a Body et al.

Teaching the Body

2026-04-19T15:56:53Z

We had a new guy show up in November, making him our first new long-hauler in 3-4 years, depending how you count it. (He’s the first new semi-daily fronter in 4.) There’s a lot of complications and drama and confusion that causes, but one of the bigger ones is him needing to learn how the Body moves.

Our body is quite disabled, with moderate to severe Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome that means our joints hyperextend and slip from their sockets constantly. We use a cane full time (or we should—certain people like to not use it and then injure ourself), and we also have a rolator, crutches, and wheelchair.

Quite frankly, no one except maybe TW has any idea how to use those aids as well as me. Part of being good at using mobility aids is being good at integrating them into your perception of your body, and especially for headmates who originated as explicitly nondisabled (Riley, AJ, the Knights) that is hard to do! Every long-hauler has a decent sense and doesn’t make serious mistakes, but they’re less efficient.

Monday, though, is brand new. He’s been here for five months, which has given him time to learn, but it took me way too long to realize that I should probably teach him.

It’s easy not to notice how weirdly your body moves, especially when it’s been weird your entire life and got worse gradually. When it gains a new able-bodied inhabitant who spent their school years in physical training, it is much more visible. The way we deal with inclines while hiking, for example, very actively avoids pressure on our knees by having our steps bounce weirdly.

And this is all before trying to explain how to relocate our joints (which is usually my job because I’m the best at it), when to take as-needed medication, what exactly is too much exertion, and other body needs that are so specific to ours.

It’s one of those things that tempts me to make a zine.

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I Can Do What Makes Me Happy

2026-03-26T04:56:55Z

The past couple of weeks have honestly been, for me, revolutionary.

Like virtually everyone alive, I grew up with a lot of restrictions on my autonomy that were eventually reduced. And like many other people, I wasn’t really told what I could do with the new autonomies I was granted. This is an incredibly basic observation. It’s not the point. This is a diary entry, not an essay.

So last week, as we were driving to campus from a meeting with TW’s rabbi, we passed a creek. As I drove on the road running alongside it, I kept thinking how much I would love to be in a creek, to walk through the trees in the sunlight and climb on rocks and stumps. And after a minute or two, I realized that I could literally just fucking do that. So I did—I parked at the Rock Creek Park visitor center (and you can tell them I sent you, it’s a very solid park for being in such a sub/urban location), and we took a forty minute walk together. I realized that we hadn’t been on a hike with any degree of difficulty since Monday joined us, so I took joy in teaching him how to move our janky body which follows different rules than he’d been taught. (He and the Knights are very effective in moving our body the way a body should move, though. I have to imagine combat training and solid memories of an abled body has a lot to do with it.)

We had brain fog too bad for class, so we went to the Hirschhorn, a modern art museum I have a previously unsubstantiated personal beef with. Monday suggested it, and I couldn’t tell if he was antagonizing me, but since he hasn’t gotten to go to any sculpture gardens because of the cold weather I went with it. We wandered, we investigated the gift shop (which is a museum in itself to me—we grew up with museums in many ways, and the gift shops are always fascinating if you view them through that lens), and we took a stroll on the National Mall, which is one of the places in DC that annoys us the most, but also has a lot of open air where we could see the ready-to-storm sky overhead.

I went to my D&D session, and I asked a member of my campaign for help physically grounding when I was too brain fogged to understand the session. I had a panic attack after, and I asked a friend who lived on campus if I could go over for a hug. These were very hard and brave things to do. They were also very kind things people did for me. I’m proud of myself, though not as proud as Riley is, who almost started crying over it? Which confused me a bit, but alright.

The next day, we took our first walk through one segment of our home creek in months. Monday got to endure me pointing out everything about it. I love my local creeks dearly, what can I say. I should make a zine.

