Glitter, sparkles, and warmth. Tags of legend and a fantastic sense of whatever the written equivalent of comic timing is (verbal rhythm??) The way you write about characters with such observativeness (is that a word?) and affection. -warp6 (to make the signature meta: a minor but endearing part of your brand is the relatable bafflement over who blog-switchers are :D)
✨💖🥰 thank you!! i love everything about tumblr punctuation because i can now force my intended cadence for a sentence directly into your brain.
so a funny thing about the “okay but who were you LAST week” that i never considered before right now is that people changing their names all the hecking time has been.... an ongoing problem in my life.
those of you who’ve been here A While may know that i had what might be called a “non-standard upbringing,” as in “my netflix comedy special will be called Cult Baby”
(*it was a good cult don’t worry about it)
(*no it’s still not the church of latter-day saints)
point is, almost everyone i grew up around had at least two names: the name they came in with, a name given to them by a spiritual leader, aNOTHER name given to them by a spiritual leader if they decided to really go ham on the spirituality thing and renounce the material world, and honestly?? this usually wasn’t the first cult somebody tried so often there were several layers of additional spiritually-derived names in the mix. sometimes a person would just go into the woods and come back like “my name is this string of vowels now” and we just let them.
things got really crazy when the community was falling apart amid ~scandal~, as such communities do. people would publicly renounce their spiritual-teacher-given name but didn’t want to return to the name their parents had given them, so it was a real free-for-all of identity discovery. obscure rituals and baby name books were very popular. the ouija board mysteriously disappeared from our schoolroom. a woman who had been one of the kids’ teachers when i was in fourth grade went through five names in a year.
this had an unexpected side benefit for me personally, though, because there were very few children in the community, so as people dispersed and then sometimes came back around to visit, they would recognize me! and greet me as if i were Very Important To Them! but i had only the vague sense that i should know who they are. and some people were VERY offended for a while if you called them by the name given to them by the deposed spiritual leader (which i understand now -- but at the time i was like YOU’RE MAKING THIS SO HARD and also maybe I HAVE UNADDRESSED TRAUMA), so i finally just started opening every conversation with a familiar stranger with “of COURSE i remember you!!!! so what are you going by these days?”
so all in all, i should be better prepared for the tumblr url culture than i am! i don’t want the kids to get off the lawn, i specifically invite you TO the lawn, i just want like. nametags. and bibliographies upon request
