lb_lee | Entries tagged with lb makes:essay

Crisis Planning: Legal Stuff: Wills, Organ/Body Donations, and DNR/MOLST/POLST Forms
Series: Essay (Crisis Planning)
Summary: A guide to living wills, health care agents, organ/body donations, and DNR/MOLST/POLST forms (i.e., how to make sure you get the care you want and not the stuff you don't when you're unable to make your desires known).
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! If you want to support my work, join LiberaPay or Patreon and get double-weight for your votes. Also, these crisis plan essays have proven so popular (and regrettably necessary) that we have made a whole ebook of them up for sale for $5 here.

Nobody likes to think about this stuff, but seriously, think it over, especially if any of the following is a concern of yours:
• Ending up under the care of your abusers if medically incapacitated.
• Being denied medical care you need, leading to your “merciful” death.
• Making sure your loved ones know what to do if you’re in a coma.
• Donating your body to science.

( Read more... )

( Citations )

Current Mood: busy

Pluralstories: Why We Did It Like That
Summary: "Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off." --Spider Robinson
Word Count: 3450
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month and sponsored by our fans at LiberaPay and Patreon! Derelict from a "plurals in video games" academic paper that didn't end up happening.

We first got the idea of making a catalog of plural stories in 2009, back when we were in library school. People seemed to want one, and we heard plenty of complaints along the lines of, "I just want to read a story about people like me!" but at best there were lists of a few favorites on a blog or (later on) in an itch.io collection. Arguably the closest thing to a comprehensive catalog was Nita and Anita's now-defunct Multiple Personality and Dissociation Book List, which after a decade in existence listed 161 books with keywords and reviews. However significant, it had major flaws: it was limited to books from a medical standpoint, used only vague keywords like "fiction" and "psychiatry", gave no description of what the books were actually about, and kept the reviews (the only place to find content descriptions) siloed off and organized by reviewer name, rather than book title. Something more comprehensive and searchable was needed.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: geeky

Crisis Planning: The Hit-By-A-Bus Plan
Series: Essay (crisis planning)
Summary: A crisis plan for when you are, say, hit by a bus, put in a coma, and have no family or spouse to handle your business while you're incapacitated.
Word Count: 2500
Notes: Winner of this month’s fan poll. You should definitely read How To Make A Pocket Crisis Guide first! The blank worksheets are here.

The hit-by-a-bus plan is for when you are suddenly unable to perform your usual duties or communicate the need to get them done to others—such as when you are suddenly committed to a mental hospital, kidnapped, or hit by a bus and put in a coma. The plan is especially for people without spouse or families. Getting hit by a bus may be unavoidable, but less so is getting fired (or a pet dying) because you aren’t there and nobody knows what happened or what to do. It has two components: prep work for yourself (for psychological crisis), and stuff for helpers to do on your behalf afterward (general purpose).

( This essay brought to you by a dead cat that I am still not over! )

Current Mood: working

We're a Cyborg, and So am I
Series: Essay
Summary: "When I tell people I am a cyborg, they often ask if I have read Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.' Of course I have read it. And I disagree with it. [...] The manifesto coopts cyborg identity while eliminating reference to disabled people on which the notion of the cyborg is premised. Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors." --the Cyborg Jillian Weise, "Common Cyborg"
Word Count: 3100
Notes: Winner of the December 2024 fan poll by a landslide! If you want to support my work and help me keep uploading stuff, hit me up on LiberaPay or Patreon. Mentions of violence, ableism, and racism, but this isn't an intense essay.

Rogan: Our vessel became a cyborg when we were seventeen, more than half its lifetime ago. That was less than a year after my individual creation, so I have been a cyborg for basically all my life. My cyborginess is important to me, more so than the others here, because far as I know, I was the only one there for the whole process.

( I'm Just So Happy That We Are Cyborg Friends )

Crisis Planning: Go-Bags and GTFO
Summary: “JUST WALK OUT! You can leave!!! […] IF IT SUCKS… HIT DA BRICKS!! real winners quit” --dasharz0ne
Series: Essay (Crisis Planning)
Word Count: 3000
Notes: This one was a request from

hungryghosts, which was then sponsored by a benevolent anon! (Considering our current financial duress, this is a boon. Thank you, anon!)

So, your home’s gone rancid and it’s time to bolt. What do you do?

