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We've said before that there really isn't a headspace. This isn't completely accurate.

Our first headspace was a tree that looked different depending on who looked at it. For J it looked like a sort of robot tree, and while away from front he had limited abilities over it through a process not unlike the Doctor working on the TARDIS. For Pandora, it was furred over in black and white moth-like eye patterns. I think the tree sort of represented the system's psychic nervous system, and by manipulating it we could sometimes effect things like our habits and urges.

A few months ago we sort of remodeled through an extended series of consensus meetings, facilitated by the Lalondes over a period of weeks. We haven't seen or done much with it since then, at all. The blueprint we settled on was basically a Greek island, one of the ones with the white houses everywhere, and we had more ambitious plans to set up things like an economy that we never got around to for obvious reasons.

I should explain something else. We don't really see ourselves or each other in headspace. There, we exist in the same state of blend that we do everywhere else. We experience headspace in the first-person, and it's a limited first person. In our dreams, we have serious physical limitations. Most obviously, our punches pause in midair and never connect with their target, as though they're being repelled by a powerful magnet. Often, when we try to yell, no sound will come out. Generally speaking, our movements feel like we're moving in slow-motion, and we have a very hard time turning our head. Although we did extensive research on the subject of lucid dreaming in the body's youth, we've never heard of anyone having a similar problem.

To be frank, our actions within headspace are even more limited. I (Rose Lalonde, as of the last paragraph, for the record) suspect the phenomena to be related. We do have abilities in headspace that we don't in reality, though, or that other people report having a difficult time with, though. For instance, we can shift perspective without moving our heads. We can look at a building behind us and even zoom in. We can also take part in limited actions in reality without those actions dispeling our involvement in headspace.

I haven't tried language, largely because I have no reason to suspect that anyone in headspace has use of it. This is probably a huge oversight on Sibyl's part, and something I'll make a mental note for her to do.

These limitations probably explain why we haven't done too much with headspace. Under these conditions, it's difficult to get much done in the way of exploration or satisfying interaction.

Tonight, though, Sibyl was able to give it a brief visit. Although there are deviations from the original blueprint, the basic concept seems to have been created faithfully, having drawn significant inspiration from the Sonic Unleashed level Apotos, which in fairness is based on the Greek island of Mykonos. There were multicolored Christmas lights.

We were in what appeared to be an outdoor dining area, although we knew intuitively that the actual dining function hadn't been planned. The thought didn't occur at the time to see if any of the other tables actually had people at them, but we did find one NPC, who was a member of a race of mushroom people who we'd planned to include in an RPG we'd partially planned out when we were about fifteen. I suspect that the rest of the NPC's will be members of this species, too, although I could again be wrong.

Our stay there probably lasted less than five minutes. We basically just took in the atmosphere.

I do wonder, also, if our increased satisfaction with our life in reality is contributing to the accessibility of our headspace.

Making a mental note to ask Jewel about this.

Current Location: Reality: bedroom. Dream: a non-functional outdoor dining area

We came out in 2005. We were 13 years old, and we lived in a small suburb of 10,000 people, which was about 6 miles from the nearest city of 50,000. There certainly wasn't an active queer community where I lived, and if there was I'd have been too socially anxious/schizophrenic to access it, and to my knowledge my transition actually predates the widespread reclamation of "queer" (although terms like "genderqueer" were already in use). My support was entirely online.

I think that this webcomic arc from 2002, up to comic 135, is a good starting point for understanding my transition. This arc does a good job of detailing what I feel to be the two major factors that affected my position in trans groups, those being my age and my direction.

For the rest of this post I'm probably going to frame things in a binary of MTF and FTM, and there's a very good reason for that. To me, being trans was (and still is) a very different thing than it is on fumblr and most other places. I'm going to need anyone reading to be open to new (or old, as the case may be) ideas on the matter; I'm not posting this as an endorsement so much as sharing my experiences.

