The Packbats' Weblog

A metaphor for social expectations and transgressing them.

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 22:13:03 GMT

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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Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:42:12 GMT

...I think what we need to do is download our old user icons and delete the ones we won't use off our UI here, because it's a little stressful looking at them but we don't want them to be gone.

- Packdragon 🐲 💭

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Teavlogs 2 & 3: "Complimenting Myself" and "Does any1 care?"

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 19:23:25 GMT

Forgot to post here, but I've made two more teavlogs over the past two weeks:

Complimenting Myself: one of the things that I struggle with is accepting that I'm a good person, so I talked a bit about that and also said some nice things about who I am.
Does any1 care?: I talk about how having an audience affects my motivation to create.

...they're fun. Making a vlog while doing something else adds visual interest, gives the vlog a natural stopping point (the tea is done and the kettle refilled), and it's just kind of fun to perform for the camera. And I pick topics I feel capable of speaking extemporaneously about - subjects I've thought through and have a pretty clear idea of what I want to communicate.

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Something akin to a love letter for my past self

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 21:58:52 GMT

Things I need to say to myself, to my past self, to the person who made themself into me.

You love reality, love truth, want passionately to know what is and not fall for what isn't.

You try to understand things you love. You immerse yourself in these things, pull in everything you can from the experience of them, find features and elements that make them mean so much.

You have so much enthusiasm. Your fear and anxiety cannot stop you when your passion is sparked - words will just flow out of you.

You are entertaining - work hard to entertain, to think about what things you can do that work and don't, to think about what people might appreciate, to craft the things you make and words you say.

You're idealistic. You take all of these things about you, all the things you have because of where you came from, and you find with these things ways you can make the world better. You find out what making the world better means, you find out how the gears are turning and what they are producing, you find clues and share them like seeds - share everything you have as best as you can, hoping it will grow in people's gardens and make their lives and themselves and their abilities better.

You're a good person. I don't say that enough.

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