hello everyone hello every many so glad to be back we are back we are the redwoods and we are so glad to be here thank you to all the wonderful volunteers who helped this event happen and to all our fellow speakers let's go so we're the redwoods we're 13 people in one body we identify as plural or multiple we started becoming aware of our system in 2012 so it's been over 10 years of working together and overall we are very proud in love and building community within our system and beyond i agree
me too so while it hasn't always been the case we switch pretty quickly and we blur sometimes and sometimes we have the energy or desire to share who's fronting like right now i don't sometimes we don't and that's great this is joy hi uh so sometimes someone will say like george did now who's fronting uh but then not say when they switch like i don't feel like saying who am and that's okay we're working together image description we the redwoods are in one white trans-feminine non-binary body w
ith long dark brown hair blue eyes and sitting in an office chair just wanna say hi to littles and big people and everyone in between and beyond it's uh talk for everyone and also uh it's gonna contain some intense themes um about trying to make the world a better place people have tried to do that the reasons why we want to make the world a better place including injustice and some of the contents of that so um take care of yourselves take breaks um this will be recorded and shared so you can c
ome back to it another time or not come back to it if you need to leave and it's just like now this isn't for us and we'll be around after um the talk live and around on the internet and you can catch up with us later just a huge thanks again to the plural positivity world conference for creating this space to [Music] call us to bring forth what is the conversation that different speakers want to bring forth so please support the plural association and thanks for attending this conference okay s
o we redwoods think a lot about plural activism making things better for systems for people who are many in one body and we really believe we need a social movement and a concerted long-term multi-generational effort to make things better and that really starts within our systems and a lot of that work no one else can see so that's why we called this talk invisible plural activism we wanted to try to highlight just how much of this work is unseen such that you might already be doing a lot of it
we're somewhat known in some spaces for doing somewhat visible activism whether it's videos or talks or just being on twitter but even for us a lot of it is about the invisible stuff so just to highlight if you're coming to this talk out of the context you know we're thinking of plural activism is foreign by plurals uh plural we're defining as anyone who's more than one they might be many uh in one body uh they might use terms like people parts alters individuals folks beings entities we're curi
ous chat if you want to share what words you use for yourselves [Music] and we're talking about any origin so there's a lot of different theories and ideas and identities around where people uh understand this to come from and we think that that's really underdescribed underexplored um and we welcome all origins we also recognize that there's variable relationships the psychiatric system so it includes uh you know dissociative identity disorder otherwise specified dissociative disorders you know
multiple personality disorder uh is still what some people in the world largely have heard of or even were diagnosed as there's also you know no diagnosis self-diagnosis post diagnosis and also identity is just completely separate from the idea of diagnosis or some combination uh you could have any goal you might want to remain as you are you might want to move towards greater co-consciousness you might be interested in fusion you might be interested in um you might just be unsure you might jus
t be struggling to survive um uh there it's it's just about people who have this experience regardless of where they came from or where they're going and for us it's any amount of time aware and any amount of time in the movement including not yet aware right we're part of who we're working for uh is systems who don't know their systems yet because we were all there once in a state of unawareness or at least most of us um and we definitely had a long period of our life where it would have been h
elpful to know but we did not know and we figured it out and there was a lot of work there right and then even then we weren't in the movement there maybe wasn't as much of a movement when we figured it out in 2012 in some ways but there also were a lot of people doing a lot of work around different uh subgroups of this community and we just didn't know about it and so we're thinking about those folks who are out there who know their system but are not connected with others or with this particul
ar effort what does it mean to be invisible it's easy to think that maybe invisible is good or bad or something we should try to change or recognize more but invisible is a very complex idea uh it there's a lot of just vastness in the universe and things that we don't know about like i googled invisible and i found this butterfly just for image description it's a purple butterfly with on a green leaf that's kind of a blurry background with these beautiful kind of transparent wings there's also u
h this is kind of a metaphorical image of uh kind of hands reaching up like a tree and then with a root system beneath it right there's there's stuff that we just don't see every day that makes up we don't see uh the infrastructure of our cities uh of our own bodies um we don't see the roots of trees around us it's just kind of there there's just a lot there and we kind of grow an awareness of what's inside of us around us but it's it's not like oh i need to dig up the tree uh it's so bad that i
