Grumpy Angel Advice

When we began this census, our central goal was to help to rebuild our community. Events over the past several years have caused the community to drift apart, and our hope is that having a central place to look for other angelkin, we can make it easier to connect with each other and regrow our community. That central place is the Tumblr Angelkin Directory!

The directory itself can be found [here].

The directory is sorted alphabetically by name (as given in the user's response to the census), followed by the blogs of anyone who chose not to share a name in alphabetical order. Additionally, there were ten respondents who chose not to have any information listed in the directory.

We highly encourage looking through the directory, and considering following any blogs you like! Building connections is the best way to rebuild our community, and we hope that this directory will make it easier for members of the community to begin finding each other again.

If you notice any errors in the directory, feel free to send an ask to this blog, and we'll work to fix it as soon as we can. However, we will not be adding to the directory at this time. We intend to run another community census in a few year's time, at which point we hope that the community will have grown, and the directory with it!

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

In the nicest way possible. Don’t go to the askbox of people you don’t know on tumblr to ask them if your identity is valid. Even if they seem well-educated. You shouldn’t base your confidence in your identity off of the approval of a stranger on the internet.

Do your research, do some introspection. Ask for advice, sure? But the only one who can define who you are is you. And we are not spokespeople for the community. Hell, I made this blog when I was 14. I was not and am not qualified to tell you which identites are “valid.”

I’m sorry. There are no easy answers. None that I can give you, and none that you’ll find elsewhere. If you ever want to be secure in your own identity, stop relying on internet strangers to endorse it.

Y'know, somehow I knew I was going to get this anon when I posted that.

Anon, I need you to understand that at least from my perspective, it's not about kids having fun. It really isn't - though I can see where it comes off that way sometimes.

It's about the fact that it's become increasingly difficult, almost impossible on some platforms, to find others with experiences like your own because every time you think you've found one, it turns out that they're just pretending for fun and think you're weird and "crazy" when they realize you're actually being honest and genuine.

It's about the fact that more and more often these days, when you do find yourself in that situation, you're suddenly being attacked with classic antikin rhetoric - "you're delusional," "you're taking this too seriously," general bullying and harassment, and yes, "you need help" - from people and a space that you thought were safe. It does a lot more damage from people that you'd let your guard down with than it does from self-proclaimed "antikin."

It's about the fact that we created these words to describe our own experiences, specifically to describe our own experiences, and now because of people stealing our words, when I see someone saying they "kin" something I have to question every single time whether they're actually 'kin or whether they're someone who might very well attack me for actually being 'kin.

It is, in part, about the fact that sometimes what causes trauma - clinical trauma, I mean - is not necessarily something "big and obvious" that everyone would assume causes trauma. People have different thresholds for things.

It is, for that matter, about the fact that every single time we try to say "this is hurting us, please stop and use the words that actually mean what you're doing instead of misusing ours," we get immediately dismissed by answers like yours, anon - by "you're taking this too seriously."

Generally speaking, I take what people tell me in good faith - if someone tells me they're having anxiety spikes whenever they see KFF, I assume they're telling the truth unless I have evidence otherwise, and whether that qualifies as clinical "trauma" or not, what it is is suffering, preventable suffering. I do, in fact, agree that anon should probably see a therapist about it - not because it's something that shouldn't matter to them, but because it clearly DOES matter to them, and it's something that's harming them, and a therapist's job is to help cope with that.

But then, if one can dismiss that harm with "you shouldn't care this much, so it's your fault that you're hurt," then I suppose that makes it easier to ignore one's own responsibility for it, which is probably why so many KFFers use that argument.

Because again: it's not about "kids having fun." Kids can have fun in a way that doesn't actively drown out and try to erase an entire community. And I'm sorry, but something that by definition is integral to one's identity and sense of self is likely to make people upset when it's bastardized and attacked from all sides.

If you can’t afford or access any of Marie Kondo’s official works I heavily recommend this hour talk Marie Kondo did that covered her philosphies.

