#akanyap

I feel like we don't talk anywhere near enough about the somatic symptoms of CDD's. Like everyone mentions them but... nowhere near as much in depth discussion. Especially vision related ones. My dissociation impacts my vision a lot and I just have to wait it out because there is no underlying cause. Sometimes things look grayed out/pale and foggy, sometimes my vision gets much blurrier than usual, sometimes I feel like I lose the contrast between the darkest dark and lightest light. And the motor function related ones, my dexterity suffers a lot; sometimes I can barely control my legs. I have literally woken up sore, achey, and bruised because of how hard I was clenching and unclenching in my sleep. Beyond headaches, I get tingly sensations and frequent stomach aches (alongside digestion problems), and there were so many days when I was a child that I'd be taken to the doctor and there would be nothing wrong with me that could be causing it. We have an alter who is perpetually cold - her mere presence causes constant chills and goosebumps. A protector is the opposite, she's always so angry that it gets warm.

Today I had a dream where our co-host made an ironic "anti-willo-komaeda" blog and got sent a hate ask by an endo that horrificly mistranslated a Kodaka tweet from 2014 to say "Komaeda Nagito is positive towards Willogenics." and I woke up to getting 100 hate messages on this blog the day after with no memory of such a blog even existing. what I love is that it's type of shit that would actually happen IRL in these discourses.

People used to tell me how respectful the relationship between me and my brother was growing up. They didn't see what was happening behind closed doors. That "this respect" was actually a power imbalance formed out of fear. That I had been actively discouraged from forming a connection to my parents so that I would prioritize his authority; to the point of failing to recognize them on multiple occasions; that I didn't even know what my brother's face looked like because I was too scared to do something as simple as look up to face him. Yet, of course, it took me other people - peers and on one occasion a therapist - pointing out that none of this was OK for me to realize what was being done to me. Because I wasn't hit, right? Even if I was constantly afraid that the next time I pissed him off, he would finally hit me - Because he didn't cuss at me, right? Even if he would go on and on about how I was a useless child who was only redeemable if I let him "save" me. Because siblings hating eachother wasn't a joke but literal, right? Even if it made me feel like shit? Because only parents, or uncles/aunts, or grandparents were old enough to be abusive, right? I mean, I had abused friends with home problems - theirs looked different. It was a parent, it was a parent's sibling, it was never meant to be a sibling. I was still insistent on denying everything until memories started coming up - a bit after he got "bored" of it, and fucked around found out when I was diagnosed with severe depression so young and that everyone was trying to figure our HOW this happened. He robbed me of my fucking life.

I think there's nuance to conversation to be had about he/him lesbians and she/her gays. Being a he/him lesbian, or a she/her gay, is not the same thing as being a straight man/girl claiming to be a lesbian/gay. I think a lot of the confusion stems from the fact that gender is a complicated construct; both neurobiological and social. When we say "guy" or "gal", we tend to apply it to queer peoples who socially are aligned more with a certain category. Like a genderqueer lesbian who uses masculine terms or adopts masculine roles, we can call that a guy; because guy is generally also used for social category beyond just "binary male". Of course, there's also kneejerk reaction because of history. Trans women were attacked on the basis of being "autogynephiles", or like a "super-dedicated gay man"; so when we hear "she/her gay", especially older members of community - or those familiar with older history - tend to associate it with a time where trans women were a third category. Similarly, for trans men; straight trans guys were often seen as "predatory lesbians seeking staright girls", and gay trans guys were often seen as "wannabe gay men/not serious about the male part" (because we think of gay men as half a man as that's how patriarchy treats them). So when people hear "he/him lesbian", especially straight trans guys, they assume that it's talking about them and go back to a time where "butch flight" was a conspiracy. Ultimately pronouns isn't gender. Gender isn't fully social (rather, an internal perception of sex; i.e neurological and according to recent study genetic as well); but the language we use to talk of things associated with a gender/sex are social, and social rules are not set in stone. Logically queer people tend to agree, but we need to recognize that you still need to address internal bias - and having internal bias from growing up in a heteronormative society does not make you just like "those bigots". Much like how sex has a bimodal distribution rather than binary, so does gender, and much like how we assume sex before the person has the language to describe themselves, the words are not concrete nor prescriptive.