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What's All This Then?
Jan. 6th, 2022 01:29 pmWelcome to our little project! Here's answers to questions we feel like answering:
What's this journal for?
We've had thoughts and ideas boiling around in our head for some time now. So we decided that it'd be best to get those thoughts to paper (er, silicone I guess). This place is where we'll be talking about our views on plurality. It might take the form of rants, vents, essays, tiktok scripts, idk. We didn't go into this with a big plan or anything. We just wanted to talk to someone outside of our own head, even if it ends up being the digital void.
Why do you keep referring to yourself as "we"?
That's because I (Faye) am not alone in my head. I have other people here sharing my body, brain, and life. They get to have input on long term projects like these. We're a plural system of headmates.
What the heck is plurality??
So you're just talking to your imaginary friends?
They are my friends yes. And technically they are being "imagined". But I'm not the one imagining them, they imagine themselves.
Are you faking this?
I don't think so. Just about all of us have taken a turn calling everyone in our head fake. But that hasn't scared any of them off.
You don't have other people in your head, you're just making them up!
Not a question. But, I'm not making them up. My brain is. But my brain is also making me up, just like how your brain is making you up. Everybody you have ever met has been the product of just over a kilo of electrified meat encased in a skull firing off electrochemical signals that instantiate coherent thoughts. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that has only been observed in incredibly complex neurological organs. Why is it so hard to imagine that architecture holding up more than of those consciousnesses?
And technically consciousness has never been observed. Because we cannot see directly into the subjective mental experience of someone else. Which means you already take it for granted that someone has a mind and thinks when they say 'hello'.
You're faking this! DID is incredibly rare and debilitating. How dare you make fun of them!!
So much to unpack, why did I imagine such a loaded question? Also not a question. But, DID is also far more common than you might think. 1.5% last we checked (and I don't think that statistic included OSDD). Red hair is 2% if I recall correctly. When numbers are in the billions, rare things are incredibly common.
We also don't have DID. Me and Moxie have gone many rounds about what disorder(s) we actually have (and we'll probably share those rounds in this journal!). Usually only one of us suffers distress over our dissociative symptoms. So we seem to pass around our OSDD-1. If it turns out we don't understand the DSM-V and we do not in fact qualify for OSDD-1, well that's fine, we aren't planning on getting diagnosed anyways. Maybe we just have DPDRD. We don't need medical experts to validate (or worse, invalidate) our lived experience.
We also don't think that plurality begins or ends with DID/OSDD. There are cultural exemptions, sub-clinical levels of distress, and varieties of human experience that would qualify as plurality outside of medical models. We're not denying science or anything like that, we're just saying that science has had a sampling bias for multiples with a certain shared experience.
Finally, we're not making fun of anything! If you come here, read our experiences of life, and come away feeling like it's an insult, that says more about you than it does about us.
DID/OSDD is the only form of plurality!
(Moxie: Wow Faye, you suck at putting these in the form of questions) If a person reports a subjective first person experience, you cannot disprove that. They may be incorrect about the mechanics of it all, but they cannot be mistaken about the qualia or "what it's likeness" of the experience. If you heard a voice in your head, no one could tell you that you did not experience hearing a voice in your head, regardless of the explanations they might have for the cause. So, if someone reports that they have a first person subjective experience of having more than one individual, person, or self in the body, and that doesn't line up with diagnostic criteria for or structural theories of DID/OSDD, then it's simply the case that they are plural and not DID/OSDD.
By not being DID/OSDD you're invalidating people with real problems.
This is a bit of a straw-man I'm making up, but we have heard this before. We are not at all diminishing the very real struggles of people with DID/OSDD. In fact, we were very resistant to diagnosing ourselves because our problems didn't seem bad enough (hence the compromise position stated above). We also do have "real" problems. Plurality just isn't the source of them. It's what we've used to overcome them.
Did you form from trauma / what made your system?
As a note, never ask someone this. For one, it's really easy for a neurodivergent and/or traumatized person to hear that question and feel compelled to tell you what traumatized them. We've almost fallen for that a few times ourselves. Second, victims of trauma are at higher risk for future abuse. Abusive people can and will use a person's trauma to hurt them. It's safer to let someone open up instead of disrespecting boundaries and prodding for information you don't really even need.
But to answer your question, we are an adaptive system. We think that our system was formed to overcome adverse life circumstances.
Wait, so you really hear voices in your head and ascribe them to other, independent, persistent, people?
Finally you're getting it! But actually no, we don't "hear" voices or "see" pictures. We have aphantasia. I have thoughts that I author, the others have thoughts that they author. The "raw feel" of thinking a thought is different from that of having a thought thought at you. Which is probably the reason we took so long to realize we were not the same person.