The most important thing Marie Kondo’s work has taught me is to trust myself and what I want. Before reading her book or watching her show I found it INCREDIBLY difficult to trust my own instincts or understand what I truly wanted from myself because I was so worried about what others thought or outside factors.

But going through and honing my “Spark Joy” ability through organising my stuff really taught me how to identify my own feelings of what I wanted and to take ownership of my own actions. At my core I am a very sentimental and emotional person who wants to puts everyone else’s needs ahead of mine and that extends to objects. She emphasizes knowing what you truly need in life, and being able to approach even the most essential items with love and care and gratitude.

I’m still an incredibly sentimental and emotional person, but knowing what truly sparks joy to me has made it a lot easier to let go of situations and items I might have held onto and really changed how I approached everything in my life. Marie Kondo’s work has taught me to center myself and my needs in a way that valued the emotionality of an otherwise rational and cold logic topic like organisation.

Our story begins June 24th, 2017.

The angelkin community on tumblr is as alive as its ever been, having recently come down from the Adnarel drama. A particular tension reverberates through the community: though there had not yet been any lines drawn, there was beginning to be low-grade conflict between those in the community who gravitated more towards “fluff”- the lighthearted side of memories, more fun-oriented discussion, and jokes- and the more “serious” side of the community, who were known for their penchant for questioning, desire for more in-depth discussion, and stance against a “culture of validation”.

As this tension grows, a blog appears in the angelkin tags with an introduction post claiming to be a shard of the Abrahamic- most likely Christian- God. The URL? The same this blog has: i-am-real-i-am-alive. This post has, unfortunately, since been lost to time, as the entire blog has since been deleted.

What follows devastated the angelkin community in a way that has not yet been recovered from, if ever. Soon after this incident resolved, a callout post began circulating for a popular divinekin messaging group known as Hell’s Network, claiming it to be a cult-in-the-making. This incident decimated the remaining blogs and few are left standing today.

This makes finding record of this incident… difficult. I am lucky enough to be in a server that was around and discussed the events as they happened, though most of the post links were direct and now cannot be accessed. I was also present during the event, though sadly I didn’t preserve many of the events myself. What will follow is a collection of reblogs and screenshots that document the event as best I can gather.

Short answer: It’s a load of bullshit.

Long answer: The entire concept of choirs of angels and spheres of Heaven doesn’t seem to match up with how things actually work/worked in the High Angelic Period. Really, the entire idea of categorizing things in that era doesn’t really work, because none of it is as clear cut as people would like it to be.

You see, it’s human nature to try finding patterns in things, and to categorize things where possible. I remember seeing a video a while back that explains that it’s that part of us that is the reason that we can see two completely different dog breeds (chihuahuas and German shepards, for example), and immediately identify them both as dogs, even if we’ve never seen either of them before. It’s an incredibly useful trait to have, because it helps us understand new things by comparing them to things we’ve previously experienced. Chihuahuas might be tiny, but we can understand that they’re shaped like a dog, and act like a dog (mostly), and understand “Hey, that’s a weird looking dog!” It’s great.

The problem is, when you try applying that to things outside of this particular iteration of reality, it starts working a lot less. People like to think that there are neat little categories of angels, and “choir” is a nice poetic term for that kind of category. The thing is, angels aren’t like dogs. There aren’t distinct physical attributes one can look at and say, “Hey, that’s a weird looking angel!” The traits that are commonly associated with angels (wings, halos, all that jazz) are simply artistic renderings of what people think angels look like. So trying to create a set of neat categories for angels isn’t going to work out well.

Now, you might be thinking, “What about categorizing angels by their role in Heaven? Surely that will work.” The thing is, every example of “choirs” I’ve seen thrown around aren’t based on roles. More specifically, they claim that an angel’s choir determines their role, not the other way around. The problem is, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that an angel with certain characteristics is automatically in a specific role. There are/were numerous similarities between Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, but they had/have vastly different roles. Yet people try lumping them together under the umbrella of “archangel”. (An aside: I have issues with using “archangel” as an umbrella term like that, but that’s a separate rant altogether.)

