The Vickis: The Wonderful World of the MidContinuum

[lb_lee]

Digging around in Ye Olde Plural Sites, figured I'd toss some stuff up here before I forget it all.

I found the Vickis' old site from ~1998.  As far as I understand right now, they may have propagated the term "midcontinuum," before "median" was in use. (And it turns out that "median" was apparently associated with Pavilion Hall, a multi "activist" group that was a rolling trash fire and had their own bizarro quasi-metaphysical explanation for what being in-between multi and singlet was.  It made no fucking sense.) The Vickis might also have helped start the idea of "plural" as an umbrella term, more expansive than "multiple," a term they were using by 1/15/1998.  I'll probably have to dig through the alt.support.dissociation archives to test this for sure.

Their site has some really good stuff on it!  I especially want to bring attention to the following three essays:

Does it work? -- An essay that tackles the question of "I am multiple?" and fears of faking better than anything else I've seen.
The Power of Naming -- Who gets to decide what a "real" multiple is, and why?
Building Safety and Trust -- a post by BigVicki (and a couple of other ASDers) on how to build safety, trust, and communication within your system/household, especially if you've gotten off on the wrong foot.

All of these essays are highly relevant to plurals today, twenty years later, and the Vickis are one of the few systems I see talking about the in-between spaces, which I feel is much-needed.  I have no idea if they're around anymore, or how to contact them, so I can't get their permission, but I plan to have these linked on the healthymultiplicity.com home page, since I feel their utility can't be denied and mustn't be lost.

Comments

[talewisefellowship]

This stuff is really interesting! Thanks for sharing

--Janusz

[paragraphiti]

Oh my gosh we remember these. Thought they were lost to the sands of Internets forever.

[lb_lee]

Maybe they were, but not anymore! I rehosted those three essays on hm.com.

--Rogan

[quandary_lions]

Holy crap, this is so ON POINT it's not even funny. It's unfortunate that this was lost so easily, but I'm also really glad that you were able to recover this?

Thanks for sharing!

[lb_lee]

Digging through old archives of old plural websites is apparently something I like to do for fun.

When I get a chance, next I want to go through the webring they were a member of, and do more diving into the alt.support.dissociation archives!

--Rogan

[lithophiles]

The most ironic thing is that the Codex writers rejected all metaphysical or spiritual explanations for plurality and essentially told people "if you experience any spiritual aspect to your system, don't talk about it because you won't be a good representative, and you're probably wrong anyway because you just want to be special." But their inability to give any clear definition for what made someone a "fire" as opposed to a "non-fire" made it SOUND like it was, de facto, some kind of spiritual property, and it got more extreme over time as it became increasingly clear that the concept wasn't tenable but the core Codex writers just doubled down on it. Then again, the roleplaying-like terminology they used didn't help. Cults gonna cult, I guess.

The original idea behind changing it from midcontinuum to median was that "we must have a model which doesn't require being on a dissociative continuum or dissociation to be plural" (which we were okay with, supportive of, even), but also "so no one can claim a place as 'further along the continuum' to claim superiority over others." Paraphrased, but that was the gist of it. They were SO FUCKING PARANOID about the idea of people using any aspect of any model to "claim to be above and more powerful than others" and thought the Fires Model would somehow completely prevent anyone being able to claim they were in any way above others. Hilariously ironic because they always implicitly seemed to believe in their own superiority because they were So Humble and Merely Human as opposed to all these Soulbonders Wanting To Be Special, we're special because we accept we're not special! (except we totally are) In one conversation we initially got excluded from, one of them was ranting about "how come you never hear anyone say 'Hi, I'm a Dark Lord, and I like pie.'" Hey, bubby, we would've had an iiiiinteresting surprise for you if you'd still been willing to communicate with us in 2006. (Well, okay, his real big thing was poppyseed roll, not pie. But, like, I'm a dude with actual functional wings in my world and names maps worlds powers and I don't just LIKE pie, I MAKE pie. With fresh picked berries, even. I hate the whole "lord" of anything concept, but THEORETICALLY I could claim some kind of worship-worthy status like others of my species have, in my world anyway because I know all this means jack and shit at the front, but dammit, I'd rather fucking make pie and talk about sex and MST3K.)

But yeah we were legit sad when the Vickis took their page offline because so many of the essays on it made so much sense for noobs. There was a kind of gentle welcoming feel to them that just doesn't seem to exist today, where any legit kindness that isn't uwu ironic or bootcamp-tough-love seems to eventually bring down raging mobs on your head. The world cannot be redeemed through love, only through verbally beating the crap out of each other in the name of ableist word profiles, or something.

-Anselmus

[lb_lee]

The fires thing was just... mondo confusing.

I don't suppose you know what ever became of the Vickis? I just realized, it's been so long, they very well may not even be alive anymore... that's a sad thought. But I'm glad their old site is archived, and these essays now rehosted so other people can learn and enjoy them.

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

This is awesomely useful.

