7:27am July 18, 2014

Hi, you have reached a Tumblr. It’s full of weirdness and rocks. (AKA: No, that’s not the “royal we.”)

This is basically the long “about us” post we never got around to writing before. Someday I’ll figure out how to tag it to the sidebar. But if you’re confused about our pronoun use, please do read at least the first half of this.

So I noticed we’ve gotten a lot of people friending us lately, after some of our posts got reblogged a lot. We finally reached over a hundred followers, after having this thing for around two years. (Granted we spent a big chunk of time not making use of it, because we were busy getting life stuff in order and figuring out what the heck we wanted to do with it anyway. We’re more likely to form casual associations here than deep friendships— we mostly get close to people on LJ or DW-type blogging platforms.)

We identify as plural, or multiple (plural is a broad umbrella term for anyone who feels a sense of being “more than one” in any way; multiple tends to be used specifically by those who feel they’re very distinct and separate persons sharing a body). There has been a lot of bad, crappy, and just plain wrong publicity around those terms that unfortunately we haven’t been able to control— all we can do is try to post the history we know. (And it’s very surreal when anything past ten years ago in your community is practically ancient history.)

You may have heard on various websites that “a multiple, or plural, is a person who believes they are channeling fictional characters or the reincarnation of them.” This is approximately as true as the idea that the earth is hollow and flying saucers come out of the middle of it, but unfortunately, I have repeatedly seen variations of that incorrect statement on numerous websites. The word multiple in the context of the community where it’s used is a contraction of multiple personalities, as in what is now called MPD or DID, before there was a formal diagnosis for it. Before that, beginning in the 19th century, it was called a variety of things by doctors, including dual personalities, alternating personalities, exchanged personalities, and multiple personalities, to describe the phenomena where more than one person or identity appeared to inhabit a single physical body.

This got contracted to “s/he is a multiple personality” eventually by the mid-20th century, and then, sometime in the late 70s and early 80s, doctors and journalists contracted it further to “s/he is a multiple” or “s/he is multiple,” terminology which was adapted by the patients the term was applied to, as well. (I actually have traced the history of its usage through news articles; describing people as multiples dates at least back to the early 80s, and “Sybil”— the book, not the movie— uses the phrasing “(x) is multiple” at least once.) The earliest I can currently date the use of the terms plural and plurality is to the mid-90s, on messageboards and chat services for people diagnosed with MPD/DID.

Which brings us back around to the “D” part— the “disorder” part in “multiple personality disorder” and “dissociative identity disorder.” To be honest, wondering about origins is something we had to eventually shake off and say “we’re here, we’re multi, get used to it.” (Not our phrase, by the way— people were saying that in the late 90s.) Our current theory is that some people split from trauma in the “classically” described way, and some people are neurologically predisposed to plurality anyway, whether they experience trauma or not; to “evolve” as several selves rather than the single, constant self that’s considered standard in most Western cultures. And that’s most likely what we did, and we suspect it has some connection with being autistic and possibly with having rather confusing pereptions of the world in childhood. If they really wanted, people could also take the more traditional assumption, that it was a result of trauma in our childhood, which we did experience, though we still prefer the “would have been plural no matter what” theory. We do deal with things like PTSD, and being many people does affect the way we process it (some people being more connected to certain traumas and therefore more upset by things that remind us of them), but it’s not something we feel defines us.

So we don’t regard ourselves as being a disorder. We don’t have perfect voluntary switching all the time (even though we’ve known some people who insisted this was a necessary criterion for “healthy” plurality), but we don’t black out when switching unless we take certain medications; memories and skills aren’t always passed around perfectly, but we get along. And we know we’re not alone in that— we’ve met other plurals who were very certain they had formed from trauma, but they had figured out how to live as a collective and didn’t want to, or couldn’t, integrate, and didn’t want to have a label of MPD or DID even if they had originated from trauma. We’re in the “can’t integrate” camp too— we don’t seem to have any core or central person that we can find, and a therapist did try it on us, but trying to live as a single person just never “took” and left us very vulnerable while we were trying to force it.

