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Entry tags:
Memory Work and Data Graphics
Memory Work and Data Graphics
Series: Essay
Summary: “If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers.” —Edward R. Tufte, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed., pg. 80
Word Count: 2400
Notes: The winner of this month's Patreon poll!
When we started memory work, it felt like a terrifying, nonsensical quagmire. We had no idea how long it would last, how bad it would be, or whether we were achieving anything. So we did what any nerd would do: we started assembling data.
It took us a few years to settle on a system, which is why we only have proper numbers starting from 2016. But it’s been a huge boon: the morass is now predictable, reliable, and manageable, however unpleasant. With a paper calendar, some spreadsheets, and some graphs, we can track such things as:
• How long it takes to process a memory
• Trends in memory content
• How often we get memory chunks, their minimum, maximum, median, and mean, and greater trends therein
• Our tolerance regarding how many chunks we can take in a month before keeling over, and whether/how that changes.
• The status of our worst trigger
• Is there any pattern in our memory involving the cycle of a year?
• Are our ideas of how to pause memory work true, or are they superstitions?
We have never seen any numbers on memory work asides from our own. We’ve never even seen it discussed, despite its usefulness! So, if you’re doing memory work and want to chart like we do, here’s what we do, how we do it, and why. We are only one data source, so we hope other people will do it, expanding the data set and helping everyone. Different folks are different, but to what degree and in what way can only be answered with more data.
• Some spreadsheet program (LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Office Excel)
• Graph paper (there are surely good graphing programs but we don’t use them)
• Journal
The calendar is for easy impulse marking of whatever you’re tracking. It is great for a bird’s eye view of how a month or year has gone, and requires less brain than the spreadsheets. Most important is that it be easy and on hand. This has to be something you can reliably mark even when you’re away from home or at your worst.
The spreadsheets are the heavy lifters. They contain the hard numbers, the how often, the when, the how many. Emotions or numbness can cloud your head, but the numbers chart on regardless, focusing on quantity over quality.
The graph paper is for how you display, organize, and compare that data. To quote William Playfair, one of the granddads of graphs: “A man who has carefully investigated a printed table, finds […] that he has only a very faint and partial idea of what he has read […] On inspecting any one of these Charts attentively, a sufficiently distinct impression will be made, to remain unimpaired for a considerable time, and the idea which does remain will be simple and complete…” A table is just a list of isolated numbers; when you have a lot of those numbers, a graph shows the relationships between them better.
Feel free to experiment with different kinds of graphs—or data graphics, more expansively. Throw the data together in various ways, see what you learn. Be creative! Especially well-made data-graphs aren’t just works of numbers, but art.
• Flashbacks, body memories, abreactions, memory chunks, etc
• What triggered them (if you know) (we usually don’t)
• How much sleep you’ve gotten, and whether you had nightmares
• Energy level (sluggish, peppy, too peppy?)
• Mood (sad, happy, irritable?)
• Physical ailments (migraines, chronic illness)
• Pain numbers, physical and mental (see our psychological pain scale for details)
• Any life occurrences that might affect memory work—a visit to your hometown, an abuser dying, a big life transition like a marriage, birth, or divorce…
• Whatever else you fancy
Just throw it all at a wall and see what sticks; over time, you’ll get a sense of what’s relevant and what isn’t, and your tracking will refine. You might have to throw out a lot of your early data, but that’s okay. What matters most is getting in the habit of tracking your variables consistently, even if the variables themselves change. Your data is only as good as your rigor in reporting it.
Periodically, condense your calendar data into your spreadsheets. (We do it at the start of each month.) We ourself have three in regular use. We have one that’s just numbers by month: how many memory chunks, how many of those chunks are triggered by sex, and also how much total sex we’ve had, with yearly sums and average. (Sex is our biggest, most reliable trigger, so it needs tracking.) The other two spreadsheets show memories on the whole, their content, who they involved, and how long they took; one is just sorted by time we dealt with the memories, while the other sorts the memories by the time period they took place. Here’s their data from 2016:
Adapt and change as per your situation and needs.
These spreadsheets will be plenty useful all on their own. Ignore graphing until you have at least three years of solid, consistent data. Graphing too-small data sets will leave you chasing your tail, mistaking short-term changes for long-term trends, so just sit on it. It’ll take a while.
Perhaps you already have that data. Congratulations! Let the graphing begin!
What’s more, our tables had become just long disconnected lists of numbers. Our tables were big enough that the numbers blurred together in our mind. We could tell that memory work was gradually accelerating, that the peaks were getting ever-higher, but otherwise? Not much. What else was there to learn?
Lots. So much, even with the simple little time-series we ended up making.
Here's also the full table of the more qualitative stuff, in order of memories dealt with. (Not going with the resorted table going by time of memory itself, since it's the same data, just reshuffled.)
Now, compare and contrast to these graphs we’ve made. What patterns do you notice? What do you learn? (And if you’re doing memory work and have your own numbers, how do ours compare and contrast to yours?) Later, we’ll discuss the conclusions we ourself drew, the patterns and trends we noticed, but for now, come to it blind.
First of all, the obvious: our memory work is accelerating. Memories generally take less time to put to bed, so we’re dealing with more of them… and more frequently as well, with gradually increasing monthly spikes. There’s a lot of up-and-down month by month, but the means and medians generally bear these trends out.
Despite the acceleration, the total number of memory chunks triggered by sex is slowly decreasing. That’s good! It means that this lifelong, extremely inconvenient trigger is finally getting neutralized, bit by bit. January 2020 was the first time in our records that we had zero sex-triggered flashbacks in a month! Sure, it’d be nice if the process moved faster… but if there’s a way, we don’t know it.
