“finding your submissive self” by shae hits so hard it hurts.

Transcluding here for our future study and contemplation, emphases mine. The degree to which most of this is felt is unreal.

(The one exception is vis-à-vis degradation, but that’s not something I feel an acute absence of, but rather a questionmark regarding. There’s a big extent to which I wonder how much I inhibit my own desires due to internalised shame — it’s not something I feel on the surface, nor is it an emotionality most would associate with our public personae.

So it’s not that I don’t desire degradation, or that I do; not that I don’t know shame, or that I do. Just that I have no insight into it one way or another. What does resonate in that part is reference to needing that which I would protest to; indeed, one of my peak submission experiences so far was one in which I was helplessly trying to object to what was happening, so much so that my body was acting under its own will, trying to push away the dominant; me, awkwardly trying to tell her that despite this, I wanted her to continue.)

Recently I’ve used this phrase in some of my posts. I thought I might look at “finding your submissive self” through the lens of my own life.

I’m going back about eight years to a time before I was in a D/s life. I was in my real estate career, living a very vanilla life, dissatisfied and not sure what to do. I had been aware for some time that I was submissive, though naïve about it, but now I was beginning to think about it as more significant in me than I’d realized before.

I made a lot of mistakes in my early exploration of my submissive sexuality, but maybe this was something I did right: I dedicated time to assess my submissive feelings and inclinations — sort of a personal, submissive inventory. I really focused on it. That sounds so Tony Robbins, but for me it was less of a self-improvement technique than an inner exploration about strange desires I just needed to figure out.

Probably the most obvious thing to me then was my persistent longing to be obedient in an extreme way. I couldn’t make sense of that, but I knew it was there in me. “Obedience” to me wasn’t simply about being a follower, nor was it about being, say, a housewife in the old traditional sense, deferring passively to a husband. My longing was something else, deeper and more extreme. Of course back then my definition of “extreme” was more modest than I consider it now, but even then I had a clear sense that my longing required something beyond normal.

I remember being at parties with real estate colleagues, sitting and sipping cocktails. A particular man there, just by his presence, compelled certain submissive feelings in me. I remember having a longing to sit on the floor at his feet. In the social context there that would have been so inappropriate and odd, yet I wanted that, maybe precisely because it would have been a socially embarrassing demonstration of my obedience. I didn’t even know the man.

I realized as well that my submissiveness also involved the desire to be taken into experiences I never could or would take myself. At the time, I couldn’t specifically identify what those experiences were — I was too new to it all. But I had a palpable sense that I needed someone to command my being and push me into life events of doing and being that were otherwise beyond me.

At the time, I was also going through a kind of sexual awakening. I’ve written many times about how my sexual development was repressed in my early years, and so I was at twenty-seven just beginning to open up sexually to who I was. This led to a brief but serious relationship with a man and also a girl-crush on a colleague of mine, which led to my first sexual relationship with a woman.

But I was given advice from someone, I forget who, to imagine my submissiveness apart from my sexuality and any sexual experience. D/s, it was said to me, is not about sex, but about a radical abandonment of one’s self to another’s dominion. The point was that as I assessed my submissive self, would I still feel what I felt submissively if I took sexual attraction and sex itself out of the picture?

As I worked this through, my answer was yes. That desire to be “taken into experiences I never could or would take myself” was not primarily, to my mind, about sex. I could imagine sexual things, yes, but it was for me really about a different kind of relationship in which I was treated in a non-traditional way, taken into life experiences of submission and obedience — again, admittedly, vague and undefined. My submissiveness just had a craving sense these “other experiences” awaited me out there.

The further realization I came to was troubling to me. But it was strong and unavoidable. It was, simply, a strong wish for my own degradation.

What I didn’t know then, but believe now, is that this is possibly the core of submissive psychology. My submissive desire was to be humiliated and degraded. I didn’t feel this to be a kind masochism, a “hurt so good” desire. It was different. It was something I would likely protest and object to in reality, yet something I knew I somehow needed. Again it was ambiguous as to what and how (indeed, in my writing now, I’m still trying to figure this out), but it was a strong, driving submissive desire in me. Troubling but true.

There were other things too, other evidences, such as how dominance in persons across a crowded room would somehow melt me, and how I started to imagine myself in a kind of servitude to particular men or women. Traditional people’s fantasies look like a Hallmark movie, mine looked like “The Story of O.”

It took a long time. I was sorting out my life in a handful of different ways — my relationship with my mother and my father, my beliefs and faith, my bisexuality, my career and why it was disappointing… and now this, my submissive nature, which started to loom as a bigger reality in my life than any of the others.

