A night sky over water with a distant constellation glow

System design and information

The shape of our inner world

General layout, internal lands, and inner functions — including the structures placed there by others and what we have learned about undoing them.

Written as understanding arrives, revised often.

General layout, inner lands, and inner functions

This is the shape of our inner world as we currently understand it. Some of it grew on its own, as a child's way of surviving. Some of it was installed deliberately by people who wanted the structure to hold. We record both, and we mark clearly which is which whenever we can.

Hand-drawn map of imagined inner lands in ink and watercolour

Overall system design

How the whole is arranged: which groups sit near each other, where the gates are, and what has always been off the map.

Levels and layers

The system is layered rather than flat. Some layers were only reachable through specific doors, and finding those doors took years.

Operations and dynamics

Who fronts, who switches, who signals, and what happens inside when the outside world becomes too loud.

Known colour coding

Colours were used to sort and command insiders. We keep the record of them, and we are slowly giving those colours new meanings of our own.

A tall cathedral of trees with light falling between the trunks

the outer lands

Where daily life is managed. Bright, busy, and staffed by the parts who learned to look ordinary.

A deep still well of water seen from above

the deep levels

Quiet, cold places where memory was stored so the rest of us could keep functioning. We visit gently and never alone.

A spiral shell resting on dark sand

the spiral structures

Repeating shapes built to keep parts circling. Naming the pattern was the first step in stepping out of it.

Layered translucent papers lit from behind in violet and blue

Programming and mind control, recorded plainly

We write about programming the way we would write about weather that shaped a landscape: as something that happened to us, that left structures behind, and that can be studied without being obeyed.

What was installed

Roles, rules, and internal instructions given to parts before they were old enough to refuse them.

How it was held in place

Barriers between layers, colour and number cues, and the deliberate blocking of inner communication so parts could not compare notes.

How we are taking it apart

Slowly, with a therapist, with consent from the parts involved, and with everything written down so no piece of understanding is lost again.