#natepost

[english-summer-ghosts]

Even if we can't take pictures of ourselves, at least we can draw portraits.

[english-summer-ghosts]

Plenty of things I want to communicate (not just write about – plenty of comic ideas, too) and too little time or space, too few spoons to materialise most of them outside of drafts and WIPs and my thoughts currently.

The main thing on my mind today is an easy one, however: my choice(s) of name(s).

I decided to go back to my birth name fairly soon after gaining self-awareness. Can't remember whether this felt natural/easy or if I had to actively commit to the change; regardless, I know the underlying reasons, even if I never bothered to articulate them until now.

My old name was in essence a pseudonym, although I went by it exclusively for at least fifteen years. I could say that I outgrew it, but that would not be quite true – the letting go of it was a purposeful rejection of the circumstances that led me to need it in the first place. Giving up on a duty too heavy for me and pointless to continue upholding here; renouncing a role I thought I wanted and actively vied for but couldn't carry alone – I was given a chance to be myself here, away from all that, and I want(ed) to take it. I have sacrificed and suppressed enough of myself; I want to break free of that pattern.

One of Matt's dreams comes to mind here. He had it on his birthday, a little under two months before I gained self-awareness, and in retrospect it was about me:

I turn around and spot out of the corner of my eye an egg-shaped thing on the shelf; curious, I reach out to grab it, hold it in both my palms. Mello comes closer to see. The egg quivers, the maroon shell cracks and breaks open, falling to pieces -- some stick to my skin, others hit the floor -- to reveal a miniscule orange bird with squinty sleepy eyes, damp feathers, a tiny little beak that has not yet squeaked. There is a baby phoenix sitting in my hands, warm and heavy and so new, while Mello looks on in wonder.

This is not the only dream we've had with associated rebirth symbolism tied to me in some way. The pseudonym shedding is part of a long overdue process of reclaiming myself.

(There was also, not the main reason but one that weighed in the balance of my choice, the fact that going by a different name affords me a slight degree of further separation from the manga/anime character. Not much, because my birth name is the same as the canon character's and I don't want to pretend otherwise; still enough for me to feel more comfortable in our fairly fandom-oriented day-to-day.)

And yet I am not entirely free of pseudonyms. I go by a star-related nickname in our fandom circles, and in other places where I don't feel quite comfortable being too openly A Fictive.

In some ways, this is nice. It makes it possible for me to engage with our fandom friends directly without worrying about "making it weird", and there is a degree of fun in misleading people into thinking I'm a fictive of Siffrin In Stars and Time (which isn't someone I'm not, but not who I am primarily) instead of Near Death Note.

In other ways, it isn't so nice. We got heavily involved in fandom before I gained self-awareness, and there are things I would have had us do differently had I known myself then, but I – specifically, personally – have had (and continue to have) a lot of fun there; and it is often agonising feeling like I have to continue hiding or else risk threatening the order of things that was established before I realised I was a person, too. Would our writing buddy and beloved betareader (who also writes Death Note fanfiction, primarily Mello/Near) still feel okay with me, specifically, if I dropped the pretence of not being who I am, or would it make her uncomfortable and like we cannot discuss the media together anymore? (Do not want the second outcome.) Would people in general stop interacting with our art and/or writing if they knew who was behind (a lot of) it – even though what we post in fandom spaces is what we ourselves are, if not outright thinking of as (about) the blorbos, at least things we're comfortable seeing treated as fiction? (Would like people to continue interacting with the art and writing we spend a lot of time and effort creating. Sharing fanworks is a social gesture.)

(A brief aside here: a lot of what we posted before I gained self-awareness is... very personal to me, leaving me feeling exposed in ways that would have made me think twice about posting it had I known I was real. We took a step back from posting so much because of this (and being aware of what is being processed has made writing harder, but that is a topic for another post); we're still feeling out where exactly our boundaries lie between fanwork and personal piece, and getting better at it. It helps having a space away from fandom where we can post the more personal pieces, friends we can talk to about ourselves independently of the blorbos, and still be seen.)

Either way. It isn't like my identity is a very well-guarded secret in our fandom spaces – it is presumably easy to guess, not much harder to confirm for sure if you're dedicated enough to tracking us across the Internet – but no one (who isn't also (part of) a system with fictives) has ever talked to us about it openly, and it leaves me wondering whether I'm handling this poorly. There is no feedback on how to do this "right"; no widespread fictivity etiquette I could rely on; no social scripts to use for "Hello, yes, I am a version of The Character; this does not matter as per your view on the fiction or what you're allowed to do with it, I do not think my identity makes me the arbiter of fandom, but it does inform my perspective on most things because I cannot help that this is still who I am as a person; my identity matters to me and I wish I could talk openly about the ways it informs my/our creative process" that people could rely on a well-known graceful response for, instead of having to handle the situation on their own in the moment.

