h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello Auntie, Arpeggio, et al

I have come to your personal space to apologise to you if I caused any distress by discussing you in the 'Discrepancies' thread, or elsewhere. I truly did not mean to threaten in any way.

It is good to see you back here on the site, and it is also good to see that there has been so much support for you from so many people.

As I said to other people, and I am now saying to you, what was done to you and the way it was done to you grieved me very much.

I would be lying if I said that I had not found some of your postings confusing and a little overwhelming, but (as you can verify in my Personal Space) I believe passionately in freedom of speech for all.

As I said to MoG, a lot of us are on a learning curve about Multiple Personalities, and it might be helpful in the public forums if you noted at the top of some of your posts who they are from. It can take a while for the reader to get to the signature at the bottom of each post.

The other thing which I found immensely useful was the guide to his/her/their personalities and posters created by Lucinda et al.

These are slightly selfish suggestions on my part, because they would help me understand you better. It is of course entirely up to you what you do.

Anyway, welcome back. I will unsubscribe from this thread next week, so if you wish to post a reply before then I can read it.

Wishing you nothing but kindness

a girl called Ben

A Girl Called Ben~

Thank you. That was both kind and thoughtful of you. Your apology is indeed gratefully accepted.

If you look at our comments in the thread called 'Attention Lurkers', maybe you'll understand how we feel. This suspension, and the harassment during the several days preceding it, and the fiasco on the Infamous Intelligence Thread have happened in the course of seven weeks. That would have made anyone made of the usual stuff run for the hills. And, to quote Puddleglum from C.S. Lewis' /The Silver Chair/: 'Even a Marsh-Wiggle gets tired of being chewed.'

We are loyal to anyone or anything we believe in, and we would definitely have quit h2g2 in the third week here if we saw nothing to believe in, here. We are just in a position where our trust, which we do not give easily, has been ridden over, roughshod. That, we all know, is not fatal. Trust does not come easily to us, however, and when it is betrayed is very difficult to regain.

Some of the people we thought were 'friends' turned out not to be. Other people we hardly knew turned out to be friends. Life is full of little surprises. The gain in new friends is wonderful. The betrayal by people we thought we could trust is just Same Shxt, Different Year. Before that suspension, we'd have been the sort who would have confronted them. Now, we just don't have enough invested... that makes us sad. We hate just *not caring* about anyone.



As to writing little bios the way Martin et al did - well, it isn't particularly practical, for us. There are well over 20 individual adults who have posted here, and at least 8 who do so with some regularity. We are much more fully developed as individuals than any one of Martin's 'others', because we have had fully separate identities since the body was a child, and the body is almost 40. Some went to uni, others had to catch up by memory. Some went to graduate school, some helped with the practise of psychology (we are not a physician, and have never been a practising *psychiatrist*, which we believe someone said of one of us - combat medic yes, practising MD, never), in particular areas. Some avoid human contact with dread, but don't mind the Internet too much. It would take ages, and would not be that informative, we fear.

We did start such a thing, after reading your post. It came out disorganised and rambly, with too many characters and a *nasty* plot. Much of who each of us is has been shaped by the circumstances of hir/its creation. Most of us were created as a way for the child to save her life and/or sanity. That is not agreeable reading, and there is so *much* of it. We are not our history, but our histories inform a lot of who we each are, and how we are different from one another. Does that make sense?

People find our postings overwhelming... They probably are. We're trying to tone the emotional loading down, so people can manage to read and understand what we say. We are *trying* to be less wordy, too. We know the message gets lost. If we didn't care so damn much we wouldn't have these problems.

We often collaborate on postings, though one or another of us generally signs at the end. We *could* put a 'from Arpeggio', or 'from Kassandra' at the top of postings. In public fora, we try to stick to the first person singular, our of respect for convention, and I, Arpeggio, try to do the actual talking, for the sake of consistency. Don't you think most people, who don't know us at all, and don't really have any interest in going to the trouble, would find such a note at the top of a posting distracting, and confusing? We prefer not to distract people with our 'stuff', if there's a point to be made.

Usually, people reply to me, when someone else signed the post. That is a measure of how relevant the 'who' is to them. Our general feeling is that it would detract more than it would add, but we're not actively averse to the idea. We think public fora is not a good place to do it. Those who *want* to know us better can read our website, or ask us questions. We do a lot better with specific questions than with something like a bio. If someone says 'What are Kassandra's External Reality credentials?', or 'Explain what a Music-Energy Being is, please', it gives us the impetus to try, because we know the interest is there. Otherwise it is just us, talking about us to the world-at-large. We don't know whether we are answering the questions they have, or not. We do plenty of that at the MetaSite and Kids' Site.