t's invisible you know actually like like forcing visibility can be harmful right can be destructive to extract to dissect um can be violent even so we can also respect the boundaries of uh the invisible sometimes it's it's it's uh not meant to be revealed and other times there's you know highly contested debate about uh whether it should be shared or not and when you start to think about mental health some people uh make the case that a lot of stuff should remain invisible or should remain quie
t um that others really like us i really think should be shared so there's two you know this is google's screenshot of google's definition of invisible and there's kind of the literal unable to be seen not visible to the eye concealed from sight or hidden but then there's the kind of more metaphorical which is treated as if unable to be seen ignored or not taken into consideration so you know what does plural visibility look like right there's the literal challenge of being unable to see differe
nt system members and then there's uh the fact that our large presence in society is largely ignored or not taken into consideration so it can mean some of these pretty painful things unseen ignored hidden avoided denied repressed erased but there's other benefits of being invisible right now i'm visible to you but i'm invisible to my neighbors because i have some privacy um i am not being overheard you know i feel safe in my home um i feel comfortable uh and there's a simplicity of just being a
lone together as the redwoods and most of the time we're here the camera's not on and uh not everything is meant to be turned inside out when it comes to plurality i'm i'm curious about what you all think about being invisible in the chat what do you think it means to be invisible one of the things that we've noticed is that there's a subjectivity of invisibility right like uh we know that we're here most of the time sometimes we're not paying attention to each other or to ourselves even but we
have some level of visibility internally to each other right but then there's the outer world who doesn't necessarily see that unless we switch or we share about it this is someone small when it comes to being invisible one of the things i like i like that i can cut that i have a space to go away that i don't have to be on all the time that's the nice thing about being plural and i like that when i do want to come out i can be like hello and i like that my system helps me think about when to com
e forward or not yeah anyone else invisible i think that uh some stuff is like kind of kept out of sight for and almost special occasions so there's certain places in our inner world that we're not always there or thinking about um there's also like certain people who we don't get to see all the time you know internally but also externally interpersonal relationships and um i don't know there's there's there's a shift in context right like uh this the sun after it sets is invisible for a bit um
and then it becomes visible again so there's a cyclical nature to visibility and invisibility that i think of it's interesting yeah i also just think that what sucks about invisibility is when you don't have a choice so to me the core theme is autonomy right like i want to be able to be visible when it makes sense for me to be visible because i don't feel like hiding or i feel like just being myself and myself happens to be visible visibly trans visibly plural visibly weird visibly musical visib
ly tired whatever those things are and i want to just be able to be that and not have people give me crap for it and that's very important to me yeah that's yeah and similarly when i want these things that are on screen of privacy uh safety and i wanna withdraw and i wanna recharge i wanna be able to have that too and i think that um to get those things like economic security and a place to live your your visible self has to be presentable to society in a particular way and not everybody has equ
al access to those presentations you know and so it's hard for many people to secure the safe places and ways to be invisible i also think that neglect is part of being invisible like we've neglected it's easier to neglect things that are invisible that are not readily apparent that are not right in your face and then even the things that are right in our face that society doesn't want to deal with even though it's visually visible it becomes ignored as if it's invisible so i think about homeles
sness for example in a lot of cities you can see people living on the street right there but it's just normalized say we want to make something visible right we think we've made this kind of funny hyperbolic chart about we were just thinking about the philosophical extremes of of who knows right how visible and so on the left you have kind of no one ever right completely unknown unknowable invisible uh and then on the far end uh in big caps we have all beings across the multiverse across species
for all time and it's hard to think of examples of things that all beings across the multiverse across species for all time are constantly aware of when we think about activism the big big examples so perhaps uh gandhi king uh black lives matter there's so many examples of the iconic right the big things that reached many many people um and might have reached hundreds of millions of people now and for future generations right we hope um but a lot of those things uh kind of fade into the backgro
und at some point right it becomes less visible most of the time uh as an impact of activism and kind of just becomes normal having weekends are an expression of a victory of the labor movement and but now in our day-to-day life we don't most people don't think of uh weekends as a product of the labor movement and they don't see themselves as part of the labor movement on the other end is there's just the things that someone somewhere knows like this talk for example like we had it in our system
