gosh 100% all of this omg.
and if you'll permit us to longpost in a reply, we'd like to share some disparate things we wrote about changing how we perceive the world, that we've hitherto not found a good place for, but wanted to share. because this has reminded us
someone asked us what we meant by "customizing our perception once". We wrote this (rather materialistic, but maybe that's helpful):
ok so like the thing u gotta start with is that the way u perceive the world is yr brain gets a bunch of sensory inputs, yr emotional state, yr thoughts, etc. and then hallucinates them all together into something cohesive. you never really see "reality", u always are seeing this interpretation of it.
so anyways, u can change that. u can change what different sensory inputs mean and how your brain constructs them into yr final qualitative experience of the world. u can also inject extra feelings that are from internal sources instead of external senses, or filter stuff out, etc. etc.
yr actually already doing this right now, whether yr conscious of it or not. thats just how perception works anyway. so basically u can modify that with intention. you do it enough and it moves from being a thing yr putting work into changing to a thing that has been changed, and now u see the world different.
we take whats already there and change what it means. and this, THIS, is what made it so much easier to add more things on top. when we first started imposing ourselves into the world, we started with normal senses. the weight of pants became the weight of a fox in our lap. the weight of a coat became the weight of our wings on our back. and with enough of that, we learned to recall. recall the way the feelings felt, when they meant something different. re-summon them from the void. feel them without aids. creatio ex nihilo. who we are, who we want to be, it's all mostly already there, if we change the way we see.
there is overlap with trans-related things here.
It's astounding how malleable self-image is...
Before HRT I'd look at pictures of myself, and all I saw were flaws. Even when I wasn't picking apart the details I just looked... wrong. But now when I look at those exact same pictures from that time, I don't see that. I see a depressed girl, but I see a girl. I see a sad feral creature, but I see a feral creature. Seems like transition's most important changes were the ways I changed the way I see myself.
And the last snippet, a chatlog shared with permission from the blue girl:
[blue girl] immersing into that narrative fully tends to work better (in my experience) with the same suspension of disbelief you'd apply reading a book
[blue girl] you dont read a well-written book and go "ah well this cant happen actually" when theyre doing magic or whatever, if the book's narrative is internally consistent. you dont need to. you're working inside the narrative's logic
[blue girl] so this is why i stash the low level details i built the narrative on away somewhere else because they just get in the way of playing the narrative. i can come back to them if i need them but they're out of mind
[blue girl] and so personal narrative crafting in this way is really quite an interesting art because it plays with our day to day lives, and isnt within the sandbox of a storybook. it needs to be consistent enough with our experiences of reality that it doesnt fall apart and break our own belief in it. so there's certain rules of the world it has to fit within
[blue girl] at the same time, the act of participating in a narrative shifts our own perception of reality. so its possible to write a story that a previous version of us would not have been able to participate in for lack of belief in its rules, but that the present version of us can.
[blue girl] in much the same way that once we realized we were trans, it was much easier to conceptualize ourselves as non-binary. and once we realized we were plural it was much easier to conceptualize ourselves as therian/otherkin. those narratives were "unlocked" for us in a sense, by the transformative nature of living the stories that came before them.
[...]
[blue girl] one of us was walking in our body while another of us walked alongside them in the material world (as like, a mentally imposed presence) and as they were walking the imposed person walked in a path that led them to run into a pole
[blue girl] we noticed this and they kinda like smacked into the pole and fell over, had to get up, were a little woozy for a moment, had a small scrape on their leg that we washed off and cleaned before continuing home. and we acknowledged (out of scene) that this was in fact a narrative, but decided that it was fun and worthwhile, so we agreed to continue with it
[blue girl] and all of this builds power in the feeling that they're where we want to believe they are. that they're present in the world in a form that isn't the primary vessel we inhabit.
i think she wants to write more about that some time. the spells she weaves, we weave, with narratives.
anyways, thank you, for reminding us. we so often forget
