Multiplicity

Don't apologise for getting angry. It's a normal emotion and not a pathology (despite what some mental health "experts" would now have us believe).

You might read Donna Williams' books ...

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echoesnspectres.livejournal.com

You might read Donna Williams' books ...

Which describe a form of plurality as a defensive mechanism, with two "personas" (Carol and Willie) protecting the "real self" (Donna). We still get uncomfortable when we think of how we've been looking for the lost, real self... The feeling of being buried alive is probably a common experience for non-fronting selves in households who are still becoming aware of their many-ness, but I'm not sure the same can be said about a frontrunner's belief that they aren't real and ought to get rid of themself somehow so the "real" person can come back... One of us got pretty much talked into that (written, actually) by another of us some years ago, and I think it had a lot to do with our having read Donna Williams' first book.

In general we find her books very good for brainstorming and very bad for reliability.

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kangetsuhime.livejournal.com

We were nearly diagnosed with AS (only not because we got very angry when they suggested it) It isn't a part of our multiplicity at all.

*wonders what being vegan has to do with being mean, but gives up* I haven't had any experience in dealing with a system like that (I know people and systems with learning disorders, but nothing even close to that extreme) While not everyone there has things like autism,

fragmentedminds DO have a lot of experience in dealing with people who have a tendancy to have very specific system members (eg, one who is usually angry, one who holds emotions, one who is almost childlike) and they may be able to offer you advice on how best to progress.

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Oh - we were not meaning that you have to be autistic to be multiple - it is just that we notice that quite a few people who are autistic seem to have some degree of multiplicity - we think it is true what you are saying about it having to do with neurology - we were struck in reading Temple Grandin's most recent book that she says that there are three layers of the brain, being responsible for intellectualization, emotion, and sensation - which seems to compltely coinside with our three personalities . . .

We were meaning that you don't see a lot of, say, psychopaths who are vegans . . . that was the first disorder we were diagnosed with (because we so successfully hide our emotions and are so very logical) - but we really do have a lot of feelings - they just are not useful most of the time . . . and are mostly directed toward animal companions rather than humans

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That thing about the brain. Where is Temple getting that?

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It is really interesting - she bases it on brain research and it is supported by the neuropsychology stuff I learned in school - basically the idea is that as we evolved our brains just added new layers on - so we have the basic brain stem (sensation), then the rudimentary thinking part of the brain (emotions), followed by the frontal lobes (intelligence) - of course, she discusses this much more indepth and in much better words - but that is the basic idea . . .

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pengke.livejournal.com

Your understanding is faulty. The brain stem doesn't have anything to do with sensation, nor is the brain simplistically divided into layers like that.

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hellmutt.livejournal.com

I'm AS and not a multiple. I suspect my mild aspectingness (or whatever the word's meant to be) is very related to the Asperger's.

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*wry grin* We have a long-standing difference of opinion in my House about this very topic. From my point of view, all three of us are autistic, what's called 'autism' being (apparently) the result of genetically-based differences in the neurological wiring of our physical body. I don't regard these differences as "a disorder", though some of them can be less than advantageous in a culture so rabidly dedicated to social conformity. On the other hand, I don't have a problem with being called autistic or Aspie - yeah, they're silly labels, but better than some others I can think of, and if people are going to communicate with words, then they've got to have words with which to do it.

My 'brother' Kír disagrees. He says that if I wish to accept that label for myself, it's my choice, but not to impose it upon him or his twin (who takes no part in this debate, since he pays so little attention to labels that we've never even found a name he'll answer to.) Kír's view is that all the jargon and labels of the psychiatric establishment are false - no different from the medieval Church's elaborate hierarchies of demons (http://demons.monstrous.com/angels_and_demons.htm), and invented for the same reason: to frighten people into giving up money and power to those who claim to be able to aid them against these contrived terrors.

I admit I see a lot of merit in this viewpoint - the DSM-IV being basically the modern version of the Malleus Maleficarum, used in pretty-much the same way and with just about the same amount of science behind it. To a large extent, that's why I don't reject the label "autistic": out of solidarity with the autistic community. "The price of distancing oneself from a stereotype is to reinforce that stereotype, and the related injustice, for those who cannot likewise distance themselves" (http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0501/0501cov.htm).

Anyway, that's not addressing your question. Yes, we've noticed that a lot of other multiple Houses are based in autistic bodies. One might speculate that differences in the structure of the cerebral cortex (http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/58/3/428) make multiplicity easier for autistics. It would, of course, be only speculation; as yet there isn't enough research to support any hypothesis of that sort.