Yesterday, I found out one of my favorite bands was performing in DC at 6PM, with the show beginning at 7PM. And I just went, because I could! And it was a truly fantastic show—Moon Walker supported by Sarah and the Safe Word, whose set I mostly missed, and Demi the Daredevil, whose set almost made me cry twice. I got my battle jacket signed by all three lead singers, and also had great conversations with two of them. Jeff (Demi) gave me his book for free because of woke (by which I mean it came up that I’d bolted to the show straight from a Power Privilege and Inequality class and we talked a bit about how my major rules), and it’s been a beautiful read so far. I’ll recommend it properly once we finish it.

I’m working very hard to live a life I love. I’m lucky that I get so many chances. Here’s to being braver and walking by the creek. -crow&

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Happy Purim! (Welcome Back, Deadbeat)

2026-03-05T07:36:46Z

Purim sameach! This Monday we went to our shul’s Purim party, and we wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Jewish holidays really only fall into two categories; solemn and sober observation, and FUCK YOU WE LIVED. Purim is firmly in the latter camp. I’m not going to explain the holiday, because Wikipedia will do a better job, but it’s fun. It’s awesome. We love our synagogue and we love our rabbi, who is a massive ally in every sense (plurality included).

We watched two schpiels—the first was the normal one, but the second was written by fifth graders from our synagogue’s childcare program. Our synagogue always has schpiels connected to modern day issues, and this year it was a big old fuck Trump, fuck Miller, fuck Musk, and most of all, fuck ICE. (The kids had Stephen Miller in the role of Haman. Their version talked a lot about immigrant rights and immigrant-Jew solidarity. I think the kids are alright.)

Crow&: Also, TW finally decided to show up. (We used singular pronouns up top, but we don’t know if it was me or TW writing that. Or both.)

TW: So maybe I haven’t been around in a substantial sense since last year.

Crow&: Which is very frustrating when someone is half of why we picked our major.

Anyway, Purim is over, but we try to carry its joy with us for as long as we can. Let’s see if it gets us through midterms. (And look at us, posting!)

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One week left to submit an obituary/contribution

2025-10-18T03:32:12Z

Just putting out a reminder that submissions for the first (and potentially only) printing for Riley’s plural obituary project close in one week, on October 25th. If you’re not sure if something counts or are generally on the fence, we encourage you to submit or reach out to us. Details on the project can be found here:
https://bodyetal.dreamwidth.org/19572.html

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Call for obituaries for dead, dormant, and integrated headmates (& similar beings)

2025-09-28T05:39:07Z

(Note: Submissions may be open indefinitely, but anyone who wants to be included in the first printing should submit by October 25 2025. This post is also available as a Google Doc.)

I’m Riley of a Body et al., a plural collective best known for our online work on plural education and our original zines. I’m working on a project compiling obituaries for members of plural collectives or adjacent beings (alters, soulbonds, dæmons, imaginary friends, etc.) who are dead, dormant, integrated, or otherwise gone for the foreseeable future and mourned.

This is an intentionally broad prompt; the only requirements are that obituaries be for someone gone in a way comparable to death (whatever that means to you&), and that they must be individual entities without their own bodies (a system’s collective body dying would not be included).
Disenfranchised grief is a near universal experience among plurals who have lost headmates. Being denied the right to acknowledge losses as death (or comparable to it) or to publicly mourn is a deeply damaging experience. I would like to make a public record of our grief, and in a format historically restricted to the physical deaths of people with their own bodies; obituaries and elegies.

Submission information:

Obituaries for the first printing must be submitted by October 25th 2025; there is no guarantee that a second edition will be made, though I hope to make one.
Submissions should be in the form of an obituary with an optional image of the subject included, ideally around 200 words (40 at least, 250 at most). For examples, you can see this obituary-writing guide aimed at singlet deaths, and this example obituary for a headmate. You do not need to adhere strictly to the format.
Obituaries should be for your own headmates/alters/etc.—obituaries for headmates in other peoples’ systems should be written with their consent, with contact information provided so we can verify. Very limited exceptions may be made if anonymized.
By submitting, you are agreeing to the contents of your submission being used in a commercial project without compensation or retraction, and confirming that all submitted materials are your own and made without the use of generative AI. (In less legalistic terms, this collection will be for sale, everything you submit—text, art, photos—needs to be your own original creation, and you can’t take back submissions after printing.)
Email submissions to headmateobituaries at gmail dot com—you can submit as many obituaries as you like, but please try to send them in the same message!
Questions can be sent via email, PMs, or private communication if you have my contact information.

