from the MOGAI ABCs prompt list:
Day 6: Family, Friends - what’s your relationship with the concepts of friendship and family? are you out to your family and friends, if you have them?
I'm going to break our response to this question down into three subquestions so we can answer this more accurately get through each part of this question; our opinions vary from alter to alter in the details, but we do have a fairly steady sense of how we feel about friends & family, so, here we go:
Our relationship with the concept of friendship
While I, instinctually, would call myself alloplatonic, I think I'm better described as somewhere on the aplatonic spectrum, but friendship favourable? I don't know if I experience platonic attraction, but I experience something similar (I definitely love my friends, at least), and I really enjoy the idea of friendship, especially the implied closeness of it. I mainly hesitate to call myself alloplatonic because the way I've heard platonic & romantic attractions explained, I've always felt as though I experience a mix of the two? Which, also makes figuring out if I experience romantic attraction hell rip but yeah!! I'm unsure if I experience platonic attraction, but I LOVE friendship as a concept and having friends!! I guess, I'm alloplatonic presenting, but greyplatonic if you like LOOK at it? If that makes sense!!
Our relationship with the concept of family
This one is... tricky. I don't feel much of a connection to our birth family, very few of us do, but we do feel familial attraction a lot, maybe more than most (it's hard to tell what the usual amount of it is). We mostly feel familial attraction towards people outside of our biological family, but we feel it very strongly; our chosen family is very important to us.
Are we out to our family?
Tricky question to answer... we are out as a queer trans guy to our birth family, and as AuDHD and as having OCD to the body's parents, but that's about it. We've not mentioned our alterhumanity or our plurality to any one of them, and likely never will. Ironically, we feel like those aspects of our identity are far more important than our gender or neurodivergence, but we also feel we'd be a lot less comfortable around the body's family if we did mention/discuss them, so, here we are.
As for our chosen family, though, we're basically out as all of these things to them! Specifics on what details we shared with who will vary, but they all at least know the broad strokes.
Are we out to our friends?
Mostly yes! The majority of our friendships are online and from spaces familiar with most of these concepts, which makes it a lot easier to explain things if there's a language/vocabulary gap on either side. Some irls may not be aware of our plurality and alterhumanity though, mainly because they know our mom as well, and we don't want her finding out like that.
tagging: @radiomogai @dragonpride17