We’ve always loved the idea of gathering. We did it a lot, especially with experiences that we treasured. Unfortunately, not everyone took to it well. Today, we are taking the act of archival, as a friend formally and fittingly described it, back from the hands of those who told us it was wrong. The following story details our history with recording our own things, downloading, for personal use and within the limits of the law, the work of others, and how we’re going about the process of reclaiming archival as something that, for many of us, is an integral part of our being.
When we were about body age 4 or five, perhaps even younger than that, the only thing we wanted to do was play with cassette tapes, and not by pulling them apart, but recording and playing back their audio content. While the rest of the family would be playing with one another, we would be at the tape recorder, deeply involved in listening to our work, or more often recording our surroundings, sometimes to the dismay of our companions. In later years, our grandmother would tell us that we carried the recorder everywhere, which wasn’t that far off from the truth. We did use it in strange places, for example, in a basement where someone was using a vacuum cleaner, or in front of the radio as one of our favorite songs of the month played. It wasn’t until body age 6 or so that we got a piece of technology that was primarily for the blind and visually impaired community, upon which was a recording feature. We used this feature, and only this feature, even when we upgraded to newer and more advanced versions of that line of devices, to gather audio. It wasn’t until late elementary school, though, that we began to realize the importance of what we were doing.
There was a point growing up when our house’s human population was outnumbered by pets. We had seven cats living alongside other animals at one point, and we were always trying to record their meows and other sounds in case they were ever lost to us, admittedly not in the kindest of ways. That rough treatment is something I personally still regret to this day, and it is one of the things I would have changed about the whole situation, but we all learned from it never to hold any animal against their will, because if we did we would get a claw across the face. But our lessons extended beyond this, including things like the value of memories and the part that audio recording played in records of such memories. By the time we were body age 12, we could justify all the recording we were doing, but by that point, others had also begun to take a slightly harsher notice to it. This is when, without our awareness of the fact, Jessika began, once again, to separate herself from me, Rozaya, and develop her own identity. Looking back, the pain of my father taking that first tape recorder from us at body age 6 because of my so-called refusal to be calm while in the middle of a meltdown in school was probably what began that division.
Most of the Harsher notice I’ve mentioned came from our middle school teachers, at least those who worked with us one on one, who we would proudly tell about our latest recording and audio adventures and show the results of our efforts. I will never forget the day that one of these teachers told us that such efforts were causing the problems we were having with the piece of technology that we were also using to do our school work and other projects that didn’t involve audio at all. I think Jessika must have taken over by that point, because all I remember after being given that message was being overwhelmed with pain and watching from outside of my body while at the same time seeming to protest the idea of giving up recording that this teacher had pushed. It wasn’t only the act of recording my own things that came under attack that day, and I’m sure it was Jessika who ended up owning the memory of that event, which, after beginning with the teacher making an attempt on our happiness by saying that we should stop recording, continued with another attempt, this time relating to our downloading music from various websites that contained mostly home-made, free content, for our own personal use. Such music had helped us through hard times and gave us a purpose when we left the school building. Taking that from us, even through verbal means, quickly had its expected effects. We broke down then, and once again, I’m convinced it was Jessika, for the most part, who bore the pain of the demand.
“Stop recording your life, stop caring about your memories, and stop trying to preserve what you enjoy, because it’s not important and gets in the way of your ability to do what we want you to do,” we learned that day. As with many other things in our life, Jessika’s holding onto that memory, even though unsuspected by us at the time, was what allowed us to continue downloading music and recording the events of our life despite the teacher’s remarks and insistence that we do exactly the opposite. As it turns out, our use of audio was not what was causing our technology to have problems. It was a faulty device, with shotty wiring of its speakers. We were never to blame for the issues we were having with it. The attack on our pleasure, as with so many others, was completely unnecessary. Yes, we may have done things in later years on that device which were not exactly PG13, but the messages we got about what we’d always done even before we knew about more mature subjects were in no way related to those activities whatsoever. If someone had expressed discomfort with an otherwise harmless activity, an activity that we did not engage in while involved in a public place anyway, we would have had a different reaction, but the messages we got, if acted on, would have applied across the board, with no exceptions, and that, to us, was unacceptable.
The event that freed Jessika from existing as a part of me came in 2014, the year, and the day, that we were finally caught engaging in the irresponsible activity that ultimately disabled us from any further recording or downloading of any music, accept for that which was on iTunes, because it was that same year in which we had been given an iPad as a Christmas gift. The reason for this drastic reduction in our resources was one of our own making, a stupid thing we’d done for years that, in my personal opinion, is not fit to share on this blog, though others here might think differently. Because of our actions, we could no longer take the original device along with us to our home during school breaks or summer vacations, and when we were allowed to bring it with us between school days, we were told never to use the internet or recording abilities on it unless such uses were school related. We complied, but never stopped writing, and by the time we had to return the technology to the school district for good, we had discovered many things about ourselves through that practice, even while not knowing about the multiplicity itself. Some of the things we’ve posted here reflect that. Those things are actual pieces we’d done in that year.
When we lost the original device, the one that came from the line of technology we’d used after the tape recorder, all efforts to catch audio glimpses of our life as it was in the moment stopped until 2016. Between the time of our getting caught and that year, we only downloaded music we could afford to buy through iTunes, accept for one partly successful attempt by one of us to restore a collection of songs we had no time to take with us. We hardly read any books accept for those involved in school or extra activities connected to it, because most of our books had also been lost in the transition from district-owned device to personally owned computer. Other than our half-hearted effort to restore that single song collection, we felt no desire to do any of what we once did, and I thought the teachers had broken our ability to do any of those things enjoyably again. I lost more of my sense of self in middle school, largely thanks to lacking the drive and single-minded purpose that downloading and recording things we enjoyed had given me. I know now that it was Jessika who had separated that from my awareness, slowly over the course of several years, as things had become increasingly harder to sustain safely. I will take this moment to thank her for what she’s contributed to my and the rest of the community’s wellbeing. Without her, we probably would have been worse off than we were when we first began our multiplicity discoveries.
From August of 2016 to now, together with the same friend who guided us to the full realization of the impact of empathy on our community’s functioning and development, we’ve picked up the recorder again, but with a newer twist. We use the app on our phone to gather our own audio, and specialized software alongside a more mainstream resource to gather music we want to listen to and share with others. Jessika, once so deeply hidden to contain our collective urges to go out of the way to save things, has now become a critical voice in matters related to such activities. We no longer use the district’s device for anything after it became nonfunctional to the point that its word processer hardly performed any of its expected tasks without having some kind of issue. While we miss typing in braille, it’s worth giving up that piece of technology for something else that won’t bring back memories of completely unnecessary verbal attacks on our life, our desire to do what we felt was right, and, for many of us, what turned out to be a part of who we are as individuals. It brings all of us great relief to be free to care for ourselves in the ways that we know from experience are going to help us recover and remain stable, without having to deal with the threat of people in power telling us that our activities, on our own devices, are wrong and the cause of the problems that may be had with said devices. This blog is a public display of the recovery of such urges, and a sign to ourselves and those who know us for what and who we are of that recovery. It feels good to have this part of ourselves back where it belongs.