what is this site?
shiveringnaked.org is the personal site of morgan/the myriad/myrlings (we have very many different names, but even as a system and a body there are several names we go by.) we are a multiple system (yes, diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder) but we don't see it as inherently a disorder. for more about our multiplicity and multiplicity in general, visit our frequently asked questions.

this site contains our journal, which has more than fifteen years of journal entries and is the meat of the site; a description of ourselves; a probably-dead collab project about the landscapes and realities that many people experience - often as an internal geography; and a lot of miscellaneous crap. it's also the home for a few different groups for multiples - there is amazing multiples, which is a face-to-face peer-facilitated support group that meets in seattle; there is naked multiples, which is a mailing list for multiples that tends to spend months dormant and then spring into beautiful life; and there is it's eating at us, a low- or mostly no-traffic list for multiples with eating disorders.

not part of our site but good to note: we have a photoblog which really should be updated more often. we also tend to design sites for our friends, and if you're in the multiple community or know us in some other way, feel free to ask (myriad -AT- shiveringnaked -DOT- org) - we charge about five dollars a month to host a journal and personal site, or less if you can't afford it. some of our friends are paradoxae (we didn't design that but did consult), indigo, and dana.

now that that's out of the way...
primarily, this introduction page is for telling you about us. that's why we need to update it every year or so. the old page was so flagrantly ridiculously out of date that i decided It Was Time.

so you've got that we're multiple. the reason it tends to be first is that it supercedes all other forms of identity. there is nothing else we can all agree on except that we happen to share a body so that makes us multiple - not gender, not sexuality, not talent, not - well, just name any facet of identity. and with that going on, coming pretty much before everything else, we tend to put a lot of energy into the community and just in general various Stuff that has to do with multiplicity. it has the nice side effect that energy put into the whole multiple thing is healing energy, that sends us further on the way to functionality. and there's lots of fun things we can do with functionality.

other things you can say about most of the system-at-large? well, we're really passionate, excitable, intelligent, and usually introverted, but a font of locquaiciousness when you get to know us. altogether we're bisexual (well, how could we not be?) and our love-of-life (lover-partner-boyfriend-girlfriend-daddy-friend-roommate), paradoxae, lives with us. one thing we've always been really good at is intimate relationships, and this relationship is the strongest and healthiest and long-livingest that we could imagine. that doesn't mean we don't fall in love about once a year! paradoxae and we are polyamorous, which means that we are both open to each other loving others. or just fucking them. or anything in between.

we live in seattle, in a very well-insulated apartment in the Heart of capitol hill, with grocery stores a few steps away in two directions. we're somewhere in the meandering middle of our schooling - our LifeDream (tm) is to be a professor of linguistics. we're also disabled, because of depression and the hard-to-control parts of being multiple and a healthy handful of post-traumatic stress disorder. on a good day, we'll be able to get out of the house, take pictures for our photoblog, watercolor, play guitar, work on any of our various programming projects. we don't lack interests. (we do lack agreement about which interests to devote our time to, however.) on a medium-good day we might be responsible in one tiny chunk, and spend most of our time playing computer games. on a bad day everything overwhelms us, it's hard to leave the house, even complex computer games take too much concentration, we have flashbacks and panic attacks and spend our time watching tv or playing mindless-clicking type computer games.

we're addicted to the sims 2, and a sucker for the whole darn franchise. we have kids out front much, if not most, of the time, and so we spend a lot of time doing kid stuff.

we love language. love learning welsh, and spanish, and making a silly little conlang with paradoxae, and observing language, and learning any linguisticky details we can get our grubby little hands on. we're particularly interested in computational linguistics and language engineering in general. once-upon-a-time we were a double major in computer science and linguistics. but with our trouble with functionality we've had to prioritize, and linguistics is our lifepassion, it's the thing we can all agree on.

our life story
in case you hadn't notice, the theme of shiveringnaked is in-your-face vulnerability. we put anything and everything here. we challenge ourselves to open more with each journal entry, with each successive pass through this introduction. part of our story is our background. and considering the background, it's dangerous to share. but i'm going to anyway.

