We've always been multiple, and we got in trouble for it. Awareness of each other and our comings and goings, co-running, co-fronting, etc. was normal to us, "crazy" and "rebellious" to authorities. Frontrunners tried to be unaware of it, to no avail. We can't dissociate and show few if any of the supposedly classical signs.
Read Sybil in high school when it first came out but dismissed it as of no possible relevance because our experience didn't match hers. Jay always resisted framing his experiences in terms of multiplicity because all you ever saw was the damn stereotype and he didn't know any better than to believe it. He thought being multiple meant you had to be permanently incapacitated.
When Rabbit Howls was the book that changed his mind because she set a better example. Her multiplicity did not cause her to be a failure. Rather, they stood together, which is what we've always done. Except for growing up on farms, our childhood was nothing like hers, but that was not the important part. The important part was that she described co-running and co-fronting, and in several places in the book talks about experiencing people as being nearby, not "inside". That's us. So he could say "multiple". That was November 1987.
Then trying to talk about it to family & friends, a lot of them had the same Sybil view that we'd had. Had to explain from the ground up!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-02-01 02:20 pm (UTC)Read Sybil in high school when it first came out but dismissed it as of no possible relevance because our experience didn't match hers. Jay always resisted framing his experiences in terms of multiplicity because all you ever saw was the damn stereotype and he didn't know any better than to believe it. He thought being multiple meant you had to be permanently incapacitated.
When Rabbit Howls was the book that changed his mind because she set a better example. Her multiplicity did not cause her to be a failure. Rather, they stood together, which is what we've always done. Except for growing up on farms, our childhood was nothing like hers, but that was not the important part. The important part was that she described co-running and co-fronting, and in several places in the book talks about experiencing people as being nearby, not "inside". That's us. So he could say "multiple". That was November 1987.
Then trying to talk about it to family & friends, a lot of them had the same Sybil view that we'd had. Had to explain from the ground up!