This blog mentions NSFW on it! It will be tagged #kink or #nsfw. Do whatever you need to do to take care of you! Kink, D/s, and power exchange are a big part of our life, and we don't have many plural and alterhuman focused spaces to share about that. This is one such space. We go into deeper discussion on our side blog, @chameleons3-ad. There is no in depth discussion or fetish content on this blog.
We hope to talk about just whatever. It just so happens we've never had a shared tumblr.
Also wanna post art and writing. All will be tagged and have content notes.
Any and all syscourse sent our way will be ignored and/or thrown in the proverbial trash can!
We're Chameleons. Not The Chameleons, or Chameleons Collective or anything like that, just Chameleons. We're a three-creature system and we have a neighboring system that we don't interact with very much as of now.
Our "how long have you known you're plural" timeline is complicated. We have known that we three are Chameleons, and not just one person, for around two years. We've known about our neighbors for much longer, and, they went away for a while.
Words we prefer:
System members
System mates
Selves
Others
Plural
Words that are OK:
Alter
Brainmate
Words we dislike:
Headmate
Multiple
Links
Our website we need to update more
Our website we need to update more, but for adults
Our dreamwidth
Tags (in progress)
chameleons post: original posts, no reblogs from others
chameleons dot text: anything with our words on it, reblogs or originals
āBodyā is a vehicle that is under someone(s) name(s)
Others (feel free to comment)
Voting ended onMay 10
Strictly for this earthly realm and this physical reality, to keep things simple.
You are still welcomed to talk about your experiences if you are parallel lives sharing a mind, or each having your own body, or a hivemind structure, etc.
This is a fascinating question and one that we've been thinking on a lot lately as we've begun making AAC for a member of our system who has the closest line of contact with our body. As we understand our relationship to our body right now:
Our body is our animal. It has instincts, urges, needs, desires, preferences, and feelings. We cannot truly be separated from our animal while we are alive with it, yet we are not exactly the same entities either.
We simultaneously live in our body, possess it, and are it- yet it feels like it lives in a different space than we do, like it fundamentally belongs in the external/meatspace world, whereas most of us feel we belong in our headspace and spiritual spaces. (There's one exception who bridges both spaces and acts as a liaison for our body- and also partially is our body without being the exact same entity as it- but that gets hard to explain.)
Our body does communicate with the rest of us who occupy our mental space, but not in verbal language- it speaks in its instincts, needs, preferences, feelings, etc. directly, or by locking up and refusing to listen to us. It can be as simple as a stomach grumble or as complicated as the sensation of pop rocks going up our neck, muscle fasciculations, heartburn, buzzing limbs, temperature and sensory changes, or abruptly yelling simple things like "EE".
Most often, it speaks in subtle physical sensations or by tinting our feelings (getting "hangry" is a great example). It escalates if we fail to listen to it.
This is more complicated still because our liaison speaks the same language, but with small traces of mental imagery and internal vibes added. It's a very complex relationship between them where they simultaneously are each other and aren't, but differentiating whether a message came from one or the other doesn't tend to be important enough if it's just communicating a body state. It does matter when we're trying to talk to our liaison as a person in their own right and need to know that a response is theirs instead of ambient body communication.
Our body does not have its own identity in the way most humans do- we suspect it's closer to a basic "I am" than a name, labels, etc. I'd call our body sentient, but we're still working out if it's sapient, and we're still learning to give it the respect and care it deserves as an equal member of our group.
Aside from our liason and our spiritual partner, we think of ourselves as our body's headfolk.
Every so often, we try to map the spaces that we can occupy in our system. It's usually helpful for us to understand how things work, and it answers this question nicely. Keep in mind that this is only our current understanding; it may be more or less complicated, may change in the future, may work differently from what's noted down, etc. This is a map, not the territory.
Venn diagram bubble text below:
"Body": Our animal. Instinctual, physical, deeply rooted in the external world. Has its own opinions and wants that have to be respected or it might decide not to listen to directions/requests. Communicates somatically and via senses to "me" and, if respected, does what the actor or our spiritual partner directs it to do. Keeping its trust is essential.
