What are your& goals from joining this course? We want to learn about new ways to explore and map our system – particularly visual mapping methods that come less intuitively for us, as well as less traditional maps such as skill maps and value maps. We want to know everyone in our system better by the end of the course – both in terms of our relationships with each other and understanding where one-person ends and another person begins.
What would y’all like to get out of it the most? We want to increase communication between our main group of co-conscious fronters and another group of people (including several previous hosts) stuck on the other side of a communication barrier. In an ideal world, system mapping would help us to creatively brainstorm ways of increasing communication across that barrier and help us to actively include people on either side of the barrier in our crew.
What excites y’all about being in this course? We’re really excited to brainstorm ideas with a whole bunch of systems with completely different learning styles, so we can hopefully discover new ideas and possibilities together that our system would never have considered on our own!
What’s your past experience(s) with system mapping? We’ve been making written lists and flash cards for our headmates for a long time, and we’ve been using spreadsheets as a living document to keep track of key information for each headmate (including faceclaims) for a month or so. We have playlists for songs that deeply resonate with different people in our system (the maps we interact with most on a day-to-day basis), and we made our first hand-drawn heat map / relationship map earlier today. That was really helpful – we ended up naming our main communication barrier (the River Styx) and started brainstorming ways to increase communication across it. We have a private Discord server with channels for each person who’s fronted in our system, so maybe that counts too? We also do a lot of journaling and longform writing about our system, which might loosely be considered a map – it’s at least a thorough paper trail.