I sleep here now

We thought it'd be nice to sort through our plurality-related bookmarks and make a post out of them. For better overview, but also to both reflect about our current perspective of plural communities and disclose it to others, so that it's easier to know which parts we're totally missing out on, where our misunderstandings are coming from, and what other kind of bullshit might have creeped into how we think and talk about this topic.

We discovered our plurality in March 2021, and since then we've (mentally or uh… not physically, but, like, in-our-browser-ly) bookmarked these things:

General Explanations

• Meg-John Barker's writings on plurality were the first ones we vibed with. We read their Plural Selves zine long before we understood that they were plural, let alone that we were plural, and basically thought "oh, I thought this would teach me about this serious and very-far-from-me topic, but now it's just about making playlists for different parts of your singular you? eh, still nice".
  Which sums up both what we like and what we dislike about their approaches: We love that they don't see plurality as fundamentally different from other kinds of existence, that they see it as a very multi-faceted thing that involves not one, but many spectra of "how do people exist" and a good bit of "how do folks see themselves anyway". This comes through very well in their Plural Selves FAQ, our main link for folks to understand what we mean by saying we're plural because of how hecking nuanced and queer it is. We also love how they take concepts from singlet-focused flavors of psychotherapy and make them work for their plural existence. We also enjoy the way they focus on trauma (they do focus on trauma a lot, so, maybe not that relevant for non-traumatised systems). It's both really good in general, with, like, talking about the everyday trauma of social norms, and far more relatable/useful for us than most other ways we've seen trauma discussed in plural communities because of, again, nuance and a wide variety of concepts from different theories. We learned a lot about ourselves by reading things like Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps The Score" and similar stuff floating around in spaces focused on complex trauma, and the "terrible things happen, if they're really terrible they might even make you plural" approach felt like a major downgrade. Meg-John Barker's texts helped us connect what we already knew to our new understanding of ourself.
  What we don't like as much is that sometimes, these re-thinkings of theories still end up very far from our reality and still require quite an effort to apply to our own system. We were, for a moment, tempted to call that "still a bit singlet-focused", but now that I think about it, I doubt that that's a useful way to look at this. There are so many different ways to be plural, and of course, not everything one system writes will make sense to another. One thing that feels like it might be different is that we don't see ourselves as parts of a whole, more like, as folks who are part of an uncountable number of something that's not a person when seen as a whole, maybe.
• The first thing that we read that made us chill a bit was Am I multiple? – What to do when you think you might be part of a multiple/plural system by Meeresbande. It explains how being plural is not the end of the world, and how realising that you're plural might even make things less of a disaster than they were before. It's really good.
• We also like this FAQ by the Owls. I like the way they explain some things that might come up in interacting with plural folks.

Specific Topics

• How rare is plurality? This talk starts from low % estimates of some types of plurality and shows how even those constitute numbers that, uh, are actually not that small. Starts at minute 9:35 and ends at 51:30.
• We found this guide to self-hypnosis very useful as well as this teardown of the theory of structural dissociation, but have since learned this about the authors' manipulative behavior.
• This on the history of the term "median"
• We occasionally read into the United Front Boot Camp at kinhost, and we don't super vibe with it because some of it is rather far from how we see the world, how we want to live together with others and each other, or hard to imagine for us due to us not being great at visualising things. But we respect it as a loose guide.
• Who am I right now? at kinhost helped us make sense of this whole feeling-like-nobody-at-all thing. We never paid much attention to it while we considered ourself singlet, but since we don't anymore, it's been a bit weird to feel like this.
• How to Survive in a Strange World After Sliding into an Alternate Timeline (pdf on Google Drive) on how to navigate a life that doesn't feel like yours and that you know little about
• So you wanna switch? on how to switch on purpose
• Staying Present (Google Doc) on how to maintain a link to sysmates when you're present

Community

• plural.cafe is a Mastodon server with a focus on plurality, and our main connection to plural communities. We like that the space is pretty inclusive to a wide variety of systems/collectives/gangs/…, that radical mad pride approaches can be found there, that the atmosphere feels very chill and welcoming to us.
Here's more info and the server's rules, and here's two guides to Mastodon, An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by joyeusenoelle and A futuristic Mastodon introduction for 2021 by elilla & friends.

• r/plural is our other source of community connections – it's not always one that we're happy about, but we have learned interesting things from there, too.

Media

• I am Dog(s) by softannalee is a very sweet twine game about sel…ves discovery that almost made us cry a few times.

Things

• PluralNotes is a command line notebook thing for Linux and Windows.

