a Body et al.

Purim sameach! This Monday we went to our shul’s Purim party, and we wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Jewish holidays really only fall into two categories; solemn and sober observation, and FUCK YOU WE LIVED. Purim is firmly in the latter camp. I’m not going to explain the holiday, because Wikipedia will do a better job, but it’s fun. It’s awesome. We love our synagogue and we love our rabbi, who is a massive ally in every sense (plurality included).

We watched two schpiels—the first was the normal one, but the second was written by fifth graders from our synagogue’s childcare program. Our synagogue always has schpiels connected to modern day issues, and this year it was a big old fuck Trump, fuck Miller, fuck Musk, and most of all, fuck ICE. (The kids had Stephen Miller in the role of Haman. Their version talked a lot about immigrant rights and immigrant-Jew solidarity. I think the kids are alright.)

Crow&: Also, TW finally decided to show up. (We used singular pronouns up top, but we don’t know if it was me or TW writing that. Or both.)

TW: So maybe I haven’t been around in a substantial sense since last year.

Crow&: Which is very frustrating when someone is half of why we picked our major.

Anyway, Purim is over, but we try to carry its joy with us for as long as we can. Let’s see if it gets us through midterms. (And look at us, posting!)

I’m Riley of a Body et al., a plural collective best known for our online work on plural education and our original zines. I’m working on a project compiling obituaries for members of plural collectives or adjacent beings (alters, soulbonds, dæmons, imaginary friends, etc.) who are dead, dormant, integrated, or otherwise gone for the foreseeable future and mourned.This is an intentionally broad prompt; the only requirements are that obituaries be for someone gone in a way comparable to death (whatever that means to you&), and that they must be individual entities without their own bodies (a system’s collective body dying would not be included).
Disenfranchised grief is a near universal experience among plurals who have lost headmates. Being denied the right to acknowledge losses as death (or comparable to it) or to publicly mourn is a deeply damaging experience. I would like to make a public record of our grief, and in a format historically restricted to the physical deaths of people with their own bodies; obituaries and elegies.

Submission information:

• Obituaries for the first printing must be submitted by October 25th 2025; there is no guarantee that a second edition will be made, though I hope to make one.
• Submissions should be in the form of an obituary with an optional image of the subject included, ideally around 200 words (40 at least, 250 at most). For examples, you can see this obituary-writing guide aimed at singlet deaths, and this example obituary for a headmate. You do not need to adhere strictly to the format.
• Obituaries should be for your own headmates/alters/etc.—obituaries for headmates in other peoples’ systems should be written with their consent, with contact information provided so we can verify. Very limited exceptions may be made if anonymized.
• By submitting, you are agreeing to the contents of your submission being used in a commercial project without compensation or retraction, and confirming that all submitted materials are your own and made without the use of generative AI. (In less legalistic terms, this collection will be for sale, everything you submit—text, art, photos—needs to be your own original creation, and you can’t take back submissions after printing.)
• Email submissions to headmateobituaries at gmail dot com—you can submit as many obituaries as you like, but please try to send them in the same message!
• Questions can be sent via email, PMs, or private communication if you have my contact information.

For a while now, we’ve been interested in pursuing a degree in psychology—a PhD, if we’re lucky. That’s mostly driven by our collective deep interest in plurality (obviously), but we have a fairly broad range of psychology interests. Since virtually all graduate degree-holding experts in the field regarding plurality are psychologists (or occasionally bioethicists), it seemed like the obvious choice.

Anyway, cut to us about a week ago, grabbing a spoon out of the cutlery drawer and then realizing we didn’t have any reason to grab a spoon and then putting it back, after which Crow& realized that fey was weirdly unbothered by how much more attention feyr joke art got to her serious work on Tumblr, because fey was just so interested in the social factors in that happening. So we walked out to our parents in the living room (two arts management professors who teach at a uni we might transfer to) and asked if their university had any sociology and art classes—which, of course, it did.

And then we realized that we've always liked sociology, and got to thinking about why we even wanted to study psychology in the first place.

Our motivation for pursuing a psych degree for the past couple of years has been an interest in neurodiversity and plurality, and a general sense of interest in how people think, but we're primarily interested in how those function socially and within identity, as well as being staunchly antipsychiatry. One of the most important aspects of antipsychiatry to us is refusing to let psychology define plurality. So why exactly were we so ready to throw ourself into seven years of study toward the end of defining plurality through psychology? (To be clear, we know there are antipsych psychologists, we planned to be one of those.)

The obvious thing is what we said earlier—that all our examples of academics focusing on plurality are psychologists. But we aren't that interested in the psychology of plurality anymore, and haven't been in years. We're pretty well-informed about it, but we're so much more interested in what makes personhood than we are in what makes a brain develop a person. And anyway, psychology can only carry us as far as the medical model and individual care. It doesn't cover culture and history and philosophy, which is our true love here.

We're not entirely sure why it's taken so long for this to occur to us, but we're glad it did before transferring out! (And the psychology special interest remains, but the desire for the PhD might not. We're taking developmental psychology this semester and waffling on whether we want to enter social psychology. Luckily, there's a good amount of time to decide when all your options overlap so heavily!)

Riley has come to believe that we absolutely can get sick in headspace, have for a long time, and that the rest of us are just in a bizarre sort of denial about this. I didn’t agree with them. As we’ve said before, our headspace is not “real.” It’s not tangible or self-sustaining. “It’s the same thing as picturing an apple” has basically become our catchphrase.

