The summer of 2016 was, in many ways, blissful beyond measure. I’ve recently begun to have the desire to reconnect with, and live from, that feeling, and to re-create the conditions in which it was present, to the best of my ability. To do this, I’ve found it nessisary to look closely at what, exactly, made it so special. Me being body age 16 at the time probably had a lot to do with it, but I’ve begun to notice other things that, looking back, contributed just as much to that period of happiness. This post will discuss all of them in detail, and I will do my best to leave nothing out save for the names of spesific people and groups to protect their privacy.
In general, the summer of 2016 consisted of me thinking of, and being invested highly in, one thing, and one thing alone: plurality. More spesificly, my thoughts revolved either around S and potential interactions she could have with system members as they came forward, or around happenings on the inside such as the ABA schools and Vivien’s feeling center. When my attention was on neither of these, it was on fighting for our right to be who and what we were without people discouraging it, and when that wasn’t an issue it would be on determining who came from what painful memory or seeing if anyone had come about because of a given event. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that for those three months, I lived and breathed plurality from a trauma framework, and was happy to do so. It would be the only time I enjoied myself in any substantial way for several years, though I wouldn’t realize that until 2021, and would go on to defend the course I found myself on until that time, even in the face of evidence that it was harming me. In 2016, though, I suspected nothing, and was content to stay exactly where I was if only it could last a little longer. My main anxiety at the time revolved around losing the state of being I was in, and there were, in my mind, a lot of threats to it. I’d say the ratio of happiness to anxiety was 80 percent to 20 percent.
Looking back, a lot of what allowed plurality to become such a big part of my life in that three-month period was a support group I was in at the time, whose members were my only true friends for the months I was there. It was online, and I would get messages through email, which I would check on my iPad. The iPad itself was a fiew inches from my bed, allowing me easy access to the group, and the potential of interacting with its other members. When it was discovered that I was physically 16, I was removed because other members of the group did not feel safe and were concerned for my safety as well. Despite fears by the group’s owner that the descriptions of trauma and other adversity had harmed me, I can confidently say that I wasn’t hurt by anything I read while there, and that the interaction stimulated us in ways we needed to be stimulated. We felt like a part of something greater than ourselves, and that was what we needed. Yes, their focus was on trauma, but we also knew no better, and were told more about the disorder we apparently had by that group than by S, despite her insistence that we all came from suffering and pain. Not only did that group provide support, but in the wake of her unwillingness or inability to explain the diagnosis she gave me the impression I had, they provided further context for what I thought was going on.
I believe that plurality became a special intrest during this time as well. I know that when I wasn’t checking emails in the vary active group, I was running around outside, focusing on the others of this community and trying to get them to interact with nature when I thought the person I was staying with at the time wasn’t looking. These moments, even more than ones in the support group, were a source of joy; I, even then, loved the others and wanted to include them in everything I did. More than protection, I felt they provided me a reason to be happy. It’s difficult to describe the feeling I would get, and sometimes still experience, when something related to them goes right or when an unexpected thing happens that shows me how much they’ve developed as people. Such feelings are rare now, but in that time period they were frequent enough to be nearly constent. At the end of the day, that, more than anything, is what I miss.
Aside from the investment I had in plurality because of the joy it provided, and the social influence of the support group, I also had a bag full of all kinds of objects a couple of feet from where the iPad would usually sit. These objects would be taken into therapy, and each represented a member of this community. I used to justify it to myself every time I would take it places other than S’s office, but the truth of the matter was that it helped us all feel secure in ourselves to have our things near us, and served as a public statement of our rejection of anti-plurality demands from those around us who didn’t understand why we felt the need to be more than one person in a body. Carrying the bag to therapy sessions built an association between it and S, so that every time we saw it or thought of one of the things in it we would also think of her, which would lead us to thoughts of potential interactions she could have with us. I’m not going to go into all of the fights and disagreements we had with some family members over the fact that it was open-topped, or too heavy, or that I wouldn’t tell them why I felt the need to take it to some places. The fact of the matter is that I was afraid of not being understood, and of having this source of inspiration tainted by that lack of understanding, as others had been. I don’t have the bag itself today, but many of the objects sit in the back room of my apartment, untouched. I don’t know what to do with the majority of them.
Of course, that brings me to the element that held everything together. The promise of going to S’s office for another session of what was, at the time, nurturing therapy that left me with warm fuzzies, was enough to keep me trying to bring things into session that we could talk about. I didn’t want to stay ill, or anything close to it, but I did want to keep that connection, so there were many times where all we would do in session was let the kids talk to her or act out things they had experienced somewhere with the toys in the bag mentioned above. I honestly think coming to someone every week whose undivided attention was solely focused on us was what kept everything as active as it was, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish for that again, outside of a therapeutic context. S was right about one thing; I was isolated, and she and the support group were basically the only sources of understanding and validation I had in that time period. She provided tangible, physical experiences that I have not been able to re-create anywhere else, and did so without my having to ask her for them. That, not her, is another thing I miss about being a teenager.
Ultimately, the elements of the summer of 2016 are these: A high level of investment in plurality as a concept, heavy social focus put on plurality by groups or people who understood us, physical proximity of things that reminded us of ourselves and one another, and the upward spiral that all of these things created. All of these can be established again, and we will even be able to do so without putting ourselves in any danger. The key will be to establish a social space in which plurality, of any origin, is the main focus, and build from there. One of the main things that we did when not interacting with the support group, as mentioned above, was imagine interactions with S, and though she is no longer in our lives, I have every confidence that we’ll be able to find something to take her place. We did before; this entire blog attests to that. What we need to do is relight the candle. We’ve been through a rebirth, and now it’s time to start growing, because that’s what the summer is for.