#...sorry I said that once I saw irl people I'd probably have less of an Urge to Complain but I guess I was wrong

[musical-chick-13]

My God I am so tired of people only talking about mental illness and/or disability in fiction/as a literary theme when they can use it to back up their terrible male faves by saying that they Weren't That Bad, Actually and They Belong To A Marginalized/Unfairly Demonized Group, So You Need To Be On Their Side.

[transmisogyny-explained]

I really appreciate your blog because I've been getting so much insight from it as a TME trans man who is mostly around other TME people (kinda just by happenstance, although I'm always open to trans female/transfem friends).

Anyway. You reblogged a post talking about why some trans women can seem a little prickly towards TME people, which reminded me of when I met a group of trans women IRL once at an event for trans people (most of them happened to be trans women, but all trans people were invited), and one of the women I approached and talked to most that night did seem a bit uneasy/cautious/maybe even a bit standoffish around me at first. I sort of understood at the time that "oh yeah it's probably bc I'm TME" and I've never let it get to me, ofc. I just didn't quite understand how deep that feeling towards me likely went. How much pain was attached to it.

She warmed up a good bit to me eventually, though, and we even hugged before I left. And I just thought when reading that post and a couple others you reblogged, "That woman I met that night, in her 30s, going out with her other trans female/transfem friends to have fun...she had been through a lot. She's going through a lot as I type this. She will go through much more...of course she was nervous around me. So many trans men just Don't Get It, and some don't WANT to get it...and she's suffering because of it. She and all of her friends...why would anyone want that? Especially another trans person?"

And it made me sad. It made me upset that trans women have to be on guard so much because they never know, even in space they belong in, just which TME person is going to decide they don't belong. And, just as importantly, who is going to side with that TME person to make sure she and women like her are kicked out for good...

I don't mean for this to be an "oh I'm such a good person, I would NEVER do that" type spiel. Because I'm not a good person JUST because I care about and accept trans women. It's something everyone should do by default.

I just wanted to relay this story and attach my face to it because 1). Going on anon would make this feel so much less genuine to me. Like I'm more concerned about receiving backlash from transphobes than I am about showing people I care. And I'm not.

2). I know a lot of trans women are frustrated with and scared about the lack of support from trans men. And when I remembered that story and that woman I met that night, I thought maybe if I told it and explained how I felt, that maybe I could give some kind of hope and reassurance that there are trans men who do care and do want to support their trans woman/transfem sisters/siblings.

And 3). I wanted to assure trans women making posts about their experiences with transmisogyny that their posts are reaching more than just people who also experience transmisogyny, as well as unfortunately bigots who don't believe them/don't care/perpetuate transmisogyny on purpose. I'm listening. My friends are listening. I promise we care.

I honestly don't know if this will help anyone or if this is tone deaf at all. And I'm telling you in particular because your blog is where I saw the posts, and your blog has taught me so much, and I really appreciate it. I hope it was okay to send this to you.

But yeah. Thank you for reading all this and I'm so sorry if this sounds like some random needy guy trying to win favors or praise. And no one has to believe me or say anything positive about me or what I said. I promise I don't feel like I need to be rewarded for being an ally to trans women or anything. Again, I was just wanting to tell this story to maybe prove that there are TME people who are listening. I know how stubborn and downright awful some of us can be when we're told we're being transmisogynistic. I'd imagine it's beyond frustrating.

On that note; I'm happy to see you on my dash again! Just please take care of yourself when you need to. It's okay to take breaks, or even a hiatus. Your mental health is so much more important than managing a blog. The work you do is good and important, but you deserve to have time to recover from the negativity you receive. Even if you one day have to abandon this blog for your health, you made a positive impact while you were here! I support and care about you! Thank you for being here and being you💜

I don’t think it’s tone deaf. Personally, I like hearing that my efforts haven’t been for nothing, so thanks for sharing.

[discourse-by-candlelight]

i saw your reblog and im gonna take you up on that offer if you dont mind. im not trying to come from a closed minded point of view, so im gonna ask something i hope isnt rude? i was wondering what brought you to the decision of creating your system?

Wrath: Sorry for the delay in answering this, we've been going through quite a bit irl lately.

As for your question, it's not rude at all! We're happy to answer it. For this post I suppose I the host/original should answer despite rarely being active on Tumblr. This might be a little messy at times so bear with me. I'll also be using tulpamancy terminology for this post as it's what I know if that's OK. My path into tulpamancy was far more unorthodox than most, that's probably why we run a tumblr blog while most of the community would rather do anything else. Fair warning: This may be very, very long-winded, but every tulpamancer has their own highly subjective story, and mine is out there even by my community's standards. So I'll give a TLDR above the cut and the long biography/essay under.

