Welcome to the Freak Show (Apparently, That’s Us)
Plurality, autism, ADHD, trauma, neurodivergence… we’re the lab rats, the freak show, the never-ending grant proposal. Singletons love to put us under their microscope like they’re David Attenborough narrating…
“Observe, in their natural habitat, the elusive plural… notice how it struggles to survive in the wild.”
Cute. Except we’re not wildlife documentaries. We’re human beings. And we’re sick of being turned into someone else’s TED Talk.
[See also: Singleton Journal of Pathologizing People They Don’t Understand, Vol. 32.]
Objectivity… Science Cosplay for Singletons
Researchers strut around bragging about “objectivity” like it’s some rare Pokémon card. But let’s get real… Objectivity is just privilege in a lab coat.
When we write about our own lives? “Anecdotal.”
When they write about our lives? “Groundbreaking.”
When we theorize? “Too biased.”
When they theorize? “Peer-reviewed.”
It’s not science… It’s cosplay. They’re just singletons LARPing as the sole gatekeepers of truth.
[See: Groundbreaking Study Finds Plurals Still Inconvenient, Clinical Ego Journal, 2021.]
The DID Myth: Rare? Try Everywhere.
Ah yes, the favorite bedtime story of every therapist who doesn’t want to learn… “You’ll probably never meet someone with DID, it’s too rare.”
Newsflash… DID is statistically more common than schizophrenia. And schizophrenia isn’t treated like a unicorn…It’s on every damn syllabus. Meanwhile DID gets shoved in the corner like the creepy cousin at Thanksgiving.
Why? Because acknowledging how common plurality is would break the singleton fantasy that “one body, one mind” is some universal truth. If we’re everywhere, their whole house of cards collapses.
And let’s not forget… most DID research zooms in on hospitalized survivors. That’s like only studying people who fell down an elevator shaft and then concluding walking is a disorder.
[See: Study of Five Institutionalized Patients Becomes Universal Truth, The Gaslight Review, 1998.]
Translation Olympics (Gold Medal… Survivors; Participation Trophy… Clinicians)
We spend our whole lives translating ourselves into their frameworks.
We say… “We have parts who share memory.”
They publish… “Subject demonstrates fragmented ego states consistent with structural dissociation model.”
We bend into their language because otherwise we don’t get jobs, housing, therapy, or basic respect. Do they translate back? FUCK NO!… They just sip their conference coffee and dismiss our truths as “unscientific.”
It’s like we’re writing in neon, and they insist on squinting at it through a black-and-white filter.
[See: Translation of Fatigue in Marginalized Populations, aka Every Damn Survivor Ever, 2024.]
The Violence of Being Studied
Let’s be crystal clear… Being studied is not neutral… It’s violent when you’re reduced to specimen, spectacle, or symptom.
Plurality has been turned into horror movies, clickbait headlines, and case studies where survivors weren’t even treated like people. Every time we try to push back, we get told we’re “too… biased, too…(fill in the blanks).”
Translation… “We get to exploit your life for careers and clout, but you don’t get to speak on it.”
That’s not science. That’s theft.
[See: How to Build a Career Off Someone Else’s Trauma, Singleton Publishing House, 2015.]
Imagine Real Research (I Know, Radical)
Imagine if research actually centered plurals.
What if lived experience was considered expertise instead of “extra credit”?
What if studies asked, “How do systems build community, create art, regulate, thrive?” instead of “How broken are they on a scale of 1 to institutionalize?”
What if we weren’t data points, but principal investigators?
We don’t need another outsider telling us what we are. We need the mic, the grant, and the goddamn publishing deal.
[See Upcoming: Radical Concept: Survivors Are Experts, Unpublished Because Academia Can’t Handle It, 2025.]
From Specimen to Speaker
We are not jars of preserved trauma on your shelf. We are researchers, theorists, clinicians, creators, and loud-mouthed rebels who refuse to be reduced to your pathology porn.
Stop researching us like bugs in jars. Start listening like we’re human.
🌈 Read Plurality Isn’t a Disorder and Plurality as Liberation and Structural Dissociation… Not Our Map
If you want to stop being a case study and start being seen, heard, and held… Come work with me.
Let’s break the jar together
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