So we can’t categorize angels by their appearance, because there’s too much variety for the categories to be meaningful (rather like how categorizing people by race isn’t actually all that useful unless you’re discriminating against some of those races), and we can’t categorize angels by their role, because there’s no consistent traits that we can connect to a given angelic role (rather like how categorizing people by occupation isn’t actually all that useful). That doesn’t leave us much to use as a basis for categories, unless we start diving into things that most people seem to have trouble comprehending (on account of filtering unearthly things through a lens of earthly understanding). By this point, I hope you can see why the idea of “choirs” just doesn’t hold up. It’s just the human need to categorize things being applied in a situation where it doesn’t apply.

Then we move onto the idea of the spheres of Heaven… There’s plenty of rant to be had here, but I honestly don’t have the energy to go into it in full after going on about choirs for that long. The big summary is this: There is absolutely no reason to think that Heaven is/was made up of discrete “spheres”. Again, this is an attempt to apply earthly thinking to unearthly things. The whole idea doesn’t match up with anything we know about Heaven, and it’s probably tied into artistic renditions of things that have been repeated again and again until they’re taken as fact.

As a vaguely related aside: It bugs the shit out of me when people talk about places in Heaven as if they’re the only example of that thing. It’s always The Garden, or The Library, or any number of other things starting with “The”. There is absolutely no reason to assume that there’s only the one big example of those things in all of Heaven. Even if Heaven were half the size of earth, that’s still a fuck-load of space to fill, and there’s no way there’d only be one of a given thing. Plus, it’s pretentious as hell to refer to things like that. If someone in New York starts talking about THE Park, the logical thing to assume is that they’re talking about Central Park, but even then, there are plenty of other parks in New York they could be referring to.

So, yeah. Teal Deer is that the whole idea of choirs of angels and spheres of Heaven are flawed assumptions based on trying to apply human thinking to inhuman things. You’re better off putting the whole set-up aside and approaching things without it. You’ll have much better time dealing with things then.

There has been a topic that has been bothering me for a long while that I think I need to try getting a conversation started about. In the briefest of words I can find: pop culture is causing serious problems for the community. Consistently, I see the same few names referenced (the ones most common in pop culture), agreement with very specific types of memories (events as they appear in pop culture), and various smaller indications that pop culture is skewing many people’s understanding of their past and the way things worked back then. At best, I find it frustrating. Most of the time, it just pisses me off.

My gut instinct is that there are two major reasons why pop culture ideas are so pervasive in the community. The first is simply a matter of exposure and internalization. Pop culture is all around us from the time we’re born through to the present day. Avoiding it isn’t really an option, so it becomes part of who we are. I can understand that, though if that were the entire reason for it, then it would be easy to identify it and compensate.

The second reason, as far as my gut is concerned, is that it ties into the same reason that the community has a bad habit of ignoring serious discussion in favour of memes, jokes, and soft gentle aesthetic posts. As much as it might get glossed over, the angelic period was brutal. Pain and suffering were common, brother was turned against brother… It was all the horrors of mortal war, but on another scale. For many, it’s easier to turn away from that and try to focus on something else, but in the end, that helps no one. Still, the community prefers to focus on the things that don’t relate back to the darker parts of the era. Michael and Lucifer are more pop culture than historical figure at this point, and it’s easier to swallow the Fall as being one moment, rather than an ongoing rebellion full of violence and bloodshed (ichorshed? I don’t know.)

It’s common in metaphysical circles to see discussions about the multiverse and parallel realities. These discussions often center around past lives, especially when those past lives contain details that contradict what we accept as the basic nature of our reality. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation floating around these ideas, and I feel like I need to do what I can to clear some things up.

