a Body et al.

that’s it that’s the post

we are very happy

we also might post on how our plurality is affected by anesthesia/surgery at some point, but right now we’re just recovering and living our best life/ves :3 -crow& et al.

Probably weird use of Dreamwidth, but we’re going to be in Boston for a day or two next week with fairly abundant free time. We are especially interested in libraries, queer cafes, and anywhere we can leave zines!

as it turns out, changing things that are making you unhappy with yourself that you know you want to change makes you feel a whole lot better!

i’ve been really hating my profile image on here—it was a photo of me, and not even a bad photo, but something about having it next to my journal entries made me feel gross. i’m still not really clear on what, exactly—dysphoria, maybe? i’d been wanting to change it to something illustrated for weeks, if not months, but i just didn’t.

so i finally changed it (to my pluralkit icon—it’s the picture on this post) and, would you believe it, immediately felt a whole lot happier! now i just have to update old posts, which i’ll do in the morning.

likewise, while i really like having longer hair (the body’s hair now reaches our shoulders when straight), and while i really like having a mohawk, it turns out that we cannot have both. partly because my headmates don’t like it, and partly because a very long unstyled mohawk looks like an undercut but with a weird duck tail in the back.

so last night i trimmed it into an undercut, and whaddya know, we all feel better!

i am currently in autism burnout hell which is making me unusually change sensitive, but these little changes have both made me feel a lot less like i’m crumbling to ash. working up the emotional energy to fix stuff you know how to fix is hard, but super worth it, as it turns out!

we’re down with the sickness.
by which i mean circles.
by which i mean there’s circles on our face. they hurt.

we do not know the origin of these circles. they’re all about dime sized, dry, painful, slightly pink, and flaky. sort of like a bad sunburn, except they don’t hurt constantly.

the first circle was in whatever that divot between your lower lip and chin is called, the second circle on our inner cheek near our upper lip/philtrum (which we do know the word for), and the third is on our eyelid, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

we will be seeing a dermatologist about the mystery circles if we can get ourselves to make a phone call (which is a coin toss). for now we are just slapping unscented moisturizer on the circles and telling ourselves it’s helping.

I have nothing worth writing about, but I’m on the Metro and my book was left at home. So, all that’s left is to live up to my name.

I am among one of the oldest entities in this body. It is difficult to know the exact timing, though Crow& is making a valiant effort to pin it down. The use of entities is also intentional; my personhood postdates my existence (as opposed to someone like Riley, who emerged as an individual). We were a dissociative child, not a multiple one, and despite my distaste from the term, I existed as a “part.”

I have memories that belong to me going back at least a decade. I was angry—incredibly, incandescently, murderously angry. But I didn’t have the strength for murder. At best, I had the strength to scream. And I did scream.

Sometimes Crow& is surprised at what I remember as mine. It’s not feyr fault; fey’s incredibly young (arguably younger than Riley), but tends to assume fey’s been here a lot longer. There’s some interesting logistics to that, which I don’t care to explain here. But I’ve been here for a very, very long time.

I wonder, sometimes, why the Body didn’t end up being mine. My bet is that it’s because we became safer, and I had less to do. I spent my entire life fighting, and I was not prepared for the adjustment. I survived it, clearly, but I did not thrive. I retained my antisociality, and I continued on my track to becoming an adult sociopath. The others made friends—the Sols and then the Crows especially—but I did not engage with them. I still rarely do.

The first thing that grounded me in the world once screaming was no longer needed was writing, and writing angrily. I wrote most of our essays (which became Instagram posts) under our pseudonym of Sol V Díaz, to the point that I was originally known as the Writer and when it was time for us to decide on last names, I was given Díaz without a second thought. I find my listing of “Díaz, TW” to be mildly amusing. Díaz, the writer. How on the nose.

But then we stopped writing. We dropped out of high school, the environment that fueled most of my fury and inspiration. We developed a spinal injury that made it incredibly difficult to put words together. I became depressed, but we had no frame of reference for depression in sociopaths, so me and my headmates alike assumed I was simply bored. I’m slightly surprised it didn’t kill me. I suppose I do have an incredibly persistent… well, perhaps not a will to live, but determination not to die.

I do have a new thing worth being in the world for. Actually, it’s two; college (and our efforts at a psychology PhD), and my conversion to Judaism. I still write, too, but I am a writer not because I love writing so much as it is because it is my best means of action. I do not write just for the sake of it. This post is the closest I’m willing to get to that.

