from the MOGAI ABCs prompt list:
Day 4: Disconnect - are you disconnected with any particular aspect of your identity?
When I originally wrote the first draft on paper, I said (and I stand by this as a general statement) that it's easier to notice the presence of something than it's absence. However, I proceeded to fill up a page of my B5 notebook with my thoughts on this, so... clearly I am!! Here we go:
Culture: this one's in a weird spot for me, both collectively and for me (Tommy) specifically. As best as I can express it, on the collective level, growing up online from a very young age means we just don't know a lot about Portuguese culture, so there's a disconnect born out of lack of knowledge there. Meanwhile, on the individual level, there's a disconnect because I wasn't Portuguese in any of my sources, I was British, so there's a sort of apathy towards Portuguese culture because of that.
Body: like I said on our day 2 post, very few of us see the body as ours; the disconnect here stems from our plurality. This is also why, or at least part of why, seeing ourselves as disabled is difficult; if the body isn't youra, then you're not disabled, ykwim?
Orientations: it feels odd to say this, but we find this part of our identity... profoundly uninteresting to look into? It's likely influenced by our collective being aspec, meaning partnerships aren't particularly interesting to most of us. There's little interest in exploring the topic, which leads to less knowledge, which leads to a disconnect. Also, being alexithymic does not help
Gender: a mix of the aforementioned alexithymia and internalized exorsexism means it took us a long time to realize we aren't on the male-female binary spectrum? And a lot of that confusion stemmed from the fact that, since we live in a society that primarily sees this binary as the only valid options, it's very hard to present as a non binary gender, which makes us slot ourselves into a place on that spectrum we felt most comfortable with for our presentation, and that made us think it was our gender instead of our presentation.
@dragonpride17 @radiomogai
