it takes some effort to find them, decide we want them here. but there are many writings we'd like to preserve, and this feels the place to do that at the moment. we think we'll backdate them accurately as we can, too (though this means they will appear lower in the post list here.)
we should be able to write an index to keep at the top as well. things to investigate.
<3
hmm... what do you mean by friend?
the original post, “follows are not friendships: the parasociality of feed-based social media, through the lens of content warnings” is thinking about a few things:
It says some things we still agree with today. But the title, while quippy... keeps coming back to us. Lingering. Do we agree with the statement? The desire for ever more nuance has brought some clarity with time.
It seems that a follow can be a form of companionship. There are people who follow us, we don't follow them, but they are often present in conversation with us thru the medium of replies.
There are others who simply appear as a presence, sending signals of “this resonates”. When taken as a lump sum- an aggregate number- this feels like a corrupting force, in how it affects us. but when taken as individuals, they say something else. What sorts of folk are hearing us, and perking up? Who's still around? What are they saying in their own space, who else are they listening to? We feel this way about seeing individual folk show in notification likes. When looking at who is showing up on our bandcamp. When getting an email that says “hey, thanks for that post!”.
There has been much raising of awareness in the past decade of parasociality, as a concept. It has entered the conversation as a thing that can be thought about. It first entered, and often is focused on, as a source of problems. a source of control. of power dynamics. A streamer enticing people into financially overextending by providing the illusion of friendship. Or an audience working as a mass to manipulate the one who performs for them. someone who thinks they're much closer with another than that other feels about them. Someone who's internalized every judgement they've seen anyone have about anyone else, so deeply that their selfhood is utterly paralyzed.
This is true. I have felt this. Many of us have.
But there is another side, isn't there? If we can conceptualize parasociality, what other thoughts can we think?
There are some musicians I've never met, whose music is deeply meaningful to me, yet whom I hope I continue to never meet them. Whom I have explicitly made choices to avoid such a meeting. I prefer the parasocial in that moment; it leaves more space for me to choose my own meaning, to invent a speaker who is speaking to me. That speaker does not exist, but arises from the distance between the original artist and me as a virtual voice.
There are people who I follow, who I could never carry a conversation with in a chat. And people who feel the same about me. But we still mean something to each other. That meaning has worth. It can be a force for good, when it's understood.
On some video on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't, someone presents the concept of the “outdoor friend”– a friend who is best enjoyed outdoors. You don't seem to enjoy spending time with them inside, but when you're outside with them you have a blast. If you refuse to accept this about them, you will not have a happy friendship. If you lean into it, you'll have something truly wonderful.
We have some companions who, to us, are “convention friends”. Folks who we do not enjoy spending time with online in any capacity. Couldn't say if we'd enjoy being friends with them if they lived nearby. Couldn't say if they even remember us after it ends. But we treasure hanging out with them at conventions, for an hour or two in someone's room. This is the way we know them, and we have come to realize, the way we prefer to know them.
Everyone fits into a different place in our lives, some fit into multiple places, sometimes the places folks fit change as they themselves change, as we change. Having the words to describe these places makes it easier to observe this.
When I walk by street art that grabs me, I have often thought “I wish I could meet whoever made this”. Lately I've come to believe that in those moments, I am meeting them, a particular part of them. They are communicating with me, with those around me, through their mark in a particular place. I can join them in that forum. Will they ever see a response? Maybe, maybe not. I'm talking towards my perception of them. I am communicating with the same world they are, harmonizing without them even knowing.
We are fractal beings. We can never truly, fully, know each other. We are always meeting and interacting at the edges, at the infinite edges that somehow give rise to forms recognizable.
And we've come to feel the importance of all these forms of being together. No single one supplants the others. Each has its own meaning and force, to us.