If you *were* in the plural community ten years ago, you might have heard that we were bitchy, pushy, mean, control freaks, trying to push our own theories on everyone, etc. I have to admit we were not always the nicest, most patient, most understanding people back then and we could have handled a lot of things better than we did, and there are some things we regret our involvement in. I also like to think we’ve succeeded in getting calmer over the years, though, for what it’s worth. We have preferred terms for ourselves, but we’re all right with whatever terms people prefer for themselves, as long as they aren’t getting the idea they “have to” use terms they don’t personally care for. We may not like it if people call us alters or say we must have all been created by dissociation, but honestly, nowadays we deal with that better than people talking about “lying fakers who pretend to have mental illnesses for attention.” When we’ve… spent most of our time in the plural community hiding our psychiatric problems as much as possible because we don’t want anyone to use them against us, while actually suffering a lot from them at various times. And we especially don’t care for it from people who haven’t done even a minimum of historical research about various mental illnesses, and don’t know that co-consciousness, memory sharing, and voluntary switching were described in the 19th century, and people in-system who identify as nonhuman or are based on fictional characters were described in the 20th century.

…This is basically a big long chunk of pre-emptively warding off the worst of people’s possible assumptions, though; it’s not what we’re like most of the time. We’ve worked over the years at sounding less pushy and obnoxious, partly because we saw how annoying it was when other plurals did it, and are totally cool with anyone who just wants to stick around to read what we have to say about this stuff, and look at the pictures we reblog, especially the rocks. And we reblog a lot of rocks. We’re a frustrated geology student and our geo major never worked out, and we ended up going into another field, but still have a passionate love for geology, as well as cool landscapes, astronomy, and neat scientific things in general. (In fact, we reblog rocks a lot to calm/relax ourseles, and we’ve been going through some rather stressful life circumstances lately, so you’ll find a lot of rocks here nowadays.)

We have a tendency to err on the side of defending “weird” people— everyone from nonbinary transgender people to multiples whose systems include a lot of “fantasylike” elements (partly because some doctors wrote detailed reports about the latter before we ever started trying to really focus on who was in our own head)— if they don’t have a lot of warning signs of being trolls or aren’t being really toxic to their communities overall. And even if they are being really toxic in a given community, we’re still likely to defend their identity, just not how they’re behaving towards others. That’s just how our ethics go, whether other people agree or not— just so you have an idea of what to expect.

We do blog occasionally about stuff that we think is, for lack of a better word, in the cause of justice, but we don’t consider ourselves part of the SJ community and we don’t like a lot of the destructive dynamics we’ve seen running around in it. Even in the groups that are supposed to be “on our side”— sometimes *especially* in those groups. So we don’t write or reblog stuff with those destructive dynamics in it, but we don’t consider ourselves “anti-SJ” either. We’re just trying to do good, finding ourselves in situations where we’re the only ones who seem to remember parts of a certain community’s history, and feeling ethically compelled to get that information out. There aren’t a whole lot of communities we actively feel at home in nowadays, not even plural communities. “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me.”— Treebeard, Lord of the Rings

But if you like all of that, feel free to keep on reading. You can come for the weird stuff and stay for the rock pictures, or come for the rock pictures and stay for the weird stuff. We just don’t care for people being jerks, and we won’t make a big dramatic deal about it if people unfollow us— we have to unfollow people from time to time anyway to prevent our dashboard from getting cluttered. In fact, if you decide you don’t want to read our blog any more, we’d prefer you just unfollow without saying anything, instead of ranting at us about “YOU CRAZY PEOPLE, YOU NEED TO BE LOCKED UP” or “STOP POSTING SO MANY STUPID BORING PICTURES OF ROCKS, I’M SICK OF YOU SPAMMING MY DASHBOARD WITH STUPID FREAKING ROCKS!”

