lovers, lunatics, and shifters : be a little unhinged. . . ౨ৎ
there is a thread, nay, a scarlet artery, connecting the lovers, the lunatics, and the shifters. to shift is to trespass on reality, to dip your hands into the molten core of the universe and remould it into your own fevered image. it is the soul’s protest against mediocrity, the mind’s rejection of limits, the heart’s defiance of a single beat. and those who do it best; the masters, the legends, the whispers on every shifting forum, are always a little unhinged. as byron said, “ we of the craft are all crazy. some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched. ”
to shift is to romance the impossible, to waltz with the unthinkable. it is a seduction of worlds, a love affair with the multiverse. shifters do not merely believe in the unimaginable; they kiss it, bite its lip, and pull it into their beds. who but a lunatic would think they could rewrite the script of their reality? who but a lover would try?
the best shifters carry a touch of the byronic hero; beautifully broken, defiantly romantic, and unrepentantly mad. they’re the heathcliffs screaming into the moors of the quantum field, the sylvia plaths scribbling metaphysical maps on the back of love letters, the nietzsches staring into the abyss until the abyss becomes their favourite guest room. to shift, one must possess a mind that both rebels and surrenders, that whispers, the world is not enough, and then answers, fine. i’ll make another.
madness is a prerequisite. shifting is not for the faint of heart nor the sound of mind. it’s for the ones who drink their dreams like absinthe, who walk the razor’s edge between the sublime and the absurd. it’s for the ones who wake up and think, this is not where i belong. a true shifter is someone who looks at the locked door of reality and decides it’s time to burn the house down because if you build a house with the same bricks, will you truly build a different house?
but madness alone is not enough; one must also be a lover. shifting is an act of radical intimacy with oneself. it demands a devotion to your desires so deep it borders on obsession. you woo your dreams like they are your most capricious lover. you memorise every contour of the world you wish to inhabit, every quirk of the life you are calling forth. shifting is a love letter written to the universe in the ink of your own longing. it is whispering, i choose you, to a reality that does not yet exist and then watching as it blushes and says, okay.
and then there’s the lunacy. the kind that nietzsche described when he wrote, “one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” chaos is the shifter’s greatest tool. to slip between worlds, you must let go of the comforting logic of this one. you must embrace the absurd, the paradoxical, the downright ridiculous. it is not rational to believe you can wake up in hogwarts or narnia or hollywood or 18th-century versailles with your childhood crush reincarnated as a brooding prince. but it is necessary. shifters are the fools who dream, and in their foolishness, they become gods.
to shift is to step into a lineage of poets and prophets, artists and alchemists. it is to claim a heritage of lunatics who dared to defy the tyranny of the real. byron, plath, nietzsche. they would all understand the allure of shifting, the sweet madness of it. they would sit with us, the shifters, and nod gently as we murmured our desires. they would see the way we court the thing that is reality, as if it a muse, how we hold our dreams with hands and declare them real.
so yes, the best shifters are unhinged. they have to be. to shift is to live as both lover and lunatic, to dance on the edge of the possible and the impossible. it is to carry the madness of a poet, the passion of a lover, and the audacity of a god. it is to say, i am the architect of my existence, and then prove it. shifters are the dreamers who refuse to wake up, the lovers who refuse to let go, the lunatics who refuse to make sense.
and thank god for that . ་ ˖
vaporwave
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