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now four times dumber!

2025-08-13T05:28:07Z

unrelated to our last post, we got our wisdom teeth out yesterday! given that we now have four adults present (and four long-haulers) we're thinking of just splitting the teeth up (because obviously we kept them). suggestions for what to do with the teeth are welcome! we're probably each going to do our own thing—our dear riley is trying to decide how to make their tooth into a horrible pony bead bracelet, g-d help me.

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Maybe We Want a Sociology Degree

2025-08-13T05:25:02Z

For a while now, we’ve been interested in pursuing a degree in psychology—a PhD, if we’re lucky. That’s mostly driven by our collective deep interest in plurality (obviously), but we have a fairly broad range of psychology interests. Since virtually all graduate degree-holding experts in the field regarding plurality are psychologists (or occasionally bioethicists), it seemed like the obvious choice.

Anyway, cut to us about a week ago, grabbing a spoon out of the cutlery drawer and then realizing we didn’t have any reason to grab a spoon and then putting it back, after which Crow& realized that fey was weirdly unbothered by how much more attention feyr joke art got to her serious work on Tumblr, because fey was just so interested in the social factors in that happening. So we walked out to our parents in the living room (two arts management professors who teach at a uni we might transfer to) and asked if their university had any sociology and art classes—which, of course, it did.

And then we realized that we've always liked sociology, and got to thinking about why we even wanted to study psychology in the first place.

Our motivation for pursuing a psych degree for the past couple of years has been an interest in neurodiversity and plurality, and a general sense of interest in how people think, but we're primarily interested in how those function socially and within identity, as well as being staunchly antipsychiatry. One of the most important aspects of antipsychiatry to us is refusing to let psychology define plurality. So why exactly were we so ready to throw ourself into seven years of study toward the end of defining plurality through psychology? (To be clear, we know there are antipsych psychologists, we planned to be one of those.)

The obvious thing is what we said earlier—that all our examples of academics focusing on plurality are psychologists. But we aren't that interested in the psychology of plurality anymore, and haven't been in years. We're pretty well-informed about it, but we're so much more interested in what makes personhood than we are in what makes a brain develop a person. And anyway, psychology can only carry us as far as the medical model and individual care. It doesn't cover culture and history and philosophy, which is our true love here.

We're not entirely sure why it's taken so long for this to occur to us, but we're glad it did before transferring out! (And the psychology special interest remains, but the desire for the PhD might not. We're taking developmental psychology this semester and waffling on whether we want to enter social psychology. Luckily, there's a good amount of time to decide when all your options overlap so heavily!)

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Visiting Boston For Real This Time!

2025-06-26T06:43:26Z

we’ll be in boston for the last week of july to attend a funeral, and will have a lot of free time to putter about! if folks have recommendations for places to go and shit to see, let us know :) we also would like to find places to distribute/donate our zines, so if folks know of libraries/archives/collectives that would take them please tell us. (also a reminder that we are 20 and cannot get into places that card.)

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Soulsickness [Crow&]

2025-06-23T08:22:38Z

Riley has come to believe that we absolutely can get sick in headspace, have for a long time, and that the rest of us are just in a bizarre sort of denial about this. I didn’t agree with them. As we’ve said before, our headspace is not “real.” It’s not tangible or self-sustaining. “It’s the same thing as picturing an apple” has basically become our catchphrase.

But there is something we’ve been failing to mention (and honestly ignoring): our inner selves are affected by our outer selves’ condition. When we say people “collapse out of front,” sometimes it’s just kind of a metaphor for dropping out quickly because of fatigue or stress or whatever. But sometimes we will also see them literally collapse in the void. Sometimes getting kicked out of front would mean someone appearing and falling like they’d been thrown. I can cry when the body can’t, because my inner self does.