( YOU GTFO, SON! But how? )

A Cure for Plural Piss-fight Poisoning
Summary: “She was so afraid, so certain that she was a terrible, sick person. When it all came out, though, there was not that much to it, nothing to match those years of knotted-up silent grief. It’s usually like that, you know. We’re rarely as terrible as we believe ourselves to be.” –Dorothy Allison, “Public Silence, Private Terror”
Series: Essay (Plural Relationships)
Word Count: 3000
Notes: You know, I was worried this essay was completely superfluous, but this was the overwhelming victor of the LiberaPay/Patreon poll this month. Y’all sure showed me.

Hello, friend! Are you exhausted by plural piss-fights about tedious minutiae nobody outside a very tiny subculture knows or cares about? Does trying to explain this soul-shriveling nonsense to others only make them stare at you in bewildered incomprehension? Have you felt like you personally are making things worse for multis everywhere, just by existing?

If so, this one’s for you!

( Become Unpissable )

Soul Composting
Summary: “In many cultures, both ancient and modern, three types of dead are almost always presumed to be dangerously restless: those who have no received funeral rites (ataphoi), the untimely or prematurely dead (aōroi), and those who have died violently (biaiothanatoi). The reason that ataphoi are restless seems fairly obvious: no longer among the living, they are not yet in their proper place within the realm of the dead either; they linger at the border in between or move back and forth without peace. The remedy for problems caused by this sort of dead seems obvious as well: performance of proper funeral rites usually does the trick. Both the problems and the remedies connected with the violently dead and the untimely dead are more complex, however..." --Johnston's Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece, pg. 127
Series: Essay
Word Count: 3000 words
Notes: This personal essay won the LiberaPay/Patreon poll this month! It’s about our personal inner workings, death-cycle, and religious practice, and it is written in spiritual terms more than psychological. (If you prefer a psychological discussion of similar territory, see our Memory Work Essays.) It is not intended to be a guide or of general use, though if you do find it helpful, that’s great. Please do not make this into a Star-Bellied Sneetches thing, for the love of all that is dead and holy. Be aware, this essay is about death and heartbreak, and includes some of the writing/art our ghosts have made, which you may find intense! This essay also owes a debt to Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor Frankl.

In LB land, being dead and being a ghost aren’t the same. All ghosts are dead, but not all dead people become ghosts.

( Death! )

Current Mood: accomplished

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Summary: “By placing it into the hands of physicians, spirit sex is relegated to the status of a disease that must be cured. […] by regarding sex with spirits as a psychological disorder of the mind, it can be dismissed as a mere fantasy or illusion, probably induced by some childhood trauma, that has no value to or significance in the so-called real world. The view is that once a person who is under the ‘illusion’ that he or she is having sex with a spirit has been successfully counseled, the aberrant notion will simply fade away like a forgotten dream.” (Tyson, 25)
Series: Essay (sorta)
Word Count: 3000ish
Notes: Rough transcription and expansion of a talk I gave for the Pleasure Pie Sex Salon in November 2023; it was the blow-out winner of the writing poll! Mentions of psychiatric abuse, exorcism, rape, violence, harassment, negative side effects of tantric training, and suicide. Despite all that, this is a happy essay.

Hello! We are Rogan and Mac of LB Lee. We are multi (multiple personalities by popular parlance), we’ve been together since 2007, and we’ve been making comics about it since 2008!

Pretty quickly in, we realized that people had no idea how we have sex, and there was no way for them to learn, asides from asking us rude, intrusive questions. There were no books, no pamphlets, no guides—even the Internet barely mentioned such things, except as “this happens” and “what a freak show!” So we started making works like Alter Boys In Love (2010-2017) and Multi, Orgasmic (2022). But this is a live talk, not a comic, so let’s get into the nuts and bolts: what, exactly, do you do with a noncorporeal partner?

( This is a text-only medium so you just have to imagine us waggling our eyebrows. )

Shared Dreams
Series: Essays
Summary: When headmates share dreams via memory leakage, nightmares, and dream hook-ups, plus the skills and ontology thereof.
Word Count: 4400
Notes: This essay straightforwardly discusses nightmares, flashbacks, and sex. It was sponsored by the Patreon crew! It is also prep work for Multi, Moregasmic because that’s a sex-specific zine and we want a more general thing about shared dreams for plural use.

In December 2020, Rogan, Mac, Miranda, Sneak, Bob, and Grace found themselves all together sharing a dream taking place at a water park that defied physics. They piled into a giant water raft roller coaster, got soaked, and had a blast. (And afterward, Sneak magically dried Grace’s clothes to put the creases back in her suit.)