There seems to be no predictable cycles within the year, except one: memory work slows down in December, even if we’re having more sex. This implies that the stress of the Christmas season is the cause, rather than avoiding sex. (And indeed, the graphs show that having less sex is no protection against a spike—that trick of ours seems at best a desperation ploy, if not pure superstition.)
There are a few troughs where things slow down—our hometown visit in September 2017, summer 2018’s harassment campaign and major headspace change, and mid-2019’s housing loss. (We aren’t sure what’s behind the trough in fall 2016.) All of this supports the feeling we got that the only reliable way to slow memory work is intense stress (and even that doesn’t work as well as it used to; even being homeless wasn’t enough to dip memory chunks below 4 a month). Obviously, we are only one multi, and our data shouldn’t be generalized, but when we were younger, we tended to hurl ourselves into stress after stress, perhaps as an attempt to keep the wolves at bay; is this something other people experience? Does it work for them, and does it lose efficacy over time? Or is this just coincidence and superstition?
Obviously, the accelerating pace of memory work is concerning. We want less of this, not more, don’t we? We’ve been at this miserable business for six solid years! (Seriously, how long will be stuck doing this? There has to be a better way, right?)
Let yourself be upset, for one thing. I’ve certainly ranted my spleen at the ocean plenty of times. But knowledge is power, even if it’s unpleasant. Look through your numbers again. Was there a specific turning point where things started getting out of control? Are their mechanisms in you or your headspace to bring it back under control? Can you adapt, and if so, how? What coping skills can you bring to bear? Also, is this a short-term uptick, or something to be worried about in the long-term? (I remember being intensely frustrated in 2017, where every memory took months to deal with. I knew that at this rate, I’d be doing memory work in a grave. Fortunately, that was not a long-term change. Eventually, I got through the pinch.)
What specifically is worrisome? For us, it was just how long everything is taking. But there might be a silver lining, maybe.
First of all, the memories are either getting less painful or our tolerance is rising. We don’t have good hard numbers on this, unfortunately; our memory chunks were so predictably upsetting (Crazy-8, by our mental pain scale) that it didn’t seem worth tracking. However, in 2013, before we even started getting narrative memory chunks, just emotions, we made this comic:
At least according to this strip, it took us six days to recover from a memory chunk, which were purely made up of emotions adding context to narrative memories we already had, and also probably spaced out much further apart. Even if we’re liberal and pretend that we got them every six days on the dot, that’s only 5 a month, and we clearly found that grueling.
In 2019’s memory work zine, we reported that we could handle up to 8 memory chunks a month before falling over. 5 a month had become our rough mean (with the exception of 2018; its mean was 7).
Now, in 2021, 5 is a vacation, 8 below-average, and even 10 is manageable. Even if we’re conservative in our estimates, it seems our recovery time has roughly halved. (Though the pandemic shutting everything down may be skewing the results—without in-person events, we have less to distract us. Only future data will tell.)
We’re also going through an interesting sea change in memory work, though it’s too soon to understand the ramifications. As of last year, we’re getting headspace-only memories, which aren’t necessarily upsetting in content. We don’t know why this is happening or what it means, but our brain is insistent on it, so maybe we’ll know more in another five years.
But even removing headspace-only memories from the count, we’re clearly moving through more memories faster. The torturous 2017 days look to be over, or at least rarer. Hopefully that means that we’ll finish this process sooner.
Sooner, but not soon. Predicting how long this will last is a tough proposition, but we have used as a rough measure our knowledge of our headmate roster: do we have memories of everyone’s start here (and end, if relevant)? By our current best guess, we have had 18 total headmates, so that gives us 18 births/arrivals and 14 deaths/departures (since Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda never left). 32 data points in total, and we know… 15. Less than half. (And that’s assuming there are no surprise headmates we don’t know of! Which we wouldn’t bet money on, seeing as we have had four surprises already.) So if current trends hold, it seems a safe bet that we are going to be doing this a long time, at least six more years.
That’s a bummer, but it is what it is. And that is the real power of data: letting us not just understand the past, but predict the present and future, however roughly. However dismaying the numbers are, they have proven one thing: memory work is not some arcane, taboo subject that can’t be understood through any statistical or quantitative means. It has a rhyme and reason! And we are only one loony. It’s no good if we’re the only data source. We hope other people start charting their own journeys, so we can pool our data, see if there are any commonalities, any generalizable trends. Then maybe we can teach and learn from each other, and find better ways through the woods.
Series: Essay
Summary: “If the statistics are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers.” —Edward R. Tufte, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed., pg. 80
Word Count: 2400
Notes: The winner of this month's Patreon poll!
When we started memory work, it felt like a terrifying, nonsensical quagmire. We had no idea how long it would last, how bad it would be, or whether we were achieving anything. So we did what any nerd would do: we started assembling data.
It took us a few years to settle on a system, which is why we only have proper numbers starting from 2016. But it’s been a huge boon: the morass is now predictable, reliable, and manageable, however unpleasant. With a paper calendar, some spreadsheets, and some graphs, we can track such things as:
• How long it takes to process a memory
• Trends in memory content
• How often we get memory chunks, their minimum, maximum, median, and mean, and greater trends therein
• Our tolerance regarding how many chunks we can take in a month before keeling over, and whether/how that changes.
• The status of our worst trigger
• Is there any pattern in our memory involving the cycle of a year?
• Are our ideas of how to pause memory work true, or are they superstitions?
We have never seen any numbers on memory work asides from our own. We’ve never even seen it discussed, despite its usefulness! So, if you’re doing memory work and want to chart like we do, here’s what we do, how we do it, and why. We are only one data source, so we hope other people will do it, expanding the data set and helping everyone. Different folks are different, but to what degree and in what way can only be answered with more data.