"The Actor": Attached to our body and in very close contact/communication with it, able to carry out actions and move- AKA, body control or influence is possible here. Other circles can ask the actor to do things for them, but to do it yourself, you have to tap into this bubble. It's our direct line between the mental and the physical. Any of us can tap into the actor, but one specific person spends most or all of their time here (and thus speaks our body's language natively, not our mental language).
"Me": Center of thought, what most systems call "fronting". The feeling of mentally being yourself. Can have direct body control, but usually operates more as a central command and assigns tasks to the actor, who decides how to do them. Can hear body, but still learning how to understand its language.
"You": People not in full, direct control of thoughts- may or may not be reachable, but this is what we call "the back". Can sometimes reach forwards and occupy the actor as well without taking the mental front seat, but it's harder to do and was a learned skill. Cannot hear our body directly without moving fully into "me" or the actor. Essentially the space of "not me".
"Spiritual": We're still figuring this out, but our partner exists in this area- you could argue headspace does as well (I'd say headspace bridges the spiritual and the mental, personally- it's both). Hard to explain by nature, but it has a deeply felt reality in the same way the physical world does. Things that happen here matter just as much as things that happen there. The unseen parts of existence if you only listen to meat perception.
"The Sea": The parts of us that belong to none of us. The fragments, loose/lost memories, subconscious material, raw potential, ambient selfstuff. The things we can't see head-on or understand yet. Where we go to be remade. Has parallels to the actor for the spiritual/mental side- quietly carries out actions on the mental/spiritual level if asked politely. Represented by water in headspace.
Outside of situations where masking plurality is necessary (e.g. where someone may use known memory problems as an abuse tool), you probably need to mask yourselves less than you think.
Very, very few people will notice overt plurality without being directly told about it. The few that might notice tend to be plural themselves or have plural friends, and they tend to be safe to be spotted by anyway because they're familiar with plurality and how to handle it respectfully.
The average person doesn't have plurality on their radar in the first place. Heck, they barely know what DID is, assuming that they live somewhere it's a diagnosis option, and they've never heard of anything beyond that. Most people will see overt plurality and think "oh, they're moody, or genderfluid, or just use a lot of names, or do a lot of things, or..." if they notice anything different at all.
Seriously, people are oblivious. You can introduce yourself by three different names, have wildly different preferences and modes of expression, and even toss in an accent. The most you might get in response is "are you okay?" (to which the non-disclosure answer is something like "yeah, just feeling different today" or "yeah, I'm just like this sometimes, it's normal". They'll usually let it go if you don't make a fuss about it).
In any case, people are probably not looking for signs of plurality when talking to you- they're more focused on the conversation. The odds of them noticing something different in the first place and bringing it up are low. They have other things to talk about.
In the event that they do notice something different, those can be explained away.
We straight up switch mid sentences in meetings at work. We've gone to local events where we aren't out; someone recognized us from an event where we were not speaking and using AAC, and didn't even blink an eye that we happened to be speaking at that event.
In moments where we are asked why, we just say, "sometimes it's hard for me to talk," and leave it at that.
Seriously. The vast majority of people clock absolute fuck all.
Prev's tags (@the-dream-archives):
> I would love to use this if I wasn't scared of being judged
People are going to judge you anyway. People will judge you for literally anything. Bad hair day? Shirt they don't like? Sitting weird? Doing literally nothing but standing there? Someone out there will be judgy about it, but most of the time, that judgy stranger is in your head, not out there. People, on average, are kinder than you'd expect.
Do you want to let the imaginary judge control your every move? Do you want to suffer for their benefit? Does listening to them actually help you live a life that you find rewarding, happy, and comfortable, or does it push you further away from yourself? If the judge didn't exist, what would you let yourself do? Why are you letting the judge stop you? Is that reason actually worth it?
(And if the judge is literal: what are they afraid would happen if they let you do it? What can you do to help them feel safe and respect their needs so they can respect yours in turn?)