To begin, we need to discuss one of the most misused concepts in metaphysics: Quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics dealing with things at the sub-atomic scale, which act in ways very different from the larger scale physics we deal with on a regular basis (from the easily observed human scale of apples falling up to plants and galaxies). There are a lot of competing theories to explain various quantum phenomena, with varying amounts of evidence in their favour. In general, though, it’s a sub-field with a lot of complicated mathematics and some unique problems with observation.

(A small aside: The common adage about “observations affect outcomes” largely comes from quantum mechanics, and it isn’t some odd physical law that causes it. The only way to observe things at the quantum scale necessitates interacting with what you’re trying to observe, and at that scale even something as tiny as a photon of light bouncing off of a particle is enough to substantially affect that particle. At the larger scale we deal with on a daily basis, observation doesn’t have the same kind of influence.)

When dealing with the concept of the multiverse and parallel realities, the main quantum mechanical theory that’s tapped is known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which is an attempt at explaining the way that particles sometimes seem to act in random ways that are essentially impossible to predict with any accuracy. The way that Many-Worlds reconciles this is by saying that for every possible outcome, every outcome does occur, but in a separate universe. To use a slightly inaccurate but easy to understand example: Imagine you are flipping a coin. That coin can land on heads, tails, or (very, very rarely) on its edge. According to Many-Worlds, the coin will simultaneously land on heads, tails, and its edge, but each outcome becomes a new universe where only that outcome occurred.

There are a few important details about Many-Worlds that get misrepresented in metaphysical discussions of it, however. First, the parallel universes that occur can only contain outcomes which are physically possible. To return to the coin example, it can land on any of its sides, but there will never be a universe where the coin spontaneously turns into a dove and flies away. Second, the parallel universes have no lasting connection to each other. After the coin is flipped, each of the universes diverges and there’s no way to communicate from one to the other. It also means that there is no way to travel between these universes; whichever sequence of universe splittings has led to where you are, that is the sequence that will always be true from your point of view.

Coming back around to the metaphysical side of things, this means that Many-Worlds does not support universes with what might be called “fantastical” elements (including things like obvious functional magic as seen in fantasy media, creatures that cannot function under our current physical laws like giants and dragons, and so on), nor does it inherently point to all fictional settings being real “somewhere” (as some claim regularly). It also doesn’t support the concept of movement between universes, whether through the cycle of reincarnation or astrally shifting to another universe, since that would mean that it is possible to communicate between universes (if only by remembering information from another universe). All Many-Worlds says is that for every probabilistic event, all possible outcomes will occur. Nothing more, nothing less.

Many-Worlds is also a contentious theory among those professionally studying quantum mechanics, with limited (though not non-existent) support. There are multiple competing theories that do not include Many-World’s branching universes, and they are at least as rigorous and well-tested as Many-Worlds is. We can’t be certain that parallel universes exist (since there’s no way to transfer information from another universe here), and there is a reasonable chance that Many-Worlds is entirely wrong. It will likely be some time before we are certain one way or the other, though.

On the one hand, I understand that it’s good to let people know that their experiences and feelings are valid. There are a lot of people who legitimately need that kind of encouragement, and it’s good that they’re able to get it. On the other hand, I know exactly where you’re coming from, though I’ve got a bit different view on the situation.

(Due to the excessive length of this ramble, I’ve decided to put the bulk of it under the cut. Warning: Wall of text.)

There’s a topic I’ve realized I haven’t discussed here, so I figure it’s time to write something about it. As usual, due to the length of this essay, the bulk of it is under the cut.

I’ve seen a lot of posts going around by people exploring nonhuman past lives, especially those which aren’t possible here/now (i.e., angels, dragons, etc.), and describing any memories they have in very human terms. Things like walking down streets, gathering in gardens or libraries, standing before a judge in court during a trial. I think this is the result of a lack of awareness of a phenomenon we all deal with, but which is rarely (if ever) discussed directly.