We are always willing to answer any honest question, and there is no such thing as a stupid question. Multiplicity is a *different* way to be. (Not that there are not a lot of closet mps here... but we don't DO closets.) We don't know that there is much we can say, above and beyond extending the offer. It does force people to take the initiative. That's all right. People think we are more enamoured of the sound of our own voice than we are.

We're just so constantly afraid of being misunderstood, and it happens anyway.

Thank you for your words of support. They are very much appreciated. You don't need to unscubscribe from this thread unless you don't want to pursue a conversation. We'd like to... Have a flower?


Arpeggio, on behalf of most of LeKZ

Hello Arpeggio, and any other people who are reading this,

Thank you for your reply. Please have a from me.

My suggestion was just that - a suggestion. If it is not practical to write a a guide to some of you who post more regularly here, or if it is too painful or to difficult, or even if you just plain dont want to - then please don't feel you have to do it. My thought was that it might help others to understand you and be less agressive. But the important thing is that you should feel good (safe, secure, peaceful, happy, satisfied - however you choose to define 'good' at that moment in time). I would always respect your reasons, and I do now understand them.

You have been so clear and so explicit about mps, and you are so passionate and so articulate, that you took a lot of us by surprise. Some of us are on a fairly steep learning curve, here. I see change and a willingness to listen and to learn in many of the researchers here, and this is down to you. Thank you.

With yourselves, and with Martin, I am never quite sure how to address you when I post. Or do I And (being English) I am afraid of annoying whoever I am speaking to, and of embarrasing myself, and (being English) I ususally get it wrong. Alas. This may be true of a lot of us who have had no personal knowledge of mps; we are not sure of the ettiquette, and sometimes get it wrong. If I do that, please know that it is ignorance and folly, not rudeness and insensitivity.

I do admire the way you have persevered and responded to the demands that have been laid on you here on this site. So many people are unwilling to change what they say and how they behave in response to the reactions of others. And it is a fine line between being responsive and damaging ones integrity. You have managed to tread that tightrope with grace and skill. We need an acrobat smiley here to show it.

Please do not take my observations about MY reactions to your posts as criticisms of you or the posts. Without reading the backlog I cannot be sure, but I don't beleive I have ever said 'the post is x y and z'. I think I have always said 'I find the posts x y and z'. You can see the difference here. If I find Shakespeare irrelevent and boring, and my sister finds him human and poetic, it says more about my sister and me than it does about Shakespeare. This is PARTICULARLY true of the internet, where so much context is stripped from the content, and so many people are posting in a second or even a third language.

I am not as strong as you - I very very rarely lie, and then only to protect someone else. But it is safe to assume that when I am posting here I am either telling the truth as I see it at that time, or I am being flippant. Like everyone, sometimes when I post my emotions are driving the mouse, and at other times it is my brain.

I do not see the world in black and white, friend or foe, good and evil. (This only my view - and is in many ways a luxury and a privilege). This means that I do not feel uncomfortable offering messages of kindness and support to people who have hurt each other. I see the hurt they both feel, as well as the stress between them. Please know that if I offer friendship and support to someone who has hurt you, I am not intending to gang up or attack you by doing that.

Anyway, thank you again for your reply.

See you in the fora!

Love, and another

a poster of long posts called Ben

Responder to long posts, with sensitivity, and called Ben~

We do not believe that the 'friend of my enemy is my enemy' any more than we believe that the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend'. We particularly do not believe there are any real *enmities* in us toward anyone/thing who is not genuinely Evil. We dislike and carp and grouse (how did 'carp' and 'grouse' come to mean the same thing? some kids are wondering in the back of our mind) about rudeness and social irritants. We do not judge people by the people to whom they choose to talk. This is not a battle. Been there. Did that. Not the same. It is not, for us, an issue of 'sides', generally.

We insist on the right to be safe from verbal assaults and gross invasions of privacy. We would insist on that right for *anyone* who expressed a need for it, or any fear for hir safety. No one should feel *unsafe* in any community, RL or online. There has been one very transparent threat. It was removed.

We speak out vociferously against injustice. To us, having studied Social Justice as part of our master's degree program, 'injustice' is a wider range of issues and concepts than it is, to most people. We often find ourself pointing out injustices that folk have simply not noticed. That can be off-putting, but nobody *enjoys* having hir consciousness raised! It always feels as though one is being judged and found wanting. Usually - and we don't always get this across - it is the person/s *information*, and not character, that is wanting. Ignorance is amazingly curable, provided the ignorant are willing to participate in the cure.