right and so we talked about it with our system and we're discovering it kind of as we go but we know about it and now we're sharing it with you all we're trying to move things up into the right of greater awareness and we're also uh trying to recognize that we have to start with someone somewhere with ourselves right and we can maybe promote the works of others that we know and maybe promote a video or a book or a movement or an event or an action uh but we are ourselves uh someone somewhere t
rying to take something that we know and share with a few people so what is activism then uh this is kind of google's snippet about activism which is highly based on the wikipedia there's some interesting things here you have an image of a person with a megaphone and some signs and banners kind of a cartoon version of a street protest scene you have uh some imagery of what looks like one of the marches from the civil rights movement someone holding a cartoon sign of the national organization of
women so activism consists of efforts to promote impede direct or intervene in social political economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived greater good so you're trying to change something either by stopping it or starting it or intervening in it in a variety of different contexts social political economic because you think that whatever you're trying to do is good and i think the important thing here is that activism is not inherently good it
is an expression of people trying to make a change but there's a lot of activism that i heavily disagree with uh that you happily disagree with um and maybe some of my activism whoever's watching this you heavily disagree with but it doesn't mean it's not activism and you might do things that i heavily disagree with and and maybe think are immoral um but it might be your perception of uh pushing society towards what you think a better society is and we might radically disagree about what we thin
k a better society is you know and and and i admire a lot of those people um you have martin luther king jr you have greta thuneberg malcolm x and malala yousafzai and those are highly visible activists you know of the 1960s or of today and there are other activists who represent very different viewpoints there are people who hold viewpoints that i'm not even going to mention who are technically activists because they're uh trying to promote their own uh thing that i find disgusting and moral an
d horrible and and sometimes they win right unfortunately and then we have to do activism uh to counter that a lot going on in the world and uh yes so there's also this idea of activist organizations right so there's individuals but also organizations and organizations could be more or less visible they have an interesting list here um yeah activism can include making things visible so this idea that injustice must be exposed right i'll read the quote shortly uh it's from the letter from birming
ham jail by martin luther king jr so the context was that a lot of the images of the civil rights movement are of black protesters being attacked uh by white police with hoses dogs things like that and a lot of that came out of nonviolent direct action work of king and his associates southern christian leadership conference many different activists um and they were accused of causing trouble he says you know there's the the klansmen and the uh white supremacists who are opponents but there's thi
s bigger challenge of the white moderate the people who say you're trying to do too much too fast too soon just wait your tactics are too disruptive you're causing tension and you're causing trouble and this is one of our favorite quotes about activism you know actually we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension we merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive we bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with like a boil that c
an never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light injustice must be exposed with all the tension its exposure creates to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured very fascinating that there's just this long history and activism of thinking about how can we show what's going on in a way that is uh understandable immediately uh highlighted as wrong um and how can we bring thin
gs out into the open so it's interesting to think about how are we as a plural movement like bringing things into visible presence and what what is yet to be exposed um because i think we have a long way to go and when you have uh maybe a lot of the harm is in in psychiatric contexts um how do you how do we how do we expose uh the harms of this of the health care system of course though even as these movements and famous people from history were doing these things it wasn't just like dr king or
malcolm x or any particular iconic member of any movement in the civil rights movement there's been a lot of writing about who are the people behind uh the icons um there's this book invisible activists by lisa artane the subtitle is women of the louisiana naacp and the struggle for civil rights from 1915 to 1945 and it's basically exploring the idea that um hey you know actually the the most of the people doing most of the work at this critical time in that states uh uh civil rights organizing
were women and they are just not recognized uh but without them uh the work really wouldn't have existed um bayern rustin uh is a gay man who was a major organizer uh with king uh but was not really recognized widely at the time uh and kind of took a backseat in a lot of different ways um so there's this effort to elevate in history different groups and individuals who maybe were missed at the time to try to understand things and i think that it's similarly important in our movement work to thin
