The Packbats' Weblog

A metaphor for social expectations and transgressing them.

2022-02-06T22:13:03Z

Being raised, we were handed a box to remain inside. Be polite. Don't be prideful. Stay cautious. Practice your piano pieces. Wear a suit. Get good grades. Sit in the first rows of the classroom. There were cracks in the box, to be sure but we were expected to keep ourselves contained. We knew, compliant though we were, that pieces of us stuck out, but we held ourselves in enough. Told ourselves that we held ourselves in enough.

We were lucky enough to be spared attack for our parts that stuck out.

...well, for a while. Did you know that being trans stuck out of the box? We didn't know being trans stuck out of the box. We thought that fit in just fine.

I don't know if that was a turning point. Connecting our dots, we can see holes in the box from before that. I do know it was impossible for us to accept being contained that far. Surely that was allowed. We knew we wouldn't stop being trans - not for anyone.

I don't know if that was a turning point, but it meant that we knew what it was like to have a wall pressed against us, and we knew how to break it.

We're nonbinary. We're not a woman. The world isn't a sphere, it's an oblate spheroid. We're nonbinary, and there was a wall pressed against us, a wall beyond which was neopronouns, beyond which was expressing gender through language more resonant with ourselves than "they" and "it", and it was a wall we knew how to break.

Nonhumanity ... took more force, to break a wall to reach. Plurality, not as much force but more time. Disability, mostly took us time to name and tentatively claim. By the time we knew the thickness of the wall blocking the way to asexuality, we were already well past it, and we easily explored aromanticism, polyamory, and relationship anarchy from there. The person who showed us our autism, years before the rest of these, was happy to do it and happy to see it, and so were we - the box wasn't even on our mind.

The box is on our mind sometimes. That fear that we are somehow inexcusable for being outside it, leading to dread as we look at how far our wings span and see that we will never fit back inside it.

But also fuck that box. It was a prison. We'll never go back.

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Weird

2020-06-22T23:01:18Z

occasionally we are overwhelmed by the realization of how much weirder we are than we had any idea we were allowed to be.

- 🦊 (January 12)

Thinking about this b/c 👋🏽 🐰 - new system member fronting.

Like, god, the goalposts on our brain's bullshit just don't stop moving. We grew up taught to be proper and obedient, and we grew up knowing on a gut level that stepping outside the bounds of what's allowed could mean being punished and being told you deserve it ... so we have a really strong sense of when we're in a zone that we feel confident of social safety - of society's authorization - and when we don't.

And we can sense the gradations, because being a plural system with two members is already breaking from what society licenses, but being a plural system with a bunch of members, and adding more month after month, just ... we know we're not safe from What Everyone Knows out here.

...

Thank goodness for friends who are excited to meet new friends instead.

- 🐰

(Maybe with help from others - 🦗? 🐦? or maybe when I'm driving my fingers, their signatures feel close to hand. We don't know. We're still learning.)

we can't speak to anyone else's weird

weird, for us, was not lying to ourselves nor sabotaging ourselves in the name of compliance to the expectations placed on us

it has been scary because it has meant putting ourselves outside the bounds of what power structures defend as normal

but it has also made us real

made us self-aware, self-affirming, and self-actualizing

we get to exist and avoid pain and harm and seek out joy and accomplishment

this is the part in the script where we say it is worth it, but it honestly wasn't a decision for us - or if it was, it was the decision we made as a child, that we were not okay lying to ourselves

but we can say that not lying to ourselves seems to work out

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Admittedly, it is a very Applish kind of fiery crash.

2010-02-10T05:47:11Z

Does anyone know why, when a MacBook Core 2 Duo running 10.5.8 crashes hard - so hard that even a Vulcan nerve-pinch is ineffective - that the iTunes will keep playing until it finishes the song?

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