When last I travelled to the United States’ East coast, I met a fascinating group of people who all shared one body. Collectively, they introduced themselves as LB, short for the chosen name Loony Brain. They told me that they each use different gender pronouns, but for the sake of simplicity they all felt comfortable—for a number of reasons—with “they/them” language.

Loony Brain is part of a loose-knit network of people “advocat[ing] for Healthy Multiplicity awareness,” and against the idea that when multiple people share one body—commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder—they are automatically suffering from a pathology. When I met them, LB spoke eloquently and, to my mind, persuasively about the healthy differences between someone like me and someone like them. They are not one person, but a “system,” and as such their perspective on plurality was absolutely fascinating to me.

Loony Brain also authors numerous comics and ‘zines about Multiplicity distributed free on the Web, and that you can get in print for a several dollar donation. The strip above is from their “Questions” comic, answering a bunch of frequently-asked questions that they regularly get. In this strip, Sneak (one of the five people comprising LB), talks about their identity as an asexual person:

Question #3: “Would you like to date me?” (by Sneak)

Actually, nobody asks me this question, and I really wish they would! That way, I could say NO! Some people just seem to assume I do, and that they can touch me when I don’t really know them! Eeewww!

People did this even when I was twelve, which is, like, double the icky. Please don’t do that!

I only love people like friends, okay? That doesn’t mean I’m hard to get, it means NO! No dating! Okay?

Not all asexuals feel the way I do, but please don’t assume I want a romantic relationship. I’m happy the way I am! Just because I have family members who are older than me and sexual doesn’t make me interested!

So don’t do it please. It’s icky.

How many assumptions about human beings will we need to unpack to understand multis/plural systems?

My own tumult with the medical industry (yes, it’s an industry), was relatively smooth by some standards, yet I still feel scarred by a good deal of my interactions with it. As I wrote in 2008:

It’s been my mental illness, bipolar disorder, that has been the scapegoat and the whipping boy for much of [the] failings of my character, yet—ironically, in keeping with my character—I’ve always rejected the notion that such a simplistic, restricting explanation as mental illness is the full answer.

When I was twelve, I was struggling in school, and at home. There was one horrible month in which I had three debilitating panic attacks in as many weeks. My life was coming apart at the seams.

Like so many other young people in so much pain, I took to self-harm to stay alive. I burned my arms and palms with the household stove, partly an act of self-care, and partly an act of cultural defiance. My answer to “Don’t touch that! It’s hot,” was apparently “FUCK YOU! I’LL DO WHAT I WANT!”

It was then that I learned of Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, who selflessly and unknowingly saved my life. My mother (bless her fierce, if sometimes painful, love for me) took me to see a lecture of Dr. Jamison’s at Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital, as she had recently completed reading Dr. Jamison’s book, An Unquiet Mind. At that time in my life, it was unclear whether I would soon call this hospital my home; school officials and medical professionals alike were warning my parents that if things did not improve, I may have to be committed.

Dr. Jamison’s lecture was part medical talk and Q&A, but also partly her own personal story. I listened, enraptured, wide-eyed, as though I had just discovered the door to Narnia. Dr. Jamison was diagnosed with bipolar disorder herself, and, like me, almost lost far more than her career over it. She almost lost her life.

When the talk was over, my mother introduced us. Though it was only a brief moment, shaking her hand and seeing Dr. Jamison smile at me helped give me the courage to be interested enough in life to live. What I didn’t know that I needed more than any pill, more than any prescription, more than any chemical, was just to see someone else who had been dealt a similar-enough hand in life to me who also simply refused to compromise on their aspirations. I needed to see someone refuse to go down.

Around that same time, my father took me to an arcade called Lazer Park in Times Square. We sat in a corner in the back of the arcade, near the skee ball and the concession stand. We were eating greasy pizza.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to him.

He paused. Then, he suggested something that would change my life forever. “Why not make a website? Write about this, and yourself.”

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“I’ll help,” he said.

That night, holding the image of Dr. Jamison speaking at that lecture hall in my mind as strongly as I could, I started writing. My father, good to his word, helped me. Not long after that, “Ups and Downs: A Personal Story of a Bipolar Teenager” was online. Back then, in the late 1990’s, when there was no Google, when people searched the Web—probably using Alta Vista—for “bipolar disorder,” guess who they found? Me.

I was not prepared for the influx of personal stories, queries, and pleas for help I received. ”Ups and Downs” remains archived on my personal website to this day. Partly, that’s for posterity. But also? It’s for helping to remind me that personal stories can help people bear the troubles and routines of the present.

Dr. Jamison doesn’t know who I am. But she saved my life simply by refusing to not live hers. I am eternally grateful to her for that.

You can’t know how many people’s lives you’re saving just by living your own. I don’t know if anyone’s even meant to. But I do know that if you can squeeze your suffering so hard that the scars in your psyche become gemstone jewelry on your skin, if you can turn your sadness into anger and your anger into action and your action into compassion, then you will become something far more important than just another agent of change. You will become your own reason to live.

And your life story itself will help others stay alive. As Mary Lou Kownacki once said, “there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story.” When you hurt out loud, 10 others are saved your pain. But when you hurt in isolation, 10 more will hurt 10 times worse than you.

I don’t know who you are, dear reader. I don’t think LB knows who you are either. We don’t need to. All we need to know is that we’re not gonna go down. We need to keep going. That, and encourage you to write.

Write about this, and yourself. We’ll help.