Phosphor [&]

Someone on /r/Plural asked whether they should write a manual for new headmates and this was my reply:

If you're thinking about writing down passwords, go the full mile and use a decent password manager. Bitwarden is my recommendation.

If you're bodily adult or on the cusp of adulthood, I would also keep a list of addresses you've lived at and the month + year you moved in and out, along with workplaces and the month + year you started and ended each job, if applicable. This is less for in the case of new members, and more because a lot of applications like to ask you about these things and it's tricky even for folks without dissociation/memory issues to keep track. (Keep this information in a secure location, too. Bitwarden should let you store notes in addition to passwords.) Since you mention that new headmates tend to come around during times of high stress, I'd also recommend writing down safe coping strategies, a self-care checklist, safe people to talk to, and anything else that might help you get through those times.

For the rest, it depends on whether that knowledge is something that you use in your daily life, and thus something that would actually help people feel less lost. I would start by asking newer members why they felt lost, what tasks they struggled with, and what information could have helped them out, instead of writing down things for the sake of writing them down. You want to reduce overwhelm, not add to it.

(But like, seriously! Please don't make your newbies memorize a bunch of plural community jargon and the names and roles of every one of their coworkers on their first day here! Not even singlet workplaces expect that!)

I kind of want to go back to this and expand it some into a proper essay, though we're semi-underqualified because we don't get newcomers anymore. Maybe it can be a general list of "stuff that's good to write down because your parents didn't teach you shit about how to be an adult."

• recurring payments, their cost and what they are (subscriptions, both yearly and monthly; rent and average cost of utilities)
• copy of our lease
• copy of our vaccinations
• places we've saved credit card info
• passwords (USE A PASSWORD MANAGER.)
• various PINs (again, in a password manager)
• not one but several backups of 2FA keys, including some in the (encrypted) cloud (this may be overkill but)
• addresses of places we've lived (+ year/month of move-in/move-out)
• places we've worked (+ year/month of starting/ending work)
• ongoing budgeting spreadsheet
• wishlist of stuff various people in the system want
• important dates (date we discovered plurality, date we escaped our shitty family)
• easy foods to eat for when our brain Just Won't

+ physical stuff that always stays in A Designated Place

• physical card with our address + roommates' and partners' phone numbers
• Social Security card (US-centric)
• birth certificate
• will and advance directive
• COVID vaccination card (probably obsolete now :/)

ymmv on what helps and what doesn't, and I don't recommend including all of this in your manual for newbies. please do not make the new person memorize all your monthly expenditures

highly recommend that if you're going to keep this in the cloud, you use something that encrypts everything on your device before it gets uploaded to a server, which makes it harder for people to hack in and steal your shit. it's probably overkill for a lot of this stuff but. anyway some recs are the aforementioned Bitwarden, Standard Notes, and Lunatask (last one of which is pretty new and not open-source but has a very nice to-do interface) for notes, Cryptee for file storage