Amelia @mordremoth@lgbt.io

I finally managed to crystallize a sentiment that I've been brewing for the better part of a year now, and have left glimpses of in prior posts here.

It's a bit of a read, but it's from the heart.

https://starshipgender.blogspot.com/2019/12/other-by-default.html

Boosts appreciated, if you like the sentiment (or, you know, if you don't like it but want to help prove my point for some reason).

:-)

It's true, what they say, that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the analogy is, as analogies always are, imperfect.

The collective of humanity moves forwards; sometimes we take steps back in some areas, but over time, change simply happens. And on a long enough time scale, change tends to be positive for the world.

So the things we wish to leave behind can simply sink under the waves.

The realities we wish to reach can guide us - as the stars have done for sailors, for ages.

As long as we pause to help the floundering, the fleet gets bigger.

If the world seems dark and bleak, look for the ones who can shine those lights of hope.

And if your light burns brightly, consider taking the time to help those who are steering by it.

Be lovely to each other. ❤

i dream of a world where people can come together, share a chuckle about our similarities, and get on with the good bit - where we revel in our differences.

nite, lovely people. be excellent to each other.

Ame'lyeh fhtagn.

I think the thing that hurts the most and that scares me the most is feeling unable to explain my experiences to people who do not share them.

It reminds me, in a painful way, of trying to explain some deeply autistic experience to neurotypical people; we're all using English words, but the difference in point of reference is so profound that no real communication happens.

To really get how much this damages people, I think one almost has to live through it - but I would never wish that hell on anyone.

It feels indescribably lonely to try to connect with someone on an intimate level, only to be stymied by past traumas in a way that makes intimate connection seem unattainable... and then not even be able to fully describe the isolating horror that I'm locked in.

There's a way out of this. I just haven't found it yet.

I've lived long enough that, when encountering a new challenge, my first instinct is to see if anyone else has tackled it before, to learn what I can from them.

I'm queer and other enough that, many times, everyone else I find is right out here on the expanding edge of human experience, struggling with the same questions.

Sometimes all I can do is try and learn in public and see where it goes. So I'm going to try and start talking more here about my #purityculture recovery process, and more about being #queerelational.

Of course I'm attracted to strong, brilliant, gender-defiant feminine people.

I'm a homosexual. I like people like me ;-)

Recently been realizing just how much healing I have left to do from being subjected to a particularly nasty and vehement strain of purity culture and sex-shaming in my formative years.

My own inner turmoil around expressing and acting on attraction is palpable to the very people I most wish to share it with, and it's heartbreaking.

I've run across a few odds and ends to help with this sort of thing over the years, but if anyone happens to know any decent resources - especially queer-affirming and/or trauma-informed ones - I'd deeply appreciate suggestions.

(Boosts welcome)

I need some practice being open about certain things that I'm trying to do with my life, particularly things that are desires more than needs. I feel confident in my ability to advocate for my needs, but asking for things just because I want them is still a struggle.

So I'm going to do the sort of thing I tend to do when I get a goal stuck in my head, and find a way to really double down and lean into accomplishing it.

I want more queer friends in my local area, and I also want to play more DnD in general, so I'm going to start GMing some one shot sessions (online for now because, yeah) and see what comes of it.

It's time for Queers on Quests.

I love being queer, and I love the radically anti-normative way in which I am queerelational.

Being queerelational is how I get to go travel to see a long-distance girlfriend, play DnD with three different sets of her friends (including having her GM a one-shot session for me and another person she's dating), get my return flights cancelled three times in a row, and still have a welcoming, supportive place to keep crashing until I can eventually make it back home.

I have gone two entire weeks without feeling judged, stigmatized, gaslit, or invalidated but anyone or anything and for my trauma-riddled ass that's about as close as it gets to paradise on earth.

Oh don't mind me, I'll just be over here deconstructing mono-normative BS and such, carry on

For all the things I truly love about various sapphic subcultures, I am so well and truly annoyed with the pervasive reluctance - bordering on refusal - to initiate anything beyond friendly, platonic chit chat.

Maybe it's my autism, maybe I just am feeling the weight of a lot of loneliness (and some of the darker threads of my past that always seem to surface when I'm feeling alone), but I just can't comprehend the dynamic of "yeah let's literally talk about how much we both desperately want exactly what the other person has to offer and then just part ways as if we'd just been remarking on the weather."

I get the sociological and cultural factors that lead to this. I really do.

I have one and only one plea to sapphics everywhere:

Just ask them the f*** out already.

Please.

I wonder if there's a meaningful connection between the cultural treatment of "storyteller" being a niche/privileged role (e.g. authors, filmmakers, etc) and the common struggle of adult game players to find enjoyment in "pure sandbox" environments.

Every time I hear the lament of "but what are you supposed to DO?!" I wonder if what I'm actually hearing is an unarticulated longing to retake the option of being able to freely imagine and to weave fanciful tales in a grown-up, "responsible" body.

People who do seem to thrive in sandboxes also seem to - somehow - also retain their childlike capacity to just make silly stuff up.

How can we give that skill back to those who have had it stolen from them by the cultural pressure to act their age?

How much better off could the world be if we all dreamed freely?

This is the sort of rabbit trail my brain goes on when I start trying to think up Dungeons and Dragons campaigns...

I'm on a huge decolonization kick these days, and have just been musing all evening about the way that colonist cultures tend to conceptualize the telling of stories, versus the way story is treated in the bulk of global/historical human tradition.

I have to wonder if there's a deep connection between contemporary counterculture - and ideas like "controlling the narrative" or even just the need for authentic representation of people and experiences in media - and the artificial delineation of "this is the story and it exists independently of the audience."

In other words... Is it possible that the very act of regarding a "story" as meaningfully separable from its audience creates the space for perpetuating ideas that lead to oppression?

We "get" that authentic representation requires the story to include the voices of those being represented. Is there a symmetry to this that impacts the *listener* as well? Is the adage of "know your audience" just pragmatic advice, or does it hint at a deeper need to move storytelling back to a more participatory experience for the listener instead of just a passive one?

The entire linguistic (and conceptual) framework of gender just seems fundamentally ineffective for me personally, to an almost frustrating degree. Having to describe myself as "non-binary" feels a lot like describing a language as "all the words besides 'food' and 'snowplow'."

There's a bigger world there than just that. Defining my existence in contrast to a limited concept doesn't give me enough space to be my full self.

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that there is no way to think about me while looking through the lenses of gender that doesn't fundamentally erase, obscure, or contort some extremely important facet of who I am.

I feel like I somehow have a rare inverse version of the logistical challenges DnD players usually struggle with: I really want t to GM a few small one-shots (I don't have the spoons right now to do a full campaign) but I can't find anyone who is invested enough in playing to even sign up to chat about character creation.

Dear researchers:

If your model only functions by discarding the existence of statistical outliers, your model is not good enough.

Please do better.

Signed,

~ An outlier in basically every category of identity

I think I'm going to start a Sapphic funk band just to have a place to use the name "Brides and Grooves"

Today, on Trans Day of Remembrance, I choose to live as fully, as well, and as defiantly as I can - in memory of those lost, and to fuel my ability to continue building a world where no one ever has to die for who we are again.

One of the trickiest life skills I've ever tried to learn - and also one of the most powerful - has been recognizing that some situations are not my fault, and their reality is not a negative statement about me as a person - but I still have the option to choose to work to improve them.