## Blind Strife

There is a tension within me. It is not the tension of muscles — though there is often that — but the tension between contrasting ideas. I have been through my dialectical behavioral therapy. I have learned that this is a thing to be understood within one's core, to be held with care and love. I *get* that. It is a thing that I have not just intellectualized, but a thing that I have internalized. I do not struggle with the idea of dialectics, of dichotomies.

> I had read the sign, and had immediately fallen down into the space defined by that dichotomy, the gap between had-to-be and could-not-be. Dichotomy? Dialectic? There was no telling anymore, no matter how many times I'd tried to paste one word or the other onto the two phrases. Were ‘dichotomy' and ‘dialectic' a dichotomy or dialectic?\footnote{\cite{plu}}

Or perhaps I do.

> I choke down a half-laugh-half-sob.\footnote{\cite{plu}}

There is a tension within me, and it lies between expectations and desires. There is this expectation that I simply must take up more space than I ought, and also this desire that I deserve to take up space.

I ought to, yes? I ought to be able to be seen. I deserve to validated. I want that recognition that I am a person and thus deserve to exist.

More, I need it on a more practical level. If I am to be a writer, then surely I need that recognition in order to live. I must market myself. I must prove that what I write is worth reading.

I take my dreams, my idle musings, and I wrap them up in pretty cloth and set them down on the page. I dream of growing old, and of hyperfixation. I dream of an expansion of self, of what it must feel like to undergo some sort of duplication, change, following each to their logical end as they arise. 

In the Post-Self books, characters can create copies of themselves with vanishing ease, and those copies are free to go on and live their own lives, facing divergence, leaning into individuation as though it were a quotidian joy. Then, if they so choose, they may merge back down with the instance from which they were spawned, and with them, all of their memories may go with.

> *All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?* \footnote{\cite[164]{qoheleth}. The character speaking, Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, speaks in italics, which has been preserved here. I do not make the rules, I simply foist them upon the reader.}

Who, then, has this merged instance become? Are they who they were? And yet, so much of identity is formed from the experiences we have, the memories that we form. Are they not also that ephemeral up-tree instance? Some mix of the two? And how much? Half and half? The down-tree instance may keep only a portion of the memories, rather than merging them all wholesale; how does that change things? There may be conflicting memories, where identity rankles; when these are reconciled, does that affect identity more or less?

These questions attract more than a little attention from those who experience plurality, whether in the form of Dissociative Identity Disorder or some form of medianity.

I can see the allure, there, myself. Of course I can.

I teased myself when the first book in that series, *Qoheleth*, came out that if I had an nickel for every time I accidentally wrote something with heavy plural undertones that nonetheless made me doubt my own identity, I would have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, as the quote continues, but it is weird that it happened twice. After all, hadn't I received all of that attention from plural folks with regards to *ally*? "I think it's my favorite plural memoir", Rax wrote,\footnote{\cite{rax}} yes?

And then *Toledot* came out. And, six months later, *Nevi'im*, and *Mitzvot* six months after that.

Five hundred thousand words about a people whose lives were defined by their ability to fork and individuate. Half a million words of almost-plurality heaped around me, edging me out of the corners where I had previously hid, forcing me to stand, visible, in the centers of rooms where I might be perceived.

When *ally* came out, when I got that review from Rax, I tripped over a crack in my identity and fell to my hands and knees, skinning my palms, barking my shin against this potential conceptualization of self.

> Are you me?
> 
> > *Am I?*
> 
> I don't know. I can't tell. I can't tell if you're me, if the adversary is me, if “that third-of-three parts, that part defined by negative space and shadow and blind spots” is me.
> 
> I can't tell if hypomanic Madison is me. I can't tell if depressed Madison is me.
> 
> Sometimes she feels separate. Depressed Madison, I mean. Sometimes she feels like another person who is doing different things, and I feel trapped up within my head, watching her act–
> 
> > *Or not.*
> 
> –or not, and I feel like nothing I say or do can get her to change the things she does or does not do. Nothing I say or do can change the way she feels.
> 
> The way I feel?
> 
> The way she feels when she's fronting?\footnote{\cite{ally-plurality}}

It sent me into my five thousand word tailspin where I asked dozens and dozens of questions of my ally, of myself, as I tried to nail down the panic that came with being confronted by this idea of plurality. There was this anxiety of definition — was this me? Was this who I was? — right alongside the anxiety of identification: if this is me, what does that mean for my life?

