The Estel System

it goes against every instinct i have, save the instinct that tells me to follow her every command to the ends of my ability. so that same shield that i would place in front of her, i now place between myself and her. the blade i would swing to block another before it struck her, i now aim at her weakest, softest points.

she is never afraid, not with me as her instructor. she knows that even as she urges me on, i only wield my sword with a fraction of the ferocity she has seen me show to her enemies. she recognizes that in the absence of a shield and blade i would use my very flesh to protect her, should this ever again extend beyond a training drill.

she believes that my knowledge of her behavior from years of service makes me uniquely poised to teach her to cover her faults. she realizes that i know her body and her senses as intimately as i know my own, and i will care for them even more carefully than mine.

she is aware that even as i knock her dagger aside, grasp her wrist and kick at the back of her knee to knock her off kilter, i counterbalance her weight as she falls to make her landing softer. she understands that as i plant my knees about her hips and lean over her, grasping for her dropped dagger in the dirt, putting it to the soft underside of her chin while my other arm braces across her chest, i do it only to serve her and not my own desires. only her. only her.

but, i dare to consider, what if her desire matches my own? what if she wishes for me to take what i crave, if she equally craves it to be taken? what if, in her endless wisdom, she foresaw that it would come to this, with her at my mercy and me at my most riled and ruthless, and welcomed it?

what if my hand twitches on the blade, a thoughtless reflex, but enough to nick a single jewel of blood from her throat? what if, when i drop the blade, i dip my mouth instead of my hands to clean the wound? what if her hands caress the back of my neck as i linger there, if her voice moans soft in my ear with the press of my lips? would it be so wrong to serve myself in this moment?

normal advisor to the empress' loyal general staff, and definitely not puppeting the whole of the military (and thus the empire, given the ongoing war) :)

Much is made of a woman's first kill, but it's normal to kill. Chickens and fishes and yes, men: these are things it does not surprise us to learn that a woman has bled dry with her own hands.

What really changes a woman is the first time she watches someone die for her. Maybe a lucky lover will get it once, the height of her tragedy, but it is the part of the Empress to come to expect it.

Every day the Empress demands the final expression of love, and every day she gets it, from women on every continent and on the blood-slick decks of warships and at the gallows.

Every recruiting sergeant gets one quick kiss from me so that later, when some woman takes the silver thaler from between her teeth (the sergeant winks as the kiss breaks, the young woman blushes) we can say the kiss came direct from Her Majesty.

The regimental colors, the bayonets glinting row on row are me, the cameo on the wall is me—within my borders I am every girl's first love.

A simple paperback diary lies on an old shelf, sandwiched between The Lord of The Rings trilogy and the first Hyperion book.

15.3.1992 A thought came to me today: What if I embrace the emptiness instead trying to fill it?

2.4.1992 Finally, after searching obscure tomes in dusty antiquarian bookstores, I found it! The old book describes techniques of meditations and procedures of "becoming", which promises something like "stillness". I've never heard of these before, in any of the occult books I've read. I tried asking around, but everyone is as clueless as I am.

20.5.1992 I managed to calm my mind to the point that there is no inner monologue. It's fascinating how I can still think, just without the constant chatter. This also makes meditating and other practices in the book so much easier.

25.5.1992 My mind's access to memories has changed, I see them now as pure facts. The progress is faster than I expected!

30.5.1992 The meditation practices have also accustomed me to sitting motionless for long periods of time. Is this the Stillness the book speaks of? It's very comfortable to be in it, I could sit like that for hours, just staring blankly and enjoying the sweet nothingness.

5.9.1992 Not only did my mind change, but my body as well. I've stopped needing to eat, but I crave tea a lot more. Skin is transforming into something else, though I don't know what yet. It's hardening and has this… porcelain quality? I also have this longing inside me, a yearning for some purpose. I need to find someone …

Now that I've taken a yoga class, I can truly say that yoga DOES deserve the hype

with two BIG caveats: number one, I don't think I would have benefited at all from it 5 years ago. I think I was able to get a lot out of it because I'd already gone through a journey of learning that my body and its feelings and reactions weren't the enemy.

Back when I had a more antagonistic relationship with my body and I was still keeping all my trauma bottled up and tamped down, I think it would have been very frustrating to try to do yoga.

The second BIG caveat is that it depends hugely on the instructor and some yoga practices are basically "exercise" in that it's supposed to be actively "hard" and you're expected to push/force your body through distress.

One thing that is really helpful to me about yoga is that you don't push to the outer extremity of your limits.

The mentality of exercise is doing things with your body that are as hard as you can possibly tolerate, for as long as you possibly can, as determined by your force of will and ability to ignore pain. Yoga was very different because instead of straining my willpower to the absolute limit, it encouraged me to be highly aware of what parts of my body were being challenged and engaged. Instead of pushing that to the point of the worst distress I could stand, I was encouraged to explore the bodily experience mentally and notice how my muscles and joints worked together, how they held or released tension and how my emotions reacted.

