From its initial conception, Respir has been a haven for us. A whole universe to create and thrive in. We are enternally grateful to it for its constant companionship in our lives. Since we were young we have been coming up with characters and worlds inside Respir and hope to share that joy one day with others. This website serves as an archive of sorts, for the ideas and dreams we have poured into making Respir a reality. A server of sorts to store and share all the works we've made. Thank you for deciding to take a look.
Welcome to our corner of the internet. If you’ve somehow stumbled upon this without clicking on our bio links: hey, that's impressive, We don't know how you did that! We're Livid, a fused plural system interested in many forms of media including video games, manga, anime, webcomics and books. We like to make and pursue art and hope to one day do it full time as a published author. We have some small side goals like producing our own webcomic, trying our hand at manga creation and generally finishing what we started. Most of this website is to host our writing and act as a wiki for anything that happens in said stories. As well as in small part being a place where we can info-dump about our interests and plurality. Currently, our main project is both the development of this website and our story “District:0” Which we aim to turn into a manga or a webcomic depending on how spicy we’re feeling about the whole production process and how much pain we can endure. Confused and have no idea what a system is? A system is a collection of multiple personalities. There are many ways to be a system and many variations so we cannot in good faith explain anything but our own experience. Click Here to view a masterdoc of resources for DID and System related information :)
I: Revelations There comes a time where you learn something so fundamentally earth-shattering about yourself that it's as if the great glass pillars holding up your existence crack and rain down around you, revealing a truth that, laid bare, is almost impossible to parse. That was what it was like to even consider the idea that we were plural. It was unheard of, it didn't fit within our framework of understanding in the slightest, we had no idea what being plural or a system was. But we knew in concept multiple personalities, and deep inside as our ex suggested we might be, something twisted and squirmed uncomfortably, but not because what was saying was wrong, but because it was all too correct. This, whilst being mindblowingly high at the time, was how we came to realise we weren't in fact singular. We remember vividly, all at once, everyone coming to front in rapid succession, all equally as confused as to the fact that they existed. They had been hidden and pushed aside for so long that even to themselves they had believed they were the singular existence in our head. We remember leaning against the wall to prop us up. We were in such shock and struggling to adjust. But it was also such an “aha!” Moment for us. It was like everything just then started to finally make sense. Every contradictory thought, feeling and decision. The way we adapted to others so much that we felt like vividly different people at times, the lack of a core identity, the paranoia around how we felt and who we were. It all suddenly clicked. The genie could not be put back into the lamp. II: Birth of Genesis I like to describe system discovery as “a second renaissance”. It doesn't apply to everyone but as someone who is gender non conforming as well as queer, learning we were a system was kind of like what it was like to explore sexuality and gender expression. It was a whole new layer of information to understand about yourself and experimentation was definitely needed to figure out all the ins and outs of yourself. That as well as the excitement of discovering a new dimension of yourself at least in our cases, was a commonality too. For us, we spent a lot of our initial system discovery excitedly learning about our alters and documenting who they were as much as we were able to. We had a couple alters dedicated to cataloguing everyone and drafting up files on each of us in the system. It was also where a lot of our “huh, that's interesting to realise and now makes lots of sense!” Discoveries came from. One of the fun things was tracking down parts of ourselves and realising what each alter represented in ourself. It broadened our understanding of ourselves greatly, and most importantly, what we had been repressing. Lots of system stuff we would say is what you were unable to express or felt guilt or shame over feeling or acting like. We think it's sadly natural, to look at parts of yourself and decide they are unsightly and thus push them down and hope they don't ever re-emerge. It gets more complicated when a majority of the sentiment in the system is very anti that specific part of you. For example in our system a majority of us were AroAce and held a lot of shame around sometimes enjoying or seeking out sexual situations. This was because we had one member in our system that was hypersexual and incredibly vocal about it. It led to very conflicting feelings on if we were somehow lying about being AroAce, and it didn't help that sometimes we felt very anti sex, but other times very pro sex. So realising we had this alter of ours that deserved to be heard and treated with dignity was eye-opening. We luckily already had the knowledge and experience from being close to another system in our past, to know that denying or outright rejecting the existence of an Alter only made them lash out more ferociously. So we didn't make that particular mistake. All in all, system discovery was a fun time of our lives, and was definitely the honeymoon period of being a system. Which made the gravity of what came next harder to adjust to. III: The Weight of The World Something we think literally everyone who's neurodivergent or mentally ill has felt is the feeling of being trapped in your ways due to your condition/s. It's a thought that worms its way into your mind like a festering magatama, eats through your grey matter, curls itself around your brainstem and whispers sweet nothings during your lowest moments. We tend to think and feel this way quite often, and it's something that brings us to despair and tears at times. We feel very trapped in our ways, debilitated by