Autistics tend to have fewer hard-wired (instinctive) social patterns - look at how many of us 'fall through the cracks' of gender/sex-role definitions; how many of us are puzzled by or oblivious to the whole concept of "race". Possibly it seems like more of us are multiple just because we don't see anything so wrong about sharing a body with other people, thus are more likely to admit it.

When you speak of multiplicity being "part of AS", you're begging the question of causality. There's no way to determine to what extent (in any specific case OR in general) multiplicity is part of autism, autism is part of multiplicity, both are part of something else (or several 'somethings'), or the two conditions are unrelated.

Now, if you aren't considering either autism or multiplicity as "psychiatric disorders" that people 'have', but rather as unusual but perfectly viable ways for people to be, you'll probably find a lot about shamanic practice (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0877734062/103-9683110-8942243?v=glance) to interest you. Anyway, good luck with your book! :)

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Thank you - this is exactly the sort of thing we are looking for . . .

Gabriel agrees with you that the DSM is just a way to persecute people, but Daniel points out that it is good to be realistic - we may know that we function perfectly well and that no one knows how differently our mind works until we tell them - so refering to the DSM is useful becuase it presents more of a medical model than saying 'Well that person is just crazy!'
So though we know we do not have a disorder because we can function it is important to remember that other people still view it as a disorder and will react that way to it . . .

One of the people we know at work is a very intelligent person and had a friend at another job who had (what sounds like) a psychotic break and she talks about how afraid she was of that person - it makes us sad to hear her talk like that when we know she is an intelligent, basically good person, and so we feel that a DSM model would help her to understand that she is talking about a disease that is no different from someone having cancer or something . . .
She tells us these things and we think 'If you had any clue who you were talking to!'

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Unfortunately, mental disease in this society is viewed quite differently from having cancer. A DSM explanation may not be as helpful as you'd wish. You need a way to remind your co-worker that her friend is still a person, deserving of the same respect and friendship as before her alleged "psychotic break". The DSM may only confuse things. Her reaction was emotional, therefore it might be best to appeal to her emotions.

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You're surely welcome! *smiles* Nice to see the topic brought up here; it's one in which we take a lot of interest.

The DSM is pseudo-medicine, pseudo-science, certainly not a valid medical model, and I don't see that paying it lip service does anybody any good (except the psychiatrists, insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations, of course.) I refer you to this article, Head Games (http://www.reason.com/0301/cr.js.head.shtml):

""Disease reveals itself in the abnormal activity of the body, not of the person," Szasz writes. "When a lesion can be demonstrated, physicians speak of bodily illnesses. When none can be demonstrated, perhaps because none exists, but when physicians and others nevertheless want to treat the problem as a disease, they speak of mental illnesses. The term ‘mental illness’ is a semantic strategy for medicalizing economic, moral, personal, political, and social problems."

"For Szasz, the fact that psychiatrists, politicians, bureaucrats, and activists are constantly insisting that mental illnesses are real diseases, just like cancer or diabetes, indicates that in fact they are fundamentally different. "There are no illnesses outside of the realm of the mental health field whose disease status requires defense by the White House," he slyly notes. "In the end, we come down to the meaning of the term ‘mental illness’: If we use it to mean brain disease, then psychiatry would be absorbed into neurology and disappear....However, pyromania is plainly not like multiple sclerosis, and treating a patient with schizophrenia without his consent is plainly not like treating a patient with anemia with his consent."

It IS very sad that your co-worker was afraid of her friend just at the time the friend was most likely terrified and miserable and in dire need of all the comfort and support those who cared about her could provide. That's the dire stigma of "mental illness" - that people struggling with a mental/spiritual/emotional crisis are shunned, mocked, drugged and imprisoned against their will, for no reason but ignorant prejudice.

However, how does it help to say "it's a disease, like cancer", when it's not? That's the same thing the 'curebies' in the anti-autism movement say (and here's an article (http://www.autistics.org/library/love.html) that explains what's wrong with that.) It's the same thing the anti-gay movement was saying about homosexuality (http://www.psych.org/pnews/98-07-17/dsm.html) a generation ago. The plain, unvarnished truth is that none of these conditions are diseases, and that a great deal of the suffering that comes with them is the result of societal rejection, not of the conditions themselves.