But yes, some people will judge you overtly. Some might even be mean to your face. It sucks, it hurts, it's scary. But it's also one thing: honest. That person is telling you exactly what they think. That's a gift. They've just let you know, "this person is not my friend." It tells you that they're not worth your time, and you can disregard their opinion and move on with whatever makes you happy/comfortable/alive.
You're right if a jerk makes you angry or upset or uneasy. That means it's time to ditch them and go find someone kinder (and if you can't, then it's a cue to either find a way out or derail them off the hate- we once got a homophobe off our case by insistently talking about home aquarium care until they ran with the topic change).
But, most importantly: You'll never find the people who love you as you are if you spend all your time trying to be perfectly palatable. Hiding and people pleasing and burying yourself and your needs away doesn't attract the kind of friends who will change your life for the better. That attracts people who see you trying to please them and use it at your expense. And it destroys you from the inside out in the process.
I think our biggest gripes with the origin label discourse and the general community bend towards "you must categorize yourself under one of two boxes, and the other box is evil" are:
The assumption that experiences have an objective, fundamental truth that allows perfect sorting
The assumption that experiences and understandings of those experiences also never change- that if you can sort yourself into a box, then you should live there forever.
The general "us versus them" of the whole thing.
Point one: experiences of self, identity, consciousness, etc. are all very fuzzy, subjective concepts at the moment. We've yet to pin down what even makes a person conscious, let alone what a person's "I" is. I'm not confident that an objective truth of the self exists.
Maybe some meatspace things do have a usefully objective truth, though more often than not it's filtered through human definitions like anything else- if this desk is a meter long, then how big is a meter, and is a meter truly an objective measurement? Who made it?
What's a person? What's a self? Are those things the same, or different? Where do I end, and where do you begin? Ask ten people and you'll get ten different answers. That's the beauty of it. We don't fully know.
Point two: People change all the time. We are always having new and different experiences in life, and those can shape how you see yourself over time. We used to exclusively see ourselves as a medicalized, psychology-based system. We see ourselves a lot more holistically now, but our life experiences are still just as much a factor as any woo-woo spirituality we experience. That's a change that breaks boxes.
We are not the only system who's changed how they understand themselves over time. Spirituality, medical psychology, and other frameworks are neither mutually exclusive nor fixed in place. Like the framework of plurality, they're a way to understand the world and your experiences in it. They're an attempt to make sense of it all. If it's not working, put it down and try something else.
Point three: it's slowly improving, but the average Joe still has no idea plural people exist outside of horror movie serial killers and shock stories. They don't think they'll ever meet a multiple, and if they do, they're still using Multiple Personality Disorder as a label for it regardless of the system's actual experiences.
We have bigger problems than each other. Biting each other's throats won't help us any more than infighting and scapegoating has helped in any other community. The fact that we're still fighting over this in one form or another 20 years later is depressing.
Here, take the current list of our specific journal prompts. They might help you?
(These are sort of tailored toward our experiences as a person with a dissociative disorder but they can probably be used by any system since they're...pretty generic in my opinion? I do use parts language here, though.)
Thoughts on today, if you remember it?
How was today, if you remember?
What's something you're grateful for today?
What worries do you have about [___]? Why?
Do you have any concerns about [___]? Why?
What makes you <happy/angry/etc>? Why?
Do you remember any recent dreams? What were they?
Is there anything bothering you from our dreams? What? Why?
What's your <first/happiest/last/etc> memory?
Have you had any flashbacks recently? Of what, if you want to share? How did coping with them go? Do you want to talk about it at all, either with another part or with the therapist?
Are you dealing with any in system conflict? How does that make you feel? What help do you want? OR: what do you think could possibly be done to resolve it? Do you want to ask the therapist for help at all?
What are your thoughts on [out-system issue?] Do you have any ideas on how we should handle it?
What are your thoughts on how we handled [___]?
What are your thoughts on [person]?
