HarmonyFriends

it's the whole gang!

chronically ill multiply disabled genderfluid transfem autistic plural system of too many gay li'l creatures, etc.

we dabble in game dev, music, writing, video, and art; you might know us under the name “Hinchy” from co-directing SiIvaGunner: King for Another Day Tournament, or doing music for Sonic Time Twisted.

check out our readme for more about us, including bios for many of our common fronters.

est. 1991 · re-est. 2021
🏳‍🌈 🏳‍⚧ ⚥ ⚢ ΘΔ & ♿ ♾️
you're never too old to become your true self!



bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

another day, another trawl through the tumblr plurality tags and simultaneously feeling for these kids while also going "at some point you NEED to learn how to separate your sense of validity and worth from what other people think"


HarmonyFriends
@HarmonyFriends

I'm in my 30s and I still haven't figured out to do this. How can I, when I'm disabled to the point of not being able to operate independently and my survival literally depends on other people thinking I'm valid and worth giving a damn about enough to take care of me? Just about the only thing I know right now is that when I stand up for myself and assert how I feel, I get discarded in an instant. Relying on others for my sense of worth is an ingrained survival strategy. How the hell am I supposed to change that when embracing myself inevitably results in loss of support I cannot afford?


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in reply to @bazelgeuse-apologist's post:

in reply to @HarmonyFriends's post:

This one is certainly open to hearing what you have to say.

It's worth noting that we were emotional amnesia moding hard when we wrote this, though. The fact of the matter is that we're already developing skills and finding new sources of stability that contradict the idea that standing up for ourselves and living up to others' ideas of who we ought to be is inevitably bad. We just… are messy and complicated and not every part of this system has internalized it yet.

That said I'm always down to hear new potential perspectives and add more quality ideas to our toolbox for encouraging ourselves to believe in our own validity and fight for self-respect.

—👻

Ah yeah, I totally get the emotional amnesia! I'm sorry that y'all have been struggling.

A bit of context that's a little more apparent in a followup I wrote but not in this post itself (which is my bad!) is that the Tumblr posts that sparked this one were along the line of people being distressed that a random person on the internet had said something dismissive or invalidating. I think this distress is understandable: even if said randos don't have a direct impact on our lives, they're a reminder that the world is full of judgemental people who'd turn away from us just for being different, which is acutely terrifying when you're disabled or otherwise marginalized and vulnerable.

At the same time... "not caring about what other people think" is absolutely an oversimplification, but I think steps can still be taken to kind of control the damage even if it's not possible to fully quell the anxiety? We have to care about what the people we're dependent upon think of us... but maybe it's okay to step away from the people less immediately close to us. Maybe it's okay to stop checking cringe subreddits in fear that we were posted, maybe it's okay to stop arguing with people on the internet who'll never believe us anyway, maybe it's okay to just block assholes on sight instead of entertaining them.

Maybe it's okay to stop injecting their poison into our brains, and maybe, eventually, we can learn to say, "the problem is with them, not us." And even if the anxiety of living in an unaccepting world never goes away, maybe we can learn, at least, to not blame ourselves for existing.

That's basically the gist I was going for, but was probably not communicated well!