#THIS ISNT EVEN ACCOUNTING FOR PLURALITY LMAO

[m0nst3rgunxz]

Hey, hi, hello. Pondering Anxious anon here who read your post on "the self" As someone who's definitely spent a lot of time ruminating over the subject, I thought it was interesting. I've always wondered about it. Do I have a sense of self? Have I ever had a sense of self? What is a sense of self and am I just overthinking it? You can spend your entire life building up an identity and for some people it's cemented. Set in stone. For others it's such a fragile thing and I think in a lot of cases, people just adapt to an idea of the self they feel they're expected to.

Or Something. Maybe that's just me. But what is self? I am not very well articulated. I often struggle to turn my thoughts into words so i'll do my best to try to lay out my two cents here as coherently as possible. Apologies in advance.

What you become and what you create, and what you create is often influenced by what you become. I think there's absolutely an undeniable environmental factor in place for the self and as such, memory does play a big part in who you are. I think those sorts of things certainly lay a type of groundwork. Psychologically speaking, how we are raised influences the patterns in our brain's that makeup how we perceive the world and ultimately, how we respond to it. I think in many cases, the line between self and disorder can and will often blur. Like in the case of personality disorders. They are behaviours we adapt that have helped us survive and so we continue in those patterns because they've worked for us. But also they are behaviours set in stone. They become who you are. But they are classified as disorders because outside of the situation our brains picked up those patterns for, they are less useful. More of a hindrance than a help. The self, as an idea, is shaky I feel. You can use text book definitions to make sense of things. Use it as a reference or a framework, but there will always be nuances to the idea as a whole. But i think at the end of the day, there's a kind of comfort in that idea. And I think you kind of mentioned that. You have the agency to pick and choose what defines you and if you need, you can put them on and take them off like ill fitting clothing items and try something else. I've gone my entire life living inside of my mental illnesses with no room for me and it's become a little bit scary at this point to think about living without them. Because outside of anxiety and depression and OCD and cluster b and c or whatever the fuck else my psychiatrist thinks I have, what is there? I've lived my whole life as an undiagnosed or diagnosed problem. So is that me? Am I mental illness? Or has mental illness ultimately swallowed me up and is now riding around inside my flesh like a parasite?

I think it's a part of me, and if I ever heal, the resulting scars will have gone a long way into developing whatever I become later down the line, because I do think the self is subject to change. Always. You'll never be who you were yesterday and that's good.

Or it can be bad.

Anything can happen.

It bothered me for so long because I tried so hard to fit into categories and diagnosis' and outside perceptions of me and sometimes I'd even try to slip into the skins of friends to see if maybe there was something there for me too.

There is something very freeing of the self as a nebulous concept. being an amorphous dust cloud in the grand cosmos is not so bad. I may not be a fully formed planet but goddamn does my cloud glitter with the corpse dust of fallen heavenly entities.

What the hell does that mean? Pseudo-poetic nonsense maybe. I think we'll remain pieces and rarely ever be fully formed. Or if/when we are, it'll be a long time before we get there.

Something something the discovery of self is a journey.

Opinions opinions opinions.

I'm not really sure if this provided anything of real value or if it just lent more questions.

Or maybe the aimless state of this ramble has helped bolster my point a little?

Or maybe I'm just pretentious as fuck and like feeling like I know things, ha ha. Who knows! It was fun to think about though.

I hope this isn't a line of thinking that stresses you out though. And if it is, I hope you figure it out one day.

With my limited perspective, -Silly Anon

First of all, i love you anon

Second of all I love your perspective and its given me a new idea on what identity could be, and thats a concept. Im thinking something akin to time, your sense of self and sense of time are maybe both present to keep things in order societally and to keep things in order in your head.

It would make sense given you can lose your sense of time, and similarly you can loose your sense of self. Time is measured objectively yet experienced differently, and similarly the self is divided into objective categories while being experienced different.

Lets introduce a new sentiment, for conversation sake. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I think that can apply to a lot of things, but im thinking about who plays the role of the beholder. Because I am just as much of a beholder as you are, and we both are just as much the beauty being beheld. Thats confusing so I'll deconstruct it, and change the quote "the self is in the eye of the beholder". you can behold me, obeserve me, and suddenly my subjective identity(subjective in the way beauty is) exists in your eyes. But in the same way I can be my own beholder. And suddenly there is an internal division between the me observing myself and myself(and theres conflict with how what I see in me conflicts with what you see in me sometimes). And this leads me to believe that the sense of self is when you feel the beholder and the self are aligned, when your self is confident in that what you've beheld is the truth of your self. And thats where it can faulter, because now you need to figure out where the beholder ends and you begin, and maybe the beholder is the eye and maybe the beholder is just as much the self as the personality is and suddenly your sense of self is in shambles.