I worked myself sick last week, and the body got sick along with me, but I kept symptoms both in and out of front and when I fronted the body was worse. That wasn’t the first time—I’m the undefeated champ of psychosomaticism—but it was the first time that I was able to see my inner self as being sick too, rather than just stressed.

This is something we need to poke at as a concept more. Honestly, we’d have liked to make this post a breakdown of it (because more diverse interior experiences need to be represented in general), but it would require so many definitions and so much deconstruction that it’ll have to come another time. For now, we’re mostly just acknowledging it.

(The title is misleading. Soulsickness means a different thing for us. It was just a cool word—post title will change if I settle on something more accurate.)

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We’re Giving the Keynote at the Plural Positivity World Conference!

2025-05-12T03:36:27Z

A bit late to mention it here, sorry, but yes! We’ll be delivering the keynote in two weeks (May 24th, 10am EST).

We are incredibly proud and honored, honestly. We worked really hard on our session, and we can’t wait for folks to see it! Crow&, Riley, and TW cowrote it, with each of us recording roughly a third of it. This was our first time trying that, and we love how it turned out.

Unfortunately, ticket prices are way higher this year due to Airmeet changing their ticket structure for the worse, but our session (minus the Q&A) will be on the plural events YouTube channel!

Information on the conference itself is here:
https://powertotheplurals.com/pluralpositivityworldconference2024/

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WE GOT STERILIZED MOTHERFUCKERS

2025-04-04T11:10:30Z

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.

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What is a Body Native?

2025-04-02T02:39:02Z

(To be extremely clear, this is terminology we use for our own collective. We are not suggesting that this is how it works for everyone, or even how it should work. You are free to adopt the phrase for your own collective, but please don’t treat it like an implicit/universal hierarchy.)

So, one term that comes up relatively often in discussing our headmates is the concept of a body native. The most concise definition we use is that they’re people who “belong to the Body,” but that doesn’t actually make much sense or explain a whole lot.

More specifically, body natives are people who are not only brainmade, but explicitly connected to this body and its lineage. They have physical traits within the realm of possibility for this body, they can be traced back to a host of some kind, they generally split instead of “spawning,” and in our case, they usually have much stronger presence of self (our jargon for amount of power a headmate and their presence has, ie ability to front) than non-body natives.

We want to be very clear that body natives have no more inherent claim to this body and our life than any other headmate. For us, that is exclusively determined by how much a headmate wants to be involved in our life, and how present they are. They also are not any more “real” than any other kind of headmate. It’s the same way that someone who moves to New York is just as much a person and just as entitled to vote for their governor as someone who was born there; they are a person, and they are a part of our collective.

The main difference is just how easy it is to keep front, and how much of our complex/childhood trauma you have grandfathered in. (Our body natives generally bear the burden of complex trauma near-exclusively, non-body natives have only their own separate baggage.)

We often avoid the term in public because we don't want people to devalue or dehumanize non-body natives, but it is relevant to us, especially at a time where one of the three most active adults here is not a body native. And we definitely wanted an explainer to point to, so here y'all go!

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Stuff to Do in Boston?

2025-03-14T17:41:27Z

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!

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zine and/or shirt ideas - original, donut steel!!1! >:(

2025-03-07T07:08:28Z

crow&: none of these are guaranteed, but i have ideas kicking around in my head and i want someone to know them. so here’s some zines we want to make (especially me)!

- plural media reviews by us!
a minizine that would likely cover moon knight (show + comics), united states of tara, severance, and something else that i really wanted to include but can’t remember for my fucking life! (this one has a single page drafted)

- lipstick butch
this will either be a zine or a t-shirt. unclear. something about my relationship with butchness as a femme butch

- My Cause is Obscenity (I’m For It)
stolen tom lehrer quote, probably a t-shirt, maybe booty shorts. as a zine, would be about erotica and kink politics probably, but i’m not sure i feel like making that zine before i’m more informed than i am now

- Sex-Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll
sex hormone cocktail sequel, more hrt focused—this one is definitely happening if we ever have the fucking energy for it lmao, it’ll be a bit research heav

