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Essay: The Importance of Being Real
The Importance of Being Real
Series: Essay
Summary: “In a search for what was real, I was viewing the masks as untrue, falsehoods layered on top of whoever I was. […] If you release the idea of an essential self, throw it naked into the surf and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes.” --Akwaeke Emezi, “The Mask As The Truest Thing”
Word Count: 3000
Notes: Winner of the Patreon poll this month!
Many plurals obsess over realness. Agonizing over how “real” we are seems to be a common, maybe even necessary part of becoming selves-aware—our old conception of reality and self gets destroyed, so we must build new ones, a terrifying undertaking. Some people come out of the experience with new confidence; others never stop second-guessing themselves. Still others project that insecurity outward; many a plural harassment campaign has been staked on fakery, and while plenty are cynical excuses to badger a target, they wouldn’t build momentum if not for people’s preexisting fears, that lingering specter of the “fake multi.”
But why are we so concerned about fakery? Why does it matter? Let’s talk about it.
Defining Reality
Growing up in my family, reality got rewritten all the time. Things that happened didn’t, things that never happened did, like a horror movie where everything changes off-camera. I wasn’t taught a good definition of reality, and eventually I had to ask myself: what is “real”?
This isn’t just a philosophical concern. My survival and freedom depend not just on my ability to recognize reality, but convincing others of said ability. But what kind of reality is one defined by “whatever keeps me off the street and out of the hospital”? Is that really the highest guiding principal I want for my life? That standard is best achieved by ceasing to exist—hardly life-improving. Endlessly agonizing about the reality of things isn’t much better.
I needed a new definition of reality, one that served my best interests and helped the people around me. For now, I’ve settled on, “reality is whatever requires my attention or response, especially if it repeats.”
By this (admittedly quick’n’dirty) definition, plenty of things are real regardless of whether they are true. My memories of violence may be false, but I still have to deal with them. When I wake up in the night convinced that there is an intruder in my room, knowing I’m wrong doesn’t help; arranging my furniture so I can easily see everything from my bed does. Indiana Jones doesn’t argue ontology with the boulder; he gets out of the way.
What if you defined reality for yourself in a way that brought good things to your life and the people around you? What would that look like? How would you go about it?
“What’s real? Am I? How do I know?” are big, scary questions. Most people don’t embrace them. Instead, they turn to more ready-made answers and proofs, such as: individual differences, diagnoses, and brain studies. None of these are foolproof, though. Heck, a lot of them barely hold water.
Doctors can be wrong or unavailable—and oh, the fights I have seen about the ethics of “diagnosing” (that is, recognizing) yourself. Diagnoses do not come inscribed on stone tablets by God; they are created by fallible, frail committee, changed by flawed human beings, sculpted around insurance billing, politics, and bias. It’s a fragile hook to hang a sense of self on; I see people going to war over various sub-types of Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder, acting like it’s immutable fact and not a diagnosis created in 2013! Looking to a doctor to say, “yes, you exist,” might put off the philosophical crisis, but eventually, the brain-hounds will come a-baying.
Brain studies have similar problems. They’re expensive, finicky, and require interpretation (see polyfrazzlemented, 2020). And even if they weren’t… what kind of plurality could they track? Our kind? What about huge groups that move in swarms, rather than individual fronters? People who switch very slowly, rarely, or not at all? People who are more “I” than “we”? Can we really expect all these different folks to have a single universal “plural” brain pattern that can be readily differentiated from that of singlets? How do we prove that those singlets are really singlet and not faking or wrong? Besides, even if I somehow got into a brain scan that magically proved me singlet beyond all shadow of a doubt, I wouldn’t disappear. That magic trick has never worked for me. I may be a delusion, but I’m a persistent one.
As for individual differences, all can all be purposely chosen. My headmate Gigi wanted her own handwriting, so she practiced it, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. People can cultivate their differences if they want, but they shouldn’t have to. Plenty of plurals don’t have those obvious differences. Are we supposed to pretend they have nothing to offer? Should realness depend on forever mugging for the camera? What kind of life is that, forever performing for an invisible audience?
When we hang dignity and respect on these things, we betray everyone unwilling or unable to obtain or perform them. But what if we didn’t hold common decency hostage? What would plurality look like then?
What would other folks think?
Respectability Politics
Respectability politics is a fancy way of saying, “at least I’m not like that,” usually by people who are. Hell hath no fury like self-hate projected outward.
Think of a plural who makes you squirm, makes you cringe, maybe makes you angry. Maybe it’s Sybil. Maybe it’s the FF7 House. If you’re unusually transparent, maybe it’s yourself, five years ago.
Now, how many traits of yours does the shameful plural have? How defensive or upset do you get, thinking about it? How eager are you to rattle off all the ways you’re not like that, or conversely, how easy is it to slide into the whirlpool of self-loathing? Why is the idea of being lumped in with them so upsetting?
