our first elysian yule: holidays on krip time

we are "alone" for the holidays. as pagans, we began celebrating our major winter holiday (yule) on tuesday the 21st. today is christmas, the major winter holiday our biological family celebrates. our roommate got back from their road trip yesterday, but they're staying with their boyfriend for a few days because we developed a dry …

the material consequences of “syscourse” (or, how i became homeless)

i went quiet on this blog soon as i was finishing classes in the spring; immediately after that, i had to very quickly move into my summer housing assignment. college housing is always a toss-up. we thought we'd secured a good living situation, with another openly Plural system and someone we knew from one of …

whose “mental health” are we talking about, anyway?

existing as a chronically ill person during a pandemic is fucking exhausting. almost more exhausting is living as an openly Mad person during a pandemic where sane folks are whining about the "mental health" impact of public health measures designed to end the fucking plague. please understand where i'm coming from. for as long as …

on having dissociative episodes, after esther

i spent the better part of the last couple of weeks in a depressed-slash-dissociated state. my co-hosts apollo and pearl did their best to keep our body stable, to take care of important things in our life, to plan ahead so i'd be capable of doing the things i like doing upon grounding myself again. …

the flu shot gives me seizures. i got it anyway.

i got my flu shot just over 24 hours ago, and i'm writing this piece through seizures. they're inescapable right now, unless i lay down and go to sleep. i'm not writing this to scare anyone. i'm writing it because i need to grapple with the difficult choices chronically ill people are forced to make …

sometimes, self-care looks a lot like “giving up”.

writing is my fucking passion. so why the fuck is it so hard for me to write for school? seriously. i'm working on a hybrid poetry collection and memoir right now, i'm tens of thousands of words deep into it. and there's my fucking answer. i can't write for school because it feels meaningless, and …

learning to live with the unimaginable

content warning: death/suicide within a collective/system with DID this is not the next post i expected to be making on this blog. i could start every post with that sentence. it would probably be true. this time, it's...particularly salient. in the early morning of thursday, may 13th, one of my friends outside the collective, along …

a brief update, and a list of collective members

this blog exists because i need a place to write what and when i want to write. i have to do a lot of writing for my classes, as a creative writing major, and i often find myself struggling to write anything for my classes because thoughts about the collective are taking up so much …

about us: a brief introduction

now that i've established the history of the collective--i realize we need some space to introduce who we are now. after all, we are not our history, we are not our trauma, we are who we are today and we can always try to be better tomorrow. throughout this post especially, i'll use a lot …

on disclosing trauma (or, why i began this blog with a four-part autobiography)

within Plural and broader neurodiverse communities, i've run into various reactions to the practice of disclosing trauma the way i have here. it's a bit of a contested practice, because often when people with trauma-related neurodivergences talk to members of the general public about our experiences, we're essentially asked why we're like this. that's not …