I am not disordered nor diseased - not by autism, and not by sharing a body with my two dearly-loved 'brothers' - and I won't let anybody get away with calling me that. The root of prejudice lies in the heart of the one who has it, not in the one who's subjected to it, and I think this needs to be made unequivocably clear. There really isn't a bit of difference between being scared of "crazy people" and being scared of black people, gay people, poor people, the "younger generation", or whatever - unfortunately, most humans seem to be genetically programmed to fear and hate anyone who seems different from themselves, so irrational prejudice abounds. But why enable it? Why not call it what it is?

On the subject of 'psychotic breaks', I think you may find that this article (http://www.alternativesmagazine.com/08/levy1.html) and this book (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0874775388/103-9683110-8942243?v=glance) provide a more useful and coherent description than the fake-medical models of the DSM-IV. If that doesn't convince you, check out this one (http://www.reason.com/0205/cr.bd.ill.shtml) - which, incidentally, contains the fascinating information that Benjamin Rush, "the father of American psychiatry", "was also ahead of his time in concern for the rights of American Negroes, convinced that they were white under their disfiguring leprosy."

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Thanks for the links! *swipe*

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*grins* You're most welcome; enjoy!!!

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how many of us are puzzled by or oblivious to the whole concept of "race".

Heh, that's kind of alien to our experience, because we've always been, if anything, too aware of race and appearance. Then again, we're also rabidly competitive, and there are a lot of people who don't think autistics can understand the idea of competition, so I guess it just goes to show the extent of diversity between different autistics as well.

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Same here. The beauty of different races has always intrigued us. We had a copy of Leontyne Price's recording of Aida (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000041RW/102-2036410-1102553?v=glance) in the house, and we were very aware that our little black friends at dancing school were "Negroes like Leontyne Price". Some flowers are red, some are white, some people are white, and we, being Indian, were red.

Being Indian is part of our who-we-are in the earth world. We were always intensely aware of it, even though Indians had minimal visibility in 1950s Illinois. We won't disparage Indians as team mascots as long as they're portrayed with distinction and respect, because we grew up with the Fighting Illini (http://www.coasttocoasttickets.com/images/ncaab_illinoisfightingillini.jpg) and there was an Indian on the test pattern on TV (http://www.moderntv.com/modtvweb/special/freegif-bw1.htm) and we were proud -- that was our visibility*, even though we knew the actual Illini weren't really like that.

So yeah, race wasn't puzzling to us. Fighting between the races was, though.

--
*Well, that and Tonto being smarter than the Lone Ranger. Heh.

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Same here. The beauty of different races has always intrigued us. We had a copy of Leontyne Price's recording of Aida in the house, and we were very aware that our little black friends at dancing school were "Negroes like Leontyne Price".

Heh. I remember our black friend from swim lessons very clearly (she was the only black person in the group). We thought that maybe if we spent enough time lying in the sun, our skin would turn as dark as hers and then we wouldn't have to worry about putting suntan lotion on any more... well, we were five at the time.

So yeah, race wasn't puzzling to us. Fighting between the races was, though.

We've got kind of a weird dual perception in that regard, which is difficult to explain: at the same time that we perceive people as individual human beings, we've always got a filter on background which is constantly aware of how society's prejudices would interpret the behaviour of those around us. It's like we have a 'prejudice recording' and it's difficult to turn off, although it doesn't (I hope) come through in how we treat other people.

Then again, I've often wondered if this may perhaps be a very common thing, but no one wants to talk about it because nobody wants to admit that they might possibly have any kind of hidden prejudice; everyone wants to see themselves as a paragon of tolerance and openmindedness. The best we can do with it seems to be to acknowledge it's there, that it's not something intrinsic to us but an artifact of a biased society, and just keep trying to view people on an individual basis.

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That background filter doesn't sound too different from the usual what-will-people-think filters that anyone who is different (autistic, multiple, or whatever) might have. Like being aware of what society thinks is "too crazy or out there". We try to think of that as sort of a protective inhibition. I suppose it serves its purpose, but what I object to are the people who with your best intentions (oh, always) in mind, tell you that you must keep being aware of "what society thinks is crazy" even in the privacy of your own home. Like hell I do.

As far as lying in the sun, we did that too... the darker the better, we thought, and still do.

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"we've always got a filter on background which is constantly aware of how society's prejudices would interpret the behaviour of those around us."