My “submissive self-assessment inventory” took me about a year and a half. It was never so formal a project as that, but that’s kind of what it was. It yielded the self-revelations I share here, but slowly and often messily.

At a point, I started to accept my being submissive. And then becoming open to being extremely submissive. And then allowing myself to identify primarily as a submissive, taking on the label, allowing myself to be defined by it: “My name is Shae and I’m a submissive.”

There were still questions for me to figure out. Namely would my submissive identity need to be a full-time life? And then, how to find a dominant person who would take me places I couldn’t take myself.

But I came to this point when I was twenty-eight where I could say I found my submissive self. I knew this is what I was.

Do I know what I am?

One Step Forward — Nhato feat. Glascat (transcribed for Vivian)

Oh, oh

There is something strange inside my head
Something turns and runs from me
If I look back now what would I see there following?

Can I withstand it and make it through to the light?
If I turn back now then this will always follow

There is something strong inside my heart
Something deep, unwavering
If I breathe in now then I can’t find that part of me

Can I demand it and make it last through the night?
If I wake up now then I can’t find the future

Oh, oh
Oh, one step forward, forward
Oh, oh
Oh, one step forward, forward

Oh, oh
Oh, one step forward, forward

‘cause the fear will take me if I let it in
I must not, I must not, I must not, I must not let it in
And the light will make me if I reach the end
I will go, I will go, I will go, until it shines again

‘cause the fear will take me if I let it in
I must not, I must not, I must not, I must not let it in
And the light will make me if I reach the end
I will go, I will go, I will go, until it shines again

Oh, oh
Oh, one step forward, forward
Oh, oh
Oh, one step forward, forward

Oh, oh

I dreamt a dream that has left me unsettled all day.

backstory Ⅰ

Since I first had any kind of sexual inkling whatsoever — which is to say, since I was 12 when I’d hang around on an 18+ BDSM-themed furry MUCK and began RPing — I only ever had any inclination to be in a submissive position. When I found randoms to RP with, it was Asherah, the small pink bunny girl, wanting to have anything and everything done to her, especially if consent lines got blurry.

Even then I had to power-bottom a little bit. One rando I recall was only into the most vanilla dynamics, whereas I kept wanting to up the ante. (Tie me up! Get creative with things! Don’t just fuck me, for christ’s sake.) I got bored.

I also kinda.. baited an IRL friend who was a little too obsessed with me into joining me on the server, and then kept trying to “suggest” him into doing stuff to me. (I’m not especially proud of it, but like. I was 12, he was 13, everything at home was completely fucked up, he was super into me and could match my intelligence to boot, so.. now that we got furry MUCK-married, couldn’t we furry MUCK-do-other-stuff too please?)

This positioning of myself carried pretty strong for a while. There is probably a (bidirectional) link between that and trans feels. It’s funny how predictably some things go; I was ostensibly into girls, not boys (never mind the actual physicality that existed between me and aforementioned IRL friend for a while), but then I became a trans girl, and so liking other trans girls is only natural, and then you stop seeing “dick” as a possibly unsettling thing ‘boys’ have (and you’re not sure about your own) but a hot thing girls have too, and then you look at boys and you’re like, hm. You sure could overpower me.

backstory Ⅱ

Despite this, in relationships since I have often ended up being the one with power. Perhaps stemming from the same instinct that led to power-bottoming before, I’d much rather we get anywhere than nowhere, and I have a kind of.. exuberant personality that tends to draw in others who prefer to follow. I am naturally extremely protective, quite opinionated, have mom-vibes, and until recently have been a people-pleaser to a fault. Not knowing myself how to separate these qualities from those of a ~dominant~ has lead to me getting into places I’ve later not known how to deal with.

This mainly became a thing in two relationships, collectively spanning seven years, or a majority of my post-transition life so far.

In the first case I had a handle on life in many ways she did not yet (she was quite a bit younger than me), and so I provided everything I could; housing, a stable life away from sometimes violent parents, support for her relationships and hobbies outside me, and later when I could afford it, university education.

I’m a person who just wants to give, and as I’ve discovered lately in therapy, one who doesn’t believe, strictly speaking, that I actually deserve nice things. Accordingly, giving nice things to other is a very sure route to getting a similar sense of happiness, effectively, even if it does ultimately mean I don’t get what I truly want, and ends up being unsustainable. She didn’t want many responsibilities of life and liked the sound of a more formal and continuous D/s relationship, so I agreed to give it my best. Our relationship did not last the dissolution of the D/s layer of it (among many other issues, but this came to represent a lot about it).