Lists

• Healthy Multiplicity with links on a bunch of topics
• Plural Resources by the Owls
• Book list at Astrea's Web
• Book list at The Dissociative Initiative
• Plural Hub, a Discord server that lists plural resources

Let's see if we update this now and then :)

I have a habit of starting to study random languages now and then, and dropping them very, very soon. That means I have an above-average knowledge of beginner's text books (the first three-or-so chapters), online courses (just after the intro level) and audio courses (up to right after asking the colleague out to dinner),

Occasionally I feel the need to go on about the terrible, terrible topics that some courses pick, especially for the first three-or-so chapters. Things like

• All the social platitudes that you are never going to need, collected here, in chapter one! You won't understand half of them, just remember them.
• "Which country are you from? I am from this country! It is a good country! People-from-this-country are very happy!" (If the folks who are stereotypically thought to speak the language you are studying are considered reasonably exoticisable, that will definitely be in the infoboxes and quizzes here.)
• Learning Gender By Introducing Large Amounts Of Family Relation Terms
• Learning Gender By Telling People Whether They Are Men Or Women (hard glance at multiple Duolingo courses here)
• Business dinner
• Business dinner where the business traveler man invites the local coworker woman
• Numbers over 10 or maybe 20. I'm sorry, people who like numbers. I don't, and I find the way they are typically introduced early, en masse and without mercy very frustrating.

Today is, obviously, one of those days, but I also remembered a few things that I enjoyed, which is always good!

So, here is a list of Good Things In Language Courses.

• That Norwegian textbook that talks about bløtkake med øl in the first chapter is definitely top of the list. Cake is great, these cream cakes look like very good even though I have never eaten any, and bonus, while I don't like beer very much, the German-related associations that these words have for me make them very memorable (it's basically "bullshit with oil" in my mind).
• Everything that is a wholesome sentence about animals. The wolves are drinking milk, I have to ask my turtle, the cat is sleeping on the windowsill. That's just solid content that makes me smile and remember things because I can relate to them, and one of the few things that I appreciate about all of the Duolingo courses that I remember right now.
• Everything that is obnoxious and kind of sweet at the same time (that one teacher made us sing this ridiculously cliché love song that was probably all over the radio when she was a teen or smth and I can still almost remember some of the lyrics 7 years later).

It is a short list, but I mean it.

I saw the prettiest water things, and went a lot of kilometers by bike, and went swimming twice, and it was good.

Imagine two cuties cycling down a long straight road, listening to music, including Powderpaint, from one of those round speaker things, hooked to a bike bag. It was fun, it felt like existing and like I should definitely do that more often.

And then!! We found a very pretty water, skinny dipped, let the warm air dry us and chillaxed a bit. ( Click here for some creepy male gaze though )

After that, we met friends at a different lake, and that one was full of people and a bit less pretty, but is a popular nudist spot so the atmosphere was much nicer. Mostly no staring, just one person going "did you see??" to their friend after I passed them on my way to the pee spot. Not sure if they were just referring to my top surgery scars or noticing more wholistically how hella trans I am, either way, I gave them a mean laugh just to let them know I'd heard.

Aaand I spent some time alone in the water with a kid friend / friends' kid, and I rly like that I am getting more relaxed around them. We splashed some water at each other and then they wanted me to tow them back to land as a compromise because they wanted to stay in and I didn't. Their floater made that very easy, luckily, and all of it was a lot of fun.

Then, on my way back, I totally managed to get my bike up the train's steps, and down too, and I am so proud. Not just for that, but also for having a genuinely nice day??

Also, lots of dragonflies.

So it seems like not only do I enjoy cycling, no, I also enjoy cycling in light rain. I am a bit ashamed, shouldn't I be someone who does not enjoy any kind of outdoorsy thing? (I am also glad. Cycling makes me feel much less concerned about my looks, for example – I pick whichever clothes are coziest. And only not being able to pedal properly brought to my attention that some of my shorts are not actually comfortable at all. I am throwing them out of my wardrobe, and hoping to replace them with some more soft, cozy clothes that I could almost as well sleep in.)

Also, I read a (two-volume) zine that I picked up recently, it's called hangry and it's about body norms and body images. I enjoyed the mix! A lot of lovely contributions of different kinds, in a few languages (German and English and French I remember, there might have been some more).

I keep messing up with people who are important to me. And I'm sad. At least I feel things now? Some things at least. But maybe I always feel things and am simply afraid of admitting them to myself because that would mean admitting how much is going wrong in my relations to other people.

There is only one month of summer break left and I don't know how to get through this last year. It's going to be terrible, probably. I'm worried already. At least there will be distance learning days, which I much prefer to having to go there. I hope they still won't bother with video chats, that would be even worse than having to go there. Urgh.

Everyone around me is having great ideas, and I have nothing to contribute.

I'm trying to figure out what to do to make things less shit, but it's overwhelming and, uh, making me sad.

Hello. I'm pretty sure that microblogging doesn't work well for me right now, so I want to try out a slower, cozier medium and am finally making some use of this account. I'm not sure where this will be going…

Today:
– I did some tidying
– I put some new tires on a friend's bike
– I helped make our cat poop

I think I'd like to do some cozying, possibly some nice calm video games, and maybe take a shower.