I've got one of those, but it's mostly cued in to voices, speech patterns, phrasing, accents - all the auditory components of a person's presence, and not much of the visual. Probably I don't really look much at people I don't know, and less than "average" even at my nearest and dearest, but I listen - and yeah, the 'recording' is quite prejudiced about what constitutes acceptable speech.

I presume the 'recording' is my mother, teachers, and other critical adult women of my childhood - their fault-finding imprinted on my wee little neuro-circuits before I'd learned enough language to defend myself. Kind of tedious to have to carry their provincial linguistic value-judgements with me all my days, but mostly I just let it pass by.

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Okies, let me ask you this, if it's not too rude or nosy a question: when you say you're red, do you mean "red" like someone else would call the color red, or do you mean it the way coffee-with-cream-color people say they're black?

The reason I ask; I've known a fair number of Native folk (including our Morchalad, who's half Alaskan Indian) and I've never seen any of them as "red" except when they've been out in the hot sun or something. For that matter, if I went out in the hot sun for a couple of hours (assuming I was somewhere that had hot sun in April) I would come back true flaming scarlet, far redder than I've ever seen any darker-skinned person get. Yet people wouldn't then call me "red-skinned", just sunburned. So what's up with that?

Morchal's skin doesn't really have any notably red tones in it at all, this time of year - he's not as pale as me, of course, but he's pretty pale, and his underlying skin-tone is sort of gold - yet he'd still be called "red", yes? LOL, actually I find it pretty funny, that a Scandahoovian like myself can be both darker than a 'black' person and redder than a 'redskin'. I don't see how anyone ever keeps the whole concept straight in their minds.

*grins* Tonto was smarter and cuter than the Lone Ranger. Kato was smarter and cuter than the Green Hornet too - I didn't find out till I was grown up, that he'd been played by Bruce Lee; then it was, like, "well, no wonder!"

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We personally are more like the coffee-with-cream-color people saying they're black. We tan very red without burning, often appearing to be sunburnt when we're not, and we always thought that our heritage was part of it.

But yeah, the actual skin color often has little to do with what a person of a particular race is called. The one that puzzled us was when Asian people were called yellow, since we never saw them that way. Most of our Asian friends are Chinese, and when we can tell any difference at all in their skin color they look like -- well, shades of gold, like you said, from darker to lighter depending where they are from, but they never impressed us as being yellow.

We knew a girl of German ancestry who spent most of her time outdoors in sunsuits rather than the long-sleeved shirts and jeans that we wore most of the time (partly due to farm work). Her hair was bleached white-blonde but her skin was darker than ours, so we can picture the contrast you talk about with your friend.

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I'm quite competitive about certain things too, and I know a bunch of other ACs who are competitive - sheesh, the gamer-geek community is a veritable hotbed of rabid competitiveness - so it seems odd that there should be this idea that ACs don't *get* competition. But I never have gotten the idea of 'race' - it seems so preposterously illogical on the face of it that I don't see how anyone can possibly care about such a thing.

I mean, really, skin color? Why not hair color, or eye color, or fingernail shape? Actually, if people really wanted to get serious about hating each other for inconsequential genetic traits, they ought to make skull configuration the Big Hairy Deal. "Long-heads rule! Round-heads suck!" - not only would it be an entirely new shuffle, mix all the currently-existing 'sides' around, but because bone endures where skin does not, it would enable people to discriminate against others who'd been centuries dead! Wouldn't that be advantageous?

I guess it's autie literality that really makes the whole concept untenable for me... because nobody's 'black', nobody's 'white'. If you took a piece of white paper and a bottle of black ink and compared them to the color of every person on the planet, you wouldn't find a single true match. Nope nope - everybody's more-or-less pinkish-brown or brownish-pink; everybody's skin color varies with the climate and season, and it just seems like WAY too much work to try to keep track of which particular shade fits in which particular category.

I gave up on the whole thing when I was 16, at summer camp in Maine. My ancestry's Danish, so I'm very pale in winter, but after all summer in the Maine sun, I was pretty dark brownish-pink, while my hair had gone straw-white. Meanwhile, my friend Angie, who was "black" (actually coffee-with-cream color) had sun allergies, so she'd spent the whole summer in long sleeves and a big straw hat. Well, so, we were arm-wrestling in my cabin one evening - I looked down and noticed that my arm was a good few shades darker than hers.