To me being trans was (and remains, really) mostly a matter of the logistical concerns of hormonal transition. Sorry, this is where we pull out the diagrams:

See, normatively, a person goes into puberty with one identity (boy or girl) and comes out with another (man or woman). The goal of a trans teenager my age, as I saw it, was just to cross the wires a little bit -- avoid the rather more unpleasant effects of male puberty, some of which are painful (electroalysis), expensive (facial feminization surgery), or impossible (height) to reverse. Go into puberty with one identity (boy) and come out with another (woman).

I didn't have time to ponder the finer points of theory about how this contributes to binarism or whatever. I was operating on a time limit, and once I did have hormones, my parents would use them to exert control over me. In fact, with the minimal privacy I had, and the fact that I had to continually prove and re-prove myself to my parents, and doctors, and the various other adults who had control of my life, as someone who wouldn't "regret it later" there was no opportunity for me to explore non-binary identities until I moved out. As well, many spaces to this day remain ignorant or in disbelief of the existence of non-binary identities.

If the words "I don't identify as a woman" ever escaped my mind, and my parents found it later on a livejournal entry, or forum thread, or an IM log, and they let that out to a doctor... well, I certainly didn't let that happen. Good thing, too; I learned during my hospitalization at age 15 that my parents had had access to my livejournal, and had been reading it for months without my knowledge.

I either had hormones, or I didn't. I dedicated a completely ridiculous amount of energy to ensuring that I did, and part of that precluded talking about certain subjects. My analysis of this particular point in my life is in binary terms because my experience was in binary terms.

It was not common back in 2005 for people to come out at 13 years old. I was banned from at least one online group on the grounds that the subject matter was not for kids. I'd say that something like 25 was considered ridiculously young, and therefore enviable.

Trans narrative at the time was (and remains) controlled almost entirely by older trans women. This is another point where I differ strongly from fumblr SJ -- it is my experience that it is completely okay in these spaces to exoticise and fetishize feminine body traits, and people who have them, which in these particular setting enables an entitlement to other peoples' bodies and makes the environment very unsafe for anyone read towards the female end of the spectrum. Sexual assault is very common in support type settings that are dominated by trans women. It's happened to friends of mine, it happens to the comic's FTM protagonist 3 times (twice by the MTF protagonist; thankfully she gets called the fuck out on it) in 30 comics.

Their analysis only really extended as far as how awesome traditionally feminine body parts are. I was never taken remotely seriously when I went there for support; they'd just give crappy advice that's completely inapplicable to someone in my situation. Bullshit like "he's a doctor, he's providing you a service, you can fire him." Like hell, no I couldn't! At one point I was suspended from school for using the womens' room, I didn't get so much as emotional support. Just fetishistic crap about how lucky I was to figure it out so young. FTM's were in the same shitty spot when it came to getting help from MTF's.

I didn't have school. I was bullied incessantly BEFORE coming out, and didn't wanna open that can of worms at all. After getting my middle school diploma, I ollied the fuck outie and nominally enrolled myself in an online school, which I completely ignored. I lived in a level of social isolation that most people have trouble comprehending. My parents had moved away from my extended family in Chicago when I was two years old, and cut off contact rather than tell them about my transition. I spent most of my time in escapist video game fantasies. I had some friends online, but most of them were abusive too.

So my social life consisted entirely of my abusive parents and doctors, sexually threatening older binary trans women on the internet, and message board trolls my own age.

Things wouldn't change until I moved out. That, I'm nowhere near ready to talk about yet.

Sibyl: No, I'm feeling shy right now. You can talk to them next time you front.
Sibyl: And thank you for it, btw.
J: 8D Np. Where would you be without me?
Sibyl: Pretty freaking helpless. I've been completely helpless every time you haven't been around.
J: Likewise.
Sibyl: ...Oh. <3

This conversation made me really happy. J is a total sweetheart to literally everybody.

And the thing is he's right, too, but I legitimately hadn't realized this until he said this.

Current Mood: touched
Current Music: Nightwish - Over the Hills and Far Away

Okay. I guess it's time for an intro post?