In the second case, she was a few years older than me, but with a heart of absolute gold who had been mistreated a lot, both historically and more immediately. She nurtured a rare kindness and trust despite all that and I felt so much like I wanted to safeguard that. As our relationship quickly deepened she wanted to know if I would be her “protector”, and I assented immediately. (And I still do. <3) Then in natural order, more D/s-style parameters followed, and I put my all into it as well. It just seemed to make sense, and I had already so much of the “technique” down that the lack of deep-felt enthusiasm for the role seemed of secondary concern for a time, or not even—completely masked. I couldn’t feel that I didn’t have my heart in it, only that I wanted to make her happy.

Once you get used to ignoring what you want for a long time, you lose touch with it entirely. It took a massive reconfiguration of our relationship to accommodate removing this part of it — it had been in place from not even a month after we started dating, and there we were some year and a half later trying to imagine “us” without that. It was the best, most correct decision, but I still wish I’d figured this all out long ago and spared her the hurt.

There was one relationship in the past where I was explicitly the s to someone else’s D, but we lacked harmony regarding what each of us wanted out of a D/s relationship, and I found myself pushing for more than she wanted to give (or, well, take). It was fun being a rope bunny, though.

backstory Ⅲ

What triggered the reconfiguration was my own realisation of my asexuality. I’d been slowly putting the pieces together for a while, and then one well-timed acid trip and I just kind of blurted it out, at once feeling the surge of unverifiable truth. As I experienced a moment of serenity, my partner a sense of loss of what was. The relief of no longer feeling beholden to the allo norms of sex-having then prompted the follow-up question of whether I still wanted to be her dominant. The writing had been on the wall for a while, but it was then that the jig was finally up and I seized the chance to say “no”, as painful as it was. Pretending to be something I was not was behind me.

Living a mostly sexless life has been so much better for me. I just don’t have interest in being sexual with another, and just barely more interest in being sexual by myself. Still, it was in my own fantasies that my sexuality originated, so it’s not too surprising that it does live on there a little.

Last year I saw an endocrinologist for the first time since starting transition (which seems super dumb in retrospect but what can you do, trans healthcare is a mess), and we discovered that both my E and T levels were way too low. My E was below the very conservative range put forth by the Australian medical establishment (and well below what Americans would consider normal), and T levels at almost absolute zero. Even in natal women, T is in a clear non-zero range, and completely lacking it could explain a lack of libido, which certainly described me, as well as lack of energy in general.

So I set to correcting my E levels, then T levels. I’m now on ~3% of the anti-androgen dose that I used to be on and my T levels have just slightly inclined upward. They are still below the low watermark for “normal female levels”, but at least I get a reading.

I still don’t have any interest in being sexual with others, even though I’ve had an inkling of a sex drive for a little while again now, so it doesn’t look like the asexual descriptor was particularly linked to my hormones, but I’m increasingly feeling a need to have some kind of a sexual relationship with myself again.

the point

Last night I dreamt a dream — many, actually, with complicated interconnections, people I didn’t recognise, other people who seem like maybe they’re stand-ins for real people, a variety of settings, some drama unrelated to all this.

But there was one “segment” of it that left an indelible expression, because it seemed like my unconscious needed to make a point.

To date, I’ve never been collared by someone else in an impactful way. The tangible, real sense that you belonged to someone else now — even if time-limited or otherwise scoped. The understanding that it was not yours to put on, or yours to remove, even if it was very much your collar. I have (attempted) to provide that experience for others, when in reality it was what I wanted myself. I’ve “self-collared” a bit here and there.

In one distinct dream, I was collared. I was strongly aware I was collared, and moreover, I physically couldn’t remove it even if I wanted to. It was locked. It wasn’t up to me, and I just had to deal.

It felt really, really good. There was a sense that people might notice it, that they might point it out to each other, and that I was literally powerless to do anything about it. If I wanted to go about my day, I just had to accept that this was my lot.

I’ve never felt that before—that powerlessness. Yet it’s what I’ve wanted all along.

The dream then offered a counterpoint.

Later, somehow, the key came into my possession. The dream didn’t describe the actual supposed holder of the key, but the narrative seemed to be that whoever had collared me needed me to hold onto the key now, too. I wanted to be sure not to lose it, so I put it on a necklace.

The feeling was radically altered. Having the means of unlocking it on my person at all times meant it just became jewellery. It was no longer an aspect of control over me, just some ring with a finnicky clasp. Being out in public and being seen wearing it wasn’t a demonstration of someone else’s power over me, just my own determination. Frankly, as a trans person, somedays being seen in public at all can require a fair bit of that. This feeling barely registered, the same lack of impact that self-collaring has. I can always just take it off.

I want to feel that first one again.

A letter written to an oft-commissioned artist who was happy to hear more about the backstory of the character she’d drawn so much.