At their best, shared dreams are probably one of the most spectacular, nifty, gee-whiz things we can do. At their worst, they can be devastating, uncontrollable nightmares. Not all plurals have them, but plenty do, and yet I haven’t been able to find anyone going more in-depth than, “we can do that!” or “I cannot.” So let’s talk about it!

( Headmates Mentioned in this Essay (skip this if you don't need/want the intro) )

( Types of Shared Dreams )

( Regarding Bodies )

( (Not) Lucid Dreaming )

( What Is Real? )

( Shared-ish )

( How Can You Tell A Dream is Shared? )

( Uncomfortable Fears )

( Uncomfortable Desires )

( Why Do Unpleasant Shared Dreams Happen? )

( How Do You Prevent Unpleasant Shared Dreams? )

( Side Note: Nightmare Aftercare )

( How Do You Make Shared Dreams Happen? )

( Citations )

Current Mood: accomplished

Miserectomy: Trans, Multi, and Full of Tumors
Summary: A text-and-image rough transcription of a live talk I gave about my hysterectomy 2/10/2023 for the Pleasure Pie Reproductive Justice Salon.
Word Count: 1700
Notes: Originally performed live 2/10/2023 for the Pleasure Pie Reproductive Justice Salon. It was a fundraiser for abortion funds! In that spirit, if this essay transcript moves you, please consider donating to the Lilith Fund, which helps pregnant Texans.
( Have you room for womb or tumor humor? )

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Chumbawamba - "Ugh! Your Ugly Houses!"

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts on psychological crisis planning, made at the request of

grahamlore. See, considering the inevitable fallout of the pandemic, I decided it was time to remake a new pocket crisis plan for our wallet.

A little square cover for the pocket crisis guide, entitled Don't Do Dumb Shit, LB! with a red stop sign.

( Why Have a Pocket Crisis Plan In Your Wallet/Phone? )

( Side-Note: How to Make a Pocket Zine )

( What Should Your Crisis Plan Have? )

( Building Trust )

( The Measuring Stick: How Bad Is It? )

( What To Do )

( Where to Go )

( Who To Call )

( How to Ask For Help )

( How To Make A Please Help Script )

All Narrators are Unreliable: Comics and the Depiction of the Psyche
Series: Essay
Summary: Comics’ lack of objectivity, and their ability to visually mash physical and psychological realities together, make them great for depicting the mind.
Word Count: 2800
Notes: A rough transcription of a lecture I gave to Hillary Chute’s Graphic Medicine course at Northeastern University on April 14, 2022 and originally posted for my Patreon folks in... May? Includes images with foul language, Japanese homophobic slang, and naked girls, but nothing worse than you’d see in an art museum. Images are included as illustration, not endorsement.
( Soooo many images behind the cut. )

Atheists in Foxholes
Series: Essay
Summary: Religion and its affects on our multiplicity.
Word Count: 3000
Notes: Winner of this month’s Patreon poll, and chock full of content warnings, including just about any you can imagine associated with religion: religiously-inspired abuse, body horror, deific parasitism, mental illness, Hell, death, asphyxia, rape, and suicide. I’m not happy with this one, but I’ve been trying to tell this story for two years now, with no success, and all-done beats all-perfect. EDIT: formatting cleaned up.

“We’re gods,” he reminded her. “I don’t have to be fair.” --Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater, pg. 199.

“The worst possible relationships between humans and some mystically potent being or beings […] that I can imagine, would be […] parasitism. […] Those who think of themselves as ‘enlightened’ may in fact have been infected and, in some hideously intimate way, used.” --Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God, pg. 231-232.

“It is not external entities who are watching us and haunting us; we haunt ourselves.” --Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, pg. 46.

In 2019, I started seeing a shrouded skeleton lady in my headspace, who insisted she was not a headmate but an independently existing cosmic death entity, wearing a culturally appropriate guise for my psychological convenience. The only explanation I had was that my brain was breaking in a new way, so I bunkered down in hopes of waiting out the storm and ignoring this interloper until she went away.

It didn’t work. Instead, I had to start dealing with religion and its effects on our inner workings.

( Alternate title for this essay: The Gods Must Be Assholes. )

Current Mood: distressed

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?

( Sex, violence, and DATA GRAPHICS! )

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.

( Read more... )

Sex-Y’all-Ity
Series: Essay
Summary: Headmate sex, covering topics like: STIs, birth control, consent, shame, privacy, thoughtleak, erotic art, and dream sex.
Word Count: 2800
Notes: Won the Patreon poll by a landslide. Anonymous comments are turned on, so we highly encourage y’all to use them. Share your experiences, your tips, and your own fun activities! Also, this essay owes a debt to Mira Bellwether’s Fucking Trans Women, which is highly recommended, regardless of whether you are a trans woman.