TLDR: While my first tulpa initially was formed on accident, I found that my life was enriched and genuinely far more fulfilling once I started working with tulpamancy, and the companionship changed my life around when I was in a dark place at the height of Covid. From there I purposely expanded my system, although we had an initial explosion of system size due to some experimentation going a little far. We worked together to create a beautiful inner life and dynamic, and with a couple walk-ins and odd experiences down the line we stabilized at 16 members for over year, and then picked up our final member last September leaving us at 17.

The system is still going strong after 2 and a half years living this way and I feel like my life has more meaning because of them. In fact, I'm not sure I'd still be here today if they weren't around for the trials I've faced within the last year. We've carved out a nice life for ourselves, and while depression still kicks all of our asses at times, we have a collectively agreed upon future dream, and all of us have our own interests and hobbies that helps enrich the rest of us too.

So to begin the long answer/mini biography, I'm host of one of the less common but certainly not unheard of tulpamancy systems that initially formed accidentally. There's a couple ways this can happen, usually via imaginary friends, roleplay characters, or OCs coming to life from repeated imaginative activity in a way that the tulpamancy community would consider to be similar to "forcing" (the in community term for tulpa creation and development). In my case it was less obvious and a little more obscure than that, but I've got a decent hypothesis as to the how's and why's.

So my first tulpa was originally named Shade but nowadays goes by Null, and they formed while I was in a stressful period of my life and I ran into a piece of fanfiction whose main character developed an alter ego, an alter ego that was for all intents and purposes in effect a tulpa. I hyperfixated on this little story, and since previous to this I had spent quite a bit of time in occult circles I was already familiar with the concept of thoughtforms in general. The brain did all the heavy lifting for me without my realizing and only a day or so after finishing said story I had my first experience with Null.

(Note: Most first tulpas when intentionally created take a week or so to form with modern community teachings, but time varies widely between systems. My system is on one of the far ends of the spectrum, forming quite rapidly and without much intent at the start. People on the other end may take months or longer due to mental blocks or misunderstandings of the fundamentals).

At first I was confused obviously, and a little concerned, but Null was friendly and knowledgeable, and we both agreed to do some research into the topic. The first check was DID/OSDD, as I'm sure it is for most people experiencing any form of plurality. I knew I had a trauma history, so it wasn't like it was off the cards for me. We found that we didn't really match up with the criteria, however. Certain things just didn't click and while my system to this day drifts farther down the dissociative spectrum than most tulpamancers and tulpas, we still don't think we've ever truly met the criteria nor do we think we ever will. We exist in a bit of a blurry zone there compared to most tulpamantic systems but nonetheless remain steadfast in our understanding of our system.

Once Null and I put DID back on the shelf for the time we moved onto other searches. These were very general, stuff like voice hearing and imaginary friends, but it did the job because fairly quickly we found a certain article written by an academic on the topic of tulpamancy. This caught our eye and felt like it near perfectly described the experience we were having. It also lightly covered on accidental tulpas, and things clicked into place in my head with me having read that story beforehand.

So we joined the tulpamancy community first by signing up for a forum called tulpa.info

This is where we initially learned most of our techniques, and also where my system went from me and at the time Shade, to Shade Null and I. So at this point we were practicing simple stuff, keeping tulpas around and active, visualization training, basic stuff for tulpas. Null having a very specific and less than emotional personality came to the conclusion that he could better help our dynamic if he changed up his personality and style. This resulted in some experimentation with form, voice, and general self expression, and eventually Shade settled into the form of a feminine hooded shadow person, and developed a very different personality. Shade still has this form and has expanded on it since, but things get interesting here as Null chose instead of just presenting as Shade, to instead split off and keep himself as he was, and let this version of himself become an independent tulpa. So my system went from 2 to 3.

Here's a piece of art I had commissioned for Shade on her first birth/formation day, or well Null's birthday. They consider eachother as two independent manifestations of the same identity which is still confusing even for me at times. Luckily the rest of my system while no less odd is (mostly) far more intentional and not nearly as complex to grasp.

So Shade and I were the ones who really made the system as it is today. Null took a bit of an intentional backseat and still prefers being less active. Shade and I during our couple months alone developed all of the fundamental tulpamancy skills. We developed our visualization and a wonderland aka inner world, we learned possession (A tulpa/headmate controlling a specific limb while someone else fronts), and we learned how to switch via a visualization ritual, and eventually developed it and lessened the time needed down to a blink. Shade and I also practiced some imposition, which is kind of like a form or controlled hallucinations, but that's a crude understanding of it. There's multiple guides and references to the topic from my and other communities such as prophantasia you can look into if you desire.