I had some really strong emotional reactions to yoga. A lot of these were positive. I loved my instructor, but there was an instructional video we were assigned and also a guest instructor that made me really upset and angry. Like, "ruining my whole day" angry.

And it was the same kind of thing in both cases: they were making it into a sort of "push through the pain" exercise class mentality, purposefully trying to get to the limits of what your body can tolerate, instead of like. meditative and engaging with your body.

The most common and consistent comment I get on my writing is that it's visceral. On i am an exit (the Buckyfic) I've gotten so many comments to the effect of "wow your descriptions of bodily experiences of pain and emotions are so vivid and intense." I also get "gut-wrenching" a lot.

This is interesting to me because I'm not trying to make it intense, I'm trying to make it accurate. The rest of my experience with life suggests to me that there is something unusually visceral and intense about my actual experience of my own body. Even before I knew i was autistic, I had a ferocious, hateful awareness that I was more sensitive to literally everything than everyone else.

I think I latched onto certain aspects of the exercise mentality too strongly: when I was in martial arts, I very much showed up every day with the mentality that I was going to push myself as hard as I possibly could and get as close to my physical and mental limits as possible.

I LIKED martial arts, it made me feel strong and capable, and the ability to mentally dominate my own body by "pushing through the pain" was definitely part of that.

Looking back on myself as a kid I'm amazed at two things: how much distress I was in and how much I hated myself about it. I felt like I deserved to have something horrible happen to me, for, I don't know, being terrified by nearly every aspect of being alive?

What is described above as the mentality of excersise, of working as hard as you possibly can, is a dangerous (as in damaging) mentality to have, and quite distressing to hear about. Whats described as the mentality of yoga, of challenging your body and being aware of how it is challenged, is much better.

Excersise should not be working as hard as you possibly can, as long as you possibly can, this is an easy way to injure yourself. Excersise should be challenging, not painful. (Though if you have sensory difficulties or chronic pain this can be difficult to achieve.) If you're not used to this approach, and can't articulate the difference between an appropriate challenge and a harmful challenge, what I would recommend is striving for perfect form.

Read books or watch videos to learn good form, and then exercise in front of a mirror, or phone, or friend to check your form. Work relatively slowly with exaggerated precision, and repeat the exercise until you can no longer retain perfect form, then stop. Thats your benchmark, and when you are doing sets of this exercise you should try to get within one or two reps of that number every time.

For example, push ups are a fairly well known exercise that most people can picture in their mind, even if they're not something I would recommend for someone just starting out. Imagine doing push-ups. You don't want to keep pushing until your shoulder and chest are burning, your arms are shaking, your back is bowing, etc. Thats how you hurt yourself. You want to do them slowly and evenly until your form is less than perfect. As you get tired, you might shift your hips up or down so your back and legs are no longer aligned; this puts your torso at a different angle to your arms, and engages slightly different muscles in your shoulders. This is a naturalresponse, it gives the muscles you have been using a bit of a rest, and allows less tired muscles to take up more weight. Similarly, you might bow your back or round your shoulders or something else. This is your sign that this is enough reps in your set. Call it there and rest for a couple minutes and see if you can do the same number of reps for a second or third set; though if you're just starting out maybe you can't get that high again, its ok to do slightly less each set too.

if you believe "normal" or "healthy" psychological development necessarily involves the development of a singular identity, and that all deviations from this are disordered, it naturally follows that the cure to such a disorder would entail the creation of a singular identity (fusion) in its place.

it is not a mistake when psychiatrists start with the assumption that plurality itself is the disorder, and come to the conclusion that integration/fusion must be a part of the treatment process. instead it is a natural conclusion of their premises.

and the vision of this worldview, its ideal future, is one in which plurality does not exist. a world in which every system formation is prevented, or eventually reverted.

thus to deny the possibility that some people may simply be plural or become so over time, that it may even be a desirable state, is to reject the possibility of a neurodiversity approach for plurality.

i imagine some may disagree with this view. those who jump to explain all plural phenomena in a framework of traumatic dissociation, yet claim their personal goals do not involve fusion. these systems might turn to me, declaring their condition as a symptom, yes, but one they are happy to live with. an incurable chronic condition.

i think this is a profoundly sad way to think about the one's systemhood.

to look at a part of me that jumps out at conflict, ready to argue and assert themself, and declare them an "emotional part", a "protector", something that exists entirely as a symptom of trauma, rather than these behaviours as learned trauma responses - expressed across a plural identity yet separate from it. this remains profoundly reductive, objectifying, and wrongheaded.

even more, to assume "psychological integration" necessarily means "fusion" - that a singular identity is preferable to a multiple identity, even with strong internal cooperation, strikes me as wildly misguided. every system i've known who've tried to suppress their plurality, to act as one person, have found marked improvements as soon as they actually acknowledged these differing attitudes within them for what they were. i see no reason to believe a return to a singular identity is actually necessary or preferable to this state.