What are you afraid will happen?
Maybe you’re afraid people will sneer at you, harass you, throw you out of your home and job, take everything and everyone from you. But even if they do, they’re doing it because they can. Because they chose to. They’re the one demanding you dance for them; they’re the one holding the gun. If you manage to pull a Brer Rabbit, congratulations, but don’t pretend you’re the one wielding the power in this interaction.
When we pretend we do have that power, it’s easier to point the finger at vulnerable or unpleasant people in our own camp than admit who’s really in control. We can pretend that the problem is smaller and more manageable than it is. But as long as we blame each other, we’re doing the assholes’ work for them and keeping them in charge.
Sometimes, no amount of fancy footwork is enough. Some people can never be convinced to be decent to you. We’ve all met that insufferable fucktruck who insists on having a “rational” argument with you about your right to be treated like a human being, only to keep changing the rules and moving the goalposts around. I’ve sometimes had those fucktrucks come up to me, much later down the line, and say they changed their mind, but if they did, it wasn’t because of the argument they had with me. I didn’t make them change their mind; they changed it themselves. They had to do that work. I couldn’t do it for them.
Sometimes we have to argue with the fucktruck, sometimes we have to dance for them… but that doesn’t mean they’re right. If they’re not there pointing a gun at us, why let them dictate the terms of the argument? Why should we regurgitate those behaviors ourselves and do their dirty work for them?
Reasons I Must Not Be Multi, According to Random Fucktrucks
• Multiples don’t exist, ergo I don’t either.
• Multiplicity is so astronomically rare, it’s absurd to think we have it.
• I’m using “I,” not “we.”
• We’re too similar to each other.
• We’re too different and thus mugging for the camera.
• We’re not traumatized.
• We are traumatized, but not traumatized enough or in the right way.
• Our trauma is too over-the-top horrible to be real.
• The people in our head aren’t the right kind of people.
• Our existence hurts abuse victims.
Think of the Abuse Victims!
Possibly the biggest douche-argument I’ve seen for badgering plurals is that it somehow helps abuse victims. These tin-plated zealots never once seem to wonder exactly what help they’re providing me, nor do they ask me if I want it. (No, I don’t. Never harass someone in my name. Hell’s wrong with you?)
I’ve met some impressively horrendous plurals, but harassing them is A: mean, B: dangerous, and C: it doesn’t work. Making a jerk feel bad isn’t the same as stopping them. Trust me, the inner intrigues and espionage of the Gallifreyan Tradition Society shamed monarchies, and as far as I know, Panopticon is still trying to crown themselves president godling of their own personal universe, just elsewhere. Conversely, my plurality has gotten me on Encyclopedia Dramatica, Kiwifarms, and Shit Tumblr Says, and they haven’t gotten rid of me either.
But we still act like harassment works, like it’s some noble fight against injustice, which is bunk. Terrorizing Tulpa Teen on Twitter does nothing for abuse victims except reinforce that there are acceptable victims—which every abuse victim already knows, having been one. If you want to help us, make yourself useful; go volunteer at a DV shelter, donate money, listen to a survivor friend vent or something. Build us up, instead of tearing random people down. If someone is truly reprehensible and has to go, don’t harass them. Build a properly-sourced, fact-checkable account of their actions which can be easily found by any future victims, and do all of this while acting ethically and limiting the splash damage on previous victims. That should keep you busy for a while. The results are usually lackluster, so even that is a last resort. Sometimes a tear-down has to happen, but never mistake it for a build-up.
If someone is truly so dangerous that people require a public warning, pulling a Cultiples will put you at risk. Are you prepared to get outed, doxxed, and hounded at work, school, and home? Are you prepared to have your friends and colleagues attacked or turned against you? What about years of physical violence or spurious lawsuits?
If you aren’t afraid, than either you’re stupid or that person isn’t really a threat. That doesn’t make you a noble crusader. It makes you a schoolyard bully with a tinfoil sword.
Attacking Fakers Serves the Jerks
The vast majority of rotten plurals I’ve met probably weren’t faking. They were just unconscionable pricks. The one exception was a master at using accusations of faking to his benefit.
I’m talking about Andy Blake. I won’t go into his whole shtick (you can learn it from Unknown, n.d.) but none of it is new: cosmic headspace battles, fiction/reality blurring, that kind of thing. Plenty of plurals pull that nonsense, so what does Blake matter?
Well, Blake had no shame, so he could (and did) use anything for spin. Gender, sexuality, nationality, mental illness, even physical injuries were just fuel for the fire. People would get so bogged down in arguing over whether he was faking, and then whether asking the question was ableist/transphobic/otherwise harmful to others, that his heinous actions would be lost in the scuffle. If Blake played his cards right, he could post a dramatic revelation to create the conversation, position himself as the victim of said conversation, and then use that as a hook to lure in more people.