k about uh what groups of the past uh have existed um who are plural who would fall under the plural movement whether or not they called themselves that at the time that have been erased or left out of the narrative and who now is doing work today that is not known by most people um and it's not necessarily the face of plural activism but is very important um to the movement and i think also it's just important to think about uh the the the there's limits to the theoretical political science con
cepts around social movements but i also think that it's uh interesting to think about so this is uh what are the stages of social movements and there's this phrase emerge coalesce bureaucratize um and then there's all these different things that can happen so in the emergence period it's people coming together it's like it's starting to happen right coalescing figuring out our structures bureaucratize is like how do you actually deploy the movement how how does it get organized what organizatio
ns what structures how does it get funded is it partly within the government academia where are the institutional bodies because just individuals enough can't achieve the demands of the movement right and then it might succeed it might fail uh sometimes it gets co-opted um or repressed or can go mainstream and then all these things can lead to decline i would say for us it's interesting to think about but i think that we're somewhere in the emerge and coalesce period with a few people you know t
rying to set up organizations um but we're still very early and i'd say that this model is simple right at any point little efforts can be succeed fail be co-opted repressed or go mainstream so it's just an interesting model to think about um curious about your thoughts about this one so i have this little green dot over here and to me this represents the most visible activism in like a sea of larger society right so we have all of the world and then there's these activists over here and one of
the things that we wanted to represent is that you know those activists have a core group of supporters and they really couldn't exist without those people and those people are working hard and they're very dedicated and then there's a larger ecosystem supporting all those people movements uh activists you know lots of different kinds of folks uh and then those folks have their own support systems and then there's even more like different supporters and attention and a lot of different things so
any visible activism uh is largely supported by a whole we just thought it looked kind of like a fish so uh just a little rainbow fish break take a breath so what are we trying to change um there's this uh social ecological model that came up from erie brown from brenner in the 1970s you'll often see it represented like this this is an adaptation and i'll show a few more there's this idea of like oh you know the individual level the interpersonal level community organizations institutions polic
ies and the culture there's something missing here though for plurals here's a much more complicated model um individual relationships organizations community policy society again based on that work there's all these great examples you can pause this later you know but it attempts to look at like okay at the social level somebody's well-being is influenced by oppression and racism and societal conflict and environmental forces and natural disasters but then if you jump down for example uh you kn
ow to the relationships level family and peers social connections uh experience of parenting um you know personal interpersonal violence okay let's look at the the red and the rainbow as society and then you could say orange policy yellow is communities and and you have family and green and and blue is uh blue is uh the individual level right but for systems you have the indigo and the violet you have these individual system members this individual system member level and then you also have the
internal relationships level the center for our plural lives is erased in most sociological models in policy and all thinking about that starts from the individual so there's just so there's this pressure to hide uh there's this conceptual erasure that people just don't even know that we're there and then there's erasure in the form of loss of freedom and sadly in loss of lives right and that leads to avoiding focusing on individual system members and intra-system dynamics and that's really impo
rtant before we get into that further some of us are more erased than others so various layers of power privilege oppression and solidarity exist so we have that individual member level of so individuals members so this is the um system member at the individual member level internally to each system member there's aspects of myself that i don't even know about that that are visible to me that are or not and then at the system level i have maybe relationships with other system members that are mo
re or less strong and different system members have different levels of autonomy within our system and obviously both of those things we want to explore greater inclusion acceptance i want to accept all the aspects of myself as an individual system member and i also want to accept all the members of my system and think about what equity and eq uh inclusion looks like at the system member level um so an example of internal inclusion work is to think about who feels safe in your system and who doe