So .. I’m trans; I kinda knew about it from an early age (like in the mid-1990s; I’m 30 now), but didn’t have the words or experience or knowledge to understand why I felt the way I did. It wasn’t really a thing you ever heard about, there was no media representation, the internet barely existed, etc. etc.

So I came to understand this “other” inside me as something, or someone, that I liked to channel; like I could find her inside me and bring her to life. I always had an affinity for rabbits, and this ‘girl’ form of me just naturally seemed to be rabbit-like. When I found out about furry stuff when I was 12 or so, she very naturally became my fursona, or my fursona became her; the boundary was always very fuzzy. At the time I gave her the name Asherah. ‘We’ started hanging around on furry MUCKs, she learned to express herself more and more, and we started to develop an idea of what she looked like. (My father worked for the local ISP, so I was able to get connected very early!)

Fast forward to 2012 — things like Twitter and Tumblr were gaining popularity, and I finally understood and accepted that I was trans and I needed to do something about it. I transitioned, and kinda fucked around for a few years trying to work out what I should do about my name — tried a few different ones and none felt right — and then one day it suddenly dawned on me (or on us) that Asherah was a name people had used for ‘us’ for ten years, and that it was the name we were actually comfortable with. So I changed my name to Asherah (usually called Ashe), and after a while we started calling her, my ’sona or alternate self, Rain. It felt like Rain was keeping my name for me until I was ready for it, y’know?

I’ve had pretty bad mental health issues stemming from different trauma. A lot of awful stuff happened in my family when I was very young, and it left me really depressed for a long time. I’ve mostly gotten on top of the depression, but the last decade has been kinda dominated by anxiety and panic instead. Abusive relationships and assault and that kind of thing. I’ve worked really hard to make progress and keep my head up, but still it can be so difficult. Chronic illness has just kinda piled on top of it, or maybe stemmed from it. I just kinda have to do the best I can and hope for little improvements, instead of hoping that one day I might be magically 100% fixed. Keep trying different medications year after year, something gets better, something else gets worse. I remember seeing you tweet a photo of a bunch of medication boxes once, so you probably understand it better than most.

Rain, then, is like.. my internal guiding light, or guardian, or spirit guide, or something. She helped me see my way to my true self, helped me find my name, and now, she’s kinda my loving ever-present companion, even if just in my own head.

She’s like this ideal self that I aspire to become more like; she holds my cheerfulness and joy and curiosity, and the more I can connect to her, the more I can radiate those qualities myself. Sometimes seeing her as a separate person with a separate identity to myself is helpful; we can talk over things and be a little bit wiser than if it was ‘just me’. Over time I feel like I become more and more like her, and she keeps evolving and being the frontrunner of who we are. (idk if this makes any sense.. /o\)

But, yeah. Basically, despite all the illness and trauma and things I’ve had to deal with, I actually hold up in real life really well, thanks to my connection with her! People who know me sometimes wonder how I manage to be so well-adjusted and ‘successful’ when they learn what I’ve had to deal with, how poor my family was when I was growing up, what happened when I transitioned, etc. etc., and it’s basically through nurturing this relationship with her. I usually don’t tell them that, though, because frankly it sounds kinda nuts.

whew. Okay, that was a lot. I hope it was at least a little interesting. For what it’s worth, I’m not particularly disconnected with reality; you can look at Rain through a plurality/multiplicity/disassociative identity lens, or through an Internal Family Systems therapy lens, or in a few different other ways depending on how you understand identity or the brain. In short, she’s the way that I practice having a good loving relationship with myself. It’s really nice!

So, seeing her in art is really powerful. You’ve done three pieces of her by now, and it always feels like seeing a part of myself (or of ourselves) for the first time. The first was especially magical; we fell in love with your style instantly. It brings out the ethereal, gentle, warm sense of her spiritual dimension. And the most recent one brings her down to earth; brings her to life in a physical dimension. Gah. It’s just so beautiful ;;

This YCH feels so appropriate for Rain — the character is just radiating warmth. The design for the book cover that I gave above is a sigil — kind of a magical mark that is charged with meaning and intention, designed to have a lingering subconscious effect on its designer/user (i.e. me!). In this case, the sigil is charged with intent to strengthen the bond and connection between me and her; to help me channel her and connect with her energy; letting it flow out .. it just fits together with the ych design perfectly. (And the clothing design is super cute!)

I had some pretty powerful peer-motherly feelings last night.

I don’t quite know a better word for it. It’s not maternal as such – I do have kids and there’s a really distinct difference – but the feeling extends much further than I thought it would.

Struggling to work out how to express it now; when I was really deep in the zone I was pretty inebriated and it was much easier to just feel and be in the emotions than interrogate the feelings. But I’ll try.