i wish we had written a faq about ritual abuse or had a really good link about it. a definition google pulled up: "Ritual abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including killing and torture. The sexual abuse is usually painful, sadistic, and humiliating, and intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques, which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members and of the evil spirits they believe cult members can command." (the site i culled it from). so that's a pretty good definition, and as good an introduction as i can see. we were raised by a single mother who was too young, who was herself an abuse survivor, and who did the best she could. it wasn't very good; she was one of our abusers and the only one who was always there in our life. in our opinion our mother suffers from narcissistic personality disorder and probably some kind of dissociative disorder. we love her so much and we hate her so much. we moved around a lot growing up, being in six different states and about 20-25 different house and apartments before we were sixteen. the abusers, who involved us in programming and rituals and prostitution and just plain sexual abuse, usually found us again, throughout the moves. we were taught indirectly and directly to hate ourselves, to not trust ourselves, to think of us as not real, to think of them as all-powerful. and many other harmful messages. some of the splits in our system were carried off intentionally with programming and mind control tactics. some of them happened spontaneously. the same goes with facets of our internal landscape. for a really good introduction to ritual abuse, and guide, and healing manual, i really really really recommend the book safe passage to healing by chrystine oksana.

when we were seven, our mom met the man we call our dad. she was with him for about three years, and my little brother was born. (he's the one member of my bio-family i have nothing but good feelings for.) dad was never abusive, except when his out-of-control temper went off, and even then he never hurt us physically. it was all bluster, but with our background that could get pretty scary for us. we have a tolerable/as-good-as-could-be-expected relationship with him these days, a good one with our brother, and a pretty poor one with our mom.

when we were sixteen, our life was falling apart, if it had ever been together. we were cutting a lot and our grades, normally a perfect 4.0 in honors classes, were falling. we were graduating early from high school, mainly from a profound desire to escape. six weeks before we graduated, it all got to be too much, and we went to live with a sort of mom-figure (our dad's partner after our mom for a few years, and a really wonderful and incredible woman, the best parental figure we ever had). it helped incredibly (gee, you think getting out of an abusive situation would help?) we ended up moving from there, back to our mom's house for two months, and then out on our own with our girlfriend at the time (her name is dite, short for aphrodite, and her site is here.) we got into therapy and were diagnosed at about age 18. we started at UCSC (we had finished high school, still half a year early, at an independent study school while we were living with dite.) dite and we broke up around the time we started school, and she moved away. we met paradoxae around that time, and was also in another relationship (we usually call the person/people we were in that relationship with dani), which was mostly good but got really nasty and sour and verbally abusive toward the end.

santa cruz, while a wonderful town, has no good therapists who take medicare who are findable, and for some reason we found it impossible to make friends there. we didn't have a therapist, we kept dropping out of school, paradoxae couldn't go to school there because they were too close to graduating from another UC, and life for us was stagnating there. so we picked up and moved to seattle. rented an apartment without even seeing it first. and it's been the best thing we've ever done for ourselves. with a friend we made here, we started a support group for multiples. we eventually found an experienced therapist who takes our insurance and is willing to work with us. and we're on our way back to school. things are about as rosy as they could be.

which isn't to say we don't struggle. we've had a lot of trouble living. we just got thrown a lot of curveballs and managed to keep things pretty dark for ourselves. and we still fall down into the pit of depression a lot, and have the above-mentioned troubles with functionality. we have to go to the hospital sometimes. (we really recommend lake chelan community hospital, if you're in washington or even if you're not. if you need a trauma recovery hospital.)

you made it
phew! that was long, wasn't it? i can't think what else we should say, even though there's so much more to us. enjoy our site, and if you contact us for any reason (myriad AT shiveringnaked DOT org), know that we are receptive, and try to be good about responding, but email can be hard for us. so sometimes we don't respond for a long time; sometimes we don't respond at all. we still read and care.