Many Authors, One Body
Defying expectations of silence and shame
No one likes to disclose things that may cause readers to run away. But I have decided that hiding any longer is a waste of time.
I am actually we, distinct people living in one body.
We have individual names and experiences, and cumulatively call everyone in our body “the Redwoods.”
Everyone says, “hi!”
We Redwoods get along pretty well after many years of living together. We live in a kind of internal community, and work to raise awareness about multiplicity, sometimes known as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or the experience of being many people, parts, or alters in one body. (We prefer people.) We have many other passions, including politics, dance, nature, mindfulness, music, and we like to write.
When we Redwoods want to publish, we get stuck.
Do we “make it easy” for readers by hiding who we are and follow the authorial convention of First Name Last Name? Do we hide behind I and avoid using we and us?
We don’t want to anymore. Our existence as plural is a fundamental part of our experience, and we want to reflect our perspectives in our writing.
Yet we are concerned that the uncommon thought processes of many people in one body will be lost in translation. So let’s bridge that gap.
Readers expect a single author
When reading autobiographical work, readers expect I. If there’s a dangling we, one might check the byline for a co-author, or assume it is being used in a general sense.
Most readers assume we references at least two bodies. It’s not your fault.
Singlet: one person in one body, not multiple.
The near global assumption is one-person-in-one-body (a singlet) behind all human action. Writing is no exception. To assert otherwise can confuse readers and seem to discredit authors. But it is true.
Millions of bodies around the world are multiple, and so contain tens of millions of potential authors.
1 to 3% of the world meets the criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder.*
We find that to be a source of pride. Yes, there is trauma in the narrative for many of us, but we are also here, living, breathing, and existing. And at 1 to 3%, we are everywhere. The many individuals who have come up to us after we disclose in public spaces, to share about their own experience or family members, gives us Redwoods a tangible sense of multiples’ ubiquity.
We Redwoods have gone through deep healing work and found powerful ways of living and loving together. We are awesome, and in our organizing work we have met many other multiple systems who also have so much insight to offer, if there was only room for them.
The world is missing out on our voices, our presence. In writing and in general. Multiples suffer as a result. The stigma and silencing that keeps us hidden from public view leads to countless stories of agony and despair. Stigma makes it extremely difficult to find others like ourselves, because in the current climate, for so many, hiding is the best option. This lack of community inhibits finding role models, better understanding our own experience, and to finding support.
We the Redwoods feel this personally when we reach to publish and then hesitate — who will understand us? Have we explained this well enough?
Months pass, pages untouched, and the smothering silence of the gorge between our reality and public perception stagnates.
We have had more success with in-person interactions, where we can just show you who we are. And it has been powerful to show up in dozens of rooms big and small over the last years, sometimes leading a presentation, sometimes just speaking up in a Q&A or group discussion. Whenever we do this, it changes that room, and in a small way, the world.
We have leveraged our confidence speaking to hold forums for multiples and brought dozens of other systems together in a room, and it changes lives, starting with our own.
We are proud to be building community as multiples. We have met over 100 multiple systems (that’s over 100 bodies, not counting all the people in each body!). We have been deeply enriched by every space we share with one or more system like ours. We are not stopping.
Yet when the total number of people meeting the criteria is 3 million in the US alone, our connections with dozens of systems over years of work is frankly not enough.
Write Because The World Needs Us
Society creates a gap between our existence and your understanding, and it is mortally isolating. At some point we must break out of being dismissed as distracting, irrelevant, confusing, or freaks. We must write: a single article can reach more people than we could hope to meet in our lifetime.
Again, the world is really missing out. Content by multiples has the power to enhance a billion lives. Many people share our experience directly or via someone they know, but our impact is larger than selves-help. Multiples yield new insights into the nature of consciousness. And we are literally systems thinkers with unique perspectives of immense value to all problem-solving. When the oppressively silenced speak, it changes the world. Historically, the millions of struggles it takes to overcome the censorship of marginalized groups, including self-censorship and the institutional forces that cause it, have released waves of creativity and contribution that enhance every single genre and topic on planet Earth. It is past time for multiples and our allies to do the same.
Testimony is part of building justice. Writing is powerful and has the capacity to disrupt singlet-normativity.
