I've said it many times before and I'll say it again: when we reached final fusion, none of us died or disappeared. We are all still here!

So many people who have never experienced fusion, who don't talk to those of us who have, claim that fusion is equal to death. I often feel like that scene in Brother Bear (2003) where a bear claims that she lost her husband and, offscreen, he begs her to stop telling everybody that he's dead.

I'm not dead! We're not dead! No one in our system is dead! In our final fusion, we are all alive and present. We are all happy like this.

I have never experienced death in my system but I know others who have. I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. I don't think we could ever be integrated if a part of us died because all parts of us are necessary to be integrated. If integration was going to destroy us, I don't think our brain would've naturally put us through it.

Yet, we know there are some folks who have experienced the death of headmates. Some of those folks had that happen through fusion. We may not understand it, but we respect their experience. They have the right to grieve.

But...I still can't help but notice something...

When I see plurals describing their fusions as death or disappearing or something equally scary, I have to wonder. It's not relatable at all to my experience with fusion...but it is relatable to my experiences with dissociation. Sometimes these descriptions are almost exactly like how I've experienced splitting and dormancy.

Splitting is the term I use for the formation of new parts. There isn't always a metaphorical 'split.' Most of the time, headmates just formed out of nowhere and no one else was involved in that. But, occasionally, we had splits where it felt like people were genuinely splitting apart into new headmates. At times, it was like they lost a piece of who they were which sometimes changed them dramatically. Other times, it felt like they just ceased to exist. The new parts could be like fragmented pieces of the original person or they could be just as developed. Sometimes they seemed like entirely new people but the more we got to know them, the better we could see that they carried kernels of the original part inside of them.

Dormancy, on the other hand, is when a part suddenly stops fronting and effectively disappears -- usually due to stress or big changes in our life. A headmate going dormant would feel like they just stopped existing, sometimes without a trace. We knew they were supposed to be there...but they just weren't. The empty space they left behind was palpable and it was awful and would cause so much turmoil. The dormant headmates would eventually come back, though...

Fusion was not like any of that for us. Fusion did not make any of us cease to exist. It's the complete opposite.

We're always present in final fusion. We have complete access to everyone and everything each of us contains (our individual identities, thoughts, feelings, memories, etc.). It's a lot like sharing the front, but closer than that. There's no confusion or loss of who we are. It's a consistent harmony.

So, considering all of this, I can't help but wonder if some plurals are actually going through splitting or dormancy and mistaking it as fusion? Maybe some, maybe not all? The stigma attached to fusion probably doesn't make it easy to figure out.

Actually, it can be hard to figure these things out, just, generally. Back when I was still struggling with dissociation, it was difficult to differentiate between splitting, dormancy, and fusion. Sometimes, a headmate can fuse with others in the system but not with you. Those headmates share existence with the fused part but to you it's like that part just disappeared. Add poor system communication on top of that and it gets even messier. Plurality can be complicated like that.

I'm just tired of people assuming all fusions are dead because it's not always like that. "Quit telling everyone I'm dead!"