sn't feel safe and why and are there behaviors interpersonally inside of your system that contribute to some people feeling less safe um this is allie i think a lot about um how some people take up space in ways especially because we share a body right that can be harmful to others so if somebody is avoiding the needs of an individual system member or is actively harming the rest of the system through neglect or abuse there's some need for intervention and that intervention is a form of activism
right so interpersonally uh you know anti-plural sentiment uh is augmented by external inequity so racism classism sexism anti-trans and other ableism you know other experiences um mean that some systems uh have an easier time being seen in the world as hard as it is for anyone than others basically some systems have access to community that others don't have access to and there's geogra geographic and cultural wide variation around the world and in each region and there's more and more facets
of whether or not someone has the ability to be visible if they want to be i just want to highlight a few forgotten groups speakers of most languages are just forgotten in the conversation there's too much bias towards english currently we want to highlight and content warning uh those in institutional isolation so there's people who are plural in prisons uh cults detention centers psych wards and those are folks who are difficult to reach at this time and we might not be able to reach them imme
diately in big ways but we can slowly grow our capacity and find uh different interventions to reach uh and support systems wherever they are there's also people without access to technology a lot of this is online including this conference um people in most countries uh you know uh are not gonna have the same access and awareness as folks in the us even how ever small that awareness is systems who don't follow psychiatric narratives face specific barriers to being visible to being accepted and
then obviously people in active crisis who are unhoused or in poverty um you know various states of vulnerability it takes privilege to make and occupy a platform in in this unfair world and it doesn't mean that you need to feel bad about your ability to do that but you do need to think about how you can as you grow awareness and help more systems uh part of that can be helping systems less advantaged than ourselves uh to grow advance as leaders of this emerging movement yeah and i i'm just curi
ous who else you know in the chat who else is particularly erased left out or unheard how can you become visible right so how can you know who's there uh and understand yourselves individually and get to know yourself as a system member so you want your system to keep track of who's there and you want folks to check in and acknowledge um it's you know i won't read everything here but there's some ideas the other thing that i would say is just acknowledging your wholeness as an individual so this
is ali for example it's important for me to remember that i'm not just a personality that i'm not just the girly one or the feminine one or the one who likes fashion or you know like those whatever stereotype i might be brought into it's important to think about it as like i'm just a whole i'm a whole person so it's also helpful uh and there's resources on kinhost.org powered plurals and talks from this conference uh about how to tend to and reveal the intrasystem relationship so what's really
been helpful for us is uh structured facilitation uh so you know time with therapists uh working with us as a group so we've also had friends do this and and facilitators and mediators who work with our organizations will take us and sit us down and work with us as a as an organization where it's like okay what is fairness look like what are what are our values in our system right now and are we reflecting that in our system and do people feel like they are equal participants and it's a work in
progress it takes a lot of work yeah and part of that is considering your governance structures for smaller systems uh it might look really different than much larger systems but in general you're wanting to think about uh how you work together the other thing i would add is just making time for each uh dyad or small group set of relationships to the extent that you can and dealing with internal jealousy internal conflict about uh envy or you know i wanna i wanna be with that person you're with
that person i wanna be that person and creating an equanimity a capacity to accept each other's uh relationships and care for each other there's also uh effort it takes effort to become visible to those outside of your system right and if you're coming out to someone [Music] that is a form of activism because you really you can really change that person uh you can change that person's impression you might help them realize they're plural uh but you're definitely gonna make them someone who knows
more about it now that might not be a safe person to come out to or not and we talked about our coming out panel um uh from ppwc in 2020 i believe uh with us and a few other systems so definitely think about more about the type of coming out but it is it is powerful it's also very important to spend time with other plurals so i just want to talk about uh the avoidance of spending time with other plurals we redwoods have met a few dozen systems we've gotten to know pretty well and we've probably
met in passing over 100 systems and there's still a massive temptation to run away there's still a massive temptation to be like oh yeah that was a phase in my life and now i don't talk to those people anymore because look i can be normal and i can hold i can hold like a a job and uh i don't i don't know and i don't have to be like this anymore i'm done you know but it's not true i'm not done the more we heal the more we're us and the more we're us the more we heal but i uh it's very painful to