- We Do Not Have Wi-Fi, Talk to Each Other, Start a Revolution, Pretend It’s 1969
real bodyetal-heads may recognize this as the title of an existing plural minizine by us. the new idea is for a bigger zine on getting the fuck offline and finding community that isnt plural-specific, but we can’t think of a better title for it than that. idk, is it kosher to re-use a title? the minizine has a subtitle, so… (i really want to re-use the title damn it. i just dont want to cause problems)

- Toothcare (working title)
zine on how to take care of your teeth when you’re not able to take care of your teeth—AKA a list of alternatives to brushing for 3 minutes with adult toothpaste and an electric toothbrush. judgement-free and with the full range of shit we do. companion to BABY TEETH, a dental trauma zine we’re almost done with and would like to release at the same/similar time

thoughts and suggestions welcome, i am super spitballing

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Untitled Haunting by Statues [Poem]

2025-02-08T06:53:11Z

one of crow&’s “fugue poems” (AKA poems that fey feels suddenly compelled to write and knocks out immediately), on an aspect of our plurality we haven’t decided whether to explain otherwise. partial free verse/elegy, if you’re nerdy about that kind of thing.

( CW: vague allusions to potential ego death and trauma )

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happy 4 yearz of the safety pins!!!

2025-02-07T02:48:24Z

yesterday (feb 5) marked 4 yearz of us identifying as plural!!! even tho we probably had our syscovery at least a year earlier, we were konvinced we “didnt kount” for agez, meaning we dont know that og date and also dont rlly celebrate it.

but we celebrate this 1!!

we had a bit of a crisis a week ago, and while we’re ok now, our functioning haznt returned 2 normal. if we were more in our regular state wed have made a nicer post, but i think this workz 4 now!

we still did some nice stuff 4 ourselvez, tho!! the kiddo got new clothez (they havent owned any clothing in 2+ yearz), i got new kraft suppliez, TW has a new pen, and krow got a new skirt. i also finally got permission 2 kut our hair, tho i havent gotten around 2 it!

we’re rlly tired, and a bit stressed, but rlly happy. we luv having each other X)

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don’t dream it, be it!

2025-01-27T06:11:26Z

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!

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Coming Back to a World That Didn't Mourn You - Dormancy Trauma in Non-Hosts

2025-01-25T00:33:27Z

[Riley’s foreword:]
this iz written from my experience, + while im rlly frustrated at the lack of writing on this from the perspective of ppl like me, i don’t like writing informational stuff @ all. i kant write in a professional style, i’m not rlly that good of an educator, and more importantly i dont want 2 be. instead, this is being written (@ my request) by my headmatez, using only my perspective. u kan think of it as an interview.
i would like 2 politely ask that system hosts with experiences of dormancy (either their own or of mourning a headmate’z) not make this post about themselvez. trust me, i kno hostz experience dormancy trauma. it’z the only kind ive ever seen discussed.

———

Dormancy is rarely talked about, and when it is, it generally only focuses on the host perspective.

( Read more... (CW: Dormancy, trauma/PTSD, host bias, pluralphobia) )

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The Egg Carton Study Guide

2025-01-18T04:59:21Z

We’ve been meaning to make a resource for folks who are new to their own plurality for a while now (especially because we have a tendency to crack egg cartons), so here it is—all the stuff we tend to wish we had in one place when a friend is questioning or has a syscovery! We tried to order the sections by importance/urgency—plurality primers are at the very bottom because this guide assumes you know what plurality is already.

Note that because of the type of collective we are, resources will skew towards multiples and non-disordered systems, but we tried to include broad topics. We’ll also be using the terms “system" and “headmate" here for ease of communication.

(If you want good compilation of general resources, we are big fans of Healthy Multiplicity as a starting point. Also, suggestions welcome, but this is meant for newbies—hence the title—so we’re trying not to add too much! We plan to update this a few more times.)

( Getting Started )
( Tools )
( The Stuff You'll Invariably Freak Out Over )
( External Safety, Relationships, and Abuse )
( In-System Relationships, Dynamics, and Abuse )
( Headspaces )
( Coming Out & Being Yourselves )
( Introjects, Otherkin, and Nonhumanity )
( Dissociation, Trauma, Therapy, and Memory Work )
( The Discourse (Please, Save Yourself/ves) )
( Integration, Dormancy, and Death )
( Miscellaneous )
( Plurality Primers )

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we have come down with Circles Disease

2025-01-17T18:44:09Z

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.