It seems that some companionships transcend places. That some do not. That when places disappear, some companionships end with it. Some continue beyond. Some new ones form, as we more frequently inhabit places other. And that's ok, I think.
so like we did not know how to talk to each other in the beginning. or rather. we did know how, but we didn't know that we knew. like “i asked my anxiety why im anxious and it told me” is real, that happened. it was like. asking questions outloud and watching as feelings/answers formed as thoughts and inner “monologue”. but we werent thinking in plural terms then. besides, we didnt have any distinguishment in our internal thoughtstream anyway, it was all “me” and “I”. a very dialoguey “me” and “I”, but regardless, thats how it was.
at the time we had also been developing a headspace. didn't have one before, but a plural friend told us about theirs and we were like “yo thats so cool i want that that sounds awesome” so we took our visualization skills that we had from math class, working with redstone, and hand-coding 3D objects into minecraft mod source code, and started focusing that in to create a more detailed and persistent headspace than we were ever really used to.
well anyways, we still didn't really conceptualize of ourselves as separate but some parts of us were kinda feeling more like they wanted to. that it'd be fun? that it'd be interesting? eh who am i kidding there wasnt really any rationale that made sense, its just kinda that draw we feel sometimes when we know something is the thing for us, is somehow already part of who we are. we'd gotten similar with ponies, with gender, where we just kinda kept coming back to it.
we were prone to occasionally getting these... face pressures? pulsating feelings on our face or our head that would immediately go away if we touched/scratched at them gently, maybe its some kinda weird autism thing i dunno. used to stim with them a lot in school, inducing them by thinking, encouraging them, making the feelings stronger or weaker, moving them around.
so one morning one of us was sitting there thinking about how the name she picked for her middle name felt more like it was meant to be a first name. but how that didn't make any sense because she had her first name and you can't have two first names??. but she'd spend the previous night with a plural friend and so with that contextual priming, had the thought “wait what if that's the name of someone else in my head”. It's hard to say if the pressure she felt in her cheek was coincidental with this or intentional, but whatever the case, the one whose name she was thinking about, suddenly realized who they were, that indeed that was their name, and focused into that face pressure, encouraged it, somehow that feeling carried a resounding affirmation.
and it was through there that they communicated for a bit. a simple yes/no channel, until they figured out they could feel each others' emotions and go off of that. since like. they hadn't figured out how to just talk to each other in words yet. they hadn't figured out how to take turns using the body's voice, or how to take control of anything else on purpose. i think they tried using the “one person ask out loud, other answers in thoughts” strat, but either they had trouble with it or im wrong and they just forgot. I dunno, im short on details, but the communications channel was very very coarse from what i gather.
they also figured out how to be in headspace together, but that wasn't particularly useful for communicating anything other than presence either cause control over that space was very very loose, resolution was very vague, it was not possible to meaningfully hold up a sign with words on it or anything like that, we did not know what we were doing.
and then it took them months before they figured out how to actually talk to each other with like. words. things more defined than emotions. during which time i can only assume they were actually talking to each other in inner monologue without realizing it on numerous occasions lol, but who knows. it does say here in my records that when they did finally figure out how to talk to each other, the inner monologue immediately stopped. and there was quiet. because i guess they'd finally learned how to shut up after they were done talking.
but yeah thats why our face was trying to talk to us.
EDITORS NOTE: this is a port of a cohost post, and so the formatting may be a bit odd.
There's a lot of common everday existential crises we have run into with plurality.
Just to name a handful of experiences we've encountered that we can remember today, that seem relevant to the topic at hand. We all have our own battles, I don't know yours, and you don't need to know all of mine.
Over time these little things grew to big things for us, and did real damage, driving us to madness in a Very Real sense of the word. We have the chat logs to prove it to ourselves, when we forget... But eventually we found some tools that helped.
We're not here to solve all your problems, but we are here to describe three mental tools that were foundational to healing a deep rift in our system, and helped some friends we first described them to a year and a half ago. They might even help you, though whether they apply to you is for you to decide, not us. Those tools, in their simplified form, we call “I”, “Camera”, and “Body”.