After a while, I noticed that Blake would redirect just about any questions about his actions (provable and documented) to his feelings and identity. We can prove a tree fell in the forest, but we can’t say for sure how it felt about it, and feelings and identity can endlessly change and be reinterpreted, providing eternal navel-gazing… and distraction.
At best, pondering Andy Blake as Andy Fake did nothing. At worst, it helped him continue hurting people. At no point did he ever go, “oh no, you caught me!” and disappear; he’d always come back with a new con. That’s what career predators do. They rarely have any better marketable skills, and you can’t shame the shameless.
So harassing others for being “fake” is mean-spirited, dangerous, and counterproductive. Why do we pretend otherwise? Because it’s not really about the fakers. It’s about ourselves.
The Fake Multi Is Me All Along
We’ve known folks who’ve been multi around us for over a decade and still get unshakable fears that they’ve been unknowingly, unwittingly faking that whole time. No amount of reasoning or reassurance can put the fears to rest. Why? Because fears of faking are often a substitute for something else. Scratch your shoulder all day; the itch on your knee will remain.
At the time of our becoming selves-aware, Gigi and Rogan had taken the most damage of our group. They had the most to lose by accepting our plurality, and thus were the slowest to come around. As long as they weren’t real, neither was the pain they’d inflicted on others or experienced themselves. If they accepted that they existed, that meant they also had to accept the moral weight of their actions and also that something terrible had happened to them. That’s a reality-breaker! Better to dismiss it all as nonsense: if no multi means no trauma, then no trauma means no multi, yes? (No, but oh, the comfort of such a simple black and white view!)
We’re not afraid of faking; we’re afraid of losing our grip on reality and plummeting into psychological free-fall. We’re afraid that people might hurt us. We’re afraid that we did bad things, or that people did bad things to us, and accepting that we’re multiple means having to accept that too. And yes, sometimes we are indeed afraid that we are somehow harming abuse victims, just by existing.
“Am I faking?” isn’t pleasant, but at least it doesn’t shake the foundations of my life philosophy. It can be a comforting, if unpleasant distraction, like sucking my thumb raw. If I’m faking, then all I have to do is stop. Easy fix. But how do I fix the knowledge that I hurt my headmates, believing none of us were real? How do I fix the realization that I couldn’t live the singlet life I built for myself? Slowly. Painfully. Maybe not at all.
Easier to shove in the “am I faking?” pacifier and worry on it instead. An easy, simple, black-and-white solution (“just stop faking!”) for a hard, complex, chromatic world.
Opening the Madhouse Gates
When we attack plurals for being fake, be it others or ourselves, we take huge problems (shame, fear, oppression) and make them small and manageable: if we just burned all the witches, everything would be fine. But it doesn’t work, because fake plurals aren’t really the problem. A society that treats us like witches is. That society may be facelessly huge, but while we can’t control it, we can still change it. We must, if we want to get anywhere.
Once upon a time, I was a child who believed that if I just said and did the right things, learned the dance, my family would stop hurting me. But I couldn’t and they didn’t, because it wasn’t about me. They were choosing to hurt me, and the only way to make the violence stop was to leave. I had to grow up and work to build a better world, not appease a worse one. I had to find my own definition of “real,” not use theirs.
The category of fake plurals only exists because assholes convinced us that we must jealously guard the madhouse doors lest it be stolen out from under us. As though anyone would want it! Singlets don’t do that nonsense; when’s the last time you heard anyone worry about fake singlets? (Even though passing as singlet confers way more benefits. Damn near every plural does it if they can.)
What are we even guarding? Respectability? Identity? Our own frailties?
What would happen if we left the gates open? What if we let people come and go? What would plurality look like? What would we be like, if the fear of faking didn’t control us?
People sometimes think they’re plural, then change their minds. Sometimes they are plural, then aren’t. Sometimes people knowingly pretend to be plural for any number of reasons, which may have nothing to do with malice.
What if it didn’t matter? What would we lose?
Is our madhouse really that besieged? Do malicious singlets really want it that badly? What would they even do with it if they got it? For all the handwringing about fakers I’ve seen, I’ve yet to see anyone explain the endgame, except for some vague, “they’ll prey on us,” as though that isn’t already happening. As though that game isn’t rigged to begin with.
Even Andy Blake didn’t want our madhouse. In his induction packet to his followers, he went to some contortions to explain how he couldn’t be like other forms of plurals—he didn’t have “insanity”, “DID/schitzo [sic]”, or “paranormal possession”, for silly reasons like his “others have full range of emotions […] life experiences and knowledge,” (Willson, 2011, image 2). He wasn’t like us but a superior form of being, unrelated to any who’d come before. Having other plurals around might make him look drab, so as far as I know, he never attempted to join a plural group (though he did try to persuade at least one follower she had multiple personalities, was demon-possessed, and needed therapy and exorcism from his “others”; see Willson, paragraph 5-6).
