Aw, hello Rhiannon
hello! we've probably talked before, just neither of us knew it. I was not exempt from the conflation of myself with Lenester, right up until I shattered it by accident. just up and referred to em in the third person and with the wrong pronoun because apparently the habit changes we built a couple of years back stuck to me instead. we were all very confused for a minute, about who I could be talking about and why there was a voice feeling hurtfully misgendered. anyway we revisited that and Lenester's still good with e/em/es; I'm gonna try out xie/xer. looks like in the prior sensation we had of "demibutch," I was the butch and e was the demi. (more examination of the latter has been encouraged.)
anyway the big fallout (and extra shakeup) is that we're suddenly far more able to distinguish our thoughts as they're happening (rather than after, forensically) which has immediately yielded a LOT more internal conversation; and also more able to actively decide who's (co-)fronting without intermediate tools/roleplaying aids/total concentration. this wall of text is quite nearly single-source! partly a matter of just knowing we needed to metaphorically plug another microphone into the mixing board; but it also seems that me being wadded up with Lenester was like being covered in tar for both of us.
e's the introverted hyperanalizer, the preemptive defender, and also the load-bearer for most of our unprocessed trauma, including all that stuff with our ex from upthread. meanwhile it's looking like I'm as extroverted as Akhra, and also the most overtly genderfucked among us. (Akhra is fully fem; Lenester is... possibly null at the core? but still scarred into the shape of what was projected on us for so long.)
so now we think what was happening was, me basically just existing and having my normal impulses was getting muddied into Lenester's first-person and triggering all sorts of internalized shame responses left over from last decade; which usually prevented me expressing myself (which, no offense to Akhra, probably explains where so much of our game went relative to pre-ex) and also kept em too busy processing immediate shutdowns to have any bandwidth for the backlog.
so yeah tldr prognosis is highly optimistic, this is already changing how we relate and interact with the outside world.
oh and incidentally we were wrong earlier, I'm not another badger; that's just the shape I was stuck to amid the identity confusion. after stretching out I might not be stuck to any one shape at all, which seems like it's gonna be fun. for the moment I think I'm just gonna call it "dragon" (because trying wings on my back absolutely was fun) and lean into natural-shapeshifter tropes, we'll see if anything else shakes out with more exploration. and since at this point it looks like we're really gonna need some alter tags, that makes it easy: 🍯Akhra, 🦡Lenester, 🐲Rhiannon!
—🐲