What's this journal for?
We've had thoughts and ideas boiling around in our head for some time now. So we decided that it'd be best to get those thoughts to paper (er, silicone I guess). This place is where we'll be talking about our views on plurality. It might take the form of rants, vents, essays, tiktok scripts, idk. We didn't go into this with a big plan or anything. We just wanted to talk to someone outside of our own head, even if it ends up being the digital void.
Why do you keep referring to yourself as "we"?
That's because I (Faye) am not alone in my head. I have other people here sharing my body, brain, and life. They get to have input on long term projects like these. We're a plural system of headmates.
What the heck is plurality??
"The experience of having more than one person, self or identity within the body" --Manchester Metroplitan University's Understanding Multiplicity.
So you're just talking to your imaginary friends?
They are my friends yes. And technically they are being "imagined". But I'm not the one imagining them, they imagine themselves.
Are you faking this?
I don't think so. Just about all of us have taken a turn calling everyone in our head fake. But that hasn't scared any of them off.
You don't have other people in your head, you're just making them up!
Not a question. But, I'm not making them up. My brain is. But my brain is also making me up, just like how your brain is making you up. Everybody you have ever met has been the product of just over a kilo of electrified meat encased in a skull firing off electrochemical signals that instantiate coherent thoughts. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that has only been observed in incredibly complex neurological organs. Why is it so hard to imagine that architecture holding up more than of those consciousnesses?
And technically consciousness has never been observed. Because we cannot see directly into the subjective mental experience of someone else. Which means you already take it for granted that someone has a mind and thinks when they say 'hello'.
You're faking this! DID is incredibly rare and debilitating. How dare you make fun of them!!
So much to unpack, why did I imagine such a loaded question? Also not a question. But, DID is also far more common than you might think. 1.5% last we checked (and I don't think that statistic included OSDD). Red hair is 2% if I recall correctly. When numbers are in the billions, rare things are incredibly common.
We also don't have DID. Me and Moxie have gone many rounds about what disorder(s) we actually have (and we'll probably share those rounds in this journal!). Usually only one of us suffers distress over our dissociative symptoms. So we seem to pass around our OSDD-1. If it turns out we don't understand the DSM-V and we do not in fact qualify for OSDD-1, well that's fine, we aren't planning on getting diagnosed anyways. Maybe we just have DPDRD. We don't need medical experts to validate (or worse, invalidate) our lived experience.
We also don't think that plurality begins or ends with DID/OSDD. There are cultural exemptions, sub-clinical levels of distress, and varieties of human experience that would qualify as plurality outside of medical models. We're not denying science or anything like that, we're just saying that science has had a sampling bias for multiples with a certain shared experience.
Finally, we're not making fun of anything! If you come here, read our experiences of life, and come away feeling like it's an insult, that says more about you than it does about us.
DID/OSDD is the only form of plurality!
(Moxie: Wow Faye, you suck at putting these in the form of questions) If a person reports a subjective first person experience, you cannot disprove that. They may be incorrect about the mechanics of it all, but they cannot be mistaken about the qualia or "what it's likeness" of the experience. If you heard a voice in your head, no one could tell you that you did not experience hearing a voice in your head, regardless of the explanations they might have for the cause. So, if someone reports that they have a first person subjective experience of having more than one individual, person, or self in the body, and that doesn't line up with diagnostic criteria for or structural theories of DID/OSDD, then it's simply the case that they are plural and not DID/OSDD.
By not being DID/OSDD you're invalidating people with real problems.
This is a bit of a straw-man I'm making up, but we have heard this before. We are not at all diminishing the very real struggles of people with DID/OSDD. In fact, we were very resistant to diagnosing ourselves because our problems didn't seem bad enough (hence the compromise position stated above). We also do have "real" problems. Plurality just isn't the source of them. It's what we've used to overcome them.
Did you form from trauma / what made your system?
As a note, never ask someone this. For one, it's really easy for a neurodivergent and/or traumatized person to hear that question and feel compelled to tell you what traumatized them. We've almost fallen for that a few times ourselves. Second, victims of trauma are at higher risk for future abuse. Abusive people can and will use a person's trauma to hurt them. It's safer to let someone open up instead of disrespecting boundaries and prodding for information you don't really even need.
But to answer your question, we are an adaptive system. We think that our system was formed to overcome adverse life circumstances.
Wait, so you really hear voices in your head and ascribe them to other, independent, persistent, people?
Finally you're getting it! But actually no, we don't "hear" voices or "see" pictures. We have aphantasia. I have thoughts that I author, the others have thoughts that they author. The "raw feel" of thinking a thought is different from that of having a thought thought at you. Which is probably the reason we took so long to realize we were not the same person.