So who are we defending against?
References
Emezi, Akwaeke. (2018). “The Mask As The Truest Thing.” Dazed Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/39610/1/harley-weir-akwaeke-emezi-lagos-nigeria
Polyfrazzlemented. (2020). Neurononsense [Dreamwidth Post]. Retrieved from https://polyfrazzlemented.dreamwidth.org/23915.html
Unknown. (n.d.) Andrew Blake, in Summary [Google document]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cOKawfFc6ozgxkg3PL8Avq3dV-p-xJ5_afRbD410wqE/edit
Willson, Abbey. (2011). A Letter To The DAYDians: My Life With Andrew Blake Laid Bare [Wordpress post]. Retrieved from https://kqcrazytrain.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/a-letter-to-the-daydians-my-life-with-andrew-blake-laid-bare/#more-1454
Series: Essay
Summary: “In a search for what was real, I was viewing the masks as untrue, falsehoods layered on top of whoever I was. […] If you release the idea of an essential self, throw it naked into the surf and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes.” --Akwaeke Emezi, “The Mask As The Truest Thing”
Word Count: 3000
Notes: Winner of the Patreon poll this month!
Many plurals obsess over realness. Agonizing over how “real” we are seems to be a common, maybe even necessary part of becoming selves-aware—our old conception of reality and self gets destroyed, so we must build new ones, a terrifying undertaking. Some people come out of the experience with new confidence; others never stop second-guessing themselves. Still others project that insecurity outward; many a plural harassment campaign has been staked on fakery, and while plenty are cynical excuses to badger a target, they wouldn’t build momentum if not for people’s preexisting fears, that lingering specter of the “fake multi.”
But why are we so concerned about fakery? Why does it matter? Let’s talk about it.
Defining Reality
Growing up in my family, reality got rewritten all the time. Things that happened didn’t, things that never happened did, like a horror movie where everything changes off-camera. I wasn’t taught a good definition of reality, and eventually I had to ask myself: what is “real”?
This isn’t just a philosophical concern. My survival and freedom depend not just on my ability to recognize reality, but convincing others of said ability. But what kind of reality is one defined by “whatever keeps me off the street and out of the hospital”? Is that really the highest guiding principal I want for my life? That standard is best achieved by ceasing to exist—hardly life-improving. Endlessly agonizing about the reality of things isn’t much better.
I needed a new definition of reality, one that served my best interests and helped the people around me. For now, I’ve settled on, “reality is whatever requires my attention or response, especially if it repeats.”
By this (admittedly quick’n’dirty) definition, plenty of things are real regardless of whether they are true. My memories of violence may be false, but I still have to deal with them. When I wake up in the night convinced that there is an intruder in my room, knowing I’m wrong doesn’t help; arranging my furniture so I can easily see everything from my bed does. Indiana Jones doesn’t argue ontology with the boulder; he gets out of the way.
What if you defined reality for yourself in a way that brought good things to your life and the people around you? What would that look like? How would you go about it?
“What’s real? Am I? How do I know?” are big, scary questions. Most people don’t embrace them. Instead, they turn to more ready-made answers and proofs, such as: individual differences, diagnoses, and brain studies. None of these are foolproof, though. Heck, a lot of them barely hold water.
Doctors can be wrong or unavailable—and oh, the fights I have seen about the ethics of “diagnosing” (that is, recognizing) yourself. Diagnoses do not come inscribed on stone tablets by God; they are created by fallible, frail committee, changed by flawed human beings, sculpted around insurance billing, politics, and bias. It’s a fragile hook to hang a sense of self on; I see people going to war over various sub-types of Otherwise Specified Dissociative Disorder, acting like it’s immutable fact and not a diagnosis created in 2013! Looking to a doctor to say, “yes, you exist,” might put off the philosophical crisis, but eventually, the brain-hounds will come a-baying.
Brain studies have similar problems. They’re expensive, finicky, and require interpretation (see polyfrazzlemented, 2020). And even if they weren’t… what kind of plurality could they track? Our kind? What about huge groups that move in swarms, rather than individual fronters? People who switch very slowly, rarely, or not at all? People who are more “I” than “we”? Can we really expect all these different folks to have a single universal “plural” brain pattern that can be readily differentiated from that of singlets? How do we prove that those singlets are really singlet and not faking or wrong? Besides, even if I somehow got into a brain scan that magically proved me singlet beyond all shadow of a doubt, I wouldn’t disappear. That magic trick has never worked for me. I may be a delusion, but I’m a persistent one.