Aaaaa but I'm a lot more used to how things are on tumblr... where I can just be like, VALIDATE MY MOMENTARY FRUSTRATIONS!!! but I can't really do that here... I think I'll get used to it though. I'm just gonna say whatever comes to mind about my plurality and other subjects I've had brewing up for a while now...

I'm Sibyl. I'm nonhuman, I'm not sure how. My current theory is that I'm an indigo child, but it's hard to find anything on that subject that isn't full of new agey fluffy white bullshit, so I'm starting to prefer the term alienkin, although a few key characteristics about myself that I consider to be non-human in nature are covered really well by the indigo framework... particularly my really intense need for physical affection and a sense of opposition to authority that, I feel runs deeper than ideological differences, however fundamental. Not to say I don't have ideological differences, I do! And they're really intense, and really important to me -- but I feel like I would have them in any possible universe, and that that is absolutely fundamental to my existence.

Anatomically, I have horns that change in shape, size, texture, even material pretty frequently, but the rest of my anatomy is kind of a mystery because in this head, visualizations usually aren't too much a part of our self-concept... We don't have a functioning physical headspace, for example, and we don't really know what we look like. We can visualize things, but it's mostly super basic like shapes and stuff... it never comes in clearly, so it's not a huge part of our self-concept.

We tend not to announce switching, because it happens several times a sentence. The three folks at the moment who front with any degree of regularity all have their own pretty unique typing styles -- I'm probably going to have to develop a new one that meets the uh, standards of formality that I feel like exists on dreamwidth, but I feel like I can pretty much tell who wrote what part of what sentence by reading it. I use a lot of deliberately complicated language, pushing myself to utilize my extensive vocabulary. J tends to be calmer and more... gentle, and casual, and he uses a lot of hearts. F is careful to use proper capitalization and punctuation, and has a really distinctive typing style anyway.

Sibyl isn't a name. It's a title. The Sibyl is the person who has ownership of the body and its past and all of that stuff; we had a mythological concept of the Sibyl before we actually had a Sibyl. Pandora and a few other strays merged down to make a Sibyl. We didn't really do it on purpose. It just kind of happened.

J's been in the system since we were fifteen. Although he's human (EDIT: This is a damn lie, he's the biggest indigo ever born), he is a very distinctive person; we were able to pinpoint him before we were able to identify reliably any pieces of the Sibyl. His energy is masculine, but not threatening -- like we said earlier it's gentle, reassuring, sometimes kind of guiding but only in the most subtle ways. He's about as passive as it's possible for a person to be. He fronts regularly; there have been periods where he fronted for months at a time with almost no interruption. He takes care of us a lot, with basic chores and cooking and going for walks alone... he likes to be alone. Unlike Sibyl, who is sarcastic, sometimes blunt, I'd like to be blunter, and always busy, always forming elaborate plans related to social networking and community building.

Since they're such opposite people, we had a really hard time of things until about a year ago when we realized we actually were different people -- it was hard to balance our separate needs, especially without any form of communication. We ended up in really, really bad shape -- we were homeless for about three years, and it took some serious anguish and serious work to fix that situation.

In this system we get a lot of "visitors", although I hesitate to call them that because they don't have their own homes or anything, the way other people say they do. We believe the psychological explanation 100%. What we get is fragments, basically, usually with source material, who show up and leave. We have a working theory that there's a maturation process that it should be theoretically possible to have a fragment go through to become a whole person -- there's another member who's been here a few months now through that theory, and is certainly not a fragment.

Since there's about a million of her on tumblr, who she doesn't really feel she fits in with, and since her relationship to source material is really different, she's still trying to figure out how she feels about being open about what her source material is -- it's more how I would feel reading the journal of my grandmother or something. She's trying on a new name, we'll call her Freya for now? She's also really distinctive -- she's assertive to the point of often being demanding, especially when it comes to getting others to pay attention to her. But I'm making her shy by talking about her.

Especially because she's not even sure if the maturation process is sustainable or going to work. I don't want to count my irons before they hatch, you know? It's a tangled web we're dealing with here. I'm not comfortable being counted as a full-fledged system member or anything.

Anyway, here's. Us. Or the nature of our plurality, at least.