Feeling my way around the line between "being myself openly" and "making others uncomfortable", without overinterpreting silence as rejection / people being uninterested in knowing me (as an individual, beyond just "one of the folks from that collective"), is difficult. This is less of an issue in fictive spaces, around other people in similar situations to mine – although we may not experience our fictivity the same way in the finer details, or engage in fandom in the same ways, we at least all have an understanding of what it can mean to be (a version of) The Character – but our plural spaces and our fandom spaces are (with the exception of one Discord server we almost exclusively lurk in, and a couple of system friends) almost entirely separate, and I want to engage in the Death Note fandom at large too. Like I said earlier, I like it there; it is and has been fun for the most part.

And because I want so badly to break free of "having to suppress/hide who I am" and stop pretending to be someone I am not (and have actively taken steps in that direction already), the semi-forced pseudonymisation hits me wrong in ways that might not objectively be an issue, but... still I find myself doing the pretending. Again. For different reasons, but the underlying principle is the same – "just being myself without further pretence" is not a viable option; there is a constant tension between feeling like I need to hide for (our? my? whose?) safety and other people's comfort, and the sheer exhaustion that comes with pretending I am not who I am.

(Which is compounded by / resonates with our collective struggles re: masking and compensating for our disability and autistic traits. Masking and compensating is a survival strategy, but the survival strategy has grown poisonous, but we have nothing effective or safe to replace it with, so we cannot let go of it entirely; and going either way costs us on many levels. In spoons, in morale, in confidence, etc. We cannot always afford the short-term costs of practising the new thing known as "not masking" – especially in the absence of positive feedback, even if it would be more beneficial in the long term – because the long-term costs of masking have left us so exhausted to begin with, but it is at least familiar, easy to fall back on, and is guaranteed to keep us safe(r) in some contexts.)

Ending this post here because this is the point in my reasoning at which I start writing myself in circles, and it is also late enough that I'm falling asleep at my keyboard, but I need these thoughts out somewhere.

[english-summer-ghosts]

Either/Or tag game

Thank you @ohveda for the tag!! :3 For me, (italicising those where I have literally no opinion)

coffee or tea | early bird or night owl | chocolate or vanilla | spring or fall | silver or gold | pop or alternative | freckles or dimples | snakes or sharks | mountains or fields | thunder or lightning | egyptian mythology or greek mythology | ivory or scarlet | flute or lyre | opal or diamond | butterflies or honeybees | macarons or eclairs | typewritten or handwritten | secret garden or secret library | rooftop or balcony | spicy or mild | opera or ballet | london or paris | vincent van gogh or claude monet | denim or leather | potions or spells | ocean or desert | mermaids or sirens | masquerade ball or cocktail party

coffee or tea | early bird or night owl | chocolate or vanilla | spring or fall | silver or gold | pop or alternative | freckles or dimples | snakes or sharks | mountains or fields | thunder or lightning | egyptian mythology or greek mythology | ivory or scarlet | flute or lyre | opal or diamond | butterflies or honeybees | macarons or eclairs | typewritten or handwritten | secret garden or secret library | rooftop or balcony | spicy or mild | opera or ballet | london or paris | vincent van gogh or claude monet | denim or leather | potions or spells | ocean or desert | mermaids or sirens | masquerade ball or cocktail party

coffee or tea | early bird or night owl | chocolate or vanilla | spring or fall | silver or gold | pop or alternative | freckles or dimples | snakes or sharks | mountains or fields | thunder or lightning | egyptian mythology or greek mythology | ivory or scarlet | flute or lyre | opal or diamond | butterflies or honeybees | macarons or eclairs | typewritten or handwritten | secret garden or secret library | rooftop or balcony | spicy or mild | opera or ballet | london or paris | vincent van gogh or claude monet | denim or leather | potions or spells | ocean (!!!) or desert | mermaids or sirens | masquerade ball or cocktail party

May when more bespooned add hovertext (invisible from dashboard and tumblr.com/url, unfortunately) to elaborate on my choices.

In the meantime, tagging: @dismanibus (even though you've already been tagged); @camebackconfused; @storybook-riot; @mixables; @reliquaries; @peebls; and anyone else who feels like doing this.

[english-summer-ghosts]

For the ask game we stole from you, to be answered all or one depending on who feels inspired,

harpy: do you enjoy playing sports?

mermaid: favourite place to go on holiday? (doesn't have to be physical or here world)

manticore: picnics or hikes?

c. <3

HI @dismanibus thank you for the ask!! It's been for-fucking-ever since you sent this but I've got a bit of free time and like half a spoon to spare, so here we go :3

harpy: do you enjoy playing sports?