Charting Tools
• Paper calendar (apps or digital are surely as good or better; Hungry Ghosts have mentioned bearable.app!)• Some spreadsheet program (LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Office Excel)
• Graph paper (there are surely good graphing programs but we don’t use them)
• Journal
What Are They For?
The journal is for thought-barfing out a memory chunk’s contents. Go as in-depth or hog wild as you want. It’s handy for future reference and putting a memory to bed so it no longer hurts, but it’s crummy for charting numbers. We won’t be describing it in detail, because it’s pretty simple. You have a nightmare, and the content seems relevant? You write it down. A memory comes up? Write it down. You have a weird feeling that you can’t explain? Write it down. You can come back to it later, and sometimes it helps get the awful out of your head, rather than lingering like a bad smell.The calendar is for easy impulse marking of whatever you’re tracking. It is great for a bird’s eye view of how a month or year has gone, and requires less brain than the spreadsheets. Most important is that it be easy and on hand. This has to be something you can reliably mark even when you’re away from home or at your worst.
The spreadsheets are the heavy lifters. They contain the hard numbers, the how often, the when, the how many. Emotions or numbness can cloud your head, but the numbers chart on regardless, focusing on quantity over quality.
The graph paper is for how you display, organize, and compare that data. To quote William Playfair, one of the granddads of graphs: “A man who has carefully investigated a printed table, finds […] that he has only a very faint and partial idea of what he has read […] On inspecting any one of these Charts attentively, a sufficiently distinct impression will be made, to remain unimpaired for a considerable time, and the idea which does remain will be simple and complete…” A table is just a list of isolated numbers; when you have a lot of those numbers, a graph shows the relationships between them better.
Feel free to experiment with different kinds of graphs—or data graphics, more expansively. Throw the data together in various ways, see what you learn. Be creative! Especially well-made data-graphs aren’t just works of numbers, but art.
How To Chart
Start tracking with your calendar. Ellen Forney’s Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life has some recommendations, but here are things we or other folks have charted:• Flashbacks, body memories, abreactions, memory chunks, etc
• What triggered them (if you know) (we usually don’t)
• How much sleep you’ve gotten, and whether you had nightmares
• Energy level (sluggish, peppy, too peppy?)
• Mood (sad, happy, irritable?)
• Physical ailments (migraines, chronic illness)
• Pain numbers, physical and mental (see our psychological pain scale for details)
• Any life occurrences that might affect memory work—a visit to your hometown, an abuser dying, a big life transition like a marriage, birth, or divorce…
• Whatever else you fancy
Just throw it all at a wall and see what sticks; over time, you’ll get a sense of what’s relevant and what isn’t, and your tracking will refine. You might have to throw out a lot of your early data, but that’s okay. What matters most is getting in the habit of tracking your variables consistently, even if the variables themselves change. Your data is only as good as your rigor in reporting it.
Periodically, condense your calendar data into your spreadsheets. (We do it at the start of each month.) We ourself have three in regular use. We have one that’s just numbers by month: how many memory chunks, how many of those chunks are triggered by sex, and also how much total sex we’ve had, with yearly sums and average. (Sex is our biggest, most reliable trigger, so it needs tracking.) The other two spreadsheets show memories on the whole, their content, who they involved, and how long they took; one is just sorted by time we dealt with the memories, while the other sorts the memories by the time period they took place. Here’s their data from 2016:
| Month | Episodes | From Sex | Sex |
| Jan-16 | 4 | 3 | 26 |
| Feb-16 | 5 | 2 | 30 |
| Mar-16 | 8 | 4 | 25 |
| Apr-16 | 3 | 1 | 23 |
| May-16 | 6 | 4 | 27 |
| Jun-16 | 6 | 5 | 25 |
| Jul-16 | 6 | 3 | 26 |
| Aug-16 | 8 | 7 | 19 |
| Sep-16 | 6 | 5 | 16 |
| Oct-16 | 3 | 3 | 23 |
| Nov-16 | 6 | 5 | 23 |
| Dec-16 | 5 | 4 | 29 |
| Year Sum | 66 | 46 | 292 |
| Monthly Average | 5.5 | 3 | 24 |
| Start | End | Name | Memory Date | Memory Content | Violence? | Us | Others | Notes |
| 11/10/15 | 01/26/16 | Earthshaker Twins | 3/8?/04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with beating and Mom there. | Yes | M.D., Rogan | Dad, Mom | Created Rogan |
| 01/30/16 | 02/09/16 | Skullface | Late '03, early '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | M.D. | Dad | |
| 02/09/16 | 02/16/16 | Wild | Late '03, early '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | M.D. | Dad | |
| 02/16/16 | 03/01/16 | Cold Hands | Summer? '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | Rogan | Dad | Unfinished? |
| 03/08/16 | 06/07/16 | Craig (again) | 3/10/07-3/18/07 | Bro sexually assaults Mir and Ro; Mom chokes Rogan | Yes | Mir, Lolly, Rogan | Mom, Bro | First appeared 3/21/07. |
| 06/01/16 | 09/29/16 | Box | Christmas '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, force, with Mom there. | Restraint | Rogan, Sneak | Dad, Mom | |
| 10/09/16 | 02/14/17 | Shadowhall | ? | Mom suffocates, sexually assaults Rogan | Yes | Rogan | Mom |
Adapt and change as per your situation and needs.
These spreadsheets will be plenty useful all on their own. Ignore graphing until you have at least three years of solid, consistent data. Graphing too-small data sets will leave you chasing your tail, mistaking short-term changes for long-term trends, so just sit on it. It’ll take a while.
Perhaps you already have that data. Congratulations! Let the graphing begin!