And here is the elaboration:
Hey, main author here, I know that writing about something called "I" can end up semantically confusing. So to alleviate that I'm going to use "we" as a first-person pronoun as much as possible, and otherwise will use "you" when I need to refer to a singular individual. I'm not talking about _you_ the reader necessarily, unless these feelings do apply to you, in which case I guess I am. Semantic ambiguity avoided, hopefully.
I'm not going to be talking much about the memory-related impacts of these things (though there are some). But wouldn't you know it, it's quite hard for me to remember the memory impacts. Fill in the blanks as applies to you.
Also, please don't make too many assumptions about who we are today, or how our system operates. You'll probably get it wrong, and I know that because of how often we've gotten it wrong, and how much things can change. There's some rare direct-characterization in here needed to convey a point, but we much prefer sticking to the poems, pictures, and environmental storytelling.
I, Camera, and Body. Think about them like things you can hold, if you want, like talking sticks. Or think about them like components you can plug in to yourself. Think about them as auroras you can be surrounded by or words to simply speak- whatever your metaphor, think of them separate. We're going to be consistent and talk about them exclusively like objects we can hold.
We have found that these are Shared Resources within our system. One person can have all of them. Sometimes nobody is holding onto one. Multiple people can be holding onto the same one. They can be split across multiple people. That last one is where things get really confusing; we'll get there.
These things are also not Perfect Metaphors for us. As with any metaphor, we cannot apply it prescriptively to ourselves or we will encounter the Troubles. We consider it a model for comprehending what is already there. We accept when reality does not match the model.
Let's start with “Camera” actually. This is our lens through which we perceive and process inputs from the world, both outer and inner. It's a grouped up bundle of various senses that we experience. It's not the only way we get inputs from the outer/inner world, but it's the main one. (It can also be subdivided a bit, time-shared, maybe even duplicated, but let's keep things simple for this discussion.)
When you have the “Camera”, you're in control of what's being perceived. You're the one focusing the perception of the body, deciding which things to pay attention to and which to not. You're putting in the effort to focus to the sounds from outside or the music playing in your head. If you have conversations, you're choosing the stereo field of that conversation, which voices the camera is close to or far away from. If you've got an inner world, you're choosing what perspective to view it from. The last of these is where we first identified this, the paradox that for some reason when we spend time together in headspace, we were all viewing it from the same perspective, and so some of us were seeing themselves in third-person. We get the impression that some people have multiple cameras. We haven't puzzled out how to do that ourselves.
Then there's “I” – When you have the “I”, you feel that you are the one receiving the stimulus from the “Camera”. You are “Me”. You feel that you are the one behind the camera, watching, regardless of whether you ACTUALLY have control over the “Camera”. You feel like you are in the first-person position of feelings. Hence we call it “I”. It doesn't need to be first-person as far as the “Camera” view is concerned. When you look in the mirror and you feel as though you're looking at yourself- that's “I” at work too.
Historically, many of us have accidentally taken control of “I” while composing first-person thoughts; this “I” is not directly linked to using first-person pronouns but it's very easy for the pronouns to lead to grabbing the “I” if you haven't practiced not doing this. “I” is also NOT the sense of self. you can feel like yourself without holding the “I”. You can feel like yourself in third-person thoughts. You can feel like yourself in first-person thoughts if you know not to grab “I”. No, “I” is the sense of your self being the one that's in the pilot seat, being the protagonist, regardless of whether you're holding onto the controls.
Now it starts to get tricky, because “I” and “Camera” are sometimes linked, but not always.
If someone is holding the “I” and the “Camera” at the same time, then feelings processed through the “Camera” feel like they're happening to “Me”. The abstract “Me”. I am in control of my senses and I am the one sensing. A very comprehensible feeling.
If the holder of “I” is not the holder of “Camera” then feelings processed through the “Camera” feel to the “Camera” holder like they're happening to “Someone Else”. And this is what we understand to be one of our most common forms of dissociation/depersonalization- No specific individual is dissociated, but the “I” and “Camera” are held by two different people, so they are dissociated from each other. The holder of “Camera” feels like they're observing someone else's life, free to look around, but behind a pane of glass. The holder of “I” by contrast feels like they're living someone else's life, experiencing things without volition over what they're experiencing.