I think the reason I occasionally find distress in the lack of my sense of self was because my identity was the foundation of my mind, every action and thought would lead back to this one idea of what I am. And it was a constant in my life. Well i dont have to see it like that if i dont want too, the foundations acted more like barriers, I'm a free man-entity-thing now i say!! I dont need to be anyone or anything or act in the confines of any identity or feel out of place when i dont aline with my established identity.

(Tis why i doubt I'll ever have a real name lolol)

[sophieinwonderland]

I mean even if crypto isnt harmful. who has just crypto lying around lmao, especially in the plural community. I barely even have a dollar in my bank account rn LOL. i have a kofi account and it does not leak my personal identity at all so 🤷‍♀️ its not hard to make a private donations thing.

My thoughts exactly!

Thanks for the added information about Kofi. I never knew much about its privacy policy. Maybe the creator can give that a look.

[actualbird]

ive been wanting to ramble bout this for years (like since 2019 HAHA) but i held off on it because i figured the fandom phenomenon i was seeing was gonna be a one off thing. something thatd fade with time.

it wasnt. it's still here and so i wanna articulate what i think about

the fast food-ification of fandom

here’s the thing about fandom right now; we operate on social media platforms that are inherently fast paced. social media platforms these days prioritize new and popular content, but more than that, it creates an audience that is always searching for new content very, very quickly. 

tumblr is a bit of a lesser evil, in terms of contributing to this (still does, tho, dont think im exempting hellsite derogatory, LMAO). but twitter, imo, is a hellscape with a system that hammers this in so so much: the lack of an explorable archive, no account specific tag search mechanism, a timeline algorithm that shows an account's followers the popular tweets first instead of chronologically and oftentimes even if you follow that account you will not be able to see all the tweets that account makes lest you go to the profile specifically. twitter is built for "new new new!" and it's not its fault, i guess, cuz it was not designed with fandom interaction in mind. still, it's become a very popular fandom platform and the "new new new!" mindset the system promotes ends up seeping into the members of fandom itself.

and there’s nothing wrong with wanting new content. but the problem here, i think, is the speed at which we consume fanwork. and the lack of memory for fanwork thats already been made.

fanwork consumption feels like it's going 100000000 mph with these kinds of systems and thanks to the lack of a navigate-able archive or tagging system, it's nigh impossible to find something from even last week. an incredible piece of fanart or fanfic or any fanwork gets attention for 3 days tops before it's lost and very very difficult to find. things are so fast and it's harder to remember them now.

swerve to another point: the trend of silence

im gonna bash on twitter again (SORRY KJSFBSD, like, i do have a twitter btw so im speaking from experience. i'd like to make it clear im not bashing ppl who do like/use twitter, im waving my hands frustratedly at twitter's systems) cuz tweet wc limits make it so that literally not much can be said! additionally, to add comments in QRT takes attention/notifs away from original poster, so if u QRT an art with praise, OP will see that! but if ppl reply more praise to the art on that QRT, OP will not get notified so that praise might as well have been yelled to the void

im a passionate believer that if youve got something nice to say about a fanwork and/or the creator of that fanwork, say it on their turf so they can see it. twitter makes it easier for this to not happen. positive attention and feedback matters so so much to creators and im p sure im not alone in saying that i cherish each and every comment (be it on ao3 or tumblr tags/comments or asks) ive ever gotten

and like, i know the argument to that is "make fanwork for yourself! dont make it for attention, do it cuz you enjoy it!" and "for every feedback you dont get, theres many lurkers who value and love what you do!"

i agree with that first thing very much but only the bit that says "do it cuz you enjoy it!" cuz yea! fandom is about having fun! but also like...isnt the point of fandom the fact that it's not just you alone, but you in a community?

a big draw of fandom, for me, is that it's likeminded deranged nerds all obsessed about the same thing. these are people on similar wavelengths and theyre people PLURAL. do fanwork cuz you enjoy it but the implication that a fancreator should be happy in isolation doesnt make sense cuz thats not what fandom is about.