That did it. If 'white' people could be darker than 'black' people, as was obviously the case, then clearly there just wasn't any sense in the category-system at all. I still think that, and can't understand how other people do find any sense in it; it seems an utterly useless notion to me.

I guess there's such a thing as "racial competition", but I don't really *get* how that's supposed to work either - because, after all, all the competitors are going with what they were born with. They didn't choose it or earn it, and they can't change it, so... what's the point? Competition's supposed to be a contest, right? but you can't have a real contest unless both sides have a fair chance.

*rueful grin* It's possible that my autie-ness (or some other factor) keeps me from seeing the point. I do understand it intellectually, sort of, but emotionally? Not a clue.

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I mean, really, skin color? Why not hair color, or eye color, or fingernail shape? Actually, if people really wanted to get serious about hating each other for inconsequential genetic traits, they ought to make skull configuration the Big Hairy Deal. "Long-heads rule! Round-heads suck!"

Heh, the basic consensus of most reputable scientists nowadays is that 'race' doesn't really even exist as a discrete biological category-- you could just as easily classify people into separate races on the basis of, say, the prevalence of the sickle-cell anemia gene, which would put Mediterreanean and sub-Saharan African people into the same racial group.

(http://www.antiracistaction.ca/race3.html is entertaining, on this issue.)

I've got sort of a thing going on where I know intellectually that there's nothing to stereotypes, but my awareness of them makes me uncomfortable and, in some cases, I worry that they might be true, even if there's no mitigating evidence-- like if we get stuck on a math problem, I'll start to worry that it might be because 'girls can't do math.' x_X Not to any disabling extent, but... it's there, yeah, the social programming. (OTOH, we seem to have avoided a lot of the social programming in regards to what women's priorities should be, and how they should aspire to look.)

I don't know what to make sometimes of the fact that there are several people in our system who aren't 'white,' though I probably overanalyze it. If they were all filling gratuitous stereotypes (which I have unfortunately seen before with multiples), that would be cause for legitimate concern, but I see the ones who share my headspace as being simply people, before they're a specific race or gender. What frustrates me is that I can't always be colorblind in 'non-head' interactions. Hm.

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Ah, excellent link; thanks! It'd been my understanding that "race" was discredited as a scientific concept before I was born... and in America especially, it's not even reasonable to talk about "sub-species", because people here have come from all over the world.

"I don't know what to make sometimes of the fact that there are several people in our system who aren't 'white'"

Hmmm... I never thought of that before. Kír wasn't born in this body, and he's northern Asian... Crist-Erui was born in this body, but if he's Kír's twin from the time-before, does that make him northern Asian too, and therefore "not-white"?

*wry grin* Kír says the question is moot; that he came to us as a ghost, and his brother is not bound by the conventions of ordinary men, so these questions of physical distinction have no meaning for them. Fair enough. Where Kír and I sometimes have conflict isn't about 'race', but about culture - we've worked it out over the years to a great extent, but every so often we run into problems because despite his efforts, he still thinks by the 'rules' of a culture drastically different from this one.

I seem to have avoided a lot of the cultural programming about "how women are supposed to relate to people", but I got a major dose of "how women are supposed to relate to objects". This causes me difficulties about housekeeping (I cycle endlessly between two modes, "perfection" and "squalor"), car maintenance, clothing, shopping... because there're ten thousand things I have to deal with, and they're each supposed to be dealt with in a particular way, and it's just too much.

This is one reason I love camping: I only have to cope with the things I brought along, and that's not so many.

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echoesnspectres.livejournal.com

Hi :). Don't know if it's of any use for the book, but we've been meaning to bring this up for some time: there is a fictional example of autism and multiplicity being combined in one person. It's in The Speed Of Dark (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345447549/), which is a notable book for several other reasons: it has the first adult autistic protagonist (that we know of, at least), and it goes into stuff like societal prejudices and the "cure" debate; the author has discussed these things with autistics online to get an inside perspective, which is also somewhat extraordinary.

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Currently, we are working on a book about Asperger's Syndrome in which we want to address the concept of multiplicity and autism - in short, we have found that quite a few people with AS report something like multiplicity so we are thinking that this may be part of AS . . .

Welcome.

As

ksol1460 said, Donna Williams is the only autistic author who's mentioned it in her books, though

echoesnspectres mentions further down that she also saw her plurality as being a defense mechanism. There's a rather disturbing scene in her book "Like Colour to the Blind" where she frets that an acquaintance's autistic and clearly multiple daughter "may never learn to be her true self" if she's allowed to keep on being many people. I know Williams herself has had some communication with Astraea, although I don't know how much of their page she read, or if she's revised her stance on multiplicity since that book.