As for individual differences, all can all be purposely chosen. My headmate Gigi wanted her own handwriting, so she practiced it, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. People can cultivate their differences if they want, but they shouldn’t have to. Plenty of plurals don’t have those obvious differences. Are we supposed to pretend they have nothing to offer? Should realness depend on forever mugging for the camera? What kind of life is that, forever performing for an invisible audience?
When we hang dignity and respect on these things, we betray everyone unwilling or unable to obtain or perform them. But what if we didn’t hold common decency hostage? What would plurality look like then?
What would other folks think?
Respectability Politics
Respectability politics is a fancy way of saying, “at least I’m not like that,” usually by people who are. Hell hath no fury like self-hate projected outward.
Think of a plural who makes you squirm, makes you cringe, maybe makes you angry. Maybe it’s Sybil. Maybe it’s the FF7 House. If you’re unusually transparent, maybe it’s yourself, five years ago.
Now, how many traits of yours does the shameful plural have? How defensive or upset do you get, thinking about it? How eager are you to rattle off all the ways you’re not like that, or conversely, how easy is it to slide into the whirlpool of self-loathing? Why is the idea of being lumped in with them so upsetting?
What are you afraid will happen?
Maybe you’re afraid people will sneer at you, harass you, throw you out of your home and job, take everything and everyone from you. But even if they do, they’re doing it because they can. Because they chose to. They’re the one demanding you dance for them; they’re the one holding the gun. If you manage to pull a Brer Rabbit, congratulations, but don’t pretend you’re the one wielding the power in this interaction.
When we pretend we do have that power, it’s easier to point the finger at vulnerable or unpleasant people in our own camp than admit who’s really in control. We can pretend that the problem is smaller and more manageable than it is. But as long as we blame each other, we’re doing the assholes’ work for them and keeping them in charge.
Sometimes, no amount of fancy footwork is enough. Some people can never be convinced to be decent to you. We’ve all met that insufferable fucktruck who insists on having a “rational” argument with you about your right to be treated like a human being, only to keep changing the rules and moving the goalposts around. I’ve sometimes had those fucktrucks come up to me, much later down the line, and say they changed their mind, but if they did, it wasn’t because of the argument they had with me. I didn’t make them change their mind; they changed it themselves. They had to do that work. I couldn’t do it for them.
Sometimes we have to argue with the fucktruck, sometimes we have to dance for them… but that doesn’t mean they’re right. If they’re not there pointing a gun at us, why let them dictate the terms of the argument? Why should we regurgitate those behaviors ourselves and do their dirty work for them?
Reasons I Must Not Be Multi, According to Random Fucktrucks
• Multiples don’t exist, ergo I don’t either.
• Multiplicity is so astronomically rare, it’s absurd to think we have it.
• I’m using “I,” not “we.”
• We’re too similar to each other.
• We’re too different and thus mugging for the camera.
• We’re not traumatized.
• We are traumatized, but not traumatized enough or in the right way.
• Our trauma is too over-the-top horrible to be real.
• The people in our head aren’t the right kind of people.
• Our existence hurts abuse victims.
Think of the Abuse Victims!
Possibly the biggest douche-argument I’ve seen for badgering plurals is that it somehow helps abuse victims. These tin-plated zealots never once seem to wonder exactly what help they’re providing me, nor do they ask me if I want it. (No, I don’t. Never harass someone in my name. Hell’s wrong with you?)
I’ve met some impressively horrendous plurals, but harassing them is A: mean, B: dangerous, and C: it doesn’t work. Making a jerk feel bad isn’t the same as stopping them. Trust me, the inner intrigues and espionage of the Gallifreyan Tradition Society shamed monarchies, and as far as I know, Panopticon is still trying to crown themselves president godling of their own personal universe, just elsewhere. Conversely, my plurality has gotten me on Encyclopedia Dramatica, Kiwifarms, and Shit Tumblr Says, and they haven’t gotten rid of me either.
But we still act like harassment works, like it’s some noble fight against injustice, which is bunk. Terrorizing Tulpa Teen on Twitter does nothing for abuse victims except reinforce that there are acceptable victims—which every abuse victim already knows, having been one. If you want to help us, make yourself useful; go volunteer at a DV shelter, donate money, listen to a survivor friend vent or something. Build us up, instead of tearing random people down. If someone is truly reprehensible and has to go, don’t harass them. Build a properly-sourced, fact-checkable account of their actions which can be easily found by any future victims, and do all of this while acting ethically and limiting the splash damage on previous victims. That should keep you busy for a while. The results are usually lackluster, so even that is a last resort. Sometimes a tear-down has to happen, but never mistake it for a build-up.