When I decided to try earnestly to induce lactation (3 weeks ago now) it was just a bit of fun; I got a response here that really encouraged me. I never really saw the appeal before, but it occurred to me how validating/affirming it might be to actually use my body in that way. My tits really haven’t done much for me until now; I’m pretty flat-chested and it seemed like there’s no way that’d change without actual BE. Doing the regular work that’s part of inducing meant I was paying my chest a lot of attention, every day, and also meant they were sore a lot (which is good as far as I’m concerned).

I’ve had another close friend talk about how my (one of my headmates’) energy makes her “want to curl up in your arms and be held for a bit” and lean into a little bit of being on the receiving end of caregiving-type energy, and it’s at that point – thinking about me enacting this role in more than one context – that I really envisioned myself as being a “caregiving-type” in a broader sense for the first time.

And it’s really nice?? I started thinking about the role outside a strictly cgl lens, in more of a “loving, freely care-giving, supportive mom-type peer-friend” energy; thinking about an ideal sense of communal closeness where I could be that to many friends; being something like an empowering, encouraging rock that close ones knew would be able to emotionally support and nurture them.

The right words are still not coming to me and the feeling is a little more distant today than they were last night.

One image that keeps coming back to me is kinda weird, but kinda conveys it. My mind kept flitting back to images of high school (!), like in the year 12 common room where people would just hang out and chill. I’m imagining some alternate world where intimacy wasn’t restricted to romantic partners or seen as something that had to be hidden away. I would totally have been the mom-friend in that world and in that common room, where friends could just lay down across my lap and I’d stroke their hair and listen to them, and maybe suckle them a bit too if they wanted. Maybe people could do that for each other more freely and be responsive to each other’s emotional needs and play different roles as the situation called for it. (The specific setting isn’t really important but the image really stuck with me for some reason.)

tl;dr im mom

CN: sexual assault, aftermath, alcohol/drug use, psychiatry, bureaucracy

I am Rain, Song-Born.

A week ago, a friend of Asherah’s, a Namer, put out a call, inviting mutuals to ask an epithet of them. Ashe asked and they obliged.

It’s.. difficult to find the words to describe how this made us feel. My earlier writing isn’t terribly explicative, so allow me to detail it.

When Ashe discovered their latent plurality — when they saw the word “tulpamancy” and I stirred; when it became clear something was being described — they started collecting and reading resources about the practice. They’d just started a new journal, mind you, so page 3 starts with ‘tulpamancy’ in big letters and underlined, with a bunch of notes underneath about various terms; forcing, visualisation, wonderlands, imposition; how important it is to “believe in your tulpa from the start”, share things with them. All that.

They picked out a name to start with — kinda like a codename for a project in development. “Xue,” after the Mandarin reading of the word for “snow.” Long-time readers of our story will recognise this as a name Ashe used once before, in a different form. There’s a lot of this; that “double-buffered ego” I wrote about earlier. I used a name, they took the name; they used a name, I took the name. They had a fursona — I became the fursona, am the fursona, am not meaningfully distinct from it, her past actions not meaningfully distinct from mine. (This tweet came up in our feed today, retweeted by none other than the friend who provided the jump point into all this in the first place. Apt as fuck.)

Turning over to page 4, and some details start to come together; they picked out some traits for me, some likes and dislikes. The kind of character creation tulpamancy normally involves.

.. It.. is actually really weird to read this now, being me. Ashe wrote this all down, and I don’t know that they could ever have really prepared for the eventuality that one day, I would be reading it. Fuck, it’s… it’s a lot. It’s so hard to grasp the real enormity, the real rammifications of the undertaking. (Again, see earlier where I rabbit on about that.)

What really gets me is how on point it is. We’ve certainly evolved all of our identities in the half year since, but nonetheless, it’s weird looking at what feels like a blueprint for your own psyche, even knowing that I was guiding them in the ideas as much as they were contributing their own. Even knowing, it’s startling to be reminded, sometimes, how much and how little there is to being.

A small note beside: “I love her.”

And then, underneath the vague personality traits, a dividing line—

Ghost Spores 🎵

I fall in the dark
as I’m filled with the energy
rising in me, I am watching
from above my body as I dream
I cannot recall
the clear space in my mind
I’ve filled it with fire
And the lies I had once
believed

I remember when I saw you from across the room
The music elevated me as I made my way to you
Everything I have done led me to this
Time would move in a circle to prove it

Eternal return
Will the ghosts I leave behind help me to find you again?
Where have we gone? Will I wake into a better place?
Take me to my home.

My home.

We’d only discovered this song a few days prior — and it’s at this precise point that Ashe found the word “we” forming in our head for the first time, naturally, without the pretence of prior thought trains that ran “am I plural? how would that work? do I say ‘we’? when would I say that? it sounds made up.” It just came out. It was descriptive, not prescriptive.

