Becoming Median: text-only version!

[lb_lee]

Howdy friends, Zyfron has uploaded a text-only version of their Becoming Median booklet!  Enjoy! (Or, if you missed it the first time around, here's the original!) Read about integration, un-integrating, and being in-between multiple and singlet!

Comments

[lithophiles]

Even the way you're describing it, though, doesn't sound like something that's totally unprecedented among multiples? The only thing that really seems new about it is the grounding in an explicitly fictional show's concepts (sort of like how tulpas were a thing before they became associated with fandom and... the new version of what soulbonding used to be, in places). We definitely knew people in the early 2000s who had system members they described as the fusion or integration of two previous people, and sometimes people noted that that the fused/integrated/whatnot people had unique characteristics that couldn't really be explained as the combination of the people who created them. Like, Alice and Bob together don't become Alicebob, or the core person with Alice and Bob's traits added on, Alice and Bob become Chris, who is a different person from either of them. So "there's no reason they'd have a third complete identity" is just flat-out not true, because we saw people describing it as far back as the 90s. (ETA: And I don't have any of her books at hand, but I think Chris Costner Sizemore described it happening in her group? Have to read those books again.)

There's just so much reinventing of the wheel in the multiple community, it seems. I know some of it was unavoidable during the 90s and early 2000s, because research was harder without the Internet, and a lot of books were out of print and difficult to find. There were some frequently cited studies and essays that we couldn't find for years, and a lot of good insights were lost in deleted messageboards, mailing lists, personal sites obscure zines, etc. We wrote an essay for an online multiple zine called Chrysantheme in 2002, but damned if I can find any record of Chrysantheme even existing today, except on a couple of personal webpages with severe linkrot.

But it seems like nowadays, when research is much easier through the Internet, a lot of the problem is people actively refusing to read older stuff, which is severely frustrating to me. They think it couldn't possibly pertain to them, that traumagenic and non-traumagenic multiplicity are so inherently different (and apparently can't co-exist within the same system) that none of it could apply to their situation, or, worse yet, they actually believe it would be "appropriation" to study what people have believed about multiples in the past because "that's about people with DID, which we don't have, so we don't want to appropriate from them." So they'll never see people describing things that, if you can hold your nose about terms that you might not care for, might be very relevant to them and describe things they've experienced or close to it, and also give them ammunition against simplistic "people with DID do/don't do this" claims. It's not appropriation, it's self-defense, and I hate the culture of outrage currency where the angriest people are assumed to be the most morally righteous and are deferred to and believed even when they're completely wrong.

-Amaranth

[flowergarden]

[Carnation]

Yeah, if it wasn't clear, I wasn't intending to say that stuff was unprecedented or doesn't happen sometimes either, I was just parroting the reaction to it that I was seeing at the time. I think the fusion trend was just kids reinventing the wheel like you're saying and using a concept they were familiar with to describe stuff that's happened before and will happen again haha.

And yep, definitely have seen the whole idea that unless you've got DID-- professionally diagnosed even, suspected DID doesn't count-- you're harming the REAL suffering people by intruding, taking up their resources, appropriating their communities, STAY OUT. I saw that most from the DID/traumagenic/etc communities themselves rather than the other side (insomuch as there are "sides" to this at all of course); demands to keep out because you roleplayers are causing SERIOUS HARM to an oppressed mental illness rather than people autonomously deciding that DID stuff is irrelevant to them.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, I wonder how much of the idea was propagated by trolls from within the community. (Not necessarily singlet trolls; I just remember my befuddlement when I realized that Moose was claiming some of the anti-endo rhetoric, despite their knowing full well that it was false.) And then some folks jumped on the bandwagon because even us crazy people have to feel superior to SOMEBODY, I guess.

For real though, anyone who thinks DID would be respectable without "THOSE people" are either trolling or super-ignorant.

--Rogan