If someone is truly so dangerous that people require a public warning, pulling a Cultiples will put you at risk. Are you prepared to get outed, doxxed, and hounded at work, school, and home? Are you prepared to have your friends and colleagues attacked or turned against you? What about years of physical violence or spurious lawsuits?
If you aren’t afraid, than either you’re stupid or that person isn’t really a threat. That doesn’t make you a noble crusader. It makes you a schoolyard bully with a tinfoil sword.
Attacking Fakers Serves the Jerks
The vast majority of rotten plurals I’ve met probably weren’t faking. They were just unconscionable pricks. The one exception was a master at using accusations of faking to his benefit.
I’m talking about Andy Blake. I won’t go into his whole shtick (you can learn it from Unknown, n.d.) but none of it is new: cosmic headspace battles, fiction/reality blurring, that kind of thing. Plenty of plurals pull that nonsense, so what does Blake matter?
Well, Blake had no shame, so he could (and did) use anything for spin. Gender, sexuality, nationality, mental illness, even physical injuries were just fuel for the fire. People would get so bogged down in arguing over whether he was faking, and then whether asking the question was ableist/transphobic/otherwise harmful to others, that his heinous actions would be lost in the scuffle. If Blake played his cards right, he could post a dramatic revelation to create the conversation, position himself as the victim of said conversation, and then use that as a hook to lure in more people.
After a while, I noticed that Blake would redirect just about any questions about his actions (provable and documented) to his feelings and identity. We can prove a tree fell in the forest, but we can’t say for sure how it felt about it, and feelings and identity can endlessly change and be reinterpreted, providing eternal navel-gazing… and distraction.
At best, pondering Andy Blake as Andy Fake did nothing. At worst, it helped him continue hurting people. At no point did he ever go, “oh no, you caught me!” and disappear; he’d always come back with a new con. That’s what career predators do. They rarely have any better marketable skills, and you can’t shame the shameless.
So harassing others for being “fake” is mean-spirited, dangerous, and counterproductive. Why do we pretend otherwise? Because it’s not really about the fakers. It’s about ourselves.
The Fake Multi Is Me All Along
We’ve known folks who’ve been multi around us for over a decade and still get unshakable fears that they’ve been unknowingly, unwittingly faking that whole time. No amount of reasoning or reassurance can put the fears to rest. Why? Because fears of faking are often a substitute for something else. Scratch your shoulder all day; the itch on your knee will remain.
At the time of our becoming selves-aware, Gigi and Rogan had taken the most damage of our group. They had the most to lose by accepting our plurality, and thus were the slowest to come around. As long as they weren’t real, neither was the pain they’d inflicted on others or experienced themselves. If they accepted that they existed, that meant they also had to accept the moral weight of their actions and also that something terrible had happened to them. That’s a reality-breaker! Better to dismiss it all as nonsense: if no multi means no trauma, then no trauma means no multi, yes? (No, but oh, the comfort of such a simple black and white view!)
We’re not afraid of faking; we’re afraid of losing our grip on reality and plummeting into psychological free-fall. We’re afraid that people might hurt us. We’re afraid that we did bad things, or that people did bad things to us, and accepting that we’re multiple means having to accept that too. And yes, sometimes we are indeed afraid that we are somehow harming abuse victims, just by existing.
“Am I faking?” isn’t pleasant, but at least it doesn’t shake the foundations of my life philosophy. It can be a comforting, if unpleasant distraction, like sucking my thumb raw. If I’m faking, then all I have to do is stop. Easy fix. But how do I fix the knowledge that I hurt my headmates, believing none of us were real? How do I fix the realization that I couldn’t live the singlet life I built for myself? Slowly. Painfully. Maybe not at all.
Easier to shove in the “am I faking?” pacifier and worry on it instead. An easy, simple, black-and-white solution (“just stop faking!”) for a hard, complex, chromatic world.
Opening the Madhouse Gates
When we attack plurals for being fake, be it others or ourselves, we take huge problems (shame, fear, oppression) and make them small and manageable: if we just burned all the witches, everything would be fine. But it doesn’t work, because fake plurals aren’t really the problem. A society that treats us like witches is. That society may be facelessly huge, but while we can’t control it, we can still change it. We must, if we want to get anywhere.
Once upon a time, I was a child who believed that if I just said and did the right things, learned the dance, my family would stop hurting me. But I couldn’t and they didn’t, because it wasn’t about me. They were choosing to hurt me, and the only way to make the violence stop was to leave. I had to grow up and work to build a better world, not appease a worse one. I had to find my own definition of “real,” not use theirs.
The category of fake plurals only exists because assholes convinced us that we must jealously guard the madhouse doors lest it be stolen out from under us. As though anyone would want it! Singlets don’t do that nonsense; when’s the last time you heard anyone worry about fake singlets? (Even though passing as singlet confers way more benefits. Damn near every plural does it if they can.)