Singlet-normativity: the cultural expectation, clinically reinforced, that one-person-in-one-body is the norm, and that anything else is a lie or illusion of illness.
Yet writing itself is singlet-normative. We Redwoods, and multiples in general, face the challenge of how to represent our plurality. So it takes experimentation to write multiplicity. And when writing about urgent life matters, it can feel frustrating to have to experiment with the form itself. Why can’t they just understand me? Why can’t we just be ourselves?
As many authors in one body, the bulk of our excuses to avoid writing start there. Let’s name these blocks, and build an understanding that can allow writing to move forward, to build understanding around multiplicity.
From Forced Silence to Forced Repetition
If your experience has been erased from culture, when you finally speak up, you are forced to repeat yourself again and again. If the sheer volume of ignorance does not exhaust you, and you can withstand the “shut up” and “kill yourself” and “you are not qualified to speak on this” you then risk being pigeonholed into talking about your difference and only that.
If threats and smearing do not stop you from attaining a degree of success, they are told to “stick to [your genre].”
Stick to music.
Stick to your sport.
Stick to your experience/area of expertise/domain.
All such comments communicate “we are afraid of your power” and “you may have gotten out of your cell, but you’ll never get out of the prison.”
We fear the troll, the pigeonhole, and the rejection letter. Yet we are learning all we can do about it is die or keep going. If we die, they win. If we keep going, we win.
At a certain point we will have gone so far that even if and when we die, we will have succeeded at both enjoying life and helping others. Another victory.
99 to 1 is an exhausting ratio
It is tiring to be outnumbered. Largely because of needing to answer the same questions again and again to get anywhere.
Despite the abundance of multiples in the world, most people believe they have never met anyone like us. We Redwoods know, because they tell us. We have come out to thousands of people.
“You are the first multiples I’ve ever met.”
Us: “That you know of.”
We cherish people’s enthusiasm and the chance to teach, it’s just hard not to become wry when you know your people are dying and you feel stuck in square one.
Stigma against multiples is so powerful that many multiples are yet to realize they themselves are multiple, and most who know choose to tell almost no one. Yet we are everywhere.
From an educator’s standpoint, that is an overwhelming gap to close. Really we need all multiples who can to speak up. Even many in one body cannot do it alone.
Format matters. Speaking to a room, it is possible to make a dent in the questions that arise. It takes adapting to move to the written word where the audience is potentially larger, yet you will never see or hear from most of your readers, and where response can be seismic or infinitesimal. There is often no deadline, and no applause, yet successful writing can lead to both.
Yet the experience of speaking or hosting a blog, and encountering the same questions again and again, can make gigantic audiences less intimidating: anticipation is our friend; writers can address the most common concerns.
(Please remember to start somewhere; waiting to write until you can anticipate your audience is like waiting to perfect your relationship before you can begin dating.)
The Plural Writers Before Us, Around us
Writing as openly multiple already has precedent. In private forums and a sprawling array of personal websites and social media over the last 30 years, countless writing on this topic has already been done. (Our list linked below.) These writings and spaces, from perfect to questionable to problematic, have surely saved lives, and inspire folks like our system to take the leap of sharing our own experiences.
Books, too have been written, and some authors have been on talk-shows like Oprah. Yet there is generally a heavy psychologist-centric frame in tow: we hear about the patient, the terrible things that made them this way, and how their doctor helps them to be better. Some of the content is actually excellent. But what about life beyond clinical treatment? Why should we expect a single narrative to be sufficient on a topic that is literally plurality?
Yet outside of books, personal blogs and a few specialty outlets, multiples are rarely published openly representing themselves.
Where the representation is done on our behalf, you get the saga of films from Three Faces of Eve to Sybil to Split which warp our stories and exploit them for entertainment.
Enough. We Redwoods will put ourselves out there. You shouldn’t run away in fear. You shouldn’t get credit for not running away. Yet we know that it will be an exceptional few who join the long haul at first. Onward.
For our developing list of writings and websites by and about multiples check out redwoodscircle.com/resources.
Citation
* (This 1 to 3% figure comes from a meta-analysis of studies, included in the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation 2011 guidelines for the treatment of DID, published in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation. You can find it on the first pages of the guidelines. Our citation of the population size figure from the guidelines should not be construed as an endorsement of all recommendations therein.)