“The most important thing in being able to give and receive love in this way is not to be ashamed […] The physicality of our relationship affirms our mutual existence for us in a way that words alone never could.” —Daphne of Marianna, “Love and Sex Among Alters”, Many Voices, October 1993 issue, pg. 2

( Read more... )

Quick'n'Dirty Plural History, part 4 (Livejournal and the Genic Slapfight) (see also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3)
Summary: "All of our multiples out there, we all love you, all three of us!” --doublegearsystem, AKA protomagicalgirl
Word Count: 3000
Notes: IT'S FINALLY OVER! As always, this post was paid for by my lovely Patreon supporters. Honorable mentions for things I wish I could've mentioned but ran out of time/juice: The In Essence Pledge; Blackbirds and their Laymen’s Guide to Multiplicity; the DSM 5 and tumblr's OSDD fixation; the idiosyncratic tumblr interpretation of structural dissociation; how “multiplicity” was originally an umbrella term, only to then get considered too narrow so “plurality” became the umbrella term, only for other people to start defining that too narrowly.

( Noisemakers and confetti! )

Current Mood: excited

Title: Plural History, Part 3 (see also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 4)
Series: Essay
Summary: "Welcome to the jungle, everyone.” --Wednesday
Word Count: 2700
Notes: Ahaha, remember when this was going to be a two-part essay? Sorry guys. It's going to be four; no way could I cram in LJ-multiplicity, its downfall, and the exodus to tumblr and the genic wars. As usual, this essay was sponsored by the Patreon crew. Also, the (much shorter) video version of this essay went up while I was busy loony-braining. Thanks to our wonderful little studio audience!

( Let us put on a merry plural polka as we march through the earliest online wankery I've been able to find. )

Current Mood: exhausted

Quick’N’Dirty Plural History, part 2 (see also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)
Summary: "“One case is an oddity, two is a coincidence, and three is an epidemic.” --Carol Tavris, “The Widening Scientist-Practitioner Gap,” Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology, 2003, pg. ix.
Word Count: 3200 of at least 9000
Notes: This one won the Patreon vote by a landslide! This is the textual essay version of my video presentation for the Plural Positivity Conference, and sorry guys, even with the “quick and dirty” bit, it’s going to be long.

( This is the part about psuedoscience, lawsuits, abuse tactics, and reality and memory distortion. )

Current Mood: sore

Quick’N’Dirty Plural History (see also: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)
Summary: "I may not be multiple, but I'm certainly plural! " - Jaye
Word Count: 3200 of at least 9000
Notes: This one won the Patreon vote by a landslide! This is the textual essay version of my video presentation for the Plural Positivity Conference, and sorry guys, even with the “quick and dirty” bit, it’s going to be long. Also, I can’t lie, most of my citations and sources for the early folks I only know about thanks to Baldwin’s Oneselves.

We’ve seen online plural groups rise, fall, and disappear into the ether over the years. So much of our history is so ephemeral, and those who forget are doomed to regret. When we remember our history, we learn from its successes and failures, build on its foundation, and take comfort in knowing we’re not alone. So let’s talk plural history!

( Rabid kazoo noises. )

Continue to Part 2!

( Sources and Recommended Reading )

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Boots Randolph - "Yakety Sax"

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Table of Contents

Scribbles and Bits

Entries tagged with lb makes:essay

Crisis Planning: Legal/Medical Stuff

Pluralstories: Why We Did It Like That

Crisis Planning: The Hit-By-A-Bus Plan

We're a Cyborg, and So Am I

Crisis Planning: Go-Bags and GTFO

A Cure for Plural Piss-fight Poisoning

Essay: Soul Composting

Sex With Noncorporeal Beings: A Pleasure Pie Sex Salon Talk

Essay: Shared Dreams

Miserectomy: Trans, Multi, and Full of Tumors

Crisis Planning: How To Make A Pocket Crisis Guide

All Narrators are Unreliable: Comics and the Depiction of the Psyche

Essay: Atheists in Foxholes

Memory Work and Data Graphics

Essay: The Importance of Being Real

Essay: Sex-Y’all-Ity

Quick'n'Dirty Plural History, part 4 (LJ, the Genic Slapfight, and THE END!)

Plural History, part 3: Usenet and its spin-offs and Soulbonders

Plural History part 2: The Memory Wars

Quick'n'Dirty Plural History... Part 1 (1811-1980ish)

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