What are we even guarding? Respectability? Identity? Our own frailties?
What would happen if we left the gates open? What if we let people come and go? What would plurality look like? What would we be like, if the fear of faking didn’t control us?
People sometimes think they’re plural, then change their minds. Sometimes they are plural, then aren’t. Sometimes people knowingly pretend to be plural for any number of reasons, which may have nothing to do with malice.
What if it didn’t matter? What would we lose?
Is our madhouse really that besieged? Do malicious singlets really want it that badly? What would they even do with it if they got it? For all the handwringing about fakers I’ve seen, I’ve yet to see anyone explain the endgame, except for some vague, “they’ll prey on us,” as though that isn’t already happening. As though that game isn’t rigged to begin with.
Even Andy Blake didn’t want our madhouse. In his induction packet to his followers, he went to some contortions to explain how he couldn’t be like other forms of plurals—he didn’t have “insanity”, “DID/schitzo [sic]”, or “paranormal possession”, for silly reasons like his “others have full range of emotions […] life experiences and knowledge,” (Willson, 2011, image 2). He wasn’t like us but a superior form of being, unrelated to any who’d come before. Having other plurals around might make him look drab, so as far as I know, he never attempted to join a plural group (though he did try to persuade at least one follower she had multiple personalities, was demon-possessed, and needed therapy and exorcism from his “others”; see Willson, paragraph 5-6).
So who are we defending against?
References
Emezi, Akwaeke. (2018). “The Mask As The Truest Thing.” Dazed Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/39610/1/harley-weir-akwaeke-emezi-lagos-nigeria
Polyfrazzlemented. (2020). Neurononsense [Dreamwidth Post]. Retrieved from https://polyfrazzlemented.dreamwidth.org/23915.html
Unknown. (n.d.) Andrew Blake, in Summary [Google document]. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cOKawfFc6ozgxkg3PL8Avq3dV-p-xJ5_afRbD410wqE/edit
Willson, Abbey. (2011). A Letter To The DAYDians: My Life With Andrew Blake Laid Bare [Wordpress post]. Retrieved from https://kqcrazytrain.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/a-letter-to-the-daydians-my-life-with-andrew-blake-laid-bare/#more-1454
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"What is reality?" is an interesting question to think over, really. Another good one that was posed to us by a teacher is "what is trust?" which has wound up being equally worth defining along with "what is forgiveness?" posed by the same teacher. There are a surprisingly large number of ambiguous concepts like this that people insist on the importance of despite often lacking a definition of it for themselves.
"Because fears of faking are often a substitute for something else."
This really made me stop and think for a moment. Do you ever read something and then have to stop because something about it just grabs you and makes you read it again, mull it over? That sentence did that.
You're completely right in our case when I think about it. When we're hit by denial and doubt, it's often brought on by fear of judgement or pain; seeing someone hurt someone else for being plural or tell them they can't exist often leads directly to a doubt spiral in ourselves and yet somehow I never made that connection. Thinking about how people would see us if we told them or about a situation where we might be told we don't exist sets doubt off as well. We're not afraid of faking, we're afraid of being hurt for our experiences or hurting someone else, and that manifests as projecting that onto our own existence. If people would hurt us for something, we tend to think we're somehow in the wrong regardless of whether we can control the experience in question. Still working on changing that because it's caused us a lot of problems in life to believe that other people are always right.
Back when we were first discovering ourselves, the fears were mostly the same, though there were a few added on that we've since moved past (progress!). There was the fear that our experiences weren't real and that we'd lost it, that we'd somehow left the realm of reality and would wind up institutionalized for life- we're not so afraid of that now after mulling over the question of what reality and sanity are. We were also afraid of change- still struggle with that but we've made progress. Having our concept of self change was terrifying, so denial came into play to avoid that. Luckily that didn't last too long, but 1-2 years of hardcore denial is a long time to be afraid all the same.
There's a friend of ours who said something to us back when DS was questioning his gender (well before he found out we existed). He told us to "live your truth" and that's stuck with us. If your truth is that you're sharing a head, live that. Do whatever helps you and makes the most sense for your lived experiences.
"We’re not afraid of faking; we’re afraid of losing our grip on reality and plummeting into psychological free-fall. We’re afraid that people might hurt us. We’re afraid that we did bad things, or that people did bad things to us, and accepting that we’re multiple means having to accept that too. And yes, sometimes we are indeed afraid that we are somehow harming abuse victims, just by existing."
That sums it up nicely.
It makes us sad that people harass each other at all, especially for things they don't control. It doesn't help people and doesn't really make progress, and there are better ways of interacting with people that you disagree with or want to help somehow. Even then, I think people would do well to learn how to "agree to disagree" and just let people exist as they are instead of trying to force them to change their minds. If it's not directly hurting someone, there's not much sense in going after someone for it (that said, if it IS directly causing harm then that's a problem).