uh feel the shame and the discrimination that happens being us and it's natural to want it to be some other way but the real other way is selves acceptance working together to create change and also taking time to take breaks and one of the biggest ways that we've been able to take breaks is by spending time with other systems and you know we have a closed system friend who we met at a conference early on in 2013 and then um we avoided them and then we went back to the conference the next year
and we spent hours together and had a great time then we kind of avoided them and finally years later we've reconnected um but it it hurts me to think about um the pain that could have been avoided if i just let myself accept uh plural relationships into our life earlier on it's good to establish areas of your life where you're generally open about it so we started coming out in like different activist circles that weren't necessarily um plural activism we came out to some meditation spaces or t
o some dance groups uh having those different areas kind of helped lay some foundation and also changed larger groups of people that were relatively low stakes like if and then when you have those areas of comfort you can kind of start spreading those areas of comfort to other areas of your life it's important to also honor no matter how visible you are that a huge portion of your life together as a system is invisible to others and very visible to your own system it can often be like oh i'm alo
ne and no one knows anything it's like but actually like your system members are someone and yeah you all might be collectively under resourced and struggling together but you are you all are somebodies and [Music] uh you're not alone let's talk about big visibility so leading rooms uh on stage in media going viral and then things that we haven't really seen in the plural movement yet which is like highly visible protests covered in national media uh maybe national bestsellers activist figurehea
ds gone mainstream on live national news people running for office uh political leaders movements uh you know you know all kinds of different types of things uh all of that comes with a huge amount of just survival and care work uh so all the work to care and survive for ourselves as plural systems and then also for each other uh mutual aid efforts um communities friendships like that's a huge huge part of that bigger circle that we shared um and then the specifically activist activities there's
a ton of prep work and there's a lot of failed attempts before any uh big success and so it's important to just remember that like if you have a specific tangible goal of like you know reducing a terrible statistic or uh creating access to resources that's going to take a long time a lot of work and you've got to take care of yourself in that time and process so we took some time to reflect on our own uh visible and invisible plurality so i'll just start on the right so we were in a video that
has 20 million views on anthony padilla's channel um we've uh had press mentions we were in bbc radio and local uh news in the bay area and so maybe that reached 500 000 to 5 million people cumulatively uh we're and then there's the talks that we give that maybe 10 000 people reached and then we're out to family friends and work and maybe that's another thousand people right uh so that puts it but what those people are aware of is like some flash of us in social media some piece of our writing o
r or some type of presentation educational mode um maybe our closer friends maybe those 500 people who are vaguely aware they're like oh they've heard us talk about it share a concept or two and then there's like names and needs and that's kind of you could just look at is that like wow okay the redwoods did that uh underneath the surface of the iceberg uh underneath the water it gets a lot more like cold and and and lonely so there's things that our closest 10 or 20 systems to us know about us
so close friends who've known us for a long time were plural and then maybe 20 singlets who've really taken the time to get to know us and really think about it and then there's still just like most of our life they don't know about and then maybe two or three outsiders know a lot and then there's what only we know and then what only some of us know so we talked about kind of a stream of conscience of what people most people don't know most people don't know what we're like when we relax most pe
ople don't know what it's like to play video games with us most people don't know our hopes wishes and dreams they don't know our stress our struggles our anxiety uh what's pleasurable for us uh what what we feel like when we're really free uh most people don't know what it's like for the redwoods to have fun you know we might have a little model fun presented fun haha banter back and forth but like when we're really having fun and what that means for all of us as a system and what the switching
looks like when we're having a good time people don't know like we could document that and present it but like it's hard to share you got to live it live our life with us uh and so very few people uh get to have that experience and we would like more but it's it's lonely out here you know it's even harder to articulate uh what it's like to love each other inside it's just so hard to love each other so much and then to face the discrimination and the juxtaposition of like wow i really love these
people and they're so great and i live with them every day and then people still assume this horrible crap about us and it's just that juxtaposition is really painful but it's very powerful to have that knowledge of the love that we have for each other and to have that ex lived experience because in the beginning when we started figuring out who we were oh we were like so scared we were so scared and we really internalized a lot of that negative narrative and it's still there but yeah we love e
