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sophieinwonderland · 5 months

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so, i'm looking for your opinion on my brain stuff again. disregard anything ive sent you before lol idk what i said but it probably doesnt matter to this. basically "me" feels like multiple people. theres the Brain, the Body, and the Conciousness. Brain and Body can be further seperated into groups of two each. their details are unimportant. Brain generally has control over the body's mouth while Body controls the rest of everything. the Conciousness controls the eyes and fingers. Brain and Body are kinda like an old married couple who've come to resent eachother. Conciousness has next to no control over the body's actions and words. there's another entity floating around that i guess could be the personification of my delusions? he directs everything under Conciousness. in general we all talk as one. there's rarely anything like what people describe as fronting and switching like, what gets presented to the outside world is almost never just one part's opinion. every part has its own opinion and reasons for sharing vs not sharing the opinion. the pros and cons of what is to be said is debated by everyone judged by the Brain typed by the Body and edited by Conciousness to appear as "me". regardless of how it's presented to the oitside world, however, the entity(s) refered to as "me" never feel like one. when use me/myself/i pronouns for myself im talking about the conglomerant. with that in mind, my therapist is pretty sure im schizophrenic and i ahve a history of intense dissociation as well as many other mental health issues and autism.

so heres my main question: do you think this fits within any modern version of plurality? or have i just dissociated to the point where i'm watching the oarts of me function from afar?

also in general i just want your opinion and thoughts and questions about this. sorry if its longwinded.

-Crow

Sorry this took a bit to get to.

It's a fascinating dynamic described, and not one I've heard of before.

My own thoughts, how I would relate this to other forms of plurality, would be that it could be like each headmate is co-fronting and partially possessing different parts of the body.

It sounds like there's internal communication between the three which would be indicative of some form of plurality IMO.

What I'm curious about is who controls internal things like the imagination. Is each part able to imagine things separately from the others?

Brain generally has control over the body's mouth while Body controls the rest of everything.

"Generally" is also a pretty interesting statement that can imply control can be fluid. Are there times when the mouth is controlled by others?

Have you experimented to see if only one of the three can temporarily take over all the processes controlled by the others?

To me, this sounds like it could be a form of plurality, but I can't think of a specific form to compare to.

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the-queer-look · 5 years

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Shay my name

Often we are criticised, and belittled, for the new terms which we are using to fully describe our identities. It may sound weird to those who’ve never had to think about their own, but at least in English, we have the language to describe what we’re talking about. In some places around the world, there literally aren’t words to fully describe someone’s identity, and that can leave people feeling isolated.

- K

Name: Shay

Age: 27

Gender/Orientation:Agender, gray asexual

Occupation:Digital Designer

Location:Strathfield

I’m from Vietnam originally, and have been in Australia for about eight years. I went to an international college in Vietnam; That school got into some trouble with the government and got shut down, they decided to move all the students to either Singapore or Australia to finish their bachelor degree, and I decided to come here, and liked it so much that I decided to stay. I’ve been working professionally here for the last five or six years now.

In Asia, especially Vietnam and Thailand, there’s this thing where even in a relationship between two queer people, there’s a hierarchical thing where one person is considered a man, and the other a woman, and I never understood that. But thanks to the internet, I looked into it and read a whole lot and came across the concept of non-binary, and it just felt right, and really liberating. I embraced it, and now I feel like a person, defined by myself, rather than defined by my gender, that my physical body is just a vessel for me to experience the world. Identifying as non-binary helps me be free-er.

The internet is massively influential. There’s all this information that you cant necessarily find anywhere else. In my particular situation, I had to use the internet to find out what other cultures and communities were doing and saying about these things. Theres no way to refer to people in the Vietnamese language without specifying their gender, so when I go home, people in the Queer community tend to use male pronouns for me, because I tend to present more masculine, but the internet helped me to realise that theres more than that – there’s “They” which has been an accepted non gendered pronoun since the 1500s for example, which just felt so much more comfortable for me. Just having access to this knowledge through the internet give you so much power, and so much personal agency.

