an… unfinished fusion. But we’ve made peace with that already. We decided to fuse to be able to function better, and if that is the extent of it, then who cares? If it works it works. It certainly works better than before we tried fusing.
And this is what I want to say to you: there is nothing to be afraid of. Society wants to force us all into final fusion, to pressure us into becoming normal a singlet, and it’s obviously terrifying. It naturally makes a lot of plurals scared of the very concept of fusing. We used to be no different: when Len achieved the first conscious fusion in our system, the majority of us absolutely freaked out. They had always been talking about how they wanted to fuse, but somehow we still weren’t ready for it to actually happen. There was a lot of fear: am I going to lose my friend? Is Len going to care about me the same way they used to as a separate headmate? And Len themself struggled with fear too, at first, constantly stressing out over the smallest details: am I being too much of one of us right now, am I devouring the other one? If we are fused then why can’t I feel them?
At the end of the day, the only thing that has changed thanks to fusion was that our member count went down a little, and that Len became more comfortable in their skin. No, they didn’t stop caring about those of us they had already been close with pre-fusion; no, neither Morgan nor Wilhelm ended up being devoured by the other. And whenever they feel that being separate would make them feel better, they just split. Because fusion doesn’t exist to make you more normal, it exists to make you feel better.
It’s reversible! Someone play the sound of angel choirs
So no, you don’t need to strive for final fusion. Most systems, including us, don’t. That doesn’t mean you have to be afraid of fusion between headmates if they wish to give it a try: it’s not final, it’s not eternal, if it ends up making you& feel worse you can always reverse it. Any time, whenever you want to (and even when you don’t want to – really, isn’t splitting under stress kind of the whole deal? If you fuse and it stresses you out too much, the stress absolutely can make you go back to how things used to be).
There are some changes that stay with you, of course. Even though I don’t consider myself anywhere near ‘fully’ fused with Marcin, I still have some lingering Marcin traits even when we temporarily split, and the same goes for him. The experience of sharing your identity with another headmate, of being one person, obviously impacts and changes you.
But change happens regardless of whether you want it to or not. Eternity is a scam. Stop believing in it.
So how do you fuse
I’m glad you asked! Based on our experiences (god knows all brains are different, you might need some more things, I’m not your headmate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) there are 2 3 ingredients you need:
- love;
- recognition of yourself in the other (a sprouting shared identity);
- actual, conscious agreement to proceed with the fusion.
“Love” is pretty self-explanatory. You don’t want to become one person with someone you neither care about nor like, and you won’t.
Point 2 is the hardest to achieve – you need to be able to look at another headmate and sincerely believe that in some way, they are you, and you are them. It can’t be wishful thinking, ‘oh how I’d like to be you’, it has to be actual recognition, an acknowledgement that you’re already way more alike than you are different. Moreover, the other headmate needs to believe that too! If they don’t, fusion most likely won’t work.
(That has happened to us too – Aleks and Sela tried to, but did not manage to fuse at all. The problem was that Sela didn’t manage to fulfill point 2’s requirements: she always considered herself part of Aleks, but could never believe that Aleks was her. They eventually gave up and decided they’ll remain separate for now.)
#3 should calm you down, I think. Len is actually a fusion of three right now: there was a 3rd headmate who fused with Len a couple months after their first fusion. That headmate has never wanted to be known, so I won’t be naming them, but their fusion was the easiest, quickest one we’ve ever experienced… because they had been ready to do it for months before they decided to just go ahead and fuse. They had some reasons that made them believe remaining separate would benefit the system more, so even though they basically saw each other as more or less the same person, for a long time they were hesitant to fuse. Despite how well-integrated they were, they never struggled with our brain forcing them to become one, they never had to say “no, I don’t want to fuse just yet!”, fusion was simply not happening until they both decided they were ready.
After they decided it was time though? They were already fused by the evening of the same day.
(You might now ask: well, why aren’t you fully fused, then? What went wrong? Things get kind of complicated here – technically I fit all of the criteria, but in practice, both I and Marcin have… an extremely strong sense of self. The strongest in the entire system, probably. And we’re just similar enough that none of us have a stronger sense of self than the other. We’re both equally as opinionated and confrontational – at the same time, sometimes our values don’t align, so whenever something causes our senses of self to be in conflict, instead of somehow figuring out a compromise our shared identity could agree on, our brain just fucking splits us. Every single time. I can’t overpower Marcin, Marcin can’t overpower me, we’re too fucking stubborn to compromise, so the only thing that’s left is to split. Simply put: our personality (the very same one! we absolutely have the same personality!) just sucks so much that we’re doomed to be bad at fusing. We’re simply built different 💅)
Seriously, just don’t worry
For us fusion is not death, it’s not rebirth, it’s kind of its own thing. The I writing this (Kordian, temporarily separate) is the same person as Iri. I have no idea how to explain it to someone who’s never experienced fusion before; I think that’s the problem with plurality though, that language sometimes fails you when you attempt to describe an experience specific to it.
Fusion has been good for us, but we also chose not to believe it to be something final, something that cannot be changed, reversed, morphed into a tool we find suitable for our needs. We decide to fuse because we want to feel better, healthier, because we want life to become a bit easier – not because we want to be a good little mental patient. Chasing the illusion of normalcy won’t heal you; chasing happiness will.
& I think it’s fine to experiment a little! Fuck it, fusing can be “just a phase” that you go through for some time, and then decide to go back to being separate and never fusing again. Why not? Try things out, figure out what feels comfortable and what doesn’t, do what seems right to you in the moment.
(But also, obviously, if you don’t want to fuse – don’t let anyone shame you for what kind of decisions you& make about how your own head works.)
Does fusion work the same way for everyone else? I bet not! Most likely doesn’t! If splitting works differently for different people, so should fusion! Who cares!
But like, the most important point of this post is: if you’re worried you might not like being fused, then you need to know that it’s reversible. It simply is. For everybody. Look up the success rate of final fusion (spoiler: it’s low). If you don’t like being fused, you’ll stop being fused – that’s it.
Written by: Iri 🌫️ (Kordian 👁️🗨️)