ach other yay and we really we really want that to be respected yeah but i want to talk about the shame oh my god every day so much shame there's the shame around being plural but for us we have cptsd you know we're survivor we are trauma survivors uh we are uh just struggling against with discriminating the trauma of discrimination of being trans and you know living through this time of society you you blame yourself you feel not good enough you know and we have really complex struggles where p
eople will get really deep in coping need a lot of care and attention and then other aspects of our system life get neglected so there's and i hope that we we i hope that we through events like this can get and as a community gain more confidence talking about these things not just like here's you know another 101 video explaining these major concepts so like here's what you need to know but like what is it really like to struggle with group decision making and how do we show that how do we tell
more stories about that how do we talk about our deep pains and frustrations and not like oh i'm plural and it's horrible and i need to stop being plural um but like it really hurts that um i don't know that i haven't gotten to go on a date uh with a particular system member who i want to go on and date with for so long just because stuff is so intense and it and it can and we struggle with how it feels unfair for the two of us to go off on our own when there's so many needs across the whole sy
stem and how do we reconcile the the different fairness dynamics and how do we create uh space for everyone's hopes and dreams internally like that's more painful and frustrating than like whatever society thinks is hard about this you know and all of that is essential to everything big that anyone accomplishes right and it's so important to spend deep time uh beneath the surface go for the big wins go for the breakthroughs let's freaking change society let's really change things like there's so
much that needs to change be big go big please like go bigger than any of us can conceive right now go let's do it let's transform media let's transform psychiatry psychology health care education uh just what it's like to walk down the street and talk out loud to each other let's change there's a lot that needs to change and uh let's change the confidence of dating as plural of working in a variety of industries of all these things and it's going to take time so just to re reiterate find the t
hings other than that big work which sustain you because all the big things are rare and take a lot of work and risk so what are some sources of energy and support you've got personal relationships and community with other systems you got large groups of singlet supporters uh that you need to build because it's not there's just not enough plural community in our experience to do it with just plurals you gotta find some folks you can trust um who are singlets uh one strategy that we're trying rig
ht now is a career that doesn't depend on plural activism so so i would like to talk about the topic of careers so there's this book called the lifelong activist by hillary reddig and it's available online and there's a section about you know basically saying have a career so it's very hard to sustain yourself with activism financially and and being alive in this world costs money right now uh we are more invisible than uh in the past because we're trying to have a career uh that's not related t
o being plural um we're trying to be openly plural in that work one of the thoughts was that it would be helpful for us to experience the realities of trying to be plural in the workplace and uh so that we could help think about transforming workplaces to be more plural inclusive because maybe we would would make it as a big plural icon or something and be able to afford like rent and stuff but um but maybe not but there's like millions of plurals and not every plural can be a professional plura
l activist if any can right we're particularly at an early stage in this movement so the big stuff is not is kind of just getting started and it's very important you know there's this idea of activism as dying for the cause but really we mostly need people to live for the cause uh it's a really long life and there's a lot of work to do and really again that idea of the lifelong activists like we'll hopefully live to our 90s we want to retain enthusiasm and love for this work and find ways to mak
e it more and more sustainable over time and we want you all to be able to do that too we want to be able to grow old with other plural activists and also by then see you know a scale of activism coming forward and and change and and uh that we haven't seen before plural activism is also plurals doing activism that they believe in so you know disability justice uh climate justice racial justice uh all these economic justice like all that obviously benefits plurals but also it's part of our great
er sense of justice and and expressing who we are and what we care about and our values and social movements need to be inclusive of plurals um and also even when they're not uh we need to find ways to participate in pursuit of justice that we care about so um i still need a functioning climate even if the climate movement is not particularly plural friendly so what does it look like for me to create sustainable pathways for me to contribute what i want to contribute to climate justice given the
level of of plural acceptance or not that exists there it's not an excuse for reject for you know anti-plural sentiment but it's more just like hey i recognize that in my lifetime i'm going to want to work on issues where i can't necessarily transform everyone working on that you know prejudice against plurals how can i exist as us out in the world and get done what i need to get done not just earning money or um you know securing my basic needs but also like how do i fight for what i care abou