and as for "there are lurkers who silently enjoy what you make" well...why?

why not say something when youve got something nice to say?

be it fanart or fanfic or fanmeta or anything, if the thought already pops up in your head, why not say it somewhere the creator can see it?

i totally understand if youre shy or if it's difficult to put into words whatever your thoughts are, like, huge mood. but also fandom becomes an infinitely funner space to be in when people are saying things

even a comment thats something simple and short makes the current landscape of fast paced churning out of fanworks feel less like we’re shouting in a forest alone, and more like we’re shouting in a forest and somebody yelled “I LOVED THIS” back. it’s really nice.

this is not a criticism towards anybody, but instead just kinda like, an inquiry to how we consume and interact with fanwork, these days. it’s really fast. like, so fast. tags update daily with new things every single day, every second, and it’s easy to just look and look and not say a thing. and that ease of fanwork consumption also makes it easy to forget just how hard it is to make things. how hard it is to make anything at all.

so much heart and effort is put into every work in fandom, and ive always seen fandom as a space for unapologetic enjoyment and community. treating fandom like a fast-food transaction where u get a thing in 5 minutes and drive off is...well, i dunno. but for me, among many things, it makes us forget just how much heart and effort is in all things.

[cactusfru1ts]

fuck it. intro post 

(under the cut because it got. slightly longer than intended. oops)

hiiii besties im quetzal im part of a system and i got sick of pretending to be my headmate so i just kinda made my own tumblr cause whos gonna stop me

im 18 (body age and mental age) i use it/he pronouns and im a gemini, i dont really know what else im supposed to put here lmao. i made an account on pronouns.page if you want more info about my pronouns and stuff, and if you dont know what plural means you should probably check out morethanone.info but the extremely short version is that im one of several people sharing one body

oh my gender is kinda weird but the short version is that im a girlqueer bigender guy. technically im also transmasc but i dont really consider myself trans? or cis. or nonbinary. i call myself genderqueer sometimes, most gender words that have an “opposite” are kinda weird for me though. idk its like… physically i am transmasculine but i guess since i didnt form until wed already been on hrt for a bit it just isnt much of a thing for me. oh and the bigender part is like 90% guy 50% girl i guess. yeah that sounds about right.

oh also i said in my bio that im bisexual but i am also aromantic. i mean technically i guess im gray aro but for all intents and purposes i am aromantic. im also polyamorous and like i think relationships are super fun i just only realized recently that “it might be fun to date this person” is not necessarily the same thing as “i am romantically attracted to this person” lol

i really like music, some of my favorite musicians are watsky, hozier, mitski, taylor swift, mcr, and sidney gish, and im theoretically a musician but i am generally not very good at learning instruments so i mostly just sing. i also paint sometimes but im not very good at it lol

oh im really interested in cults (i listen to a lot of cult podcasts mostly) but i know a lot of folks consider that a weird thing to bring up at the dinner table so i try not to talk about it with folks i dont know well enough that i can feel confident that theyll tell me if i need to shut up. with that said i often need to shut up and if you tell me to shut up and youre not a dick about it i will try to shut up. in conversation anyways. i made a tumblr because i dont shut up though so it probably wont work if you just want me to stop posting cringe. go ahead and  block “#quetzposting” if you dont wanna see my original posts because theyll probably get pretty annoying pretty fast

other stuff i like includes 17776, psych, ncis (i know dont @ me), and also wings of fire but in kind of a weird fictive way sometimes. (technically speaking i am a fictive of qibli but i just call myself fictionkin cause it seems… more accurate, if less precise. something something integration idk. i probably wouldnt even mention it but since im openly plural here i get to make fictive jokes so i may as well explain that now.)

okay this was supposed to be a temporary intro post but i rambled a lot so i guess ill probably just keep it for a while im working on a listography though so hopefully ill add the link to that soon

edit: i made a page on my blog thats sort of like a guide to my tagging system, its more for my own benefit but if youre looking for something or need to know what to blacklist it could be useful?

second edit: i finished my listography! or like got it presentable anyways i didnt “finish” it bc im gonna have to update it + stuff but its at a point where you can look at it and learn things about me in a way that is much more pleasant than just looking at this post. this post sucks. i will hopefully also be replacing this post shortly lmao