(all quotes are from Akwaeke Emezi, "claiming the center: Akwaeke Emezi," Locus: the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field #773 June 2025, pg. 58-59)

In terms of talking about my work, people often take the spiritual side as an allegory or a metaphor for something else--sometimes for queerness or transness, but for me, it's not. [...] When I use Western language to describe myself, I'm translating. Even when I call myself queer, or I call myself trans, I'm stepping away from my actual Igbo spiritual center, and using Western language, and translating to make myself more accessible. It's honestly a form of masking, because indigenous spirituality is illegible in a Western context. Because of white supremacy, but also because the West does not acknolwedge indigenous realities as real...

( On returning home, and how the work of Akwaeke Emezi opened the door for us. )

Realized we may well have never outright said this, so we might as well make it clear: over the past few years, some of the LB alter family has grown more hivemind-y, and at times with less differentiation, in a way that doesn't bother us.

There are a few demographics in here, and the ones we call the "alters" are all people who split off the original girl who inhabited this vessel (Mori, Rawlin, Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda), rather than folks who had their own lives and came here from elsewhere (Biff, Falcon, Grey, Bob, and Mac). The alters are like threads of a greater rope, and we unravel and rebraid ourselves sometimes to achieve our goals, though only while working on corporeal tasks that engross us, such as working on a story. When engrossed in making group art, it can sometimes be hard for us to tell who's doing what! (Other times it is not. Coming In or Staying Out was very much Rogan drawing, while the Rawlin comics are all Mori drawing.) And constantly interrupting ourselves from the work to ask, "who am I?" is pointless and annoying, because in that moment, it doesn't matter.

This has also been happening sometimes while chatting with people or posting. We sometimes don't tag our entries because we don't know who's talking or care so much, or we share enough of an opinion that it no longer matters being like, "all the alters agree on this paragraph though Sneak questions Sentence 6."

Mori, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda can braid like this without too much trouble, but Rawlin especially and also Gigi are still pretty separate, presumably because they still have a lot of memories and history that remain buried and lost to us. As we deal with that, perhaps they'll be able to rebraid with us easier in the future.

The braiding happens without our conscious effort, and we unravel just as fluidly. We don't think of it or call it fusion or integration, because neither have the right feel or connotations. We were threads ripped from a greater cloth, which can never be remade again. Now we are braiding ourselves in a new way that suits us, when it suits us, a cord and not a cloth.

Took me a while, but I made an archive.org profile and am slowly uploading the multi stuff I've bookscanned and OCRed for posterity.

It is sloooooow as molasses, and I have over a hundred issues of Many Voices to upload, so it's definitely going to take a while.

Also hey, I uploaded that weird mysterious Wayfarer 1 vid, for those of who you were dying to see it! (Never uploading a vid again; I think I had to leave my computer for an hour or so.)

EDIT: made it through three issues uploaded and got clocked as spam because the metadata is nigh-identical except for the date. ...maybe I'll just upload them in year chunks, instead of each individual file, because holy crap otherwise I'll be in a hospital bed by the time I get the whole thing up.

We found Paris Williams’s book, Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift In Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis, thirdhand in a free box a couple years back, and gave it a shot. Super glad we did!

Paris Williams was a hang gliding instructor and a pilot when he experienced what others would call psychosis. He dealt with it outside the psych system, then devoted himself to studying how to handle such experiences and got a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. His book is at times awkwardly formatted, but it really made us think differently about our own brain and what it might be doing when the wheels come off its bus. Williams has put it up for free online, and it’s well worth checking out: https://rethinkingmadness.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Rethinking_Madness_completeBook.pdf

This post, however, is about only one brief tangent in this book that we keep returning to.

Williams describes “a woman who found herself in an existentially untenable situation with what I believe may have been a virtually nonexistent window of tolerance [aka, an inability to handle anything] as the result of a very traumatic childhood. In very early adulthood, her entire personal paradigm (her beliefs and experiences of herself and the world) underwent a profound transformation that clearly involved a radical shift within both her cognitive constructs [how she saw reality/herself] and her window of tolerance [how much she could handle], a modification that has remained relatively stable to this day, nearly forty years later. Within her new belief system, she experiences herself as a very powerful being on a messianic quest, and she also experiences herself as belonging to a very benevolent and supportive family outside consensus reality.(footnote) ... Her life has become an inspiring model of compassion and sympathetic joy for all beings... To this day, she continues to do quite well, having a relatively high sense of wellbeing and meeting her needs at least as well as the average person whose personal paradigm is more in alignment with consensus reality.

“Footnote: ...just because such beliefs and experiences are clearly anomalous relative to consensus reality (at least within mainstream Western society), this does not nullify the possibility of their having some degree of validity. [etc etc]” (182)

Williams doesn’t say anything more about this particular woman, but we think about her a lot, and take comfort in her anonymous forty-year example.

erinptah did a deep dive tracking the oft-thrown-around, rarely-cited statistic that "1% of people have DID!" Check it out, she did her homework!

Hey guys! We got an email from the Alexandrites:

"Susan in our system is doing a photography project for school and was wondering if you would be willing/available to be photographed some time in the next few weeks? The project is supposed to incorporate multiple exposure techniques, and she thought it would be interesting to use that to capture different members of one system in a single photo. [...] if you know any other systems who would be into this, let us know, it would be super helpful 😅

"I'm only able to do the Northeast, maybe as far up as Southern NH/VT, but would prefer the general tri-state area of MA, CT, and RI. Some time in the next 2-3 weeks, the absolute last day I can do is November 20th.

"The photos will be used for a school photography project. The only people who will find out the subjects are plural will be the 7 people in my class. There is a chance the photo will be displayed in the hallway of the school, but probably not a very high chance since it will be the end of the semester. If they are particularly good, they may go into my portfolio, but that's not something I display online, only something I show to some people in person."

If anyone is interested, you can contact Alexandrites at wearealexandra@gmail.com or WeAreAlexandra on Discord!

Do you have visual art depicting your group? We would like to see it and save copies for posterity (and maybe a slideshow).

All mediums and skill levels welcome, all interpretations of “family portrait” and “many-selved.” Please give a date and artist/s name for attribution and citation purposes. You can link in the comments below or send them to us at loonybrain at healthymultiplicity.com

We can’t accept non-digital copies; space forbids. :p

Hi everybody! For the past few years, us and grahamlore have been running an offline multi meet-up in the Boston area. We only manage it once a year or so, but it's been a humble success and we're opening it up to new locals if they're interested in joining the mailing list!

grahamlore and us bring snacks and art supplies, and the group's mostly met outdoors during the warmer months to protect our immunocompromised members. Vaccinations are required, masks optional. We have also in the past had a multi movie night, which I'm hoping to start again, using the Video Underground, a micro theater in JP!

If you want to join the mailing list, please leave a name and email address in the comments below. You do not need a Dreamwidth account; anonymous comments are turned on, and all comments are screened, so only I will see them.

Hope to see you there!

Rogan: hey friends, for those of you who've been poisoned by plural political backbiting, I have found the perfect palate-cleanser: Go read stuff about other forms of bodysharing, bodyborrowing, and manyselvedness that have NOTHING TO DO with the subcultures that poisoned you.

( Ask me how! )

Thanks to hungryghosts for telling me about this! The San Diego LGBT Community Center is having an in-person plurality event on Mondays, 5:30-7:00 PM, including one on August 28th.

"Plurality is a safe space for those exploring, learning, and growing in their multiplicity journey. Whether you are questioning or have a well-established system, we would love to have you& present."

Dunno if any readers are in San Diego, but you never know!