Every memory you have, from the broadest strokes to the finest detail, is filtered through the perception and understanding we have here/now. We’re experiencing three-dimensional space, with a (relatively) constant and linear flow of time, seeing the world by way of reflected light and hearing things by way of vibrations in the air around us. Unfortunately, because those things are the only way we’ve experienced reality in this lifetime, we are literally incapable of properly modeling other forms of reality in our minds. It’s a limitation of being here/now, and having the kinds of experiences we do.

A (slightly extended) example: It’s pretty common to be taught about nets of polyhedra in school these days. As a refresher for those who haven’t dealt with the concept in a while: Polyhedra (singular “polyhedron”) is a three-dimensional figure made up of flat planes joined at some angle. One of the most common polyhedra is the cube. Six flat faces, joined at right angles. A net of a polyhedron is a way of “unfolding” the faces of a polyhedron into a two-dimensional shape. That two-dimensional shape can then be folded through the third dimension to recreate the original polyhedron.

Nets aren’t limited to unfolding three-dimensional objects, however. Theoretically, you can create a one dimensional net of a two dimensional polygon (it’ll just be a line, but it counts). More significantly for this discussion, though, you can create three-dimensional nets of four-dimensional shapes. Some of you may be familiar with the concept of a hypercube (sometimes called a tesseract). In the same way that a cube can be thought of as being made of squares arranged in three dimensions, a hypercube can be thought of as being made of three-dimensional cubes arranged in four dimensions. (There are multiple ways of representing a hypercube in three dimensions, but all of them are by necessity inaccurate.) Now, I’d like you to take a moment, and try to imagine a proper four-dimensional hypercube, and how it unfolds into a three-dimensional net. Then try to imagine that three-dimensional net folding back into a four-dimensional hypercube.

It is, quite simply, impossible to do accurately. Our brains are simply incapable of truly visualizing four-dimensional space, and the way objects behave in four dimensions, because we’re limited to experiencing only three of them. Similarly, it is impossible to truly comprehend how reality functions outside of here/now, because we’re limited to experiencing only here/now. Brains are amazing things, however, and will try their hardest to fill in the gaps with something, even if that something is inaccurate.

When it comes to remembering nonhuman incarnations, this means that our brains will grab whatever feels closest to what you’re unable to understand, and use that to fill in the gap, regardless of if it actually fits or not. As a result, those kinds of memories are inherently unreliable, since they’re (in many ways) just our brain’s best guess about what actually happened.

I’ve taken to referring to this problem as “the lens of human perception”, since it occurs due to filtering things through the understanding we can have by perceiving the world the way humans do. Like any imperfect lens, it leads to our view of things being distorted, and because of the way brains work, we generally aren’t even aware that the distortion has occurred. And so we redefine things in terms of here/now without even realizing we’re redefining our own experiences.

Being aware of the lens of human perception can be helpful, however. It lets you consider the context of your memories, and figure out where the gaps in your understanding are getting filled in. You can then make an effort to explore those gaps, and refine your understanding to get a clearer picture of how things actually were. It’s difficult sometimes, and takes some work to do effectively, but it can be worlds better than getting caught up in misunderstandings about your own experiences.

The amount of things in the angel kin tag that are like “being nauseous is angelic uwu having anxiety attacks are angel kin uwu i feel depressed/lost all the time bc im an angel uwu” is very, very concerning and borderlines on the romanticization of mental illness.

Like yes, these are valid experiences, and yes, you may feel dissonance with this body because it’s not the one you remember but it’s still!!! your body!!! in this life!!!!! It’s as human as any other and no matter the reason you’re on this earth, whether on a mission or some path to redemption or because you fell -it’s still your responsibility to take care of it

You are, in this moment, in this life, confined to human rules and your body is just as susceptible to illness as any other. If you’re feeling nauseous talk to someone you trust or your doctor, you might have the flu. If you’re feeling lonely and disconnected from everyone around you talk to someone you trust or a doctor, it might be depression (a literal, actual medical issue where your brain is not making serotonin/similar at the right amounts). If your hands are shaking and your vision is getting blurry talk to someone you trust or your doctor, you might have a concussion.