Plural Self-Respect

Musings of Multiples

This resource is largely not expected to be beneficial for singlets
It follows on from Plural Respect, which is.

Foreword

🐉 When we started writing the Plural Respect, we were really only focused on one thing - repeating ourselves less. Despite only having our own self-awareness for less than a year, we were offering out everything we knew from that experience to an unlikely handful of partially-unrepressed and still-unsure systems that we met all around the same time. We soon realised that recounting our own and others' experience fighting for self acceptance, and defining concepts like "singlet-normativity" five times in a row was a bit hard to track. More importantly, we were concerned that another system might need similar advice, but just not trust us enough to divulge what they were going through.

🐉 So, simple enough concept - let's write down all these subjective thoughts and learned understanding and the challenges we faced and understood others to have faced, split them up into readable categories, and boom! "systemhood is new and confusing and I need to read something about it": the google doc!

🐉 Cool idea, but in practice when writing it we felt the need for our personal experiences to take a back seat to the conclusions they'd brought us to - we were feeling the flaws of the briefness of morethanone when it came to not just making someone aware that we existed - but giving them enough information to do something as complex as say… be our friend. We formalised and sured up a lot of the concepts, broke things down into logical arguments and simple statements, and we removed any elements attempting to argue against various kinds of sysphobia. And I think it really benefited from it! It really did fit the purpose it ended up having.

🐉 But what about that first idea? Talking about challenges, insecurities - about the messy unknowns and the sharp edges. Every system alive right now is trying to figure out how to be a system - often with little to no guidance and minimal contact with others going through the same thing. It might seem trivial - how different are systemhood and personhood, after all? But just how hard would it be to learn how to be a person, from scratch? Out in nature with nobody around - Would you even know you were supposed to? The challenge is as strange as "Just discover fire" - It's not easy. Everyone deserves help, and deserves to forgive themselves for the time and effort it takes - to create a normal that's never existed before and live it.

🐉 So, here's something, then - something that throws back to that first idea. For anyone who read the respect doc front to back, was reminded of the still-unsure feeling of their insides, and said "that's it?". An unsanitized collection of challenges, experiences, and prickles of a system that likes putting things into words a little too much, and with any luck, the systems and singlets around them.