Graphing the Data
Okay, so here’s the part where we’re supposed to say all the best ways to graph your data, but the fact is, we have no background in statistics or data analysis. Until our memory work zine, it never occurred to us to graph the data, and even that was only one simple time-series. Worse, most of our data had never been tabulated to begin with! It was just rotting in paper calendars stashed in a trunk, not even in spreadsheet form!What’s more, our tables had become just long disconnected lists of numbers. Our tables were big enough that the numbers blurred together in our mind. We could tell that memory work was gradually accelerating, that the peaks were getting ever-higher, but otherwise? Not much. What else was there to learn?
Lots. So much, even with the simple little time-series we ended up making.
Our Data
First, here’s a mega-table of all our numbers, rescued from the trunk, organized for easy fact-checking:| Month | Chunks | From Sex | Sex |
| Jan-16 | 4 | 3 | 26 |
| Feb-16 | 5 | 2 | 30 |
| Mar-16 | 8 | 4 | 25 |
| Apr-16 | 3 | 1 | 23 |
| May-16 | 6 | 4 | 27 |
| Jun-16 | 6 | 5 | 25 |
| Jul-16 | 6 | 3 | 26 |
| Aug-16 | 8 | 7 | 19 |
| Sep-16 | 6 | 5 | 16 |
| Oct-16 | 3 | 3 | 23 |
| Nov-16 | 6 | 5 | 23 |
| Dec-16 | 5 | 4 | 29 |
| Year Sum | 66 | 46 | 292 |
| Monthly Average | 5.5 | 3 | 24 |
| Jan-17 | 7 | 2 | 21 |
| Feb-17 | 5 | 3 | 17 |
| Mar-17 | 4 | 3 | 28 |
| Apr-17 | 5 | 3 | 12 |
| May-17 | 10 | 9 | 24 |
| Jun-17 | 2 | 2 | 14 |
| Jul-17 | 6 | 6 | 14 |
| Aug-17 | 4 | 3 | 12 |
| Sep-17 | 3 | 1 | 8 |
| Oct-17 | 6 | 4 | 15 |
| Nov-17 | 10 | 8 | 16 |
| Dec-17 | 8 | 6 | 14 |
| Year Sum | 70 | 50 | 195 |
| Monthly Average | 5 5/6 | 4 | 16 |
| Jan-18 | 7 | 3 | 17 |
| Feb-18 | 2 | 2 | 19 |
| Mar-18 | 3 | 1 | 17 |
| Apr-18 | 9 | 6 | 19 |
| May-18 | 6 | 2 | 15 |
| Jun-18 | 8 | 3 | 8 |
| Jul-18 | 6 | 2 | 7 |
| Aug-18 | 4 | 2 | 7 |
| Sep-18 | 10 | 6 | 17 |
| Oct-18 | 6 | 4 | 14 |
| Nov-18 | 12 | 5 | 14 |
| Dec-18 | 8 | 3 | 17 |
| Year Sum | 81 | 39 | 171 |
| Monthly Average | 6.75 | 3 | 14 |
| Jan-19 | 5 | 3 | 14 |
| Feb-19 | 7 | 3 | 16 |
| Mar-19 | 4 | 1 | 14 |
| Apr-19 | 9 | 1 | 11 |
| May-19 | 4 | 1 | 10 |
| Jun-19 | 6 | 2 | 10 |
| Jul-19 | 5 | 5 | 14 |
| Aug-19 | 6 | 3 | 18 |
| Sep-19 | 9 | 6 | 13 |
| Oct-19 | 4 | 3 | 18 |
| Nov-19 | 7 | 4 | 15 |
| Dec-19 | 2 | 1 | 24 |
| Year Sum | 68 | 33 | 177 |
| Monthly Average | 5 | 2 | 14 |
| Jan. '20 | 4 | 0 | 10 |
| Feb. '20 | 9 | 2 | 15 |
| March '20 | 7 | 2 | 27 |
| April '20 | 8 | 2 | 16 |
| May '20 | 10 | 2 | 18 |
| June '20 | 8 | 2 | 20 |
| July '20 | 20 | 7 | 15 |
| August '20 | 5 | 3 | 17 |
| Sept. '20 | 9 | 1 | 13 |
| Oct. '20 | 17 | 7 | 10 |
| Nov. '20 | 7 | 4 | 15 |
| Dec. '20 | 5 | 3 | 16 |
| Year Sum | 109 | 35 | 192 |
| Monthly Average | 9 | 2 | 16 |
Here's also the full table of the more qualitative stuff, in order of memories dealt with. (Not going with the resorted table going by time of memory itself, since it's the same data, just reshuffled.)
