WHAT IS FRONTING?

[runeroot]

It seems like it should be an easier question to answer than it is. It's the type of thing that sounds straightforward at first, but leaves me typing and deleting and typing and deleting over and over with answers that are incomplete, or misleading, or less universal than we're seeking. I have difficulty getting any TRACTION on it; how do you even begin to define the way you experience consciousness from within that consciousness?

 

We've heard a lot of other people talk about what fronting feels like for them. We always thought that what it SHOULD feel like is a full-bodied shift from observer to participant, a clear and delineated transfer of all agency. Alice is the puppeteer and Bob is the spectator; a snap of the fingers and Bob is working the meat while Alice rides in the back. How else could it be?

 

But "conscious" control is a complicated thing. Attention and awareness can be split, routed, directed, amplified, attenuated. What stimuli are being processed? How deeply? What is connecting to what right now? Who's talking to who? On what level are intentions being converted into actions? What patterns are active or inactive?

 

By this we mean, we have trouble defining fronting at least in part because we have trouble defining consciousness in general. What is fronting? Well, what is BEING? How does a microscope look at itself? The whole enterprise ends up feeling built on sand, like it will crumble with the lightest touch.

 

So we won't try to answer the question, then. Not that one. Maybe the question we can take an attempt at is, what is fronting FOR US?

 

Being Conscious as Roscoe has historically felt like a pretty continuous experience. We have (at least) two headmates who are very good at mentally spackling over all the shifts and breaks others make in the facade of us as One Entity, making us feel like a more homogenously constituted individual for self-preservation purposes. But lately we've been starting to convince them that letting us perceive and experience those discontinuities, those tides that sometimes crash at odd angles against each other, might actually not be the end of the world. (Headmates like these are usually convinced that if the thing they're stopping happens, it WILL be the End Of The World. <we jest, we love you>) And they're doing so much WORK to keep us from ourselves. What if instead, they put that effort into helping us in other ways?

 

And so in the last year or so, we've been slowly gaining more ability to know where our thoughts/actions/impulses/feelings/etc come from, even if we can't always tell exactly who's doing what. One thing that's become abundantly clear is that we can rarely answer the question, "Who am I right now?" At first we thought that we were just bad at it, and that was partly right! Nuanced perception of anything is hard and requires practice, and the longer we stay attentive to and curious about our own internal workings, the better we get at it. But also, we're beginning to suspect we're just not built that way, to be "one person." I think this boat runs better when it's got a FEW captains instead of just one, and when those folks are facilitating good connections between the internal and the external.

 

So, "fronting" isn't when a ghost kicks me out of my body to do stuff with it as I once thought. What IS it? Frankly, we're still not sure. We wanted to write this post because we thought we'd be able to write ourselves into some answer that felt more whole, that could act as connective tissue between all the different bits of our subjective experience. It's jarring how often we find ourselves doing things that no longer serve us in pursuit of increased single-ness or a performance thereof. But we have to start somewhere, and an honest exploration of our experience that many headmates contributed to is certainly not the worst start. We're not going able to answer this question to our own satisfaction until we're a little further along in our selves-exploratory journey, and that's okay. We have time for each other.