Watch Your Step, Don't Fall

Saturday, February 26, 2022 - 10:39 AM

Yanno what? Let's talk about the OTHER reason I'm changing my project schedule. Which, to do that, I think I need to talk about WHY THESE two projects...which is honestly something about which I'm not sure how transparent I've been. WHEEE!

So yeah, we'll start top-down: I'm a transgender Otherkin guy, which means my body HELLA doesn't match who I am inside, the who and what I'd consider to be my real self.

Actually, first let's define some terms real quick, since hey, you can never go wrong with establishing a baseline understanding up front, and I'm intending to post this one on several accounts and don't want to assume just everyone has the baseline working knowledge on subjects that have a lot of misinformation around them. Plus then I get to lay out my own working definitions.

In short, "Otherkin" refers to someone who believes they are in some way not, or not entirely, human. I tend to default to assuming "spiritually not human," but that's not by any means the only way people experience their non-human-ness. For me, I identify as/experience myself as/am a non-MLP alicorn and also Sonic the Hedgehog, and spiritually I shift pretty fluidly between the two forms (I've had others come up, but these two have been my primary and most persistent forms for most of my life).

I don't usually think it's really worth it to get into the whys and hows of how someone being Otherkin happens. I think there's a lot of possible causes, even just looking at it from a spiritual perspective, and once you add in other perspectives, like the psychological perspective, you get even more possibilities--and I assume that every single one of these possibilities are probably true for some individuals...but there's literally no way to know what's true for who, and all trying to figure it out does is tie us up in knots. Like, a certain amount of speculation is inevitable, chaos knows I have my own pet theories and ideas for what I think is going on with me--but the ACTUALLY IMPORTANT part is how it affects us in the here and now, what we're experiencing, who we are, and what we can do to mitigate the adverse realities we find ourselves experiencing--like dysphoria. Fucking hell, does it absolutely suck to be in a body that feels so fucking alien to you.

Sooo, yeah. It Doesn't Matter and New Normal are both born directly out of that complicated morass of experience--they're both projects designed specifically to address my species and gender dysphoria. Cuz hey, I can get hormone replacement therapy, I can get surgery, but my body's still gonna be human shaped, and most of my dysphoria is still gonna be here, always. It absolutely sucks, it hurts, and there's approximately fuck all I can do about it.

It's hard and it's scary to talk about this stuff. I hate opening up these vulnerabilities, because everything I've learned in this world is that people LOVE to use the things that are important to you to hurt you. I honestly don't understand it--I get lashing out in a moment, I reeeaaally don't get the premeditated, targeted, malicious stuff. But whatever, that's how some people choose to act, and I really do think that being open about my weirdness will help others out there. You're not alone.

So It Doesn't Matter (especially IDM) and New Normal are ways to combat my dysphoria. They're both explicitly ways for me to get into the headspace of one of my two main forms and just be in that for awhile. IDM especially is pseudo autobiographical, where I use the act of writing the thing itself as a focus for being in the moment, projected over to Home. Which yeah, is heckin' unusual, and there's a lot of personal stuff going on in that phenomenon. It's not a one-to-one translation, stuff is edited, streamlined, all that Good Shit. Chaos knows I've nowhere near written down everything, and there's definitely shit I'm more sure about the broad strokes of than the details, but yeah. That's the deal with that.

New Normal isn't that sort of project. It's its own thing built of characters scrounged from scrapped projects, plot threads that couldn't stand up on their own, ideas I just want to see played out in a visual medium, and some of my own weird, random experiences. It's my "more commercial" project--and it's BARELY commercial at all. But it does scratch the itch of letting me think about being a unicorn here in this world, and how navigating that while physically A Unicorn would look and feel. Plus, a lot of unicorn TFs end directly post-TF, and we barely get to see any of the adapting to their new life stuff, and that's a major shame!

So yeah. That's "Why These". That's why these projects in particular, instead of Thus Spake, the silly write-as-I-go from a quick and dirty what-if premise, or Anything But Ordinary, with a ton of interesting ideas already written and waiting to be adapted.

Which brings us alllll the way back around to The Point. I was just alternating these two by update, and now I'm gonna be going by week. Hell, before I started explicitly alternating between the two projects in January I was mostly just sporadically bouncing around interspersed with long periods of inactivity.

But needs change--they're constantly fluctuating, actually. I don't know how well my "Alternate by week," plan will work, or for how long before I need to switch it up again. That's normal, and to be expected, even if I wasn't actively in the process of working through a lot of trauma. But yeah, I am, and it sucks. And as always, now that I've patched myself together enough for it to even be possible again, I'm starting to use making things to help myself heal.

A huge part of that process for me is the act of writing--in immersing myself in the life or situation, and explicitly feeling it out. It's nice to be at a point where it's possible to touch that, to be able to reach outside myself, and to have enough energy to make something with again. It's been really hard, and it was hella scary to be messed up enough that doing so wasn't an option, especially for so long...

So yeah. I say it all the time, but it's usually faster to write something than draw it. I've had a pretty sizable backlog to work from for IDM and New Normal (it's ESPECIALLY faster to write than animate!)...but on New Normal I'm finally at the end of the script for issue one...which means it's time for Writing Time.

Buuut given the need to get into the right headspace TO write, and my own need to balance my two main forms, I was struggling. I wasn't really having much success carving out explicit writing time with my project schedule as free-form as it was, and it was quickly turning into a situation where I was forcing an alicorn shift waaaaaay too frequently--for me, I can force a shift a few different ways, from doing a few things to encourage it to happen more easily to just jamming myself there by sheer force of will...but that's neither healthy nor sustainable. And since my hedgehog form is usually my main form--to the point where I've joked about being a were-unicorn--shoving myself in that direction long term was gonna be a bad idea.

Sooo yeah. We'll see how well this works for the moment, I've been in places where things like this work well, and in ones where it doesn't work at all. I'm a little nervous about needing to be kinda strict with my shifting to coincide with this schedule. But yeah, needed to try something different! We'll see how well it works for the time being!

Watch Your Step, Don't Fall - Sonic