| Start | End | Name | Memory Date | Memory Content | Violence? | Us | Others | Notes |
| 03/21/07 | 03/21/07 | Craig | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 05/23/09 | Spiky Green | ??? | ??? blocked | |||||
| 08/13/12 | 03/??/13 | Scratch | 9/13/10-1/27/11 | Anger and grief about family. | No | Gigi, Sneak, Mir, Ro | Dad, Mom | |
| 08/17/14 | 09/14/14 | Flaming Eyeballs | 3/15/2004 | Grampa and Lois sexually and physically assault M.D. in AZ. | Restraint | M.D. | Grampa, Lois | Chunks of this also came up with Angel |
| 11/05/14 | 11/05/14 | Christmas '96 | Christmas '96 | Sexual assault from Grampa in bathroom | No | Erin | Grampa | No ghost; just memory |
| 12/30/14 | 12/30/14 | Mystery Shorts | Summer 1999? | Loaned some strange shorts. | No | N/A | Grampa, Lois | This is not a traumatic memory, just a strange one. |
| 12/15/14 | 01/12/15 | Girl in the Door | Summer 1998? | Being sexually shared between Grampa and Lois. | No | Erin | Grampa, Lois | |
| 02/17/15 | 04/27/15 | the Angel | 3/17/04-3/19/04 | Gigi physically/sexually attacked by Lois and Grampa in AZ. | Yes | Gigi | Grampa, Lois | Delayed due to move. |
| 06/07/15 | 07/19/15 | Doll Girl | 1/?/1993 | Sexual assault from Grampa at fifth birthday party. | No | Erin | Grampa | |
| 06/21/15 | 07/27/15 | Escape Object | Spring '96? | Sexual assault from Dad, inducing vomiting. | Sorta? | Erin | Dad | |
| 08/25/15 | 10/06/15 | Spiral Eyes | Christmas '03 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | M.D., Biff | Dad | |
| 11/10/15 | 01/26/16 | Earthshaker Twins | 3/8?/04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with beating and Mom there. | Yes | M.D., Rogan | Dad, Mom | Created Rogan |
| 01/30/16 | 02/09/16 | Skullface | Late '03, early '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | M.D. | Dad | |
| 02/09/16 | 02/16/16 | Wild | Late '03, early '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | M.D. | Dad | |
| 02/16/16 | 03/01/16 | Cold Hands | Summer? '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, with physical force. | Restraint | Rogan | Dad | Unfinished? |
| 03/08/16 | 06/07/16 | Craig (again) | 3/10/07-3/18/07 | Bro sexually assaults Mir and Ro; Mom chokes Rogan | Yes | Mir, Lolly, Rogan | Mom, Bro | First appeared 3/21/07. |
| 06/01/16 | 09/29/16 | Box | Christmas '04 | Sexual assault from Dad, force, with Mom there. | Restraint | Rogan, Sneak | Dad, Mom | |
| 10/09/16 | 02/14/17 | Shadowhall | ? | Mom suffocates, sexually assaults Rogan | Yes | Rogan | Mom | |
| 02/26/17 | 02/26/17 | Drowner | 3/8-3/15/04 | Mom drowns M.D. | Yes | M.D. | Mom | |
| 04/10/17 | 07/28/17 | Bubbles/Swim Team | 6/1 or 6/8/2002 | Mom attacks Bro, we flee, gatecrash swim meet, are punished with drowning (and fingering) by Mom and Dad. | Yes | M.D., Erin | Mom, Bro | Possibly the start of M.D.? |
| 09/18/17 | 02/04/18 | Starvesorry | 2000- 2/2001? | Forced to eat feces; we vomit, Mom tries to drown us in it | Yes | ??? | Mom | |
| 03/19/18 | 06/11/18 | Eyes/Shaun | Sept/Oct 2004 | Dad attempts to assault; Sneak screams, Mom wigs out, attacks and gets Dad and Bro in on it. | Yes | Sneak, Rogan | Mom, Bro, Dad, Savvy | The start of Sneak's phobia of zombies. Also the start of our interactions with the black ocean. |
| 06/11/18 | 06/19/18 | Changeling | ? | Vomiting while Mom shoves our head in the toilet, demanding we say we love her and that we aren't her child. | Yes | Rogan | Mom | |
| 06/19/18 | 06/26/18 | Pop-Pop | Mardi Gras 1996 | Escaping Dad's sexual assault at Pop-Pop's house; he intervenes and comforts us. | No | Erin | Dad, Pop-Pop | Dad doesn't dare attack us at Granny and Pop-Pop's house after this point. Also, seems to mesh with photo in albums. |
| 07/07/18 | 09/04/18 | Little Girl in the Brown Dress | Spring 1995 | Being shoved over and urinated on for wearing the wrong dress; impliactions we were being shoved around and verbally abused as early as we are capable of remembering. | Yes | Erin | Mom | This is when we start getting chills and using hot showers/baths to help pull it through. |
| 09/09/18 | 10/10/18 | Erin | 2/19-2/20/2005 | Rape by Jeff, followed by gang-rape, slapping, hitting | Yes | Erin, Rogan | Jeff, Dad, Mom, Bro | First memory involving barebacking and also our brother’s more direct involvement |
| 10/23/18 | April 2006 | 4/15/06-4/25/06 | aborted until summer ‘19 | |||||
| 10/27/18 | 11/10/18 | Voyeur | Winter ‘01 or ‘02? | Bro watching us in bed, masturbating. We drive him off, sleep in creekbed. | No | Erin, M.D., Gigi | Bro | Winter ‘01 or ‘02? |
| 11/11/18 | 12/25/18 | Vomit | 02/24/05 | BL; throwing up post-op, Mom rubbing our face in it, kicking us; Bro rapes us | Yes | Rogan | Mom, BL | First memory we have of the bony lady? |
| 12/29/18 | 02/20/19 | Bony Lady | After Aug. 2005 | BL; being dragged to master bedroom, suffocated, raped; dragged back to room, where Bro rapes us | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro, Dad, BL | After Erin died |
| 02/26/19 | 03/26/19 | Red Wings | After Aug. 2005 | BL; Mom rubbing menstrual blood on our face, go to bathroom, raped by Bro, make deal to avoid pregnancy | Yes | ??? | Mom, Bro, BL | Seems to have negotiated with our Bro to avoid impregnation |
| 04/12/19 | 04/20/19 | Family God | 3/8-3/15/04 | Making the deal with the bony lady, escaping hellpit, family god, Mom drowning | Yes | M.D. | Mom, Dad, family god | Dealt with the family god and M.D.’s deal with the bony lady at this time. |
| 04/23/19 | 05/04/19 | Brojob | After Aug. 2005 | BL; Oral rape from Bro, drowning from Mom | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro, BL | |
| 05/30/19 | 06/29/19 | Wing Stubs | Winter '05 or '06 | BL; Oral rape from Bro, beating from Mom; BL forces Rogan not to commit suicide. | Yes | Rogan | Bro, Mom, BL | Ended Rogan's relationship with the bony lady the first time; BL says this took place in 2006 |
