#experiences

We were trying to explain to some friends earlier that saying "this person is in front" and "this person is co-conscious" isn't always the most useful phrasing for us because either of those terms can mean a lot of different things. We have our own words that we like to use to describe where folks can be in relation to our awareness.

This man is ancient, bent like a finger and frail. Tufts of white hair surround his wrinkled face. Like always, he's wearing thick glasses, massive hearing aids, and his veteran's hat. George was my first introduction to the concept of war, when he told me as a child why he was missing two fingers on his hand. He's been a fixture at church since I can remember. I've only ever seen him at there or in uniform at parades, the rest of his time spent in a nursing home somewhere. He picks up a deviled egg and says, in his quiet voice,

"You know, before your grandfather died, he told me that now he had 3 grandsons."

I'm frozen in place. I don't know what to say to that, if I should say anything at all. This is not a conversation I expected to have, especially not with this man. But he continues.

"I didn't know what he meant! So he explained it to me."

And I can imagine it. My great grandfather, uninformed and opinionated but supportive, explaining to his friend the news he barely understood himself over after-service coffee and cookies. His eldest grandchild was now a boy.

"And, you know, I didn't know what to think."

Here, George looks me up and down. This 90-something year old war veteran, who knew me mostly as the little girl playing in the church kitchen with his wife, processing what my great grandfather had really meant. It feels like a long pause, even thought it probably passed in a second.

"But you look good. So, eh!"

And then he smiled, shrugged, and walked away without another word. If I was fine, if I was happier, then that's all that mattered.

i learned from a Plant Guy (can't say much about the program i was in for privacy reasons) who identified plants mostly by smelling them. A lot of plants have striking smells, and a lot of them don't smell like anything else.

Ailanthus altissimia trees have one of the worst smells ever. They smell sort of like peanut butter, like it's an oily, almost savory smell, but it's very heavily mixed with the smell of a musty basement. It is utterly foul.

Datura/jimsonweed smells so nasty I can't even touch the plant without my stomach turning. It shares some notes with ailanthus smell, but it's different.

Poison hemlock likewise is foul.

All parts of the kudzu plant have a very cloying artificial grape smell, but when you boil the stems/foliage it mixes with a smell of sweaty feet.

Pawpaw leaves smell extremely bitter. Oak leaves smell...oaky, and I didn't consciously realize there was an oaky smell until I was attempting to dry acorn flour in the oven and it smelled like that.

Plants in the mint family have a lot of aromatic compounds and different plants of the same species can smell like mint, basil, orange peel or even eucalyptus.

Black walnut smells like itself. It's all at once musky, spicy, sharp, and chemical-y but none of that actually describes what it smells like.

Hickory nuts have the most heavenly, buttery-sweet, almost maple syrup like smell you can imagine.

One of my favorite plants is Collinsonia canadensis, citronella horse balm, and its flowers have this unbelievably strong citronella smell.

Wild roses, at least the Carolina rose, have an absolutely lovely smell. I usually hate floral smells but this one is so pleasant. It's hard to understand in the era of always-blooming, unkillable, scentless Knock Out roses why roses were so revered in symbolism for so long, but the wild ones really are wonderful.

Speaking of smells, one of the worst smells I have ever encountered was chicken feather meal. It is basically ground-up chicken feathers and Farmer Family Friend was using it as a nitrogen fertilizer for his crops. I was spreading the stuff around and raking it out and god it was awful, I can't really describe it though.

As best as we can remember, we first came across MOGAI in 2016 through DeviantArt. We didn't use DeviantArt and never have, I do not know how exactly that happened, but it did. Only one year prior had we been first really exposed to the very idea of queerness. I can't say it clicked instantly, but it did immediately become monumental to us. The first time we heard of they/them pronouns was at a summer camp when a friend of ours came out as nonbinary. We used their pronouns as often as we could, jamming them into sentences where they didn't need to be, feeling around both the words and the concepts they represented. By the end of the week we were trying out a new name, new pronouns. The memories go dark from there; we have a lot of blackout amnesia, so this isn't the first time I'll say this haha. But a year later we transferred to an arts school, rediscovered queerness, and discovered MOGAI. And when we discovered MOGAI, that clicked instantly.