t in the world even if not everyone in those movements is necessarily fully aligned with who we are that's real coalition building and it's tough work it's tough work hopefully future generations of plurals will have fewer uh trade-offs to make because it will be more widely accepted and understood and embraced yeah because the other thing i wanted to say is that like we have just a ton to give when it comes to movements um because of who we are so to exclude us from relationships is to lose out
on relationships to exclude us from activism is to lose activists there's a lot of us here there's a lot of us and we have a lot of ideas we have a lot to give uh last thing we want to say is this last bottom the small impacts thank you notes from people as an example hold on to the little things so every every please ma if we have helped you ever please message us and tell us we have dissociation we forget we have toxic shame we get down on ourselves and every little thank you or positive affi
rmation it means so much to activists it means so much but particularly to plural activists and i wanna i wanna stop and be very clear about something the movement needs funding the movement needs funding the movement needs funding and so if someone has helped you and you have money and please support them financially please support the plural association please support the other speakers we're thankfully okay right now which is new um but we have a lot of visions of a lot of work that needs to
get done right uh right now we're not doing a lot but like if you have a hundred thousand dollars five thousand dollars a thousand dollars a hundred bucks um there are things that we know you can do with that money um that can help others mutual aid is very important if you need money if you need help please express it that also helps people because honestly if you're listening to this talk and you've gotten this far chances are you're an activist and chances are the movement needs you and you c
aring for yourself is going to help the movement continue to exist caring for myself is not self-indulgence it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare audrey lord black revolutionary feminist what we need as systems uh is not self-indulgence it's not self-indulgence it's not an elaborate seeking attention it's not um it's not too much this world is so full of abundance we live in a very unequal society to have what we need is okay to have more than what we need you know thin
k about pleasure activism uh by adrian murray brown it's not about just having the bare minimum it's it's about abundance we are abundantly peopled in our system right we have more than than most people have it's it's it's and we also have sometimes different and sometimes more needs than other people have so please please consider that part of the change is a world in which people can have their needs met and they can have joy and fun and comfort and abundance and security and that every step y
ou can take to give that to yourselves hopefully will help you learn how to envision that for other systems as well and it's a role model so come towards the end here plural activism needs a scale of organization bigger than any system or organization which exists today again the big big thing and that can only come from millions of system members and singlet allies taking millions of small actions which means your system living your life and helping others and movements when you can invisible d
oesn't mean good or bad it's just a fact and sometimes we want to make the invisible visible other times it just is what it is the key is to remember that it takes a lot of invisible to make something visible um and so i see the work that these activists are doing here at this conference that are even if the rest of the world doesn't and when my activist friends see us that is really supportive and also think about that be open the fact that there's a lot of experience that we don't know that th
ere's things that are invisible to us that are out there and that we don't know about yet and keep an open mind that said there's a lot of messed up stuff that needs to be exposed there's a lot of history uh and there's also a lot of wonderful stuff that deserves to be exposed so whether it's for confronting evil or expressing good um we should find ways more and more ways to share things a last thought experiment here is you know what plural liberations right if liberation is the process freein
g someone or something from control or limits of expression or oppression uh what is plural liberation at the individual system member level what does it mean to be free in our system relationships in our daily life and in in the bigger than that what does it mean for all systems to be free what would that look like very curious what you think thank you so much for attending and [Music] the space and once again thanks to the venue and to the volunteers it's a real honor to be part of this commun
ity it always helps us to participate we feel a big pull to run away like we mentioned and sometimes we don't have to be visible to the whole world just being able to be visible to our community um helps us a ton helps us a ton so also encourage you to consider giving a talk in the future consider you to participate in volunteering to get involved in other organizing to find plural communities that make meaning for you thank you for helping us in your process of changing the world and thank you
for the opportunity to help change the world a little bit with this talk thank you thank you so much thanks you
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