Multi-Media Dump

[lb_lee]

monsterqueers made an essay, 'What To Do When Your Source Upsets You' for fictionkin and fictive folk (mainly outsourced) about engaging with the media that informs your sense of self, how to recognize when it's hurting you, and what you can do about it.

rax made a cool experimental photo comic on plurality and a '90s board game called Tower of the Wizard King!

pluralstories  now has over 100 entries in its catalog! Yay!

Turns out I was wrong about Sandra J. Hocking and company making the first medical multi self-help book; Living With Your Selves was beaten out by 1991's Multiple Personality Gift, by Jacklyn Pia, which apparently did get printed by R & E Publishing, was 60 pages, and seems to have been posted online. Unfortunately, though it's interesting as a historical artifact, I can't really recommend it.

Comments

[erinptah]

"Interesting as a historical artifact" sure is a way to describe that!

You can really feel how the author was raised in some kind of toxic authoritarian Christian (or Christian-flavored) religious sect, and is now starting to get a grip on some healthy ideas about communication and self-care...but is fitting them all into the same unhealthy dynamics they grew up with, and this weird mess is the result.

It's still progress away from what they were raised with, at least? So we can hope they kept making progress after the book got published?

[lb_lee]

Yeeeeah. We try not to badmouth other multis' work, because it is too easy to fall into jaded smugness ("we're not like THOSE people") that quickly becomes paralytic artistic block ("what if I really am those people and making anything proves it?") but we get the same feeling from Gift.

Living With Your Selves has aged badly in many places, but it still has some useful stuff in it, stuff we ourself are planning to try despite being old hands. Gift, though, does not, and its insistence on the host/alter dichotomy where the host is in charge and all alters are subordinate grates. I still want people to know about it, because history is history, but engh. (And in our case, what Pia would call our host MUST NOT be in charge. Her time is done, and we run things for her.)

EDIT: It seems Ms. Pia passed on last year: https://www.altavistamortuary.com/obituary/jacklyn-pia

[erinptah]

Yeah, it sounds like a solid policy, not to get down on people for Doing Multiplicity Wrong.

But I'd criticize this one for plain old-fashioned Doing Family Dynamics Wrong, with a coat of multiplicity terms painted on top. The idea that all families must fit into a specific mold, that one person gets the final say in all decisions rather than having it be a cooperative effort between adults, and that the final-say person is destined by biology, who cares about the individual talents/abilities of the people in each specific family...just Bad Vibes all around.

Ooh, wow, that's recent. Here's hoping she, and whoever else she had around at that point, are at peace now.

[lb_lee]

Yup, agreed. And this attitude of host/alter dichotomy opens an easy abyss to fall into: plenty of multis FREAKED OUT when it turned out their "host" wasn't actually! Suddenly they had to deal with the idea that they were just another lowly alter, and it introduced a totally avoidable personal crisis! It was not a helpful binary for a lot of people, and I'm glad to see it's out of vogue now. It's such an ableist singlet thing, to insist that sure you might be multi... but there's still one TRUE, REAL one!