I never did figure that out in that section of *ally*. I very carefully, very *intentionally* did not. "It is all well and good that this is a question worth considering, and I'm happy enough to acknowledge it here like this, in a roundabout way. I think I need to, to some extent. I need to have it in words between us. But any further investigations would, I think, do a disservice to the project at hand and the roles we play, willing or not, in the endeavor," I wrote. "Hell, as it is, I'm torn as to whether or not I should have brought it up in the first place."

So kind to my reader. So kind to my friends.

I do not particularly regret this decision. *ally* is a project. It is a work of art to be read. It is a constructed thing that must take into account the ways in which others will engage with it. That very nature means that there is thought put into the ways in which it will shape those who do wind up engaging with it — "oh god i changed it by observing it :P" Rax said in a message after reading my plurality tailspin — so it would make sense that I would keep my reader, my friends in mind.

What I am cognizant of is how this has become a habit. Yes, some of that is just part of human communication. Yes, some of that is simply being a kind person. Yes, so much of this anxious spiraling is just that: anxiety.

> I don't know what this means. This feels like being cut off again — feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me.\footnote{\cite[125]{timewar}}

Perhaps I am just afraid.

Afraid! If it is a part of my identity, why should I be afraid? Isn't that the whole point behind Pride? Isn't that part of my whole schtick as the visibly and effortlessly trans girl who prides herself on being such, who aims to be a sort of trans psychopomp?

> Fig tree, how long now has it meant much to me  
> how you almost entirely skip the blossom  
> and without praise press your pure secret  
> into the promptly unfolding fruit.\footnote{\cite[57]{duino}}

Perhaps that, too, is a trans thing, though. We come out, we transition, we live in this ridiculous world, and the whole time, our goal is to tamp down our identity. Even from within the community, even from the most proud, the goal is to tamp down this part of ourselves. Yes, praise the validity, but do so by passing ever better. Praise most of all the stealth, for they have tamped down their identity with makeup and binders. Praise most of all the successful men and women who slip effortlessly through the world around them, for they have integrated.

Surely there is something similar for plurality. I imagine, given its associations with psychology, this most often is brought up in terms of functionality. After all, if it is touched by those who touch other neurodivergencies, then surely it must be the same.

There, see? The successful trans girl with ADHD: she took her meds and did her voice training and now she does a capitalism well.

> My eccentricities are tolerated: my love of cities, of poetry, my appreciation for being rootless, for being, in some ways, more Gardener than Garden, or Gardened.\footnote{\cite[124]{timewar}}

What's the analogous form of success fur a plural person? I am told that for a long time, it was becoming singular. After all, even passing as singular would be better, would it not?

More recently, I have heard that it is the ability to ensure that all of the personalities within one remain in consonance, that it remains egosyntonic, in harmony with the concept of self. This, at least, I can see being analogous with my goals of being happily, visibly trans. After all, is it not my goal to live specifically as a trans woman? Not just as a woman, but specifically a trans woman. The way I bridle when I hear "I just see you as any other woman"...

Become singular, become cis. Pass as singular, pass as cis. Live in harmony, live in harmony. It is times like these when I think back to those words, "Identity is psychopathological in that you only feel it when something makes you feel bad."

So, if I am to have this sense of pride, if I am to live in this egosyntonic harmony, then what is the fall out of that?

More strife, more strife. Expectations versus desires. Taking up space and withering at the thought. Kindness in defeat and the need to win, to live.

More strife, more strife...
