(warning: partially-formed thoughts ahead)
we've got this habit where when someone tells us about an experience, a concept, a way someone can be, we imagine what that experience is like under the assumption that we don't experience it. we construct this imagined way someone else is living, but because we assume we don't experience that, we leave out anything we do experience. time and again this happens only for us to realize years later that no, we experience that thing too. ok that's really vague let me give some examples.
so a lot of times this is us having incomplete information, and we're woken up to it by someone giving a good explanation later. ADHD was like this,
We have ADHD. we weren't diagnosed with ADHD as a child so we assumed we didn't have it. So when our friends told us they had ADHD, well, we imagined... idk, feeling like you have to run around all the time? "oh! squirrel" type exaggerations? we certainly didn't think our troubles with executive function and concentration were ADHD. we didn't think our hyperfocus spells were ADHD. we figured we just needed to "get better at focusing" or something nebulous and machismatic like that. So when we imagined what ADHD was, we didn't include any of that in it, because that's how we were, and we already thought we didn't have ADHD. We never asked them what it was actually like, never thought to. When someone did finally sit down and explain it it was instantly like "oh. yeah ok thats me. oh!". same with autism.
Othertimes though, this happens even when someone gives a clear and direct explanation.
So like, therian/kin stuff. Someone messaged us one day and explained the concept of specifically species dysphoria to us, and then some other stuff. We were like "oh yeah i feel that too"- but we had already at that point been assuming that being otherkin was something OTHER people experienced, so we didn't think further on it. We could have pursued communities about this stuff but we didn't, because we'd implicitly assumed that we weren't part of those communities. we imagined that the experience was, idk, something deeply hallucinatory (funny, given we do that on purpose now, but didnt then). or maybe we just thought you had to be "crazy", whatever that meant, but surely we weren't that.
Gender stuff also, the classic "doesn't everyone want to be a different gender?" question. Not everyone thinks that way, but we did. and a lot of "denial" for us was actually just... well we assumed you went to the doctor and they said "bad news you've got the transgenders" during a regular checkup, and that never happened to us, so clearly all our feelings weren't being trans, they were something else. What? No idea. No one ever really explained being trans to us for a long time. When someone got us to finally come out of our shell and talk to it, it was then that it finally hit us that we'd been imagining being trans as something completely different to what it is in reality, and that we were the reality.
Again with plurality, it took us a good year of talking to a plural friend before we woke up to that. reading the chat lots from that time is hilarious honestly. and now all these years later we're waking up to the fact that we experience all these memory-related effects of plurality that we'd spent the past 5 years assuming we didn't have, because. well because like with everything else, somehow we figured we'd know. figured that if we didn't know already, then it wasn't who we were.
One of the commonalities is that once we start asking questions, once we start asking people "hey i experience this does that happen with you", once we start learning how to actually express the complicated things we're feeling, then we can finally figure things out. only if we're around others who share those feelings though- part of our most recent plural explorations has been that we're around people who are willing to talk about it that we relate with.
but all those years ago, sat there thinking "i'm a completely normal cishet human boy"- that was the core self-exclusion via preconception that we've had to unwind one step at a time. we'd associated our entire lived experience up to that point with that idea, and the years since have been a very long game of recontextualization. re-attribution of feelings and experiences that were already there. new relationships with those experiences. and many of those things have grown stronger as a result, now that we engage with them on more direct terms.
And you know what, that's part of it too. Our experience of these things now is genuinely different than it used to be.
When we met someone who was able to confidently identify with an experience, to tell us without hesitation about the feelings they felt, the struggles they faced, the experiences they had, we weren't seeing us, the girls struggling to even find their emotions in the morass of gray, the girls on the cusp of understanding but buried under layers of what we thought we were.
When we talked to a plural system with all their names and individual histories and lore, we were talking to someone who was able to engage with this so intuitively, someone who, much more than us, knew who they were. We didn't see ourselves. We, supposedly a girl with what she thought to be an overly active and argumentative inner-monologue, a girl who experienced strange feelings of saying things in her head while completely different words came out of her mouth, a girl who felt a contextual distinction between experiences she didnt have the words for yet, who felt very confused when names from one place spilled over into another, who felt pulled apart at the very seams when two distinct social groups were present at the same time.
Of course we excluded ourselves. Of course we got our understanding wrong. Our preconceptions were of people who had already figured it out. and we hadn't figured it out, so that wasn't us. perhpas we should have been asking for the people who figured it out late, ask what their experiences of discovery were. maybe then we'd have realized we weren't as alone as we thought we were.
anyways, something i think about, because it keeps happening even when we think we're done with it. maybe someday we'll run out of mysteries.
