^Ruka says that social change is often slow in coming because apathy is the path of least resistance, and too few people ever grow out of the view that there's always going to be someone wiser and higher who knows what they're doing and knows what's going on, and take it for granted someone is going to fight their fight for them. Oh, sure, if they get really outraged, they might put their name on a petition, or send some money somewhere, or fire off a half-baked letter to the editor, because talk is cheap. But someone out there has got to know what they're doing and is handling things, right? Right?

Not right.

I don't want this to come across as sounding like a preachy, condemnatory call to arms for plurals/multiples/whatever. But the fact is, we don't need to be organized to do activism. Whatever you define activism as, you can do it on your own as you deem necessary, but for what it's worth, there are a few things I prioritize, things I think are important, and things I think amount to wasted energy.

Even now, as we speak, more and more singlet therapists, doctors, university lecturers-- who are in a position to indoctrinate hundreds of students-- are deciding that "MPD/DID" isn't real, and that because they assume the only way to be plural is to be MPD/DID, no form of 'more than one to a body' is valid. Even now, textbooks are being written which tell students that 'critical thinking' means believing multiple personality doesn't exist, by burning the MPD straw man, written by people without the foggiest awareness that some people come by this on their own, naturally. Even now, students are coming out of classrooms being told this and believing it. People are reading it in magazines, hearing it on TV. Appeal to cynicism is bringing on a rolling trend. In the eyes of mainstream psychology, we've gone from being freaks to a fad diagnosis to being... nonexistant. The battle now is not whether we can live healthily, or why we are the way we are. We're now on the frontlines of a battle to simply defend to singlets the fact that we exist at all, and that it's not like they think it is.

We need people to make webpages where they can talk about plurality free from the disorder paradigm.

We need people to write about their experiences and about how they are functional and healthy.

We need people to write about how they came out, were accepted by friends, got others to believe in the validity of their existence as many.

We need people to send brochures to therapists and to universities, to professors who are involved in the APA, who write textbooks, who are in the role of being able to sway the opinions of thousands of students.

We need people to speak out every time they see a bad portrayal of multiplicity, just writing letters. We need people to say "That does not reflect my truth," and tell what their truth is.

We need people to write to the OCRT and not let the issue drop until they give empowered multiplicity a fair and balanced hearing and accept it as being as true and valid as the fact that many people were hoaxed by therapists into believing they were multiple when they weren't.

We don't have to spend every hour of the day doing this, but just a few things, here and there, can make a huge difference. No one else will do it for us. Every system can only speak for itself. You don't have to be part of Pavilion or part of anything. You just have to hold your truth in hand as your weapon against a world trying to deny what it has never experienced.

We just get frustrated with the apathy, moreso than ever, after seeing another 'multiplicity doesn't exist' psych textbook today and wondering who else would be willing, really willing, to write to the author of such a book and give them a view they obviously have no experience whatsoever with.

Sometimes it's too easy to sit back when things don't seem to be outwardly bad, when you have friends around you who accept you for what you are. But on the larger scale of social attitudes, that ball of cynicism just keeps on rolling, and the only thing that can slow it down or bring it to a halt is our truth, our only and our best defense. And that's all we can do, and we want to think in the end, in the long run, it'll be enough.

Shiu Wei, Amorpha