| 07/05/19 | 10/06/19 | April 2006 (again) | 4/15/06-4/25/06 | Mac and Rogan meet, get choked by Mom, Rogan raped by Bro | Yes | Rogan, Mac | Mom, Bro | Took way longer than necessary entirely due to dumb-dumbness |
| 10/16/19 | Family Curse | 3/3/06? 1/31? | Rogan gets orally raped by Bro, vomits, beaten and anally raped by him and Mom while Dad watches | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro, Dad | Aborted? | |
| 11/26/19 | 11/26/19 | Rawlin goop | 2003 | Rawlin pins M.D. down in bed, force-feeds her obedience goo. | Restraint | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 11/29/19 | 11/29/19 | Rawlin forget | 2000-2003 | Chained Rawlin smashes someone to death, compels M.D. to forget. | N/A | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 12/09/19 | 12/09/19 | Rawlin One | 1999 | Rawlin comforts M.D. when crying | N/A | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 12/27/19 | 12/27/19 | Berserk | 5/22-6/16/00? | M.D. fights her way out of a rape from Grampa and Lois | Yes | M.D. | Grampa, Lois | |
| 01/06/20 | 01/06/20 | Walk Away | Before 7/7/00? | M.D. fights against Mom choking her while Erin walks away | Yes | M.D., Erin | Mom | |
| 01/11/20 | 01/11/20 | Hairpulling | After 7/7/00 | M.D. fights Mom pillow-suffocating her, gets a knee on her gut, blacks out | Yes | M.D. | Mom | |
| 01/31/20 | 01/31/20 | Not My Daughter | ??? | Mom suffocates M.D. with a pillow, saying she’s not her daughter | Yes | M.D. | Mom | |
| 02/02/20 | 02/02/20 | Rawlin Heartdeath | 1999-early 2000 | Rawlin protecting M.D., losing his heart | N/A | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 02/08/20 | 02/08/20 | Rawlin SAVEME | turn of ‘04 | Rawlin freaks out after being imprisoned | N/A | Rawlin | Headspace memory | |
| 02/13/20 | 02/13/20 | Copenhagen | Spring ‘00 | Mom goes screamy and shakes us, maybe hits us when we can’t remember the capital of Denmark. | Yes | Erin | Mom | Interstitial memory between Crazy Mom and Chokey Mom |
| 02/17/20 | 02/17/20 | Lice | 1st grade | Mom slaps us for crying while being combed for lice. | Yes | Erin | Mom | We want to say this was spring ‘95 but who knows |
| 02/23/20 | 05/02/20 | Jobhunt ‘04 | 5/26/04-6/14/04 | Dad anally rapes us for not getting a job fast enough, hits us for screaming | Yes | Rogan | Dad, B&G | Welp, funny, we wondered if Cold Hands was unfinished… |
| 02/25/20 | 02/25/20 | Rawlin notworking | 1999 | Rawlin defeated, saying “it’s not working” then writhing in pain and hitting M.D. by accident | Accidental | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 03/16/20 | 03/16/20 | Rawlin makeitfine | 1999 | Rawlin tells M.D. he’s going to fix it; then the seed takes him | to Rawlin | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 03/31/20 | 03/31/20 | Rawlin stormbrewing | 1999 | Storms approach; M.D. asks, and Rawlin says no worries, but is clearly worried | N/A | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 04/02/20 | 04/06/20 | Rawlin firstseeded | fall, winter 1999? | Rawlin, newly seeded, tries to mind-rape M.D., who exists | Psychological | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 04/21/20 | 04/21/20 | Rawlin lifeforce | 1999 | Headspace is dying; Rawlin plans how to revive it | N/A | Rawlin | Headspace memory | |
| 05/02/20 | 05/02/20 | Smooch | junior year | Bob and Grey stop trying to conceal their relationship from Rogan | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 05/02/20 | 05/13/20 | Who’s Hitting You? | ~8/17/05-9/22/05 | B&G try to intervene on the abuse, talk to Rogan about it; Rogan freaks and ditches and tries to unqueer himself. | N/A | Rogan | B&G, BL | Headspace memory |
| 05/04/20 | 05/04/20 | Run of the Place | junior year | B&G give Rogan free run of the apartment. | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 05/05/20 | 05/05/20 | Duties at Home | Summer 2005, pre-Neighbors | B&G convo asking what Rogan does at home; Rogan says he can do it, he just needs to make it to college, and they let him go for the moment. | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 05/07/20 | 05/07/20 | What do you like? | junior year | Bob asks Rogan if he likes boys or girls, comes out himself. | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 05/08/20 | Hug | 10/31/04-12/24/04 | Mom gets slappy over Jeff raping us. Brings Bro in. Grey hugs Rogan to calm him down. | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Jeff, Bro | ||
| 05/19/20 | 05/20/20 | B&G Neighbors | 6/18/05-8/18/05 | Rogan spends time with B&G when their neighbor and kids come to visit. | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 05/24/20 | 05/30/20 | Box (B&G) | 12/24/04 | Rogan crawls to B&G’s apartment to lick his wounds after Box. | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory | |
| 05/27/20 | 06/06/20 | Rawlin 1999 | 1999 | Sums up Rawlin’s actions up to getting chained and right after | N/A | M.D. | Rawlin | Headspace memory |
| 06/24/20 | 06/30/20 | B&G Paying the Rent | 1/25/05-6/18/05 | After getting more okay with touch, Rogan tries to get B&G to rape him, causing a meltdown | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 06/30/20 | 06/30/20 | B&G Dance | After Paying Rent | Rogan returns to his corner, watches Bob and Grey dance | N/A | Rogan | B&G | Headspace memory |
| 06/30/20 | 09/03/20 | Katrina Days | ~8/17/05-By 9/10/05 | Mom finds the gay writing, power struggle of barebacking rapechoking, until Dad ends it. Hiding out with B&G through Katrina, tried to tell Granny and Pop-Pop | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro, Dad, Granny, Pop-Pop, B&G | |