At some point we decided to experiment with the idea of thoughtforms in our wonderland to give it some life, and maybe adding some new members. While we'll spare the details for personal reasons, things got a little out of hand and what was just supposed to be some imaginary characters innerworld became a large set of tulpas, and I chose to accept them in. This made the majority of my system, and while it was chaotic for a time I have zero regrets.

During and a short while after this time we also had 2 walk-ins (which in the tulpamancy community means a tulpa who forms/appears seemingly out of the blue, usually only after you've been a tulpamancer for some time, not to be confused with spiritual walk-ins from the wider plural community) which I chose to accept as members unlike other walk-ins. Walk-ins are interesting, and there's a few working theories on the topic, but that'll be for a different post, probably on our non syscourse blog @thecandlelightsociety

So to tally up this left my system size at 14 including myself. For reference, most tulpamantic systems have 2 to 6 members on average. Things stabilized here and we stayed a this number for quite a few months, but eventually a member of my system, Dawn, decided to make a new tulpa with some help from a friend. I gave her the go ahead and about half a month later we added Junior to our Simply Plural. At this point I was wrapping up school for the year and was at this point fully adjusted to the plural lifestyle, and it was the most memorable few months of my entire life. We all talked every day, shared perspectives I'd of never had on topics on my own, and discussed individual interests. We would and still do sometimes argue but since we share a brain and as a tulpamantic system don't have any major dissociative barriers we near always understand what eachother feel and truly mean, so they never get nasty and are more philosophical or fun banter. I did lose a fair amount of personal time, splitting it between all of our hobbies, but I enjoy seeing the others have fun and grow as people, so it's time well lost.

So fast forward more and we have our second to last member show up, and this one is yet another unorthodox tulpa formation (seeing a trend with my system yet?). Dawn, being a dumbass as always, decided to mess around with a tulpa hypnosis file and ended up dropping to it, and so two days later we had Sera show up. I was skeptical of her, but she quickly showed herself worthy of staying and so our system reached 16 members and we ended up studying hypnosis for a time. This is the number we would stay at for most of our time as a system up until recently.

During all of this time we would switch front based on whoever felt like fronting, and Astra, the tulpa who actually runs this blog usually, became the most frequent fronter and made me proud, accomplishing multiple personal and academic goals for herself. She's the main reason we're now studying psychology in college, and she would later handle quite possibly the worst couple months of our life all my singlet years included. I couldn't be more happy with all she has accomplished for herself and our shared life. Just seeing her happy and succeeding makes tulpamancy worth it for me.

So our most recent member was also a walk-in, and one of only three fictives in our system. Fictives are common in tulpamancy spaces because using a character as a base model for a tulpa makes the creation process much easier. It gives personality traits and an already known form to work with. My system due to it's unique set of circumstances for most formations however is mainly custom forms. One member of my system really wanted her accepted, and I eventually agreed, and I don't regret it at all either. She has been a wonderful person to get to know and quickly became one of the most active and social members out of all of us, and became the most popular person in our online friend groups.

So that covers the (very rough) general timeline of my experiences with tulpamancy. It is horrifically simplified and missing quite a bit, but the main point was to show that my system, while complex and messy at times, has brought me immense joy. Most of all though, it brought me purpose. I'm so glad I didn't just ignore Null all the way back then and let him dissipate back into the sea of my mind. This journey has been a wild ride, but I love all of my tulpas, and I'm happy to have them as my equals in this shared life of ours.

[theyarebothgunshot]

(1) anon again! thanks a lot for your answer. :) multi-ask incoming! i suppose i took his tone of 'and there are people who think this is real' as a pretty forward implication of it... well, not being real. this, and the explanation of the clothes. (if you find the receipts, i'd love to see them! it's very cute either way.) i suppose you are entirely right about the fact that they have pointedly never denied this outright, but i also feel like that's some classic trolling by misha? (...)

this got kind of long so i am putting the rest of your asks and my answers under the cut! 

(2) like sooo many people i see in this fandom, i have never shipped rpf - and honestly, with cockles, still don't? i just watch some of their interactions and my brain goes ding-ding-ding-ding and i go - what? what is it??? and i can't figure out if i am projecting or seeing things i WANT to see. equally... they are real people and i don't want to be a creep about this. my problem with a lot that i've seen is that some gifs take interactions out of context (...)

