North Star

"I'd like to try a thought experiment instead, beginning with the popular understanding of the disease. The classic metaphor of DID is that of a ‘shattered mind’, like Jekyll and Hyde, as if the identity of the person was a plate once, and something took a hammer and broke it into a series of unusable fragments, waiting to be reassembled to allow a person to live a healthy life. The mental health profession used this type of metaphor to explain DID for a long time – a child has something happen to them that’s so terrible that it just ‘breaks their mind,’ and they have to hobble along broken-minded until they find someone to help them glue it back together.

"This is problematic in two ways: first, it’s exceptionally disempowering to those of us who are supposed to just be wandering broken plates. Sometimes this interpretation manifests in visions of fragile, emotionally and mentally crippled people, waiting for someone to save them. Alarmingly more often in the media, it paints a bogeyman story of a perfectly reasonable person who could, at any moment, transform into a violent monster, a la the previously mentioned Jekyll and Hyde, or in Marvel, something like Typhoid Mary.

"But beyond this danger, the metaphor is simply not a very accurate representation of how DID begins. The truth is that newer research both into DID and child development generally suggests that DID occurs when the child is so young that (to stretch the metaphor) they don’t even have a ‘plate’ yet. They just have a big lump of clay, waiting to be sculpted into a plate.

"Children beneath a certain age have an amorphous, plastic identity, not yet formed into a single coherent self in the adult sense. In normal development, this means they can work with their parents, who will expose them to new experiences while helping them to learn to cope with these experiences. The end state of this process is that the child can foster a single identity, equipped with the tools to handle most of what life throws at it.

"Of course, some people don’t have that support – some, instead, are compelled to cope with truly terrible things before they’ve ever had the chance to form that cohesive identity. In this case, the child may have no choice but to make their own tools without the benefit of help from an adult. There are many forms this can take. Dissociative Identity Disorder is one such form.

"In DID, the child basically makes identities on the fly to fit different situations as they arise, allowing them the emotional distance to try to integrate a life experience so painful and contradictory that it can’t be resolved by the child into a single cohesive story."

But then I was like well but they're talking in different accents with people, so yeah shouldn't someone be realizing something is going on?

And then I was reminded that when we worked at Starbucks, our alter Zhypher would often triggered out midway through our shifts. Zhypher has a British accent. We are American. Not a single one of my coworkers ever asked me about it.

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.

Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“

Team work

Even in grade school I recognized the inherent absurdity of being told about the massive destruction of rainforests - particularly the amazon - but then being told that if we want to help we can “Recycle Cans” or whatever. 

And I think that to a certain extent that trauma has a somewhat malevolent yet subtle intention. When you make small children think that the world is dying because they ate a chocolate bar in plastic wrap - you foster a sense of preexisting damnation which cannot be meaningfully fought. 

Alternatively when you make children think that adults have no plan or interest whatsoever to tackle the problem, you foster a worldview in which the children have an actively antagonist relationship to older generations. Given the power dynamics between children and adults however, this is just as likely to produce crushing despair as it might prompt furious rebellion. 

Both paths ultimately lead toward learned helplessness and general misanthropy, ensuring that resistance to ecological destruction is minimal. Stifling the emotional ecological connection of every person who was once a child filled with the wonder of a tall tree, a grassy meadow, or the first squirrel they ever saw. 

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