2016 was a big year for us. We went through a lot. We had our first delusion. And we spent a good chunk of our time poring through galleries of pride flags on DeviantArt, scrolling through lists of genders and orientations wherever we could find them. We talked about them to people offline, to generally poor reception, but even with that reception we kept on thinking about it. It wasn't our special interest yet, but it was an undoubtedly an interest.

In the years after, going through therapies and the legal system and trying to navigate a life turned upside down, MOGAI gave us something we could understand. It was something we could know. We couldn't understand the world and people around us, we couldn't understand the world inside our own head, but we could understand these labels. We could recognize niche flags without having to think about it, we could make sense of how all these identity words could fit with each other. MOGAI became our anchor. As our delusions got worse and we struggled more and more to be able to interact with fiction, MOGAI gave us an interest we could share with others. As we struggled more with school, MOGAI gave us a knowledge we were comfortable in. We came to view the world through a MOGAI lens; it became our special interest.

We finally made a blog for MOGAI in early 2019. It was @lovemogai, which is now abandoned. I... do not remember anything at all from this time. More blackout amnesia haha. But I know we didn't take long to become interested in preserving microlabels; we made radiomogai in July 2020.

MOGAI continued to be an anchor for us. Being an expert in it gave us something we could be proud of as we continued to struggle with experiences deemed outlandish and just not believed. We were raised to be proud of being weird, but as our schizotism left us stranger than the people around us could handle, MOGAI told us that it's okay. MOGAI told us that there's still a place for us. That we do not have to be alone in our eccentricity, that we are not a shameful thing, that we are not beyond understanding. MOGAI told us that we can have words for who we are, even if we have to coin them ourself. That we are not unworthy of being spoken of.

MOGAI promised us that we deserve to exist as who we are.

When we first made radiomogai, we kept it rather faceless. We just saved things, didn't really talk to anyone. I don't remember what year it was that this changed, when it was that we first started talking to people, or how long later we started making friends (though I know that that was a good bit later). It was scary! And it's still scary. Sometimes we fear it wasn't worth it, that putting a face and name to our work has caused us far more trouble than it was worth.

And despite that... MOGAI has given us community. A social circle, people who care about us, people who admire us, friends. MOGAI has led us to meet people who've helped us immensely to process and cope with things we'd always felt so alone and hopeless in. The MOGAI community gives us a place we know we can belong in. A decade ago, we were certain we were doomed to be isolated forever. And we still carry that loneliness in us but it doesn't consume us anymore. I can't put into words how immense that is for us.

MOGAI still anchors us. It gives us something we can feel confident in, even when our world falls apart on top of us. It gives us a place we can always go back to. MOGAI promises us that we deserve to exist as who we are. MOGAI promises us that we deserve to exist at all.

Identiweaver flag | Without icon | Just icon

FLAG REMASTER BY @rwuffles THANK YOU

Identiweaver : A term for people who feel an entire aesthetic/theme/motif is weaved into their identity!

Example: Purpleweave, cottageweave, lolitaweave, etc!

Flags i've coined under the identiweave identity:

Acid, Periwinkle/frost, Gore Celebration | Party Puppyweave Space, Alien, Black hole Pink/white Lotusweave Sleepyweave / Exhaustedweave Lesboy and Turigirl weave | Fictive and Factive weave F/O-loveweave & Simp/crushWeave Seasonweave(s) Sparkleweave & Starweave Technoweave & Cyberweave Menheraweave / jiraiweave halloweave > special halloweave editions! various fruitweave magical girl/kid/boy weave

Flags other people have coined under the identiweave identity:

Dollweave Mythoweave Moonweave Sunweave Red, orange, yellow Green, cyan, blue purple, magenta, pink Black, gray/grey, white Felineweave Canineweave VTuberweave Cherrypopweave Shapeshifterweave Skyweave Bunnyweave Royaltyweave Liminalweave Bendyweave Rotweave Amemorweave

All flags will be posted above! Credit me if you make a new flag or term! I'm the original coiner of the identiweaver flag!

TO BE USED BY ANYONE, but made with Dissociative identities & Neurodivergence in mind.

Refined flag findable under reblogs.

KEEP IN MIND

We are UNCOMFORTABLE with SYSCOURSE.