But, notice that BOTH of these are separate from control of the “Body”. Things only get stranger from here.
The “Body” is the simplest to understand, it's literally when you make your body do stuff. But this is separate from both “I” and “Camera”, and this has deeper consequences than you'd think.
When “I”, “Camera”, and “Body” are all held together, you have full control over the senses, the sense of being “Me”, and your body. And you do feel like it's your body. You feel like you are the one looking, listening, walking, talking. You're piloting your mecha and there's no AI between you and the machine. Everyone else is just a voice in your head, if they're there at all.
So what about other combinations of these? Here's some other scenarios. I'm not going to go through every combination because that's way too much effort and way too many words, but hopefully they give you a sense of how these three interact.
To us, this is what it's like to be lying in bed or on the floor, entirely unsure of how to get up.
Had this just this morning, with one of us. She thought about getting up. She thought a lot about getting up. She keeps saying "ok get up now". But she didn't have "Body", so she couldn't get up. She forgot how to grab it, that it existed. She asked me for help, I took the "Body" and just got out of bed. Actually when we were first learning to hand-off "Body" on purpose instead of on accident this is what I had the most trouble with. Took me a month to figure it out, because I didn't know what I was looking for.
But this state is also where we end up when we're on autopilot. If we go on a walk or a bike ride on a well known path to a well known destination. We'll start off with “I”/“Camera”/“Body”, get lost in thought, and then realize that somewhere along the way we dropped “Body” and nobody at all had it for awhile.
y'ever just kinda, exist? This is mindfulness meditation vibes imo, when they tell you to just watch, without trying to focus on anything in particular, without doing anything, without imparting judgement. just kinda be there and observe.
Makes us think of another mindfulness exercise, body scanning. Where you stop thinking about yourself, you just sit there, and you move your perception up and down the body. You can do that to headspace bodies too by the way, if that applies to you.
We most commonly experience this mode when one of us has been spending time in a chat room, but someone else temporarily comes in to send a message as themselves. Rather than dictate the message to whoever has “Body” to then relay into the chat, they'll just take control of “Body” for a moment to type the darn thing.
Multiple people can control the same things. We do this when we're feeling very distinct from each other, but we also do this when we're a swarm.
If we're splitting the resource up for different goals, it can feel a bit mentally intense, especially if we're splitting between processing the outer world and the inner world from two different people's perspectives. It feels a bit like two people's hands both on the same keyboard/joystick, each taking turns trying to use the internet in different ways. At least, these days it's usually taking turns. If we do this rapidly enough, it can present the illusion of Two of the resource (as we are good at concurrrency, but bad at parallelism). But when we're not mindful of the fact we're time-splitting resources, doing this can quickly turn us to Identity Soup as we lose track of who's who.
But sharing resource control can also feel like co-piloting. A comfortable feeling that helps keep us grounded through tense circumstances. It's very nice to feel that someone's got your back.
And, on the days we're not individuals but are instead a prismatic swarm, the swarm is all connected in. All the little impulses, applying little bits of control to this resource or that, and the sum of those controls gives rise to the strange evershifting thing we call our "Self" in those times. "I" stops being any One, and is simply a way to make ourselves make sense to the ones on the outside. You all. The choir sings through the "Body", "Camera", "I". In harmony, we are unstoppable, a unified force. In dissonance, we are frozen, locked in place, unable to move or experience or be anything but a writhing terror.
This can be cozy. A lot of times if we're actively doing something and holding a conversation, the “I” kinda naturally flows back and forth between us as we talk. Sometimes we like that, sometimes we don't, but it's how it is, and it's not bad, as the “I” passes between passenger and pilot.