Research on the relationship between multiplicity and autism, if any, is still very much in infancy-- most professionals will no longer take multiplicity seriously, and most studies of autism focus exclusively on finding a cause, a cure, or both. Most of the speculation we've seen has been from people involved in multiple communities online. Since there's never been a really good study done on the proportion of multiples in the population as a whole, I'm still up in the air about whether it's more common among autistics.

A couple of us once considered a theory, which we haven't seen suggested anywhere else, that autistic people may be less likely to suppress multiplicity because many of us get used to coping with being bombarded with sensory stimuli all day, and so having other people talking in headspace might not come across as chaotic the way it might to someone who wasn't used to dealing with it. Granted, that's just a pet theory and I can't volunteer any scientific evidence for it, but there's not very much in most theories of autism or multiplicity (including professional ones) which has to do with science anyway.

We seem to have shown signs of 'high-functioning' (I rather dislike judgemental terms like that, but there aren't very many good words to describe the different ways autism can be manifested) autism from birth, which no one around us knew quite how to interpret-- the general consensus of people around us seemed to be that we could be made to stop doing everything which 'didn't look right' if we were punished enough for it. (That wasn't quite accurate-- a lot of the things which people around us thought they'd succeeded in 'eradicating' were just suppressed, or we got sneakier about it.)

There are definite positive and negative points in our general experience of autism. The ability to obsess over things is one of our strengths, when we can turn it to our advantage; however, we have sensory and organization issues which make it difficult for us to do schoolwork without outside assistance (fortunately our school has been accomodating, for the most part). All balanced out, however, we certainly don't want to be 'cured,' as it's an essential component of who we are and we would not like to be replaced with different people who better fit society's definition of normalcy.

As far as system members are concerned, we all seem to be affected by it in slightly different ways. None of us are totally unaffected by it, although there are people in here who don't think of themselves as being autistic in their own right-- for them, it's something that goes along with the body, like gender.

We don't seem to have the experience of reduced or limited emotions-- actually, we were seen as being too emotional over the wrong things in childhood and in need of 'toughening up.' There are about 6 of us who frontrun regularly; we all seem to have a 'complete' set of emotions (er, as far as I know, it's complete-- who judges that anyway?), although of course we're inclined towards individual temperaments.

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...Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see what you've written so far on the issue-- I would love to see a book that treats autistic multiples more positively than D. Williams does, and even she mentioned that a lot of reviewers were freaked out by her mention of her own multiplicity and wouldn't touch it.

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We are lucky in the respect that our potential publisher is a close friend of one of our favorite people be around and is less likely to get TOTALLY freaked out by us . . .

We are still collecting info about autism and multiples - but when we get that chapter written we will certianly post a link to it . . .

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Are you going to mention your own multiplicity in the book, or try to make it look like an outside analysis? (Believe it or not, we've seriously considered writing a book on multiplicity from a third-party perspective, without mentioning ours-- partly because we worry that people might see it as skewing our views, if they knew how big a stake we had in it, and think we were incapable of impartial analysis. I'm not altogether convinced there is such a thing as a totally impartial analysis, but anyway, it was an idea.)

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We are going to write about it from our perspective, except we have said in the introduction that we are going to use first person language unless there is dissent, then we will mention personalities - we find that normal people are very much bothered by the 'we' language that the central processor uses . . . we also ran across the idea of each personality writing down what they feel about specific things that, say, happen at work - Nathan being unable to listen to a person we like to be around because of his tie being such an interesting color, Daniel trying to figure out the logic of people not being able to eat prawns with heads because they look too much like the animal but prawn tails are not a problem, Gabriel thinking about how lonely he is, etc . . .

We do plan to have a whole chapter at the beginning devoted to autism and also one devoted to multiplicity . . . so people will know what they are getting into . . .

We are writing the whole thing under a general pseudonym and in a city we have never been to (but that is similar in climate to where we actually grew up)(though the personalities will keep their names because very few people know that they exist . . .)

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we find that normal people are very much bothered by the 'we' language that the central processor uses . . .

People tend to freak out when we say 'we' too, but part of this is getting used to it. Singlet friends who found it odd at first often get to be okay with it after they've heard you use it for a while, and gotten used to the idea of sharing a body.

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