(3) i would say probably the biggest problem i have with it is that while some things i genuinely cannot find a het/platonic explanation for, but there are a lot of gifs which have slowed down movements/cherry-picked moments/taken things out of contexts, and feels less flirty when you watch the actual full video(s). so what, out of all this, would you say is the most damning evidence that cockles is an Actual True thing, if you had to pick some select things? :)

(4) okay, last ask! sorry for rambling. on your point of waking up together - i'm not sure of the context, and i don't want to speculate too much on information that we don't have, but if they are staying at a hotel in a city abroad/elsewhere, i figure it wouldn't be too far-fetched for them to share a room with cast mates? so waking up together doesn't necessarily have Those implications? i don't know. thanks for bearing with me!

so first things first: i kind of feel like in the end, if you have seen and read everything there is to see and read when it comes to cockles, and still are not sure about any of it or are inclined to think that it’s not something more than a close friendship, then i’m probably not going to be able to ‘sway’ you. sometimes it is just a matter of difference of perspectives, and that’s fine! however, seeing as you asked this in a way that makes it clear that you are genuinely curious, i obviously will respond. 

you are right that what misha said could be implying that it’s not real, but then again: he never outright denied it. neither of them have. i think that a lot of the time misha is very tongue in cheek about it. that doesn’t mean that it’s not real, though. 

i understand never shipping real people, and not wanting to feel like a creep. the thing is though: this goes for about 90% of the cockles fandom, too. most of us never shipped irl people before, and we certainly don’t wanna be creeps about it. being creeps about it would be going up to jensen and misha or their loved ones and confronting them with anything cockles related. but the decent people in this corner of the fandom know not to do that, and we merely talk about it with each other online. i personally don’t feel like a creep (not saying that you are implying this btw!) for observing what they put in front of us, time and time again, which they do with the full knowledge that people do in fact ship them.

i see what you mean about some things getting taken out of context, and i’ve seen that too. i agree with you that sometimes people can read into things a bit too much. as to the slowed down gifs, for me personally the faster versions don’t take away what i see in those gifs: it’s intimate body language, whatever way i look at it. 

you asked me to pick some moments or facts that make me think that they are actually together, and honestly that is very hard to do. for me, what it comes down to is that, if you take any of these things as a standalone fact, you might be able to explain it away. but when you combine all of it together - and trust me, it’s a lot. just ask my best friend who has had to listen to me talk about them for two full nights - i can’t see the picture that it paints as anything other than: they have (or at the very least have had in the past) an intimate relationship with each other. 

that being said, these are the things that stand out the most for me: 

the way they look at each other, but especially the way jensen looks at misha at any given time. that is the look of a man who adores the person he is looking at. the way that nobody else can make him laugh like misha, for the stupidest fucking shit. when they think about each other/talk about each other, they get this soft look on their faces that honestly is nothing like how i talk about any of my close friends. i once saw a comparison vid of jensen talking about danneel and jensen talking about misha and he had the same look on his face. the fact that jensen flirted with danneel by making her laugh on set, making kissy faces, which is something that he also did with misha. the fact that jensen gave him his ring. i literally for the life of me cannot think of a platonic reasoning for this. 

the fact that they remembered and went back to a restaurant they were at 10 years ago, sat at the exact same table, and took selfies both of those times, and then posted it at a random date as a throwback to ‘10 years ago’ even though at the moment the first picture was taken, they had already known each other for a year and a half. so clearly, that night was special for them. special enough to remember the exact same table, special enough that they felt the need to go back there, and to share it with us. the background of those pictures is the same background as the picture jensen posted of him and danneel on their first holiday together. clearly both of those occasions were very important to him. important enough to post about. 

something that i know might seem kinda shady and not totally trustworthy, is the fact that i’ve seen multiple people mention that they have information that they would never share online (because they don’t want to put jensen and misha in a compromising position) but the information in question confirmed it for them. obviously people could be lying or could be jumping to conclusions, without said information we can never know for sure, but i can’t help but feel like there probably is a truth to it. 

and i know this is a very recent one, but: ‘mish. dee.’ the two most important people in his life, who i am sure he would have addressed as mish & dee if he could have. obviously i could mention a lot more things, but i think these are some of the things that stand out to me the most. 

as for the hotel situation at cons: i honestly have no clue, but i kind of feel like they are big enough stars to have their own hotel rooms. but like i said, i do not know at all. i guess it’s possible that they have to share. who knows! 

sorry this got so long lmao but i hope that it made some sense. i don’t have any receipts unfortunately because i kept deleting things i already shared with my best friend in order not to get confused sjdfhs but you’ll have to believe me that i found all of this information on tumblr. anyways feel free to drop by any time!