Riley has been having a rough time of things the past couple days, mostly regarding not being treated—and not living—like a person, including treatment by people who in theory respected their person. And I’ve been having trouble with our eating disorder—not in a “I’m opposed to eating” sense (I absolutely am not!), but in forgetting that I need to. It is very easy for me to skip meals without noticing, especially on weeks like this where my schedule is wonky.

Anyway, last night, Riley had the realization that pog couldn’t remember their last proper meal. The body was fed, but pog couldn’t remember eating anything but candy or cake while fronting for months, if not over a year. Pog was already feeling terrible about not being treated like a real person*, so pog decided they were going to eat proper food: leftover Kraft macaroni.
(*post intentionally access-locked)

And it was great. It hadn’t occurred to that until just that moment how humanizing it was to eat food—and how dehumanizing it was not to. None of us have much of a desire to eat for the sake of eating, just to eat for body fuel or to have our very favorite foods, and Riley’s favorite foods are mostly… well, not food. (Airheads and Monster Energy do not count, have never counted, and will never count.)

One of the only evolutionary traits truly unique to humans is that we cook food. Cooking food has a profound social, cultural, and evolutionary impact on humans. To cook is to be human, and even if that cooking is microwaving mac ‘n’ cheese, it makes us feel like a person.

I’ve found myself cooking for the sake of my own selfhood, too. The first time I actually cooked a meal (like, with ingredients), I was so emotional for a reason I couldn’t quite place. Part of it was what it meant for my eating disorder recovery, my independence, my disability. But now I’m sure part of it was that it was such a fundamentally human act, and one I’d been deprived of all my life.

Riley’s planning to find a kind of meal that pog both likes and can easily cook. We’re too disabled for super involved cooking—fifteen minutes of standing is our hard limit—but Riley isn’t exactly someone with a highly refined palette. Pog doesn’t want a Michelin Star, pog wants humanity.

i've been struggling a bit lately with the fact that there are a lot of tattoos i want--and i mean a LOT--that it just wouldn't be reasonable to get on the body.

it's stuff like lyrics that are only significant to me, or elaborate art pieces, and generally just stuff that we would never reach a consensus of. i'm already disproportionately involved in our tattoos (i did three of them myself, and the fourth is one that "belongs" mostly to me), so getting more tattoos that just represent myself is pushing it. but i do really, really want those tattoos.

so, anyway, it just occurred to me that i could get them... but in headspace. i haven’t tried, but i’m sure i could manage it.

our headspace isn’t real in any sense of the word—it’s not real to us, it’s not substantial in our life, we barely ever use it in any way and we don’t really experience things in it. our appearances in it are mostly based on our assumptions—i have brown eyes in headspace because i know i have brown eyes. (this is also why, for non-intives, our appearances strongly resemble the body—we have automatic knowledge of what our body looks like and generally see it as ours.)

it probably won’t be enough to fulfill my desire to properly get the tattoos, and i don't even really expect it to stick, but it's worth a shot!

(also, any tips or ideas from headspace tattoo-havers are welcome--i'm especially curious on how they work in other headspaces!)

TW’s working on a very intense (private) essay, so to help us feel a bit less miserable in the meantime, we thought we’d put together our reading lists. Here goes! (Books are not in any particular order.)

Collective List:

• When Rabbit Howls, the Troops for Truddi Chase - In progress


• On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder - A re-read, but we have amnesia of the first time


• Multiple Personality: An Hispanic Perspective, Alfonso Martínez-Taboas - In progress, paused, need to return this to [system friend]

Crow&’s List:

• The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa) - In progress, paused


• The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa (& heteronyms) - In progress, paused


• Some lesbian multi erotica we forgot the title of


• Ender’s Game and the rest of the Ender Quintet, Orson Scott Card - Low priority, it’ll be our dozenth or so re-read


• A Starless Clan: Star, Erin Hunter

TW’s List:

• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley


• The Jewish Body, Melvin Konner - In progress, paused, and overdue at Arlington Central Library


• Sociopath: A Memoir, Patric Gagne - On hold at library


• The Talmud

The Kiddo’s List:

• Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom, Louis Sachar - The only Wayside we never read


• Dear Little Ones, Jade Miller - If we can get our hands on a paper copy, ideally