Because im a small person, it’s rather tricky to get the clothes that I want. I like mens clothes because, for one, they have pockets! And for another, although I love the feminine side of myself, I feel like the fashions that are associated with femininity don’t represent me particularly well. When I was Eighteen, I started experimenting by buying mens clothing, but more and more these days, I’m finding myself comfortable in buying and wearing either masculine or feminine clothing, depending on how well it works with my wardrobe. Because I work in the tech industry, I have a bit more leeway to express myself, so anything that lets me hit that non-binary spot is great. And as I’ve grown more comfortable in myself, and my identity, I’m letting myself branch out from this stricter, all black, all neutral expression, and be a bit more lively with colours and patterns that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable in before.

When I came to terms with being non-binary, I didn’t have the words to explain it in my mother tongue, but in a more progressive environment, like Australia, you can explain it very simply, very quickly, and because the language to explain it is easier to use, its much easier for people to understand, even if they haven’t heard of the concept before. It’s still a struggle though, people are always staring at me, trying to figure out my gender, I get yelled at in public bathrooms, but at least having a word that legitimises my identity is a big step forward.

The culture of Asia is so gendered that I already have a hard time explaining homosexuality to my mother, but I’ve never approached the subject of my gender identity with them because they don’t have the words to actually discuss the topic, and when I explain it to my friends, they’re quite taken aback, because the culture is so defined along gendered lines. Like I was saying before, if you have a lesbian couple, whichever one presents more masculine is referred to with masculine pronouns, and assumed to take on more masculine roles. When I explain my identity to them, they ask me why I have to define myself that way, instead of just saying that I’m a butch woman. And I need to explain to them that I don’t actually identify as a woman at all. It’s difficult, but also I feel like its a duty for someone in a position like myself, which is having the privilege of living in a western country, but also going back home to a more conservative country and spread what I’ve learned so that others can see identity as a whole rather than splitting people into boxes.

Human brains always try to put people in boxes, and define things. In reality, everything exists on a spectrum and everyone moves back and forth and changes all the time. I know that once I was able to identify and understand this, that I began to have a different view, not just on stereotypes within the queer community, but stereotypes in general. Stereotypes exist for a reason, they exist because it makes it easier for our brains to navigate the world, and I think that’s fine, but at the same time everyone needs to understand how people change constantly. The stereotypes are fine, but you can’t just be defining someone completely based off of a stereotype, you need to be able to take a step back and understand that they are a multi faceted human being. Although it’s useful to have these archetypes to define yourself by, it’s counterproductive to define someone externally based on a stereotype.

My partner and I were bingeing Xena, and having these conversation about why we never talked at the time about how this show was about two queer women leading their lives and having adventures and being wholesome about the whole thing? But we found that the studios in the 90’s went through and censored everything about their relationship. Reading the comics though, where there’s no censorship like that was really uplifting and validating. It’s not a non-binary person, obviously, but the representation of a bisexual woman having a wholesome relationship with another woman feels so validating that our identity is not being erased or oppressed every day because people cant handle how different we are for not fitting into the boxes that society has made for us. The question is, why didnt we have these role models of queer people, showing us these healthy relationships, and healthy intimacy. Why did we get The L Word instead? Don’t get me wrong, I love The L Word, but also, it’s trash, in the way that it presents these ideas of queer relationships, its a bit toxic. They’re coming back with a new season, however many years after the fact, and I’m so glad that they seem to have learned lessons about appropriate representation, for example they’re having an asian trans man, playing an asian trans character, which is great. I feel that when you don’t have appropriate representation for yourself, kids get the wrong ideas about the world, like how The L Word gave the wrong idea about how the community works to a lot of young lesbians, including myself, back when that’s how I identified. And then there’s the “i cant see myself successful because I’m a queer person” mentality. Kid’s are dying out there and thinking that they cant achieve the sort of success in their lives that they want to achieve, simply because they’re a part of the queer community, which is horrible.

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