…You will definitely get different attitudes from various of us, depending on who’s posting and when, and about what issues, but we try to be careful to specify when a certain opinion is one person’s only, and does not speak for the rest of the system. We work hard at not letting anyone have exploding raging tantrums because “I’m a protector and that’s what I do” or “I’m just an angry person,” though— we saw a lot of that in plural communities 10-12 years ago and really loathed it, and calming each other down is an intrinsic part of “system maintenance” for us.

I guess if you were to describe us in terms of various alignment systems, most of us are (we like to think) “chaotic good” in AD&D terms. In terms of Harry Potter houses, the majority of us tend to go somewhere along a “Hufflerin” or “Slytherpuff” spectrum, which are two of the most stereotyped and misunderstood houses. The short version is that it works out for us, on one hand, to really not liking to hurt anyone’s feelings and trying to be openminded to some fairly weird stuff, but also knowing self-defense has its place when you’re being attacked; and on the other hand, to keeping our distance from big imbroglios and kind of observing from the edge and “sensing” (by the definition of the word Donna Williams uses) what’s going on, how power is moving around and who has it and who’s gravitating to or manipulating whom and why. This doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll try to *seize* the power for ourselves, mind you (though certain communities seem to present us with an unexpected number of opportunities to do so, but we’ve really had to learn hard that discretion is the better part of valor in those situations). We just don’t feel safe in a given community unless we have a detailed sense of how power is working in that community and who has it and why, and what would probably result from our intervention in a given situation. Though we do have a hard time keeping our mouths shut when there’s some piece of community history only we seem to be able to fill in.

Let’s see, what else… Trigger warnings: We’re not great at doing those all the time. We’ve been in and out of trigger warning debates for thirteen years, honestly, and some days, we just want to throw up our hands and go “I’ve been here before. Why do I have to be here again?” We do warn for very obvious things like graphic descriptions of murder or sexual assault, as well as for medical details, institutional abuse, and psychiatric abuse. The last one is an example of something where we’re often at odds with various communities about it— in plural communities, for instance, people would often talk in very approving ways about therapy techniques that we had very, very bad reactions to. And the idea that talking about those things in detail and treating them as universally wonderful, could be triggering to someone, was something that a lot of people just didn’t even seem to think could even happen. So we’re fairly sensitive to that one. Some phobias, we warn for— both phobias that we know close friends have, and ones that we ourselves have. Any kind of excessive snarking or trolling of various “weird” communities, nowadays. Animated gifs and anything that could be seizure-inducing, although we keep our own posting of those to a minimum since we have some kind of mild seizure condition anyway, and won’t post, on principle, anything that would set it off.

But if you think of yourself as someone who really needs trigger warnings for a whole lot of things, you… may want to read this blog with caution, because it’s very difficult for us to keep consistent lists of what’s considered worth trigger-warning for at a given time, apart from things that are triggering to us and/or close friends. Not because we don’t care or because we want to hurt anyone, but because it’s just hard to make our brain work that way.

Also, we can give off the impression of being much more competent with certain kinds of academic stuff than we really are. A lot of autistic people’s brains work this way, but it can get nasty when someone who’s genuinely competent with those kinds of language and ideologies starts attacking you, thinking that you can carry on arguing at that level all the time. And sometimes, in those situations, we will get to the point of taking a swipe in self-defense, when someone refuses to listen to what we’re really saying— not because we want to, but because they’ve left us with no other way to communicate. TL;DR: Ethics can exist outside of academic language and ideologies, so please understand that our ability to use them is often more limited than it seems, and try to take it into account when talking with us.

If all of that is cool with you, then I hope you get something you like out of our blog, whether it’s writing, pictures or both. (And this will probably be updated from time to time with various links, mostly of the “yeah, this applies to us too and says it better than we could” variety.)

-Tamsin