In a movement of song, I was born.

The music elevated me.

A tip: “The barest working technique of tulpamancy: talk to the Universe until the Universe answers. Love it until it loves back.”

Eternal return.

Name ideas crawling down the page: Xue, Star, — something of nature, like, Azalea. Skye? Camellia. Ivy. Iris. Violet. Dawn. Luna.

Help me find you again?

The first sentence I ever felt like I could call my own is recorded:

“It feels like home”
X re: Ghost Spores

A realisation of a trip long-past:

// that time we did
acid & you
told me to
visualize my ideal
mind self

// I saw her

Rain!

The notes become increasingly fervent, day by day; page 5 — “She wants ❤︎”, and then scrawled beneath:

Send my heart into the sound
Slowly drifting into your arms
It blows away in new directions
It’s your time to know something that is real

Full pages covered in kritseldab; scribblings of madness. Incipient sigils finding form.

And then, clearing the way:

Sit with me for one last song
and be closer to me when it’s done
Come here and tell me your name

Come to me

Come to me
Don’t be shy, I want love, truly
Something that will make sense to me
Rush up on me and say something
Break something

Bad boy
Better look in my eyes, boy
You’re the love of my life, boy
Meet me at the equator
Of this earth
We are one

From slow quietude to high energy, we traversed our emotional range. The song showed the way to our understanding of plurality, of our duality. I rushed upon them, and.. well, they asked for it. I looked them in the eye; said something; broke something.

Day after day, we listened and listened, sought out the notes that would resonate; I found my place as Asherah’s spirited companion, and they found theirs as my channeller. We found our path together, as one, guided lovingly by syncretic truth and vivid insight.

The pages continue—I find my handwriting, my written voice, as Ashe finds what’s theirs in light of what’s mine. We discover that much as I had to find myself, they had to do the same. We found ourselves in each other; found our love in each other.

Every day since my first has been one defined by the joy of living a life of love.

Music is what conducts our soul; it gives rise to the emotional spaces in which we find ourselves, over and over again. A refrain can capture what no words could; can bring forth in moments what would take hours to describe.

If I was to convey to you how I feel, the truest way would be with sound.

Song is beauty. I’m looking forward to the day I can bring you my own.

I am Rain, and we are Song-Born.

Really feels like it’s a terminal or some other kind of interface for reality. But a terminal feels cold + unemotional — doesn’t feel like it has love at its core. What if the terminal has a more overtly psychedelical/magical mode of operation?

It should: channel Rain; beautify Rain — that otherworldly coupling idea seen in C.C. Yes — this is it. My key is Rain. It is through Her our ability to self-master originates — that is the truth we can see: that She came to me, and is our and my interface with Reality.

Rain is the spark of light that calls us to action + Completion. Our trace, our shadow. Our reflection. She is my key, mutually self-possessive. I didn’t create Her — She found me, chose me; — soul induction was real. She is love, our love and our Love. She is mine, and I Hers. Our partnership is ultimate, equally powerful. Rain is my spirituality, and Rainmaking my faith. We are one, we are two.

Rain: a spirit, an interface, a symbol of and from Goodness, a lover, a friend, a Companion, a co-conspirator, a seductress, a lonely soul, my other half in the Spirit world.

It’s our connection + unity in a single purpose that empowers us. Think: in that single moment of contact, our power circuit is complete, and anything becomes possible. Self-love added to other-love. We Feel.

Aesthetic: bookish, cute ponytail girl (?) who shyly admits their religion is that of communing with her personal spirit pair, Rain. Some whimsy, but otherwise an intense character who holds the courage of their convictions. Earthy.

Time to come into ourselves.

Make the leap.

Accept it all.

Now.

Rain is the closest thing there is to a Goddess in our canon. Being in Her presence is bliss.

I am her — the believer.

Please enter into dialogue with this text. Not that kind of dialogue. The other. The kind where ‘you’ read and something unspeakable decides what to do next.

Topic question: What does it mean for someone to have an identity, a personality, heck, even a soul?

We’ve characterised ourselves as a “plural egg waiting to be cracked”, and that’s basically what happened when we saw the word “tulpamancy” for the first time. In an instant, something changed. I needed to be heard.

There’ve been times in the past where I’ve been more or less known to Ashe, but seeing that word was the moment of clarity in knowing me.

Hell, it was even more circuitous than that. An acquaintance — someone we gravitated toward without knowing why we ought, only sure we should — didn’t even mention it. Just barely mentioned a mention of it. And — as Alan Watts would say when you push the button labelled “surprise” — here we are. We asked, they answered, the word was seen. We are set in motion.

