Skunks&

Some time ago, I found myself confronted with a sensation of overwhelm. When I first started leaning into plurality, there was joy there, of course, but I was super cautious. What did it mean for my sense of wholeness that I'd decided to separate these aspects of myself and treat them each as their whole person? Did that mean that I was too full? Too much? I wrote about this in my thesis, even, wondering throughout an entire essay whether this meant I was taking up too much space, that I was asking too much of my friends that they consider this aspect of me when I was already asking them to consider so many other aspects of my identity.

Pride is difficult.

As time went on, though, I found myself loosening up about my system. Perhaps I was this full of selves. Perhaps these different aspects of my identity, a thing that my stepdad sneered at as merely mercurial, were worth considering in their own right as their own wholenesses, or at least their own different takes on my own total wholeness, and using roleplay as a way to let them become what they would was as valid an approach as any.

And yet still there were reigns on this expression. There had to be, I figured, lest I lose myself in a ceaseless pile of animals, each growing ever more similar to the next as I ran thin on aspects to attribute to each.

Over the last week, however, I've been making a conscious effort to let go. Not all the way — those worries still hold — but to at least let myself revel rather than to treat exploration as a sometimes food, a decadence I only deserved as a treat.

As always, new identities fell out of roleplay, that thing I do more often than just about anything. Zacharias fell out of the queering of gender as well as my complicated thoughts on manipulation that were only gestured at by aspects such as May Then My Name. Soot fell out of my interest in plurality itself — they get to be a subsystem of Soot and Abby — as well as thoughts on disability and ownership — after all, they have a heavy lisp they refuse to 'fix' and horrible vision besides.

It feels unfocused, just as expected. It feels uncomfortable, in a way, that I have become so fractured, that an interest will pick up and then suddenly someone new will come along. Are the rest of me neglected? Is Slow Hours at risk of disappearing? What of Dry Grass? And My? Where has she gone?

They're all still there, and this process of letting go is a process of letting them not be so evident at all times. They need not be here, not at front, and, sad as it might be, not at all if that is the direction things go. I have yet to lose anyone, but if I do, I will mourn, and I will find joy in the way things are to be.

There is little in the way of concrete thought, here, other than I have been splashing around in identity, just as I always do, and Soot and Zacharias get to greet the rest of us.

Dot, I have been thinking while we sit here on the couch, you in my lap, dozing against my front, snoring softly as I brush my fingers through your fur. I have been thinking that you have spent more than a century now seven years old. That is one hundred seventh birthdays. Oh, sure, you have had a few twelfths, and once you even had a fifth, but no matter what, you have had more than your fair share of seventh birthdays.

I have been thinking, though — and this is between you and me — what if you grew up?

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