What do you think of [past choice we made]?
What thoughts do you have on [upcoming choice]? What do you think we should do? Why?
Write a letter to another part. Be nice.
Have a conversation with someone nearby inside. Be nice.
What questions do you have for our therapist?
Do you have any issues with our therapist or with therapy? What? Why?
What are your thoughts on FSG [Finding Solid Ground; the program we are doing currently] so far, or in general? What do you find works for you, or at least seems helpful? What has been difficult to use, or seems unhelpful for you?
What are your thoughts on therapy <as of last sssion/so far>?
Do you have anything you want to discuss with the therapist? What? Why?
Who in the system do you <like/dislike/etc>? Why?
Who in the system have you met or interacted with? Who do you want to meet? Why?
What do you think about [our system specific things, like the communication barriers between our subsystems for example, etc]?
Write about <yourself/your role/etc>.
Write about your <interests/hobbies/etc>.
What rules do you follow, if any, inside the system and outside it?
Which rules do you wish you could break? Why <can't/don't> you?
Are there any rules that you do break? Why?
What do you believe in? Why?
What do you wish for? Dream of? Hope for? Why?
What do you think you're good at or are strong at? Why?
What do you feel like you struggle with? Why?
What do you wish you could do/etc? Why?
What do you want to change? Why?
What do you think you're avoiding? Why?
What do you associate with yourself? Why?
What is your idea of safety? OR: What does the word safe mean to you? Why?
What's the most important thing to you? Why?
What does nobody know about you?
What's a word that you think describes you?
How do you imagine our future?
What are your three biggest wishes? Why?
How'd you pick your name, etc (if applicable)?
What does safety mean to you? Why?
What is/are your least favorite emotion/s? Why?
What does recovery mean to you? Why?
What are some things you like about yourself? If you don't know, what things do you like about other parts, or about our friends? Why?
What things are you're proud of accomplishing? Why? If you dont know, what are you proud of other parts or the system as a whole for accomplishing?
Do you like being out? Why, or why not?
What do you want to know about other parts or the system at large, our life, etc?
How do you feel about [___]? Why?
What do you do (role or job wise) in/for the system, if anything? Do you know why? Did you always do this? Etc.
What comforts you? Or: what makes you feel safer, less unsafe, neutral, or more okay/fine?
Who do you trust in the system? Why? Who do you not trust? Why?
What's something you wish others understood about you? Why?
Hey all. I know you've said in the past that you're all kind of in a state of flux, each of you changing over the years but in ways that aren't just "growing as a person" but literally becoming other people. Not exactly fusion but something else. (Or at least that's how we've interpreted it? Correct me if I'm wrong.) We reckon we're in a similar boat, and it's kind of scary to us. It's happened a couple times already and we've got very mixed feelings about it. There's a part of us that approaches that with a kind of "c'est la vie" mindset and to just roll with the waves, but there's a very real fear of a loss of identity, of individuality.
My question is, how do you guys deal with that? Is it something that gives you any anxieties or is it just how it is for you? Sorry if I'm not being totally clear.
- @myriadmanes
You interpreted it about right. Sometimes our brain yanks someone backwards, dunks them into our subconscious or unconscious mind for a few days or weeks while they do whatever they need to do to change/be remade, and eventually spits out someone that holds different priorities and traits but also has a sense of not truly being new. It usually happens when we're under unbearable stress or get stuck on our own identities ("I can't change without becoming someone else!" dilemmas- best solved by becoming someone else).
I can speculate about how it works all I want or gesture at the entities hanging out back there who handle the recycling process (one of these days, maybe they'll explain a few things to us), but the mechanics don't actually matter that much. What matters is that we get remade sometimes, and that our definition of "person" gets a little weird as a result. We tend to reach for "recycling" as shorthand to try to explain this, or point at our personal mythos to describe it in metaphor. (This one is especially relevant.) But it doesn't particularly matter what exactly we call it if we can talk about it.