| 07/27/20 | 08/03/20 | Dad Alliance | 4/15/06-5/6/06 | Rogan sucks off Dad in exchange for protection from Bro. | No | Rogan | Dad, Bro | |
| 08/13/20 | 08/13/20 | Prom | 05/07/06 | Anal rape from Dad for the car accident plus Rogan wearing drag | Yes | Rogan | Dad, Bro, Mom | |
| 08/13/20 | 08/17/20 | CraigO’s Car Accident | 7/5/06-7/8/06 | Anal rape with foreign object from Dad for car accident | Yes | Rogan | Dad, Bro, Mom | |
| 09/07/20 | 09/07/20 | BL Cigarette | ~9/22/05 | After leaving B&G, BL gives Rogan cigarettes and haggles with FG | N/A | Rogan | BL, Family God | Headspace memory |
| 09/14/20 | 09/30/20 | Gregor | Before Jobhunt ‘04 | Kitchen sink drown, beating, manual gang-rape, chest stuff | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro | Tried to hold off 9/14/20, triggered out anyway 9/27/20 |
| 09/19/20 | 09/20/20 | Chest Abuse | ??? | Mom hurting and biting our chest, disgusted and titillated | Yes | Rogan | Mom | |
| 10/01/20 | 10/03/20 | Cunnilingus Asphyxia | Before Jobhunt ‘04 | Hiding. Cunnilingus asphyxia. Hallucinating voices from shower. | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro | |
| 10/04/20 | 10/04/20 | More chest abuse | Before Jobhunt ‘04 | Chest abuse. Mutual masturbation. | Yes | Rogan | Mom | |
| 10/06/20 | 10/09/20 | Trunk | Before Jobhunt ‘04 | Asphyxia, urine in a trunk. | Yes | Rogan | Mom | |
| 10/10/20 | 10/10/20 | Jobhunt ‘04 (Mom) | 5/26/04-6/14/04 | Chest, verbal abuse from Mom in front of Grey | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Grey | |
| 10/11/20 | 10/11/20 | B&G Sketchpad | 5/26/04-6/14/04 | Oral rape from Dad, chest and verbal abuse from Mom; sketchpad from Bob and Grey | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Dad, Bro, B&G | |
| 10/17/20 | 10/17/20 | Post-Smooch | same day as Smooch | Oral rape from Mom, chest stuff, breaking in at night. | ? | Rogan | Mom | |
| 10/21/20 | 10/22/20 | Queef | junior year | Oral rape from Mom, chest stuff. Hiding at Bob and Grey’s place. | Yes | Rogan | Mom, B&G | |
| 10/25/20 | 11/21/20 | Brokakke | 2/25/05ish | Head trauma from Mom, ejaculated on by Bro. Grey present. She and Bob run support. | Yes | Rogan | Mom, Bro, B&G | |
| 12/08/20 | 12/31/20 | Miranda Changeling | After 2/19/05 | Drowning from Mom, saying we’re not her child. Exorcism, Mir made. | Yes | Rogan, Mir | Mom | Miranda created |
Now, compare and contrast to these graphs we’ve made. What patterns do you notice? What do you learn? (And if you’re doing memory work and have your own numbers, how do ours compare and contrast to yours?) Later, we’ll discuss the conclusions we ourself drew, the patterns and trends we noticed, but for now, come to it blind.
First of all, the obvious: our memory work is accelerating. Memories generally take less time to put to bed, so we’re dealing with more of them… and more frequently as well, with gradually increasing monthly spikes. There’s a lot of up-and-down month by month, but the means and medians generally bear these trends out.
Despite the acceleration, the total number of memory chunks triggered by sex is slowly decreasing. That’s good! It means that this lifelong, extremely inconvenient trigger is finally getting neutralized, bit by bit. January 2020 was the first time in our records that we had zero sex-triggered flashbacks in a month! Sure, it’d be nice if the process moved faster… but if there’s a way, we don’t know it.
There seems to be no predictable cycles within the year, except one: memory work slows down in December, even if we’re having more sex. This implies that the stress of the Christmas season is the cause, rather than avoiding sex. (And indeed, the graphs show that having less sex is no protection against a spike—that trick of ours seems at best a desperation ploy, if not pure superstition.)
There are a few troughs where things slow down—our hometown visit in September 2017, summer 2018’s harassment campaign and major headspace change, and mid-2019’s housing loss. (We aren’t sure what’s behind the trough in fall 2016.) All of this supports the feeling we got that the only reliable way to slow memory work is intense stress (and even that doesn’t work as well as it used to; even being homeless wasn’t enough to dip memory chunks below 4 a month). Obviously, we are only one multi, and our data shouldn’t be generalized, but when we were younger, we tended to hurl ourselves into stress after stress, perhaps as an attempt to keep the wolves at bay; is this something other people experience? Does it work for them, and does it lose efficacy over time? Or is this just coincidence and superstition?
Obviously, the accelerating pace of memory work is concerning. We want less of this, not more, don’t we? We’ve been at this miserable business for six solid years! (Seriously, how long will be stuck doing this? There has to be a better way, right?)
When the Numbers Have Bad News
Maybe your numbers also have bad news. Maybe you will discover that your memory work is accelerating, or becoming more painful, or getting out of control. What then?Let yourself be upset, for one thing. I’ve certainly ranted my spleen at the ocean plenty of times. But knowledge is power, even if it’s unpleasant. Look through your numbers again. Was there a specific turning point where things started getting out of control? Are their mechanisms in you or your headspace to bring it back under control? Can you adapt, and if so, how? What coping skills can you bring to bear? Also, is this a short-term uptick, or something to be worried about in the long-term? (I remember being intensely frustrated in 2017, where every memory took months to deal with. I knew that at this rate, I’d be doing memory work in a grave. Fortunately, that was not a long-term change. Eventually, I got through the pinch.)
