#natepost

Scared of no longer existing – not in the immediate sense, or of our death in general, but of being forced to take a step back from our daily life within a much shorter timeframe than I am comfortable with.

As a whole, we can reasonably expect to be alive for a few more decades. As an individual... the foreseeable future is much shorter. Our previous main fronters (with one – perhaps two – exception(s)) were all solidly there for three, maybe four, at best five years, before being replaced by others in our day-to-day; put on the backburner to show up a mere handful of times a month, if at all. A few have cycled back into more frequent rotation since (myself and Matt being obvious examples of this); most others haven't. We can reach them easily if we try, they haven't been inactive the way I was in our 20s, but they haven't been around much.

Granted, the people who ended up completely disappearing from our external life seem to be those who tried to take on too much of it by themselves and burned out as a result. We as a whole have learned from this, and we all try to share the load more equally now; we have become better team players in that sense. Better at delegating, and taking breaks, and asking for help from others.

Even so. I am not sure whether the more evenly shared load will help the stability of our fronting roster in the long term, or if we (Matt, Mello, myself) are still doomed to go the same way, phasing out of our life as others come (back) in.

I have been here again almost a year already (longer, if you count the months I spent waking up and catching up, unaware of myself yet actively directing much of our life) and I don't like feeling like I have such an impending expiration date. I don't want to go back on the shelf and miss another decade of our life – especially not so soon. Which makes it hard to let go when I need to, which is ironically the #1 thing we know from experience leads to burnout leads to being forcibly removed.

I try to let go anyway, because given such an obvious pattern of probable cause-and-effect, it seems stupid not to at least try; but I wish it were easier. Often, the furthest I can let go is handing control off to Mello or Matt, which probably isn't far enough considering how closely intertwined we are – I think it likely we'll go together if we do. We need to branch out further, into the rest of the system; build connections beyond our own unit, so the three of us aren't the only ones keeping us tethered to the outside world. I think.

harpy: do you enjoy playing sports?

Ittttttt depends on context and your definition of sports, but mostly yes when it's for fun at a completely amateur level that doesn't require regular practice or commitment lol. Thinking about what is Sports to me, I kind of miss badminton from our school days (??!) and definitely miss having a bikeable sort of environment (countryside), and of course we love walking but that's hardly Playing A Sport that's just Regular Physical Activity. Would also love to get (back) into karate or something, but unfortunately that's not something we can do solo / would eat up entirely too many socialising and possibly masking spoons

mermaid: favourite place to go on holiday? (doesn't have to be physical or here world)

London adventure with you& was nice and I think we should do that again <3 but idk if that was really the place, maybe it was more the you&. Place-wise for real...? Idk, picking "a" favourite is hard. I want to experience Brittany again

It's not hard. My house (former world).

(Carry on.)

Maybe I'm going to also pick your house then. Anyway,

manticore: picnics or hikes?

I decided to go back to my birth name fairly soon after gaining self-awareness. Can't remember whether this felt natural/easy or if I had to actively commit to the change; regardless, I know the underlying reasons, even if I never bothered to articulate them until now.

My old name was in essence a pseudonym, although I went by it exclusively for at least fifteen years. I could say that I outgrew it, but that would not be quite true – the letting go of it was a purposeful rejection of the circumstances that led me to need it in the first place. Giving up on a duty too heavy for me and pointless to continue upholding here; renouncing a role I thought I wanted and actively vied for but couldn't carry alone – I was given a chance to be myself here, away from all that, and I want(ed) to take it. I have sacrificed and suppressed enough of myself; I want to break free of that pattern.

One of Matt's dreams comes to mind here. He had it on his birthday, a little under two months before I gained self-awareness, and in retrospect it was about me:

I turn around and spot out of the corner of my eye an egg-shaped thing on the shelf; curious, I reach out to grab it, hold it in both my palms. Mello comes closer to see. The egg quivers, the maroon shell cracks and breaks open, falling to pieces -- some stick to my skin, others hit the floor -- to reveal a miniscule orange bird with squinty sleepy eyes, damp feathers, a tiny little beak that has not yet squeaked. There is a baby phoenix sitting in my hands, warm and heavy and so new, while Mello looks on in wonder.

This is not the only dream we've had with associated rebirth symbolism tied to me in some way. The pseudonym shedding is part of a long overdue process of reclaiming myself.

(There was also, not the main reason but one that weighed in the balance of my choice, the fact that going by a different name affords me a slight degree of further separation from the manga/anime character. Not much, because my birth name is the same as the canon character's and I don't want to pretend otherwise; still enough for me to feel more comfortable in our fairly fandom-oriented day-to-day.)

