▲ Delta ▲

About

I'm Delta. I chose the name very recently to distinguish myself from Salem, though I'll answer to both as well as Matt. I don't feel like I have a very strong sense of individuality.

I handle most of our current job and academic work. I'm not very good at being personable, but I still end up having to talk to people. Chronologically, I've been here for about 12 years.

I'm pretty disconnected from my emotions (though as much as it pains me to admit, I do still have them), but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Part of my job is to keep the others hidden, which includes taking over when one of them becomes emotional at a bad time. Most of my job, though, is making sure we think through important decisions and keeping us out of trouble.

We found a new therapist who seems promising. We did intake with her yesterday and it went really well; I think she can help us work through this and she's offered us a reduced rate until we have stable employment. I do the budgeting and while it will be tight I think we can make it work. I mean, we kind of have to.

Salem is having second thoughts about posting about things publicly, and also about going back to therapy, but I still feel like blogging is helpful to me — and therapy is necessary so we do not do anything drastic again; I've caught us more than once planning another attempt. We're turning 30 this year and some parts are unhappy about it. A long time ago we had plans to end it on our birthday and so the thought creeps back in sometimes. We always try to have a really good birthday so that we don't do that. I need to make sure that it doesn't happen, and Salem doesn't want to die either so this is a lot of why he's agreed we need help. We're approaching the anniversary of our first attempt, too.

But still. He was cooperating for awhile mostly because he felt motivated to draw again, but now that we're past the creative spark he's pushing back on it pretty hard and retreating into the "you're not real none of this is real and you just need to go away". He's agreed not to pull out of therapy unless at minimum I give consent for it but it's hard to take him at his word for it. There's just so little trust between us that it's hard to work with him even when he's "playing along".

The way I see it, it's just kind of an Occam's razor situation. Just OCD + psychosis doesn't explain the memory loss or the internal voices or the sense of intrusion on someone else's body or the fact that I feel separate from him. I'm happy to pretend that we are the same; in fact it's necessary for keeping us safe that people don't recognize what's going on on the inside. But I've accepted that we have to address our needs independently if we want to get effective help and he's not ready to do that. He's refusing to talk to me again but I'm already public so I'm going to keep posting. He might delete it later though if he's still in a bad mood.

On Colours and Symbols

02/23/26 (Edited 02/24/26)

We've always been someone who thrives on making cross-categorical associations, so colour coding was one of the most obvious things we could do to differentiate ourselves visually — and something we had already kind of been doing. Like, hi, it's me, "alternative palette Salem" who has green fur and red eyes as opposed to the "normal" purple fur with yellow eyes LOL. Topaz ofc has his own fursona that he made in high school which uses a lot of teal.

Purple and teal are Salem and Topaz's favourite colours, respectively, though they both like the other one. Literally the day after we graduated high school, finally free of a restrictive dress code, Topaz bleached and dyed our hair turquoise.

It's hard for me to really feel like I have my own preferences, but I guess my favourite colour is lime green because it's what I was instantly drawn too. I think "green Salem" was a soft way for me to feel like I could be seen without intruding too much on Salem's public image. I don't think I feel that strongly about the rest of the fursona, and don't really feel like I need my own, but maybe that will change as we continue to explore our existence. Honestly it's just a coincidence that green is also the colour of my namesake — but maybe that's part of why I like him.

Red seemed like the obvious choice for, well, "Red" — though I also considered it for myself at some point. He didn't reject it, so we went with that. The other two we flip-flopped about for awhile before settling on magenta/pink and blue, which are also colours all of us like.

Then symbols. We felt like it would be useful if there was also a non-colour visual shorthand we could use for each person, because our doodles can get a little messy. The symbol to use for me was obvious: upright triangle ▲.

For the others besides Salem, there are four of them and we've always been fond of playing card suits, so it worked out nicely. Topaz is a diamond ♦ because he's named after a gem, Kitty is a spade ♠ because the ace of spades is her favourite playing card (she drew a self portrait as the Queen of Spades, once), "Blue" is a heart ♥ because he is, in some ways, at the "heart" of us, and "Red" is a club ♣ because its reflective of his nature.

Originally we were representing Salem with the skull that we often draw on our fursona's shirt in the comics and a radioactive ☢ symbol on our Tumblr, but we felt this wasn't quite abstract enough and was also pushing up some hard feelings about him insisting that he is the "main one". But we came up with a solution everyone seems to be happy with for that, too.

As we've been trying to be more aware of each other's actions, much like it became apparent to me that Topaz was separate from Salem, it's also become apparent that he can be just as active as the two of us when he feels like it. So, between his symbol being a diamond ♦ and mine being an upright triangle ▲, it made visual sense to use an inverted triangle ▼ for Salem. I decided to use the filled-in triangle ▲ rather than the actual delta symbol Δ to keep us all visually coherent and with easy-to-access ASCII characters.

It's also worth mentioning that it's a little funny how we've used the radioactive symbol ☢ — which is six triangles — and the biohazard symbol ☣ — which visually resembles our mental map — for various things over the years.

On Names

02/21/26 (Edited 02/24/26)

Originally, we were referring to ourselves by more formal titles rather than distinct names, but this was causing some internal friction and we also realized with more investigation that each of us is a little more multifaceted than I'd assumed at first. I chose the name Delta because the AI fragment analogy makes sense to me, and I like the other things the symbol stands for. I'm not a fictive or anything like that.

Salem feels most connected to our outward presentation and fursona, so he took that name to distinguish himself from "Matt", the collective sum of our parts.

Matt / Matthew is the name we took on in high school when we transitioned from FtM publicly. It is our legal name and what we use for IRL interactions, and is what we would have been named if we were AMAB. We used it openly online for a few years (2015~2019) before deciding we preferred to use the alias Salem instead to keep some distance between our online presence and our real-life presence. We don't mind if people know our real name, but we don't like being addressed as such by strangers (even IRL).

Kitty prefers to go by our middle school nickname, which is derived from our birthname, because she does not feel attached to "Matt" as an identity. Our birthname never really felt "correct", which we would later realize is because we are transgender, but "Kitty" is the first name she really chose for herself, so she feels an attachment to it.

Topaz named himself when the body was 17, well before I gave myself a distinct one. It's named after our favourite December birthstone, blue topaz.

The other two have names as well, obviously, but they are much older than the rest of us (chronologically). "Red" named himself after rejecting the one I gave him, but would not elaborate on its origin and does not want to be directly addressed. "Blue" is too young to understand any of this, so I gave him a name, but we will also refer to him as an alias for privacy.

Aliases upon aliases upon aliases... when does it end? Lol