On accepting it:
Yes, we do have fears and anxieties about being remade sometimes. We get attached to ourselves, we want to keep ourselves the same, we want to feel like we know something about who we are, we envy the casual nature of other people's identity persistence. Sometimes we choose to fight it and hold still a little while longer.
Slowly, it's gotten easier to let go and trust that we'll be okay on the other side of it. More cycles passing makes the process more mundane to us. It's neither good nor bad, just a thing that happens sometimes.
We do have the comfort of there being a little continuity to the discontinuity of it all. When we're recycled, the person that emerges has access to old memories and information. They're not starting from a total blank slate. Their sense of identity is often significantly different from who they used to be, but there's the sense of a shared thread of self. We can reconnect with the thread of who we used to be if we put in a little effort, and it tends to be helpful in tying up loose ends. I am bound to who I used to be by memory and feelings, in the end, even if I was someone else when those memories were made.
Approaching the whole cycle from the lens of a sort of quasi-ancestor worship practice has helped find some comfort in it. We choose to honor who we used to be and what they gave to create us as we are, and it's a comfort to know that someday, someone else will remember us too. It creates more continuity in the chaos. (And the result is a life where we're kinder to ourselves regardless.)
Being fully fused for two years also helped a lot. It's certainly one way to get over the "a change has occurred and I am not the same person I was" fear- all or almost all of us know what it feels like to let go of a concrete identity and still exist. There's a lesson you learn of "I do not have to be the same Person to exist- I am here regardless of what face I wear, what you call me, what I think or want or fear. I am the only thing that I cannot lose."
That, and having a few possession experiences helps more than you'd think. What is the self if others can move in and out of it? Does it really matter who you are exactly if you're here? (Sometimes it does matter. Sometimes it doesn't.)
I think the biggest help, though: the idea that suffering comes from fighting, avoiding, straining to grasp/cling to, or resisting something. Change is painful if we refuse to let it happen (or chase after changes before their time). When we relax into the fear and allow ourselves to become someone new, it's not scary. It's often a relief. Allowing is a skill, and it's an incredibly useful one in a lot of ways.
There are a few comics and writing pieces that helped us with this too. I'm going to recommend most of the ones I can remember.
Annotated reading list:
This comic shaped how we handle change and self-replacement in a lot of ways (including the above self-ancestor worship angle). Content warning for suicide, death, "what makes a continuous person?" questioning, and similar. It's heavy and existentially challenging to think through, but it's useful. (We'd recommend journaling on your feelings about it if you can. Debating and discussing with ourselves about this comic opened a lot of doors.)
Partial screenshots of the most important bits (the full comic is longer):
In short: it helped us see and accept the idea that our past, present, and future selves are different people regardless of whether we change our identities, opinions, experiences, etc. We are plural in serial, not just parallel. What's one more change when me-yesterday is already someone different from me-today? Why fear change when it's already happened a million times over?
For a much shorter comic on the same ideas, see also:
Outside of comics, Opening the Door is a piece that helped us. If you can read through the metaphors/mad rambling/lightly plagarized nature of it and slowly deconstruct the thing into its lessons (or dig through its creator's website to learn the references- a starting point for you that has topical relevance), then there are a lot of useful ideas in here. It's just a challenging read the first few times (and a rare case of "this is easier to understand the more insane you are"). Take notes and reflect in the margins or a notebook as you go. It helps.
Don't worry too much about Round 10. It's confused just about everyone we know, us included. There's something there, but you can get the idea from the rest of the text without understanding what the hell Round 10 is on about.
The essential things we learned from it that are relevant here:
Your self isn't the same thing as your identity, and it's also not the same thing as (your soul, the higher self, wise mind, the continuous thread of youness if you believe that exists). The identity can change or die without killing the self or soul. Oftentimes, it has to die to escape its own self-destruction. Being remade is a rare chance to start again in a better position than where you were stuck before.
Tools are most useful when you don't let them control you. If you have a hammer, then learn when you need to go find a screwdriver instead of bashing screws into the wall because you use the hammer for everything.