And yet I am not entirely free of pseudonyms. I go by a star-related nickname in our fandom circles, and in other places where I don't feel quite comfortable being too openly A Fictive.

In some ways, this is nice. It makes it possible for me to engage with our fandom friends directly without worrying about "making it weird", and there is a degree of fun in misleading people into thinking I'm a fictive of Siffrin In Stars and Time (which isn't someone I'm not, but not who I am primarily) instead of Near Death Note.

In other ways, it isn't so nice. We got heavily involved in fandom before I gained self-awareness, and there are things I would have had us do differently had I known myself then, but I – specifically, personally – have had (and continue to have) a lot of fun there; and it is often agonising feeling like I have to continue hiding or else risk threatening the order of things that was established before I realised I was a person, too. Would our writing buddy and beloved betareader (who also writes Death Note fanfiction, primarily Mello/Near) still feel okay with me, specifically, if I dropped the pretence of not being who I am, or would it make her uncomfortable and like we cannot discuss the media together anymore? (Do not want the second outcome.) Would people in general stop interacting with our art and/or writing if they knew who was behind (a lot of) it – even though what we post in fandom spaces is what we ourselves are, if not outright thinking of as (about) the blorbos, at least things we're comfortable seeing treated as fiction? (Would like people to continue interacting with the art and writing we spend a lot of time and effort creating. Sharing fanworks is a social gesture.)

(A brief aside here: a lot of what we posted before I gained self-awareness is... very personal to me, leaving me feeling exposed in ways that would have made me think twice about posting it had I known I was real. We took a step back from posting so much because of this (and being aware of what is being processed has made writing harder, but that is a topic for another post); we're still feeling out where exactly our boundaries lie between fanwork and personal piece, and getting better at it. It helps having a space away from fandom where we can post the more personal pieces, friends we can talk to about ourselves independently of the blorbos, and still be seen.)

Either way. It isn't like my identity is a very well-guarded secret in our fandom spaces – it is presumably easy to guess, not much harder to confirm for sure if you're dedicated enough to tracking us across the Internet – but no one (who isn't also (part of) a system with fictives) has ever talked to us about it openly, and it leaves me wondering whether I'm handling this poorly. There is no feedback on how to do this "right"; no widespread fictivity etiquette I could rely on; no social scripts to use for "Hello, yes, I am a version of The Character; this does not matter as per your view on the fiction or what you're allowed to do with it, I do not think my identity makes me the arbiter of fandom, but it does inform my perspective on most things because I cannot help that this is still who I am as a person; my identity matters to me and I wish I could talk openly about the ways it informs my/our creative process" that people could rely on a well-known graceful response for, instead of having to handle the situation on their own in the moment.

Feeling my way around the line between "being myself openly" and "making others uncomfortable", without overinterpreting silence as rejection / people being uninterested in knowing me (as an individual, beyond just "one of the folks from that collective"), is difficult. This is less of an issue in fictive spaces, around other people in similar situations to mine – although we may not experience our fictivity the same way in the finer details, or engage in fandom in the same ways, we at least all have an understanding of what it can mean to be (a version of) The Character – but our plural spaces and our fandom spaces are (with the exception of one Discord server we almost exclusively lurk in, and a couple of system friends) almost entirely separate, and I want to engage in the Death Note fandom at large too. Like I said earlier, I like it there; it is and has been fun for the most part.

And because I want so badly to break free of "having to suppress/hide who I am" and stop pretending to be someone I am not (and have actively taken steps in that direction already), the semi-forced pseudonymisation hits me wrong in ways that might not objectively be an issue, but... still I find myself doing the pretending. Again. For different reasons, but the underlying principle is the same – "just being myself without further pretence" is not a viable option; there is a constant tension between feeling like I need to hide for (our? my? whose?) safety and other people's comfort, and the sheer exhaustion that comes with pretending I am not who I am.

(Which is compounded by / resonates with our collective struggles re: masking and compensating for our disability and autistic traits. Masking and compensating is a survival strategy, but the survival strategy has grown poisonous, but we have nothing effective or safe to replace it with, so we cannot let go of it entirely; and going either way costs us on many levels. In spoons, in morale, in confidence, etc. We cannot always afford the short-term costs of practising the new thing known as "not masking" – especially in the absence of positive feedback, even if it would be more beneficial in the long term – because the long-term costs of masking have left us so exhausted to begin with, but it is at least familiar, easy to fall back on, and is guaranteed to keep us safe(r) in some contexts.)