What specifically is worrisome? For us, it was just how long everything is taking. But there might be a silver lining, maybe.
First of all, the memories are either getting less painful or our tolerance is rising. We don’t have good hard numbers on this, unfortunately; our memory chunks were so predictably upsetting (Crazy-8, by our mental pain scale) that it didn’t seem worth tracking. However, in 2013, before we even started getting narrative memory chunks, just emotions, we made this comic:
At least according to this strip, it took us six days to recover from a memory chunk, which were purely made up of emotions adding context to narrative memories we already had, and also probably spaced out much further apart. Even if we’re liberal and pretend that we got them every six days on the dot, that’s only 5 a month, and we clearly found that grueling.
In 2019’s memory work zine, we reported that we could handle up to 8 memory chunks a month before falling over. 5 a month had become our rough mean (with the exception of 2018; its mean was 7).
Now, in 2021, 5 is a vacation, 8 below-average, and even 10 is manageable. Even if we’re conservative in our estimates, it seems our recovery time has roughly halved. (Though the pandemic shutting everything down may be skewing the results—without in-person events, we have less to distract us. Only future data will tell.)
We’re also going through an interesting sea change in memory work, though it’s too soon to understand the ramifications. As of last year, we’re getting headspace-only memories, which aren’t necessarily upsetting in content. We don’t know why this is happening or what it means, but our brain is insistent on it, so maybe we’ll know more in another five years.
But even removing headspace-only memories from the count, we’re clearly moving through more memories faster. The torturous 2017 days look to be over, or at least rarer. Hopefully that means that we’ll finish this process sooner.
Sooner, but not soon. Predicting how long this will last is a tough proposition, but we have used as a rough measure our knowledge of our headmate roster: do we have memories of everyone’s start here (and end, if relevant)? By our current best guess, we have had 18 total headmates, so that gives us 18 births/arrivals and 14 deaths/departures (since Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda never left). 32 data points in total, and we know… 15. Less than half. (And that’s assuming there are no surprise headmates we don’t know of! Which we wouldn’t bet money on, seeing as we have had four surprises already.) So if current trends hold, it seems a safe bet that we are going to be doing this a long time, at least six more years.
That’s a bummer, but it is what it is. And that is the real power of data: letting us not just understand the past, but predict the present and future, however roughly. However dismaying the numbers are, they have proven one thing: memory work is not some arcane, taboo subject that can’t be understood through any statistical or quantitative means. It has a rhyme and reason! And we are only one loony. It’s no good if we’re the only data source. We hope other people start charting their own journeys, so we can pool our data, see if there are any commonalities, any generalizable trends. Then maybe we can teach and learn from each other, and find better ways through the woods.
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The comic you embedded does not show, though EDIT: yeah according to the HTML it seems to be missing entirely
--Hikaru
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And yeah kanji the best way imo, but I could be a little biased hehe. Jan says that T/Th might not be a problem if modern English retained the Þ character, but it didn't so we're stuck with it lol
-- Hikaru
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Also, in the midst of the Great Media Go-Through, we rediscovered our Kanji dictionary, which has made remembering kanji a lot easier. (And way more fascinating--I may never remember how to SAY clay, but I'll remember that its kanji are "sticky rice dirt!")
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--Hikaru
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From a slightly more stats-y/data-y/research-y perspective: may I suggest gant charts to track processing length, perhaps with a line graph (or multiple line graphs) above or below with matched x-axes (showing time) that track mood, energy levels, etc.? You could also add a cumulative frequency graph (bar or line - however you feel like rolling) tracking total numbers of active memories at any given time. Scale it as you see fit (by day would be huge and potentially not super-useful; you seem to be doing most things by month, so I guess start there and see if that is ok or by week is better?
It would look something like this:
________ ____ _____________
Mood: \/\___/ \/\/\/\__\/ \/\/\___/\___/\_/
Memories: |------------|
|---------------------------------------------|
|-----------|
|----|
|-----------------|
|--------------|
|
Cumulative | | | | | | | | | | | | |
active | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
memories: | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Month: 1 3 5 7 9 11 1 3 5 7 9 11 1 3
2 4 6 8 10 12 2 4 6 8 10 12 2 etc.
(Umm, those lines next to 'cumulative active memories' are supposed to be skinny bars on a bar chart and the wiggly nonsense next to 'mood' is supposed to be a line graph. The 'month' bit is the x-axis that ties it all together as it applies to all of the graphs.)
No idea if that's useful or not...
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I am deeply interested in this though, since this is all stuff we sadly don't know but would love to! And yeah, we'd love to chart some of that, but we haven't found a concise way to deal with the huge range in memory processing length (I think 1 day to 100+), and that doesn't include ones where our brain says, "Sorry, we have to pause here and come back to it months or years down the line" while we >:[
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Here's the best ggplot2 breakdown/instructions I've found: http://www.sthda.com/english/wiki/ggplot2-essentials
And here is the sort of graph I was trying to sketch (see how there's multiple graphs stacked but they all share the same x-axis?): https://i2.wp.com/owi.usgs.gov/blog/static/beyond-basic-plotting/verticalfacetplotfixedlabels-1.png?zoom=1.25&w=578&ssl=1
And here is how to do it: http://www.sthda.com/english/articles/24-ggpubr-publication-ready-plots/81-ggplot2-easy-way-to-mix-multiple-graphs-on-the-same-page/
no subject
"My brain itches" is a great way to describe that feeling.