Identity is a tool. If it doesn't work, try something else. If it's time to let it go, then let it go.
Using a screwdriver to bash nails into the wall because you want to avoid using a hammer for everything isn't much better than using the hammer for everything. Rejection is a different kind of clinging.
Some concepts can't be understood without changing the frame you're looking at them from. Get a different viewpoint, and you might find a more useful understanding.
Footnotes:
1: I could write a whole other post on the change we experienced in 2019-2020. We went from "80-90 person gateway-adjacent system with frequent newcomers and a nagging sense of something wrong with the headcount" to "fairly small system with no true newcomers and a much more solid sense of what's real inside", but the short explanation is "we had to grapple very intensely with what it means to be a person and ask which of us were real because of a persistent feeling that most of us were neither solid/stable nor lasting people, and after making it through that crucible, we have a very high split tolerance and have yet to truly split someone new with their own thread of self-awareness". That process was also how we learned that we remake ourselves in the first place / that the Sea exists as an entity we have to work with.
as a traumagenic system how do i stop feeling resentment towards endogenic systems who seemingly taught plurality as a fun and stress free thing
Break down the origin binary you've trapped yourself in. We're more alike than you think, and these labels are new as fuck. They were coined to try to end this exact kind of internet-brained discourse. It didn't work. People still give each other shit for existing in ways they personally dislike. People still stereotype each other instead of talking.
Does it have to be like that? What are we actually getting from shredding each other? How's it help us in a world where the average singlet doesn't give a shit because we're all the same kind of crazy in their book- where Split landed big in the box office, where people tell us that the only way they'll treat us as sane is if we conform to their standards of health? Who defines disorder? Why do they get the right to call us all mad? Why are we making our peers into harrassment targets when we've got bigger problems?
Doesn't matter the kind of system: people can play, cry, celebrate, fall apart, get together, grow, break down, get traumatized, heal, change, struggle, and whatever other "you must be real enough to ride this ride" bullshit you were taught makes a system worth respecting. The contest of "you must be this fucked up to enter" is complete bullshit, and it teaches people to perform suffering in exchange for basic decency towards them. I'd rather have a world where we're not teaching new systems that they have to be in horrible pain to be real, so if some systems get to skip believing that they're doomed to suffer and manage to have fun with their lives because of that, good for them.
No one owes you their full life story online. No one owes anyone else a daily dose of struggle-wanking just to be treated with basic respect. If someone just wants to post about the fun and silly shit, they can. They don't owe you their pain. But if you want to see it, there are plenty of folks under any label who'll talk about it and show you what you're not seeing.
How many folks using the endogenic label have you talked to with an open mind- not to argue about it, but to actually listen and understand them? Are you pigeonholing a whole class of people into a stereotype, and do you want to keep doing that?
You think they never stress about it? You think they never face shit for it? Go ask them about stress. Go ask them how they get treated for being plural "for fun" and how that affects their daily life. Go ask them what's hard. They don't owe you an answer, but I've never met a system that's totally stress free without doing a shitload of work to get there. I have met systems who manage to have fun with it anyway. I have met systems that learned to make plurality a net positive for them even with their struggles.
Doesn't matter the kind of system. We're all dealing with something. But wouldn't you rather live in a world where sharing a head is allowed to be fun sometimes?
There's a paradox in a lot of plural spaces. System kids are welcome, but only if they're Literal Children who stay in child-only soft boxes where they can be ignored. If a kid wants to have an adult conversation, then they're spoken over, pushed away, or otherwise discounted more often than not- and if they're accepted, then it's often at the cost of expecting them to have absolutely no childlike qualities to "prove" that they're mature enough to stay around. We even see this pattern within systems sometimes.
What are systems without adult members supposed to do if the only place system kids can talk is in the Super Soft Safe Box? What about system kids who want to talk about theoretical physics or drugs or sex or a thousand other taboos? What about kids who function as adults? And what about system kids who are kids but don't want to live their lives in the Super Soft Safe Box like the world expects them to?