We militate against anything that is consequentially dangerous to people. That covers a vast range of topics. We will not walk away from bigotry, or victim-blaming, from dangerous ignorance and sweeping generalisations made on the basis of that ignorance. We cannot, morally, stand by and do nothing. To us, silence is the voice of complicity, and it is a moral mandate we live with, to set the record straight, however unwilling people are to hear what we have to say. We do realise there are better ways of making our points than we have used in the past. People are notoriously unwilling to listen to righteous indignation.

We HATE Evil. We had a spiritual sort of awakening one day, while meditating on the significance of Kali Mai, the Hindu Goddess of Change through Destruction. Suddenly, this concept crystallised for us:

You have to know Evil well enough, to hate Evil well enough, to stop Evil.

We were, of course, once a very black and white thinker. This is part of why we studied Religion and Ethics, Social Justice, and obviously Psychology - in addition to the Sociology we were already studying. We wanted to be able, not only to argue both sides coherently, but to try to understand WHY people belive the things they do. It was instructive. We never polarised as much as we would have done, if we had not grown up in environment of totally unorthodox, but surprisingly orthoprax Hinduism. That is not a dualistic mind-set, and protected us from many bad things we might have suffered, in the way of fall-out.



The only 'etiquette' is:

1) Most of the mps we know prefer that abbreviation, both for the adjective 'multiple', and for the noun 'multiple person'. The clinical name/s both include the word 'disorder', and most mps we know don't feel particularly 'disordered'. This varies from mp to mp and we do not speak for all of the vast world of mps.

2) We all answer to the name 'LeKZ'. That is why we chose it. Naturally, we *prefer* that people take the time to get to know us as individuals, but we can't insist on anything like that. There are enough people here to fill any medium size island off of Scotland. If you like, you can respond to posts by the name of the person who posted them. If that person is not available to answer, the person who replies to you will be someone who is available and appropriate. Posts to 'Arpeggio' are often answered by others, because my expertise is Internal Protection, and External Singing (and other music-related issues, such as the physics of musical acoustics).

3) Third person reference to us should, ideally not hap... No, I mean, we prefer the correct gender pronoun if applicable and known - for instance, Auntie is a drag-queen, so the correct pronoun is 'she'. Kassandra is an obvious feminine given-name, likewise 'she'. I, Arpeggio, am also 'she'. If you can't guess, as with Blakk, or Pat, 's/he' and 'hir' are appropriate. They are both gender-neutral by choice, as it happens, so 'ze' is better than 's/he'. LeKZ are definitely properly referred to as 'they'. We tend to use 'yous' when speaking to a mulitiple system as a whole (or a subset, like the Psych Dept), and of course 'you' is correct for addressing individuals. Since 'you' was originally plural in any case, this is also appropriate when addressing a mp.

4) Ordinary, regular manners usually are a good default. If you don't know someone is the Mayor, you are right to address him as Mr Politico. Once you do know, he's Your Honour, The Honourable, or Mayor Politico. We were brought up with very starchy, somewhat antiquated British manners. They'll do nicely, if a person is not engaging with us seriously. We know that some of those starchy manners is construed as hauteur. We also know that if we have lived for 16 years in a city where people wear blue-jeans to the opera, and still have a tendency to use 'one does not speak that way' when we are annoyed, the habit probably couldn't be beaten out of us with a chair. Not to say we don't keep trying to relax, especially when we are annoyed.



Yeah, forthright and passionate... the secret of social doom in almost any context. We said we are loyal when we believe in something or someone. The efforts people have made to rise to the occasion, and meet someone who had heretofore been the stuff of sensationalist media and lurid speculation, was what we found so very attractive here. This is not a sexual abuse survivors' forum, which all our previous online bbs forays have been. So we won't become Mother Confessor, and Local Therapist, and generally support people rather than getting it. We have the merits of our writing on *unrelated* subjects upon which to stand. And this is, by and large, a group of people with more curiosity and imagination than the average cross-section of society. The Douglas Adams connexion virtually guarantees that. We hoped it would be, and it did.

We may have thrown the first , but other people have been -with a few minor exceptions- keeping it in the air. That is also refreshing, and frankly, FUN.

Yet another very long post by,

Arpeggio, who is finding more and more about agcB to appreciate, along with all of LeKZ

"silence is the voice of complicity"

An indictment of us all.

Laconically.

Ben

Arpeggio

Thank you for the guide to ettiquette. I do appreciate it. I had been using 'you' and feeling safe because it is plural, but I understand why 'yous' is more accurate.

And thanks for taking time to reply.

Wishing you well, and finishing up for the day.

***B