But there is something we’ve been failing to mention (and honestly ignoring): our inner selves are affected by our outer selves’ condition. When we say people “collapse out of front,” sometimes it’s just kind of a metaphor for dropping out quickly because of fatigue or stress or whatever. But sometimes we will also see them literally collapse in the void. Sometimes getting kicked out of front would mean someone appearing and falling like they’d been thrown. I can cry when the body can’t, because my inner self does.

I worked myself sick last week, and the body got sick along with me, but I kept symptoms both in and out of front and when I fronted the body was worse. That wasn’t the first time—I’m the undefeated champ of psychosomaticism—but it was the first time that I was able to see my inner self as being sick too, rather than just stressed.

This is something we need to poke at as a concept more. Honestly, we’d have liked to make this post a breakdown of it (because more diverse interior experiences need to be represented in general), but it would require so many definitions and so much deconstruction that it’ll have to come another time. For now, we’re mostly just acknowledging it.

(The title is misleading. Soulsickness means a different thing for us. It was just a cool word—post title will change if I settle on something more accurate.)

that’s it that’s the post

we are very happy

we also might post on how our plurality is affected by anesthesia/surgery at some point, but right now we’re just recovering and living our best life/ves :3 -crow& et al.

Probably weird use of Dreamwidth, but we’re going to be in Boston for a day or two next week with fairly abundant free time. We are especially interested in libraries, queer cafes, and anywhere we can leave zines!

as it turns out, changing things that are making you unhappy with yourself that you know you want to change makes you feel a whole lot better!

i’ve been really hating my profile image on here—it was a photo of me, and not even a bad photo, but something about having it next to my journal entries made me feel gross. i’m still not really clear on what, exactly—dysphoria, maybe? i’d been wanting to change it to something illustrated for weeks, if not months, but i just didn’t.

so i finally changed it (to my pluralkit icon—it’s the picture on this post) and, would you believe it, immediately felt a whole lot happier! now i just have to update old posts, which i’ll do in the morning.

likewise, while i really like having longer hair (the body’s hair now reaches our shoulders when straight), and while i really like having a mohawk, it turns out that we cannot have both. partly because my headmates don’t like it, and partly because a very long unstyled mohawk looks like an undercut but with a weird duck tail in the back.

so last night i trimmed it into an undercut, and whaddya know, we all feel better!

i am currently in autism burnout hell which is making me unusually change sensitive, but these little changes have both made me feel a lot less like i’m crumbling to ash. working up the emotional energy to fix stuff you know how to fix is hard, but super worth it, as it turns out!

we’re down with the sickness.
by which i mean circles.
by which i mean there’s circles on our face. they hurt.

we do not know the origin of these circles. they’re all about dime sized, dry, painful, slightly pink, and flaky. sort of like a bad sunburn, except they don’t hurt constantly.

the first circle was in whatever that divot between your lower lip and chin is called, the second circle on our inner cheek near our upper lip/philtrum (which we do know the word for), and the third is on our eyelid, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

we will be seeing a dermatologist about the mystery circles if we can get ourselves to make a phone call (which is a coin toss). for now we are just slapping unscented moisturizer on the circles and telling ourselves it’s helping.

I have nothing worth writing about, but I’m on the Metro and my book was left at home. So, all that’s left is to live up to my name.

I am among one of the oldest entities in this body. It is difficult to know the exact timing, though Crow& is making a valiant effort to pin it down. The use of entities is also intentional; my personhood postdates my existence (as opposed to someone like Riley, who emerged as an individual). We were a dissociative child, not a multiple one, and despite my distaste from the term, I existed as a “part.”

I have memories that belong to me going back at least a decade. I was angry—incredibly, incandescently, murderously angry. But I didn’t have the strength for murder. At best, I had the strength to scream. And I did scream.

Sometimes Crow& is surprised at what I remember as mine. It’s not feyr fault; fey’s incredibly young (arguably younger than Riley), but tends to assume fey’s been here a lot longer. There’s some interesting logistics to that, which I don’t care to explain here. But I’ve been here for a very, very long time.

I wonder, sometimes, why the Body didn’t end up being mine. My bet is that it’s because we became safer, and I had less to do. I spent my entire life fighting, and I was not prepared for the adjustment. I survived it, clearly, but I did not thrive. I retained my antisociality, and I continued on my track to becoming an adult sociopath. The others made friends—the Sols and then the Crows especially—but I did not engage with them. I still rarely do.

The first thing that grounded me in the world once screaming was no longer needed was writing, and writing angrily. I wrote most of our essays (which became Instagram posts) under our pseudonym of Sol V Díaz, to the point that I was originally known as the Writer and when it was time for us to decide on last names, I was given Díaz without a second thought. I find my listing of “Díaz, TW” to be mildly amusing. Díaz, the writer. How on the nose.

But then we stopped writing. We dropped out of high school, the environment that fueled most of my fury and inspiration. We developed a spinal injury that made it incredibly difficult to put words together. I became depressed, but we had no frame of reference for depression in sociopaths, so me and my headmates alike assumed I was simply bored. I’m slightly surprised it didn’t kill me. I suppose I do have an incredibly persistent… well, perhaps not a will to live, but determination not to die.

I do have a new thing worth being in the world for. Actually, it’s two; college (and our efforts at a psychology PhD), and my conversion to Judaism. I still write, too, but I am a writer not because I love writing so much as it is because it is my best means of action. I do not write just for the sake of it. This post is the closest I’m willing to get to that.