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 :)