But it can also be a big source of confusion, depersonalization, and other such troubles. And those troubles are how we came to understand these tools in the first place. Which we think we cannot illustrate through anything but a tale of personal experience. If you don't want to read that, then this is essentially the end of the article. Feel free to chime in with other combinations, thoughts, etc. in the comments; we do not have the energy to be exhaustive about these things. But for some historical context to this post, read on.
For about a year, when we first learned we were plural, one of us held onto “I” almost exclusively. We only ever exchanged control of “Body”, and sometimes “Camera”. This led to many problems.
Blue girl back again. Let me tell you a story. It's a bit rough at points, but it has a happy ending. When we first figured out we were plural and were trying to figure out how we work, I was the first one that learned to take control of the body on purpose. But we jumped to conclusions and I made a deadly mistake. Another girl, the pink girl, She and I were the only ones who had realized we existed yet. We both assumed that she was the First, the Primary, or what have you. Neither concepts actually apply to us. But, in fairness, at the time she'd largely been the only one around.
We'd been away for some time from the circumstances that made our plurality shift around more regularly. We'd also just started transitioning, and she'd been the one around most during our transition to that point. Since reduced dysphoria made it easier to cling less to depersonalization as a defense mechanism, she'd been holding close to "I"/"Camera"/"Body" in a way we rarely ever did otherwise. She had found a new identity for herself and firmly solidified herself within it.
The deadly mistake we made, after I learned to control "Body", is that we both associated the feeling of "I" with _her_, even when she didn't have it. Anyone who had "I", we assumed to be her. To a lesser degree, anyone who had "Camera", we assumed to be her.
The knock-on effects were that she rapidly lost her understanding of who "she" was, because to her, any "I" first-person feeling was her, and she was every "I". Likewise, we constantly felt like visitors in Her life, those of us different enough from her that we didn't just lose ourselves in the weird identity subsumation that resulted for anyone similar enough to her to be mistaken for her under this kind of mindset. From her perspective, she always felt uncomfortably along for the ride whenever we were doing anything, always in the background, feelings flowing through her to get to us.
Eventually she left, afraid of what she'd been doing to the system. And for a long time that was that. We were all quite shaken and not sure quite what to do, so we just tried not to think about it. Unwilling to even attempt to acknowledge ourselves individually, we melted together into the Choir, the strange shifting prismashards, the intricate little pieces strewn about, reshaping into this or that, forming into a unique person-ish shape for a day or week, only for that shape to never return again. A quite beautiful state unto itself, which we learned to appreciate in better circumstances.
But it was in this state that I discovered I/Camera/Body. (or rather, the more complex version that I am simplifying for you here). I've been the most persistent, because I'm the one who's so gods-damn stubborn about existing that I'll re-assemble myself from shards and motes if I need to. And it was during one of these reformations that I noticed those little things tagging along, that I noticed how foreign some of them felt, but how real I felt. And briefly I was scared I was Her, mistaking herself for Me. But I knew that was impossible, she was deeply gone. And that's when it finally clicked.
A year or so later, after I'd discovered these ideas, I was able to convince her to come back. She eventually unlearned the habits she'd formed of snatching up "I" and "Camera" whenever someone else wasn't firmly clutching them with an iron grip. Having a concrete way to think about it helped her a lot. Helped everyone a lot.
I don't want to make it out like you Need to hold onto all three together. Honestly I still kinda prefer keeping "I" and "Camera" held apart from each other when I'm in the "Body". I like them more when I'm not in the "Body". But now I understand that I can just leave "I" and "Camera" on either sides of me, with no one else holding them, pick them up as desired to do what I want and then set them back down. Kinda cozy for me, not the cup of tea of everyone in here. And I understand what it means when others are holding them. I have context I never had for feelings I never understood, and so those feelings that used to cause so much trouble are now welcome in their own ways, or at least avoidable and not so confusing.