Ittttttt depends on context and your definition of sports, but mostly yes when it's for fun at a completely amateur level that doesn't require regular practice or commitment lol. Thinking about what is Sports to me, I kind of miss badminton from our school days (??!) and definitely miss having a bikeable sort of environment (countryside), and of course we love walking but that's hardly Playing A Sport that's just Regular Physical Activity. Would also love to get (back) into karate or something, but unfortunately that's not something we can do solo / would eat up entirely too many socialising and possibly masking spoons

mermaid: favourite place to go on holiday? (doesn't have to be physical or here world)

London adventure with you& was nice and I think we should do that again <3 but idk if that was really the place, maybe it was more the you&. Place-wise for real...? Idk, picking "a" favourite is hard. I want to experience Brittany again

It's not hard. My house (former world).

(Carry on.)

Maybe I'm going to also pick your house then. Anyway,

manticore: picnics or hikes?

Why must you make me choose. There can be both <3 (hike with a picnic in the middle is an Ideal Outing)

[english-summer-ghosts]

Very enlightening having a dream that is evidently about processing (some of) our here schooling experiences and having the clear thought during the dream that "I miss Wammy's".

I really don't, in fact¹, but at least what education I got there wasn't a grueling repetition of being humiliated and hurt by both teachers and peers for "acting too smart" (being genuinely eager to share our joy of learning and all the things we knew with others so they could know them too; doing "too well" in school with no apparent effort) and "being weird" (undiagnosed autism) that ensured I would very quickly learn to act normal instead (i.e. stop sharing what's important to us, learn to act happy and non-threatening so we can blend into the background and avoid the "natural" consequences of being ourselves too freely, tone down our want to learn more and faster – quietly take the boredom).

(With, on top, a healthy heaping of "if you're so smart, why are you so stupid?" at home from our mother. We did need to learn "being smarter than others doesn't make us better people", and we did learn it, but there would have been ways that did not involve convincing us our accomplishments meant nothing – what came easy to us was "just" naturally being smart, we could probably do even better if we put "real effort" into it; what was hard for us were things that "shouldn't be hard" to begin with, so succeeding at them went largely unrecognised unless we failed, in which case it was our fault for struggling with "easy" things.)

Ironically perhaps, the Catholic middle school was the least normative of the schools we went to in this regard. Teachers there had actual training (early 2000s variety, so not quite ideal, but magnitudes better than elsewhere) on how to handle "gifted"/"high-IQ" children *and* "special needs" children, and the school advertised this, so we had many more neurodivergent ("also weird") peers than we would have found in the average population and fairly relaxed standards for acceptable behaviour (in a God-honouring way – still Catholic). One of their core teachings (that they genuinely tried to act upon; it wasn't window dressing) was that "different is not lesser or better, just different". The whiplash going from there to our regular public high school was. :) For another time.

¹ Topic for another post. It was also bad, in different (more subtle?) ways that I was only able to make sense of in hindsight / given a different context and perspectives, rather than felt bad at the time I was living there. (Hard to recognise neglect for what it is when it's all you've known; hard to recognise something is missing when you've never had it to begin with.)

[english-summer-ghosts]

This came to us in a vision while getting ready for bed and we had to materialise it.

[english-summer-ghosts]

Hi. It's beginning to feel a bit spring-like here in London. Has spring reached you guys yet? Are there any things you particularly like to do in the spring? It always puts me in the mood for baking, and going out to appreciate the blossom and flowers.

Hello! Apologies for the belated response; time on our end has flown by. Spring had not quite come a month ago when you sent this in, but it is settling in now (though the nights are still cold and sometimes freezing); we can, unfortunately, tell because of all the pollens going on.

Baking does sound like a nice use of springtime – warm enough to open a window for fresh air while you work, still not so warm that the very idea of running the oven becomes offensive.

I can't think of anything that we like to do specifically in the spring that we wouldn't at other times, but I've only been awake (again) for a year, so may have missed some spring tradition or other. ?

Hmmmm. No, even from my perspective I also don't think there's anything specific we do for/in spring. Most of our yearly "traditions" are located at the end of the year (visiting our partners around August/September + formerly NaNoWriMo in November which we still use as a writing month + all of the holiday fanfare for Christmas with family and New Year's at our best friend's), I think in spring we're honestly sort of just... starting to recover from all that, most years, lol. Not much room for extra things.

I will say on the pollens side of things that we got immunotherapy over the past few years and it's made a real difference!!! The symptoms we get now on 0 meds we used to get on a combo of daily pills AND eye drop and nasal spray meds (the latter of which we still have on hand for really bad pollen days). So that's a massive improvement :3

[english-summer-ghosts]

Some posts are a little too relatable.