Acceptance of system kids as being wildly different from each other in mindset and ability is improving, but we still have a long way to go in treating system kids with a shred of respect and decency in wider plural spaces.
Not to mention... why is there so much intense focus on mental age as some universal concept in the first place? It feels like a lot of the plural community takes the concept of mental age as a given without considering where that idea comes from, how it affects how they treat others, and how it interacts with systemic discrimination and ableism. It can sometimes be a useful construct if approached critically, but I see so little critical thought about it.
If you want some reading on the topic, one of the articles cited is worth at least a skim- it's a fairly good surface overview of eugenics and its tie to IQ/mental age, immigration, racism, ableism, etc.
ID below the cut with the full quotes- sorry to alt texters, I fit as much as I could in there but the text limit is real.
[Image one ID begins:]
There's a subtle sort of discrimination to how a lot of plural spaces treat system kids/littles. Especially those in adult bodies, or with a particularly large gap from their body's age.
"Littles must always be supervised in online spaces or else they'll bother adults and be preyed upon." "There must be an adult in your system if you're bodily an adult- they should handle life while the kids go away to never be seen by adults again. Littles should only talk to other littles. Anything else is unsafe and sometimes pedophilic. Right?" "Littles shouldn't be in charge. They're supposed to be cared for by everyone else and kept out of sight." "You're welcome here! You just have to only ever talk in the Baby Zone that no adults ever visit to talk to you. Yeah, it's empty and no one will answer. But you want to talk, right?" "Sorry sweetie, the adults are talking and you can't be here. Even if you're capable of understanding, consenting, etc. You're not allowed to be here with us if you're not a real adult." "Littles can't take care of themselves or handle any adult responsibilities, ever!" "Is there an adult I can talk to?"
Blue, an anthro cat sitting down, looks angry at the above phrases.
What are adult-bodied systems with no "brain adults" supposed to do? Drawing of a family of stick figures, all of whom are either child-short or hunching to be shorter.
What about systems whose caretakers are their children? Systems where there is no older person to supervise? Systems finding ways to live an adult life when no one inside aligns with it? What are you supposed to do when a 5-year-old does your taxes and drives you home?
"Just grow up." Do I get a choice, or are you ripping that away from me too?
[End image one ID.]
[Begin image two ID.]
Why is "mental age" the bar people are using to decide whether someone is worthy of autonomy and respect, anyway? Where does the concept of mental age come from in the first place, and why does it exist?
From Wilson, R. A. (2024). Eugenic Thinking and the Cognitive Sciences. In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.c9a5f080:
"Eugenic traits:
Prominent among the eugenic traits found in sterilization laws were those concerning cognitive ability and mental health.Ā These traits, ordered in terms of their frequency in U.S. state and Canadian provincial sterilization laws, included feeble-mindedness, insanity, epilepsy, criminality, imbecility, idiocy, sexual perversion (or depravity), mental unfitness (or deficiency), and moral depravity (or degeneracy).Ā As this listing suggests, these laws especially targeted those perceived to have some kind of cognitive limitation or psychiatric condition on the grounds that they were unfit and would propagate these eugenic traits to their children; approximately 70% of all eugenic traits mentioned in sexual sterilization laws in the United States and Canada concerned cognitive ability or mental health.Ā Given this, there was a clear role for psychologists in programs of eugenic sterilization, given their expertise in psychological testing (Rose, 1985).Ā Such testing and subsequent sterilization were conducted through emerging forms of institutionalization, such as ātraining schools for the feeble-minded,ā especially as eugenics gained state-level backing (Miller et al., 2015).
One of the roles of psychologists was to develop ways to measure those who were cognitively or psychiatrically subnormal.Ā Emerging intelligence tests were adapted to quantify and classify those deemed āfeeble-mindedāor āmentally deficientā (Thomson, 1998; Trent, 1994).Ā Binetās famous test of intelligence, for example, incorporated the more specific existing folk categories of āimbecileā and āidiot,ā adapting these to designate developmentally delayed children with mental ages, respectively, of 3ā7 and 2 years.Ā Following the translation of Binetās test from French into English by Henry Goddard in 1908, āmoronā was coined in 1910 to pick out those in the general population with a putatively fixed mental age of 8ā12 years.Ā This resulted in a three-tiered schema of intellectual subnormalityāmoron, imbecile, idiotāthat came to be widely used in the eugenics movement.
