<p>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 <em>get</em> 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.</p>
<p>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}}</p>
<p>I choke down a half-laugh-half-sob.\footnote{\cite{plu}}</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Of late, I finished a series of books, the Post-Self cycle. In the 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.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>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?</em> \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.}</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.
((Struggling against expectations versus desires esp re: feeling like I deserve to take up space))</p>