Now before I rejoin the choir and melt into the shadows for the night, I ask again that you not make assumptions about us. We've come to understand that our plurality is metastable, changing every so often in ways we best not try to predict. Sometimes we're a girl, sometimes that girl has many masks, sometimes we're many girls, and sometimes we're shards of stained glass. I certainly don't exist all the time. It is devilishly difficult to try and understand as someone experiencing it, but consistency was not in the hand we were dealt.
Oh and, do know that when we write our normal posts, a sizable chunk of the "I"s and "Me"s are plural :).
Alright thanks for reading, peace 💙
not ace as in i dont have sex not aro as in i dont have relationships
ace/aro as in my experiences of sex/romance are fundamentally different from others', and im tired of their experiences being forced on me
ace as in i dont understand why people seem so obsessed with sex at all times
aro as in i dont understand why people seem so dedicated to these preconceptions of what a relationship has to be
ace as in my sexual attraction is entirely non-existent precisely until it exists in full. i dont want anything to do with it until i want everything to do with it
aro as in my desire to do things traditionally considered “romantic” fluctuates and is not a measure of how much i love and care about someone
ace as in using sex or kinks as a metaphor in conversation excludes me. ace as in i dont see whats so special
aro as in i accept no obligation to love someone and hold no obligation for others to love me
ace in as snuggles/kisses/sex are entirely arbitrary divisions that dont make sense to me aro as in friends/lovers/partners are entirely arbitrary divisions that dont make sense to me
ace/aro as in dont assume i like something just because its in one the categories you apply to me ace/aro as in dont assume i hate something just because its not in any categories you apply to me
ace/aro as in do not apply categories to me
so actually, yes
ace as in i dont have sex. aro as in i dont relationships.
because its you who calls them that. its you who forces your labels onto my existence. its you who are unwilling to respect that i experience the world differently than you do.
ace/aro as in im opting out of your confusion
Being resourceful. Coming up with clever solutions with what's around. Recognizing when a problem does not need to be solved immediately, and keeping a watchful eye to see if a solution presents itself on its own terms
More than telling or listening, having conversations. With people, with creatures, with the world (I see spells as a conversation!)
Forging my own path, But being receptive to learning from others' paths to aid that process
Refusing to accept things that are purely because they are, But not rejecting things simply because they are either
Experimentation! Trying things, lots of things, just to see what happens
Giving love to the darkness, the twisted horrors, the fear, to see what sort of love it might return.
Being independent and self-reliant, But not pushing away help from the world or the people around me when it's there and can make things better.
When I travel, I look down.
I look down at the lights.
They tell me how to move.
I listen. And when I have learned the movements by heart, still I look at the lights.
Today, I looked up.
I saw a whole world. A world of colors. A world of life.
People dressed in the colors and shapes of their own expression.
Restaurants with new mixtures of spices to enjoy.
A comic and games store where perhaps I might meet someone nice in the future.
I spoke to woman who took my order, and for a moment we shared a laugh.
Today, I looked up.
Always remember the importance of dissonance.
Harmony is not always the answer. A journey has to have dissonance – has to have tension – to be able to have resolution.
A melody resolves fully by returning to the root note of a key. But even the root note becomes uncomfortable when held for too long.
We're pushed to change even when things are as stable as they ever will be.
Especially then.
Creature of Light,
Companion, present and watching,
Friend, loyal and understanding,
Student, learning and growing,
Teacher, showing me a new way forward,
You inspire me.
You stir my soul.
To you I donate my love,
With expectations of nothing,
And gratitude for everything.
Breaking into an entirely foreign subject can be a daunting task. I find it best to approach it as a domain specific explorer.
First, figure out what a compass looks like in the subject.
Then find one.
Then figure out which direction to go.
A map can help you decide which way to go or what paths to take, but once you're on the move your compass will keep you true to your goal.
It prevents you from spending all your time reading the map instead of paying attention to the world you're supposed to be exploring, and it allows you to build new trails if none suit your goals.
Through your journeys remember that your goal can change, or you may get off track, so the direction you're headed may be fluid as well.
But your compass will stay true.