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