In the hands of the psychologist Lewis Terman, what became the Stanford-Binet test initially was deployed in selecting army recruits near the end of World War I (1914ā1918) before being used on the general population.Ā The three-tiered scheme was accordingly fed into the newly minted idea of an intelligence quotient (IQ) that remains with us 100 years on, with the fixed mental ages of moron, imbecile, and idiot mapped onto standard deviations from a normalized IQ of 100. From the 1920s, these tests were widely used to identify children who were candidates for eugenic sterilization, whether they were already housed in segregated institutions or within the regular school system or general community."
From Asilverm, & Asilverm. (n.d.). Whatās My Age Again: Why Mental Age Theory Hurts People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Retrieved May 31, 2026, from https://www.disabilitywisdom.com/2018/12/21/whats-my-age-again-why-mental-age-theory-hurts-people-with-intellectual-and-developmental-disabilities/:
The concept of āmental ageā was first introduced by Alfred Binet, co-creator of the first IQ tests, in the early twentieth century. Generally, āmental ageā has been measured by comparing an individualās score on a standardized IQ test with the average performance of their same-age peers. For people with IDD, āmental ageā may also be estimated by comparing the personās demonstrated physical, speech, adaptive or cognitive skills against the average for various age groups.
Not surprisingly, āmental ageā came about alongside the eugenics movement in the United States. Mental ages were used to classify various groups of āfeeblemindedā individuals by severity: Adults with a mental age of 9-12 years were classified as āmoronsā; those with a mental age of 6-8 years were classified as āimbecilesā; and those with a mental age of 2-5 were classified as āidiots.ā Individuals from any of these groups were thought unfit to reproduce."
A drawing of Blue looks annoyed and concerned. It's labelled, "TFW it's eugenics again. :("
Oh yeah. Why is it always eugenics?
To be clear: I'm not saying anyone is ableist or practicing eugenics for having a sense of their own internal age. I am pointing out how systemic ableism affects how system kids are treated, how the concept of mental age stems from ableism in the first place, and how terribly many cultures treat children and deemed-children to begin with: how children and disabled people are often regarded as objects, burdens, or annoyances who don't know enough to have a say about their own needs. Is this really how we want to assume all system kids should be treated? How anyone should be treated?
How much of how system kids are treated ties back to some form of ableism, in the end? I wonder about this a lot and I feel like I never see people talk about it.
Even if some of us are still in denial, we wouldn't want it any other way.
Don't think I need to say this but ofc some of us are more vivid and distinct than others, but really, so many of us are subtle in the way we present. We also didnt draw aaalll of us at the end, too lazy to draw all of us lmao. Way too many.
oh my god iām so tired psychotic does not mean violent it does not mean angry or erratic. it refers to a person suffering from psychosis, a loss of touch with reality that includes hallucinations and/or delusions. psychotic people are not inherently violent and y'all need to understand how much stigma you create when you again and again incorrectly use the word psychotic without even thinking about it
saying "question mark?" and "however comma," out loud are game changers. punctuation on the go. and it's always the funniest thing that anyone around you has ever heard
You've heard about Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini atureā¦ but have you heard about Zig zagā½
[Miralles et al. 2026 CC BY-NC 4.0]
A few weeks ago, friends and colleagues of mine (I was not involved) published this incredible new species of legless skink that makes distinctive zig-zag markings in the sand as it 'swims' through it.
[Miralles et al. 2026 CC BY-NC 4.0]
So they called it Zig zag.
ZIG ZAG, CORAL!
Gosh I love this new era of whimsy-driven taxonomy.
guy who is three guys @chameleons3 - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