our mental illnesses even on some good days. So realising we were Plural and what that potentially meant past all the fun stuff with switching and alters and the headspace and self exploration was quite tough. We have not had a super Traumatic event happen to us, but we have had some trauma in our childhood due to the way we were raised and the resulting lack of support from our family when we felt we needed it most. We were a lonely child. And one who gave up before life even really got to get started. There was an idea we used to tell therapists all throughout our time using mental health services since we were 17, that “It felt like someone died and I took their place”. This feeling never ever went away, and quite honestly went ignored, probably got lumped in with imposter syndrome (which we definitely suffer from, mind you). The fuzzy memory around childhood, the detachment to our body all throughout our life, it was all cognizant of not only depression, but our plurality too. Whoever was here before us, died, and we took their place. Whoever was here before us fractured into pieces and our existence began. That kid is no longer with us, and while we do not blame that child, we are forced to clean up and shape up for the sake of the life left inherited. This was definitely a point of contention amongst us all. The unfairness, the lack of desire to be in this body and life. It explained a lot. Why the concept of family felt so alien, why we hated our body so much, the lack of a core identity, even the way we felt like we weren't inherently good people was a result of being plural. Slowly coming to terms that yes, despite how fun it was to explore our unique plural identity, this was in fact a disorder. It was clear we were drowning, and we weren't going to be treading water for much longer. IV: Sink or Swim One of the things we are eternally grateful for, is the huge amount of support we've received since we came out as plural. Past the initial confusion and awkwardness sometimes trying to explain that you have multiple people chattering in your head, especially to people who have never heard of plurality, systems nor experience it themselves; We've been shown nothing but kindness and understanding. We are not out in that way to everyone in our lives but the people that we are out to, have been incredibly kind. Without them we would have struggled so much more, but with their support we've been able to overcome and cope with a lot of the difficulties we've encountered since system discovery. One thing we've tried our best to keep in mind is the idea that systems are inherently fluid, and prone to change. This, of course, can be a challenge especially if you find lots of comfort and stability in routine or things staying consistent, because your system will adjust and shift as time goes on. For example, in the beginning we only really had a handful of alters. This number increased to 23 at its peak, then, after noticing some background shifts, the alters agreed to a system wide merger, which brought our number down to six. If we had been resistant to these changes we would have stressed ourselves out and felt a loss of control over our own existence. Which is funny, because the alternative, letting go of control somehow feels better. Everything in moderation I suppose. As we've changed, we've gotten a lot more used to adapting and embracing the changes and what they represent for us as people. Another struggle we've had was with “feeling like ghosts possessing a body that wasn't ours”. Half of our system after the merges were “fictives”, each of them modelled after characters we've written about. And the common sentiment amongst them was feeling varying degrees of homesick for the lives and body they felt like they “left behind”. This only really got resolved with our latest change of integration/fusion. Sometimes being plural can be painful, we tend to feel a lot of pride and joy around being plural, but on dark days, it feels like being pulled in many different directions, decisions feel impossible and your head feels so loud and overstimulating. It can be distressing at points realising you're all borne of trauma and everything left unresolved and that weighs heavily on the conscience. It can be frustrating feeling so different from people that are singular, having any kind of diverging experience from “normal” people can be depressing even if you don't truly wish to be “normal”. We personally had a system goal: to go into remission for being a system, and for us that meant merging to become a singular, new personality that had ownership of the body and life in a way the alters never had. V: Full circle We all had different views on what we wanted from merging. It was a complex equation with people falling into one of two camps; the desire for non-existence and an adversity for self expression to change. These two things were seen as contradictory at first. But after testing out what merging/fusion would be like for a day or two, we realised that for us even if we wanted to, there were things about the experience that were outside of our control. Namely the fact that fronts didn't exist anymore so expression was done mainly through echos of feelings from each of the alters, and that everyone would go into an almost dormant state. Where they could only really be accessed by delving deep into the headspace, otherwise, our mind was startlingly clear for maybe the first time in years. It felt like this body and life was my own. And that sense of connection was something the alters had been missing and struggling to address. Because if no one had ownership of the body, and no one wanted to be part of the life we had, what was the point in being alive? What was there to do except disregard the body and do whatever felt good in the moment. While that kept us alive and going in the short term, I've come to realise that it wasn't perfect. It may have been all we knew what to do, but that didn't make it good for us. We've struggled with internal anger, violent thoughts and feelings. Feeling utterly lost and inhuman, even monstrous at times. There is much work to be done still, to get to a point where I can happily say we've healed. So now, it's my responsibility to live the best life I can, for myself and the alters. So that one day I can look in the mirror and be proud of the person we managed to become.