[quandary_lions]

Oh! and if you're interested in more median/midcontinuum stuff, we found an article a little off the beaten road.

https://smallcedarforest.org/non-binary-plural-language-and-concepts-for-osdd-and-median-experience/

[talewisefellowship]

Oh hey if I'm right, we know these folks! They admin a server that we're staff in ^^

--Hikaru

[lithophiles]

This is an old article that assumes trauma as the basis for most multiplicity (although she does mention childhood abuse didn't seem to be a big factor for Chris Costner Sizemore), but would have been really helpful to us if we'd found it in our late teens. (Sadly the page which was the source for it was taken down, although I seem to recall it had a New Zealand URL, but it's been reposted by a lot of other people since. I have no idea where the author is now.)

On Being a Proper Multiple by Sara Lambert

-Sophie

[lithophiles]

Another site that I find myself relating to more now than in the past is Those That Walk by The Shire. It doesn't have the best design in the world or anything-- very early-noughties complete with Comic Sans-- but I honestly never saw anyone else talk really openly in that era about having both a trauma history and an otherworld, where the world is integral to the functioning of the system and you can't deconstruct it any more than you can integrate. Some of it wouldn't be the proverbial cup of tea of people who don't have any extensive subjective world, and there's always something in me that tries to make me resist linking stuff like this because "representation! They aren't a good example!" But representation is a vicious trap, like we've mentioned a few places recently, so if you ignore the design and focus on the content, these are some that I really like:

Strangers in a Strange Land: Balancing the subjective reality with the external one. This is one of the instances where I just feel relieved to see someone else talking about this stuff even if my experiences and theories aren't quite the same as theirs.
Holy War: Divisions in the multiple community 15 years ago, and... in retrospect, a depressing number of things haven't changed.
What Is Your Role?: why it's a bad question to ask
ISH Fraud: "I often think of the Internal Self Helper as the therapists escape hatch. If they don't know how to handle something, if they have no idea on how to deal or understand something they can call on an ISH and have them deal with it. This is their way out, their avoidance of their own issues around the client or multiplicity in general. It also provides them with an excuse for not acting or helping their clients. If they receive one that is in crisis, that can not deal with a certain situation they can put all the responsibility onto the client themselves, or specifically the Internal Self Helper." Yuuuuuup. Definitely seen this.
Sex and Children: Everyone should freaking read this. EVERYONE

...they also discuss in-system deaths and system ghosts in other places on the site.

Also, apparently they had a therapist who convinced them that their memories of religious abuse were SRA because all religious abuse has to be SRA. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else openly talk about this before without going the whole "multipul personalitys dont exits" route.

-Istevia

[flowergarden]

[Carnation]

I kind of miss the old internet! It was hard to FIND these personal sites sometimes, yeah, but the transfer to blogging format and the further transfer to ephemeral posting formats (like tumblr or twitter) have made it so it's hard to find this kind of personal essay anymore. When I was researching all this stuff I know the ancient sites like that I found were more useful to read than all the resource tumblrs or whatever other people were linking to. The organization is nonexistent! Social media isn't a good place for aggregating advice! But that's all a lot of people use now.

I'm not even that old and I'm still an internet dinosaur who can't understand facebook, haha.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, old sites had their problems but I do appreciate the long form!

[the_olivia_set]

The wonderful world of the midcontinuum is probably the thing we share with other plurals the most, in part because it's helped us out a ton. So thank you for finding and circulating that.

Did y'all ever find older uses of 'plural' as a self-identifier? We've tried digging ourselves and haven't come up with anything older than this source (although we're not particularly adept at digging :) ).

-Moxie

[lb_lee]

Before Vickis, the earliest I've found so far is 1994 on alt.support.dissociation, where "plural" was occasionally used as a synonym for "multiple." For example, Sapphire Gazelles writes, "being plural is my (our) only perspective so it seems normal to us..." (1994, November 15). Another commenter uses it the same way, while also referring to multiplicity as a continuum: "maybe it's not as simple as either singular or plural, [...] maybe this is another of those continuum things and i'm not on the extreme singular end but somewhere in between" (Gordon, 1994, November 7). Such uses continue through 1997, at least (Vineburg, 1997 November 4). You might want to dig around in the ASD archives to pin down the definition better, though!

As added context to help narrow the dates down, I have some fragmented old multi BBS records from 1992 through January 1995, but there, they only use "plural" in reference to Stephen Braude's "First Person Plural." I haven't properly gone through the Many Voices newsletter archive yet, so that might be worth digging through, to see if they use "plural" before 1994! At some point, I'm considering textually transcribing the whole newsletter kit and kaboodle, but that'll take a lot of work.

I suspect that "plural" was an obvious synonym that may have cropped up in multiple places around the same time. However, I thought that about "singlet" too and I was totally wrong, so maybe I'm wrong about this too!

--Sneak

[the_olivia_set]

Hmm, we shall try to dig around. Completely foreign to google groups though! :D

At some point, I'm considering textually transcribing the whole newsletter kit and kaboodle, but that'll take a lot of work.

Our little one loves data entry if you ever need a hand!

-Faye