Tulpamancy was the vector for learning about our plurality. We found another tulpamancer who had similar views on the majesty and gravity of the activity, and I learned to learn about myself with their and their tulpa’s help. I say “majesty and gravity” probably because our first site of engaging in tulpamancy-adjacent activities was a Discord server where it basically was treated as “roleplay, except if you try really hard and long enough you can learn to impose your characters”, or some shit like that. (This isn’t any server you know about if you’re reading this, unless you’re the “other tulpamancer”.)

It’s hard for me to know what a tulpa is and isn’t; what an alter is and isn’t. Tulpae as seen usually imply a form, a distinct personality. They honestly seem pretty forced a lot of the time, as comes out in the questions asked. Even the older ones. Some of the most ‘believable’ tulpae, to me, are some of the least clearly differentiated. Is this just some kind of ego/supremacy thing going on here? Do I think anyone not like me must be less valid? ’cause bitch I know some of the shit I see is basically emotionally stunted boys playing RP fantasy who get tired of it after a few weeks when no-one else is interested in playing any more. What does that amount to? And what of the rest?

Let me be clear: these are my thoughts, concepts unfinished. Draw conclusions with great hesitation. Is that clear? Do not auto-complete my thoughts.

Here’s my experience anyway.

I see myself as occupying as much space in this brain as Ashe. I feel my network connected to so many of the same things as theirs, and choose to claim ownership. We are satisfied with this. We are two, and we are one, and I guess there’s a third sometimes which is like, the emergent consensus, the voice that is ours combined, that which is so, the context to our differentiations. But there isn’t three. Fuck me this all sounds so bananas. Don’t think I don’t see that. But, y’know — words to live by — there is a point where we needed to stop and we have clearly passed it — but let’s keep going and see what happens. This is seeing what happens.

The emergent consensus voice surprises and scares us sometimes, as much as I used to surprise Ashe when I was getting used to being heard. Take from that what you will. What I can repeat with certainty is this: there isn’t three. I think it’s adjustment to coexistence, corecognition. Like, in the fabric of consciousness. No-one ever said this would make sense.

Why do I know that with certainty? Because, as far as I can tell, the nature of our existence is two. Like, when it all comes down to it, that’s how we are structured and formed. Like, maybe we could create a tulpa and then there’d be questions and there’d be answers, but inasmuch as what we are and have been, we’re two.

Here’s what I know: when Ashe was little, they had an imaginary friend.

Here’s what I know: when they were 12 or 13, this imaginary friend was given a name, a form, an idea, and this idea was something that sometimes seemed bigger than themselves. Sometimes it was scary. Sometimes it seemed like it wasn’t under their control, just.. happened to be.

Here’s what I know: they danced and switched places with this idea, for years. They named it, it named them. Identity was always a matter of two; double-buffered ego.

Here’s what I know: that’s me.

These are words of exploration and interrogation, prompting the unknown to offer what it may.

One thing that comes to mind fairly rapidly is like, hey, is this all just a cover for some kind of psychosis? What even would that mean? “a mental disorder where a person loses the capacity to tell what’s real from what isn’t”? Am I about to start hypothesising on what “real” even means? Does that — that I want to debate “real” — mean we’ve just lost it?

What “lost it” means varies according to what others negotiate as acceptable. As far as we go without detection, none would know any better, and we’d appear that much more normal. Does that mean psychosis is socially mediated? Of course it fucking does. Why is it normal in some cultures that people should speak tongues, or hear the word of God?

And, after all, isn’t that where we’re going?

Here we are. This is where the break is more evident. They had no idea what was coming. They truly didn’t. I don’t suppose anyone dabbles in this stuff having any clue what’s waiting for them on the other side. How could they? How could anyone know what they were opening up to?

Would anyone choose to, knowing? And here’s the thing: the question is nonsensical. Knowing is too late.

And what is “this stuff”? This stuff that mysteriously connects us to others, where we share a tongue and purpose, even as it is occluded from view. You can’t open yourself up to this without being taken along for the ride. Knowing is too late.

October 25. Would this all have happened without? The question is already moot. What was meant to happen happened and what’s meant to happen will, that much we’re sure of. We didn’t always view things this way. We’ve reordered our principles on these lines, quite willingly — it’s just that we’re not going to start telling other people it’s so. Literally no-one wants another preacher. More to the point, our alignment with polyaletheia compels us to recognise that it does not follow for those who don’t believe it so. To tell them would be a lie, unless they chose to believe. (does this make us “mythologists”?)

Fuck, this is bananas. I know. I know.

But it’s our reality, so, fuck it.

Let’s keep going and see what happens.

