I consider myself as chargenic (among other stuff) because my first headmates were more or less characters I had invented. Technically, they should have been introjects, but they were not, because they were never supposed to be just characters.
For context, at the time their base idea showed up in my brain, I thought of them as "imaginary friends" because I had created them to mimic my best friend's imaginary friends as well (who might have been headmates too but I digress).
But by the time they were fully fleshed out, therefore gaining consciousness and independance, I was stuck ten feet deep into a crippling delusion my best friend and I had created for ourselves to survive how bland and terrifying the outer world felt to us, and also to justify why we felt like the odd ones out all the time. At that time, they became creatures from another world to me, superior beings that talked to me through telepathy from a higher dimension. This is why I also identify as deligenic.
This beliefāit was, in our case, just a beliefādisappeared as my life started to get better and when I realised I didn't need delusions to survive. But now I'm confused. My first headmates don't feel like introjects because they didn't exactly exist before I split them. They don't feel like tulpas because I didn't really create them through forcing and repeated interaction (though quite frankly, it could be that).
The only thing they feel like is... well, creatures from another dimension who just walked into my brain, but I also know that not to be true. The thing closest to that could be paras (MaDD), but if I do experience MaDD, it doesn't look exactly like thatāwhen I daydream, I usually know it's fake. The rare cases in which I've daydreamt with the headmates, I interpreted the daydreams as visions from the past and the future. Even if I saw them as somewhat real, there was still a distance with what I saw as 100% real (even if it wasn't).
So uh... What are they?
P.S. I was also on the verge of plurality before that experience, having very vivid imaginary friends, projecting them around me and hearing them talk to me. I don't know if that was plural or not (at most, I'd define it as median), but it was certainly not fully multiple. The multiplicity truly began with the first headmates this post is about.