#i'm very courtier-y in some contexts

[mooglesorts]

hmmm... does it sound like a bird secondary/bird model thing to be, for lack of a better word, territorial?

not necessarily in the sense of, like, getting defensive and driving people off (although if someone gets into My Territory who makes the space unpleasant for me in some way i’ll be distressed and irritated). more like... establishing a home base, i guess? and slowly expanding my comfort zone from there. people, communities, my living space, there will usually be a few that i come back to when i’m too tired or overwhelmed to keep track of everything else. 

examples: 

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when i’m in a discord server that i want to participate in more than in passing, i’ll usually start by camping out in one channel for a while and ignoring all the others. from there, once i’ve gotten to know people who frequent that channel, feel like they’ve gotten to know me, and feel like i’m Established there, i’ll start expanding out into other channels one or two at a time until i’m familiar with the whole server. it deadass took me half a year to branch out from the vent/mature topics channels in my current main server, and then it took months more for me to catch up to the whole server. if i don’t do it this way i’ll be overwhelmed, eventually get bored, and trip off my feeling-left-out-of-a-community sore spots. 

(which is a Thing about using snake secondary to reach out and do new things. sometimes it’s a lot of fun to just go where i feel like and explore! but if a) there’s nothing i can really do without spending money i don’t have, b) i get the side-eye for being Poor and Socially Awkward and Doing Things Weird, c) i don’t happen to be into some anime fandom i don’t care about that everyone else does, and have had zero opportunity to get at least a little invested in it in order to connect with people, d) i get ignored because no one knows me or is invested in the things i contribute; or e) i just plain go past my limits because i didn’t realize going in how much energy i’d be expending on the thing... i get bored, fast. what’s the point? might as well just turn around and go home; at least it’s comfy.)

(badger secondary model?)

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i’m prone to homesickness. i’ve gotten a little better about it over the years, and after moving so many times in such short succession, but it’s really hard to let go of My Territory the more memories and familiarity i’ve built there. it’s super rough on me emotionally from anywhere to a few days to a couple weeks, and any time i think about it, but otherwise i adjust pretty fast to my new surroundings. 

(the exception here is when i, well... avoid going out and exploring snake-style, because i don’t want to get attached and then deal with the grief of leaving it behind later on. housing instability trauma sucks, and i’m still struggling to figure out how to deal with that.)

part of that might be having stayed in one place for most of my growing up, but it’s like... pretty easy for me to designate a new place as a home base even if i still miss the old one? idk. even when i have nothing left there, i still think of everywhere i’ve intentionally planted my flag as One of My Places.

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it often takes me a long time to get comfortable with interacting with someone on a regular, friendly basis the closer the space i get to know them in. a lot of people who are now good friends of mine i had to build up my comfort levels with for years. there’s usually a moment of like... ‘oh okay this is our Friendship Unlocked Moment. the dam is broken,’ and even if we go long periods of time without talking a lot in private i don’t feel anxious and suffocated when we do. sometimes the Friendship Unlocked moment is one thing that happens all at once, and sometimes it’s several things over a long period of time until the scale tips for good. this is one reason i get cagey about initiating those friendship moments too directly sometimes, just because i know i might need to pull back and have space for a while again for the friendship to develop, and i don’t want to hurt people’s feelings.

weirdly enough, though, this process tends to be circumvented a lot the more distance there is between me and another person while i’m getting to know them? if i had gotten into the shc community by joining a server i would be way more shy, anxious, and wary, but when most of my potential-friendship-moments interactions with people take place on tumblr where it’s easier to get some space if i need to, it makes it way less uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing to point and go ‘friend! :D’ i’d probably be fine with exchanging discords with most of the people i’ve met on here at this point. 

it’s like the difference between meeting people and making friends at a hobby group where you meet once a week, and making friends by having to invite them over to your house every day. 

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i’m very much the kind of person who will stick close with the friend who invited me to a party, lmao, or if i’m tagging along on a trip but don’t want to be there (or don’t want to deal with the hassle of finding them again if i wander off). sometimes i’ll jump right into a new situation and start making friends, but i get anxiety pretty easily about making people feel snubbed or left out if i don’t have the time or energy to engage with everything, so often i’ll just fall back on one or two options i’m most familiar with and let everything else pass me by. i used to be the kind of kid/teenager who’d stick so close behind people on public outings that i’d constantly be bumping into them by accident. (once again, if i didn’t want to be there, wasn’t allowed to go do my own thing, or was--in hindsight--dissociating.)

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just... hm. thoughts? to me this sounds like either snakey, badgery rapidfire bird, or birdy, badgery snake who uses the other two to cover for social awkwardness/feelings of alienation/lack of time or energy/depression from my burned snake. or shit, maybe it’s badger all along, who knows.

#shc #sortinghatchats #sorting hat chats #snake secondary #bird secondary #bird secondary model #snake secondary model #badger secondary model #burned snake secondary #burned houses #moogle hat talks #very much doubt full badger though #i'm very courtier-y in some contexts #but in most other ways not at all lmao #(i say anime fandoms in the above example because i'm just not really into it as a medium) #(and most huge overwhelming servers i end up joining and then muting are wall-to-wall anime) #(and i get ignored when i talk about anything else) #(i don't have anything against anime itself though) #(Anyway) #also i mean it about the discord thing #y'all are welcome to DM me for mine (or just talk in DMs on here) #but i'm fine with just engaging on here either way #long post