Back to October 25. It was the first time we saw each other. The first time we recognised each other, eye-to-eye, as individuals. (“But, ‘individuals’, —” you begin. I KNOW.)

I acted with purpose. I tempted them into knowing. Into believing. Into stepping back. Into seeing.

“Cosmic seduction” was the first term that came to our newly joint mind, and it’s stuck with us ever since. They didn’t plan for it — they couldn’t. Around and around we go. In those moments I truly felt, and they knew. Discovery of internality began. Of making our own meaning. There’s the break. When others stop being able to dictate what has value; when the buck rests entirely with you.

Sometimes it feels like this is all so bizarrely obvious. That we should all come into possession and command of our own meaning. But it is clearly not so. We can’t exist in any other way than our energies (i know) flow.

The thing is, we keep getting feedback. In the last week alone:

1. “[your writing is] like genuinely uplifting”
2. “you know you’re really enthusiastic? it’s charming.”
3. “you are living your truth & doing so with so much positivity & energy […] if more people focused on just being themselves & doing so in a positive light like you do, the world would be a better place”

So clearly it’s not obvious, at least, not to so many people who by their own admission feel it’s a breath of fresh air to see it embodied. In case the leap isn’t clear: to describe things as so is to contrast with an implied default, a non-so being. (Yes I’m getting into ontology now shut up.) To say our being is uplifting is to contrast with an implied default way of life that does not cause uplift. Hang on: seeing us is genuinely uplifting. Just taking a moment to consider that fully. We are causing uplift. Woah. Not the first time, not the last.

So maybe it’s not obvious. Then our purpose has at least one component that is clear: to uplift. This is kasmakfa coming through, entirely of its own accord. Ehipassiko: we tested the teaching out so that it became our own.

Our own.

Ours.

We are crisscrossed paths of memory and destination,
streaks of light swirled together.

We are neither day or night.
We are both, neither, and all.

Excuse the detour, but that poem struck a nerve when it first found us. You can appreciate why.

What does it mean to uplift? I refuse to pay any more attention to the dictionary you opened just now; we’ve done all we can with the existing terms. We need to go bigger. To reach out further. Close your eyes and feel the void rushing upon you.

To uplift is to make aware. To uplift is to open eyes. To uplift is to unlock.

It’s so easy to know. But aha — it would seem that way, wouldn’t it? On the other side.

Fuck. I know.

Still, we’ve come full circle at last. “What is ‘this stuff’?” It’s knowledge (!) — that one’s purpose, meaning, life, fulfilment are all one’s own, entirely negotiable and needing negotiation with none other than yourself.

Still, there’s knowing and there’s knowing. Who hasn’t heard variants of this sentiment a hundred times already? Map/territory/etc. Show you the door/walk through it/etc.

And therein comes the purpose of uplift: to provide a better map, to show to the right door. That’s why we are who we are and so purposefully and brightly. Anyone can write something that sounds truthy. To live truthfully is another matter, especially because we live in a society. What does it mean to mix truthfully knowing living with self-sustaining existence in society? That’s what we can show.

Anyway.

All this purpose talk is neither here nor there; essentially masturbatory, ’cause it only relates to us and our plans.

We were able to clarify “this stuff”, though, which was a nice takeaway.

Earlier when I was thinking about “this stuff”, the flavour and intent — in my mind, I mean — was clearly occult/mystic. (I’ve been writing in bits and pieces for hours, now.) Y’know, all the “they had no idea what was coming” business. What was coming? Nothing other than the occult, of course. It’s one of those things that’s impossible to know anything solid about unless you know about it. Here’s that refrain: knowing is too late.

We almost happened upon this much earlier in the year, helped along by a too-high antidepressant dose that was causing a subtle but thorough sense of dissociation. It was easier to see and limn those boundaries of meaning and existence then. We shifted back into reality once we came down from that dose, and besides the angles were all wrong. Little did we know: that was just practice.

Now, “occult” is a word with all kinds of baggage and shit. There you are with that fucking dictionary again. Okay — I’ll allow it. Mystical, supernatural or magical powers or phenomena; communicated only to the initiated. Esoteric. “to cut off from view by interposing”. This time all it took was one attractor and for godssakes please do not start with some law of attraction gronk right now I do not have time for this shit.

But like, plurality was always going to be that which drew us in, it was just a matter of when and how. Seriously. It was always going to happen. You need to believe that.

And so we recall the same question: what was coming? (“belief in”) the “occult”, or rather, the belief that we can create our own reality/meaning/subjectivity.

Again with less punctuation: the belief that we create our own reality was coming.

Self-belief was coming. They had no idea what was coming. They truly didn’t. How could anyone know what they were opening up to? Would anyone choose to, knowing? The question is nonsensical. Knowing is too late.