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Making Eye Contact With Depression

2025-01-12T03:35:04Z

Depression can be extremely sneaky, especially when you’ve had at least one depressive disorder your entire life. It has a way of creeping up on you, of convincing you that actually the world has always been grey and you’ve always been tired and everything’s always been this irritating.

And sometimes it just completely fumbles and knocks over half a dozen pots and pans while it’s sneaking through your kitchen and you’re kind of upset to see it there but mostly you’re just second-hand embarrassed.

Anyway, right now, it’s the latter. I see you, buddy, you’re not as slick as you hoped. Sorry.

In depression’s defense, it’s kind of hard to hide when the body’s depressed but not a single headmate is, so people just become depressed upon switching in and feel fine as soon as they switch out. Not exactly subtle.

So I’m going to do art, make myself food, and sit near windows until this passes—which it will. The main downside is people get frontstuck easily when we’re depressed, but I can survive that just fine.

Maybe I’ll paint a landscape or a portrait instead of just thinking about it.

- Crow&

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In Which TW Only Writes

2024-12-30T06:07:43Z

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.

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Mx TW Goes to Arlington!

2024-12-23T04:44:10Z

Riley: They should invent a car that just drives itself to Arlington.
Crow&: They should invent a car that just fucking kills you the third day in a row you end up driving to Arlington.
TW: Indeed.
Riley: Tee-Dubz…
Crow&: YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON WHO HAS NOT HAD TO DRIVE TO ARLINGTON THIS WEEKEND!
TW, regretting speaking: But this is about the body being tired.
Crow&: I don’t care, it’s your turn.
TW, bargaining: …Me driving doesn’t make the body any less exhausted, you know.
Crow&: Fuck off, you’re driving.
TW, bargaining harder: And Riley only drove part of the way.
Crow&: Riley sucks at driving!
Riley: I do suck at driving.
TW: Fine, but I get the body for the library.

(Arlington is just an hour away—not a lot by DMV standards—but the drive is unusually grueling in a way we can’t articulate. Something about the I-495 really just makes us wanna fucking die.)

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To Eat & to Cook Is to Be Human

2024-12-19T07:18:35Z

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.

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memory work is a bitch but it demands RECORDS!

2024-12-15T07:08:47Z

this is mostly a note to self: write down how we're doing memory work! ideally share it for other people!

we've been doing a lot of contextual memory work and prolonged exposure trauma therapy. this is having results—we're remembering shit, often at random times, and a lot of it is useful.

our amnesia is generally a lot more "recall failure" than "recall inhibition" (we don't have amnesia barriers so much as we have a very poorly organized memory filing cabinet), which means we get a lot less of the flashback-style recalls and memory steamrollers that are popularly discussed in multi/dissociative spaces and literature.

instead, we get a recall trigger, and then that recall tends to set off another recall, and along the way we find useful information.
for example, "we experienced online abuse" > "we were harassed in a chat room" > "wait, that chat room was one we visited early in transition and on the platform chatzy" > "we can find our old chatzy login to find more records" > "looking at the records unveiled an alias we'd forgotten using". it's handy! it's also a bit of a pain to document, and a kind of memory work we do not see jack shit about.

so, all that to say we hope to write our own resource (or at least recollection) on the subject, in no small part because we need the records to know how this worked! we are a disaster of constant recall failures!

in the meantime while we wait on making a resource, we are finding the LB Lee memory work essays somewhat handy—mostly the prep ones, because narrative memory work is both not in our current wheelhouse and seemingly not the thing we need to do at all, possibly ever. if you have the "memories are actively concealed" type of amnesia you will probably get more out of the memory work essays than we did.

but we really want to make—or find—something that better applies to our form of amnesia and memory work, because there is truly fucking nothing, which we just confirmed while retrieving the essay link and checking comments!

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