I don’t print chirpy stickers about diversity because I think it’s easy. Difference can be extraordinarily painful. I was very moved by this powerful article about Patrick Burleigh: I was a four year old trapped in a teenager’s body. It’s a man’s reflection on his childhood with a very rare hormone disorder that makes puberty start in infancy. While my life has been very different and my responses to the circumstances I was in about the opposite of his, there was still a lot of common ground.

He wrote about how other people responded once they learned about his disorder:

“Revulsion. Disbelief. Lurid fascination.“

That’s a familiar place. Not all multiples/plurals experience this but many of us do. I wrote about the toxic culture of fear, fascination, and disbelief around multiplicity back when the movie Split came out, in I’m multiple and I don’t kill people. He’s right about the revulsion aspect although I suspect he gets a much stronger response of that and I get more disbelief and fear. (There’s not a lot of serial killer movies about people with rare hormone disorders murdering folks, although there are many about people with physical or facial differences doing so)

A few years ago when Star was in the worst grip of her eating disorder, I was researching to help her and came across some interesting ideas about how and why we eat. Certain impulses are innate at various strengths at different times, and help to balance each other. For example; fear of a new food we haven’t seen someone else eat, disgust at foods we have previously felt sick after eating, suddenly feeling revulsion for favourite foods when we have eaten them too often in the context of a too limited diet, and so on. These are protective impulses that help us eat sufficient foods in sufficient variety to be healthy, and to reduce our chances of being harmed by spoiled or poisonous foods. Hormones can have a big impact on which impulses are strongest (as most folks who have been pregnant can tell you) and in disordered eating, poor nutrition can change hormone production in a nasty spiral where those deep, involuntary impulses that cue hunger or revulsion are causing horrible harm instead by making it incredibly difficult to eat.

Difference and disgust have a strange relationship, not just in food but in culture. When things are out of the norm they can trigger the same deep involuntary revulsion culturally that being served raw fish, offal, or eyeballs can to someone for whom this isn’t part of their normal diet. We’ve seen this with the knee jerk reaction to LGBTIQA+ people, with the added twist that some of the most intense negative responses are from those who are themselves queer and hiding – shame and disgust appear to have a relationship – the inward and outwards face of the same rejection and loathing.

One of things I find so pernicious about the serial killer trope is that it re-enforces this response. It gets up close and personal with difference in a way that encourages revulsion and fear – which are appropriate responses to a human predator – but attached instead to people who are simply different, themselves the victim of predators, or in terrible emotional distress. When plurals and victims of trauma and abuse suffer this social burden while the people who harm us often blend in to society incredibly well, there’s a bitter irony here. There is a brutal double impact of not only being traumatised but bearing the abuser’s social stigma and shame. This can do far more harm than the abuse itself, and dealing with it is one of the reasons that people who are deemed ‘lucky’ because they were only ‘almost harmed’ by rape, assault or family violence frequently struggle in very similar ways to those who were obviously and overtly harmed. They were still powerless and traumatised. They are still impacted and different. The harsh reality is that all too often, being different can expose you to much more social harm than being predatory.

Something I find of immense value about articles like this one, is the way it links the different experience back to the universal human experience. When you are first coming to grips with something difficult or different, it tends to be consuming. At first it utterly isolates, and it feels like you are the only person in the world dealing with it. Then, if you are fortunate, there’s powerful moments of connection and recognition, finding language for experiences and peers you hadn’t known about. That’s often the case whatever the difference is – chronic illness, neurodivergence, queer identity… And for a little while you dive deeply into the new world and consume it. It’s often a life saving discovery.

After a time for most of us it eases back a little or even a lot. It ceases to be front and center of our minds and our lives. And we start to discover different threads, common ground with other people. We find that other people too, have suffered and struggled in ways that are similar and different and parallel. These connections are just as important to make, they form our bridges with humanity across deep gulfs and gaps in experiences. They help us remember all the other aspects of our identity that tend to be overshadowed for a time. There’s a rebalancing process that can involve a shuffle with how we engage communities. Queer folk get tired of their activism. Sick people decide to spend their spoons on a hobby night rather than a support group. Other aspects of life calls.

For us, when we were 10 years into multiplicity advocacy we found we reached a place where we were over it. The fear and the fascination had long gone. We couldn’t find any enthusiasm to read another book or article with a slightly different take on the same stories and ideas. The difference stops being defining, becomes part of your experience of life but no longer the terrible secret, bewildering loss, or deep wound. And in that space we are no longer captive to it. We become – both to ourselves and our communities – human. Not curios or ambassadors or there-but-for-the-grace-of. Multifaceted, members of more than one community, imperfect. Just human.

We have needed time away from the world of plurality to focus on the biggest changes in our life: letting go of Rose, grieving Star, raising Poppy, falling in love with Nightingale, bringing Bear and Calliope into the world, caring for Nemo. Building my business to the point where I’m not dependent on welfare anymore. Buying a home together. So many huge things I’ve been adjusting to, soaking up, learning about. So many precious dreams I’ve chased.

Nightingale takes me out to dinner. We discuss our good luck, our privilege, ways we can give back. She raises the Multiplicity book again. How huge the need is still in this space, how vulnerable and alone and hidden so many people still are. We turn it over and over, how it might help, how to fit the research and writing and editing into our incredibly busy lives. A fire rekindles and we find ourselves unexpectedly ready to take up the torch again. This is not all of who I am, but it is part of who I am, how we live in this world. It is complicated and isolating and beautiful and I’m not ashamed of it or willing to be utterly defined by it.

I’m also autistic, and as I discuss inclusion in schools, workplace accommodations, and police training I’m often struck by the extreme lack of parity. Can you even imagine what it could look like if plurality was given the same platform, treated with the same sense of importance and validity?

We deserve a lot better. So much of the destruction people suffer has nothing to do with the experience of plurality and everything to do with the context in which we live and are not accepted. We are human and we deserve a seat at the table.

Find more of my work about plurality/multiplicity here.