Somehow this all reminds me of an article we saw on Twitter that attempted to conceptualize what a "self" is. The author went the route of the self as a narrative (rather than a discrete or concrete thing) that was surprisingly open to the existence of systems:
"The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is
one's self... One can discover multiple selves in a person just as
unproblematically as one could find Early Young Rabbit and Late
Young Rabbit in the imagined Updike novels: all that has to be the
case is that the story doesn't cohere around one self, one imaginary
point, but coheres (coheres much better, in any case) around two
different imaginary points."
- 15S
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And separating truth from reality was a huge help for me just because... there are things that are REAL that nonetheless aren't true. A lie repeated enough times can become real (in that, it'll become something I have to deal with), but it will never become TRUE.
--Rogan
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That's a good distinction to make, especially for things like gaslighting.
- ?
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--Rogan
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Then again it looks like it was written in the 90's and not with fictives taken into count. After all, whether or not Sherlock Holmes has a mole on his left shoulder is completely irrelevant information for most people, but for a fictive who is Sherlock's significant other, that information may actually be very significant and from their own personal history they may actually have an answer to the question.
By the way, the colon in https:// is missing, which breaks the url
--janusz
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https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/selfctr.pdf
Here's the url but fixed
--Hikaru
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Thanks for adding a corrected url!
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Thank you.
Jillian
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I feel a lot of it also has application to other conditions, especially chronic pain/fatigue, mental health and Neurodiversity. The endless disability imposter syndrome, especially if you are self-diagnosed or struggling to find a diagnosis...
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--Rogan
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I quote the relevant part of my essay at length if you're interested:
EDIT: Maybe I should share this after I turn in my essay. Oh well
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And oh wow, suddenly I got into a time machine and warped back to the "gold star lesbian" age! Man, it's been years since I heard "transtrender"...
--Rogan
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-Janusz
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--Rogan
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--Hikaru
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And I will never fail to be kinda staggered by how seriously people take diagnosis for some conditions. It's one thing if we're talking something like, I dunno, syphilis, where there is a discrete thing that is caused by specific microbes that you can find, but psychologically? Hell, I don't even KNOW how I ended up with some of the diagnoses we got; they just accumulated like a paper tail over the years, and some of them (like anxiety) I don't see as an issue much at all!
--Rogan
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I've noticed that with a wide range of identity labels and mental health diagnoses. And I think that's why it's not just "Am I incorrect?", but specifically "Am I faking?" "
Am I incorrect?" is a more sensible question, but it's one which it's harder to make oneself miserable over. Being incorrect is not inherently blameworthy, so all it does is encourage looking at the facts. And looking at the facts can easily lead back to "It actually is this", and then having to deal with the original thing that one was trying to distract from.
Accusing oneself of faking, even when it doesn't make sense, adds this extra level of distracting shame to the whole thing. Which is why people who know they're not deliberately deceiving anyone, or pretending to experience anything they don't actually experience, will latch on to the word.
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--Rogan
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And questioning their reality and their memories would just hurt them and do no one any good. It would be like treating corporeal people like crap because they can't PROVE that this isn't all the Matrix!! It's like, get out of here with that solipsistic crap, y'know?
~Elle
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I know, right? It's so insufferable! Who wants to walk around having ontological arguments with any smug dickweed who asks? This isn't the debate club! Leave us alone!
--Rogan
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When we first realised we were plural around fourteen years ago, one of our greatest fears was our being fake. We used to have strong physicalist beliefs - we were sceptical of anything that even smacked of spirituality or religion because of our upbringing - and we worried that we didn't have a rational way of explaining ourselves. If we didn't have our own backgrounds and an extensive otherworld, it might have been easier, but we didn't choose to be the kind of system we are. We didn't question other systems' existence nearly as much as we did our own. We were taught for years not to trust our own perceptions, so any conclusions about our reality must be necessarily invalid because we thought of them. *sighs*
~K.
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Basically, one rhetorical answer to the rhetorical question "What if I'm not really trans?" is "What worries you about that?" If not being "trans enough" could result in therapy or medications being denied - and if that idea scares us - then there's a pretty good chance we're benefiting from those things!
As for our plurality... one of the good things about reading a lot of books on Magic is that questioning reality isn't automatically grounds for institutionalization. If cis singlets can joke about how they can't really be sure if the objective world exists, then surely we plural enbies can toss the idea around now and then.
- Fuzzy
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"The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.
"Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said “Quite. In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning”, the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind”, he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true."
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But - it's not on us to read people's minds and decide ahead of time that we need to apologize for being ourselves. People who like us wouldn't want us to worry over something like that! And like you said, people who hate us will hate us anyway, regardless of whether we chew each other up for their consumption!
-Jude
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