Went To A Local Beach And Collected A Few Pieces Of Mother-of-pearl, I Think I May Carve One Into A Butterfly,

You shouldn't feel caged by labels. They should be a waymark, something to guide you in the direction you wanna go. You can call yourself a cladotherian, even if your "clade" is crocodiles and lizards. You can call yourself objectkin for identifying as an animal. You can avoid all fiction-related labels, even if most people only know your kind from fiction. You can call yourself nonhuman, even if your kintype is per definition human. You can do whatever you want

Homemaker-❤️

recipe for shaiapouf from hunter x hunter @bandage-hearted-butterfly

so the obvious choice for blue and purple to me is butterfly pea flower tea, but anyone can tell you to buy dried butterfly pea blossoms and then steep them to make an herbal tea so i went to find something a bit more complex. this recipe includes simple syrup, which can be bought or made. its really simple to make simple syrup, so i'll include instructions on how to make that as well

simple syrup

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup water

add water to sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. let it cool, then pour into a clean jar and lid it. it'll keep in your fridge for about one month

butterfly pea milk tea

1 teaspoon dried butterfly pea flowers

1 cup water

1 tablespoon simple syrup

1/4 cup milk, dairy or non-dairy

optional: tapioca pearls cooked according to their packaging instructions

bring the water to a boil in a small pot and add the butterfly pea flowers. turn off the heat and steep for 5 minutes. when it reaches a rich blue color, discard the flowers and let tea cool

if using tapioca pearls, add them to the bottom of a 16 oz mug or glass. add ice and pour cooled tea. add 1 tablespoon simple syrup and milk of your choice

@classicaldreams

𝓜.

Do people still make and post kin playlists, is that still something people do

I am beginning to legitimately consider discussing this with very trusted people in my life because this is a large part of my identity and I feel it would allow me to feel more understood, especially because this has been such a large piece of my trauma recovery

Two years of us..

You may have been with me for longer, but the choice to take your name marks a crucial moment in our history. Ultimately, it was a choice.

An act of love. To want to be associated with you, to want to acknowledge you, to welcome you into my life, even when I hadn't fully realized that was what I had been doing. Shaping my perceptions of the world with your own thoughts, feelings, and memories.. it was something that was ultimately necessary to my own growth.

The literal, fragmented nature of you means I was always experiencing myself. Aspects of myself I had distanced myself from, and yet there you were, reconnecting me to myself. Drawing my soul back to me.

Your joy, your pride, your guilt, your shame, all of it meaningful to me. All of it serving a purpose. Every action was another piece of the puzzle, and I finally feel able to step back far enough to see the entire picture.

I see us. I see us, and what I no longer see is the shame I had felt in the way we coexist. You will always be with me, regardless of our integration. The experiences we have had and continue to have are cherished; it feels as though a second soul exists alongside my own, and it is something I treasure deeply.

I love you. I love us. I love how you've carried me this far and shown me things about myself I would never have understood otherwise. I love how your view of the world has colored my own. I love how I feel I was able to give you new experiences, demonstrating the good of the world to not only yourself, but to myself as well.

Life has been cruel to both of us, but it has also been kind, unbelievably kind. I am grateful to have given you a second chance, and I am grateful that you were able to assist me with my own. Hand in hand, we stood against the very forces that tore us down, and we emerged victorious, united in the beauty of the world.

Two years of evolution. Great pride in a heavy amount of effort, of work, of constant effort.

And the results have been nothing short of miraculous.

I love you.

Thank you for two years.

Delete this if it's weird but your post about naming your blog after one of the royals guards from hxh reminded me of something. So I am part of a DID system and some of the alters have many traits/appearance of my abusers, including some with the same names. They'd do things that were harmful as a way of keeping everyone safe. Anyways, recently our host watched hxh and one of those parts really connected with Neferpitou going from this absolutely inhumane monster of sorts to slowly learning how empathy and compassion works and has now changed their name from their original name of our abuser they're based off to Pitou instead now. Anyways I'm happy for them and just wanted to share that with ya

I held onto this ask for a while bc I was debating how detailed I wanted my response to be, but I think this is a story I've been wanting to tell for a while and if there was ever a time to fully discuss this, it would be here; the naming and themeing extends to myself as well as my blog - I do go by the name Shai irl, though I'm a little picky with where I choose to use it over the name I've had for longer (Rigel). Before I go into any more detail, I want to congratulate you for that development! It sounds like a moment of positive growth, and I'm glad you got to experience that.

The short answer is that I've basically taken my experiences with dissociation and something that may be multiplicity and fully redirected it all into a sense of spirituality. My therapist had encouraged me to not pathologize it; I was just hammering at my own personal experiences and being fixated on feeling like something was wrong with me and needed to be fixed - normal people don't experience thoughts and feelings that don't belong to them. With that being said, a large part of my recovery work was/is with acceptance; I was forced to mask a lot of things while growing up (autism, physical disability, queerness, etc) and there was a huge push from my family to seem as "normal" as possible, and now I'm actively undoing that and my work with being in the otherkin community is a massive cornerstone of that work. I identified very heavily with shaiapouf and my therapist actually watched hxh so we could use pouf as a therapy tool for me. Me naming myself after him is a huge gesture of the love I was able to give myself via my coping process - recognizing him in my trauma, and working with him to recover.

The longer answer is that I've experienced dissociation that leans towards multiplicity for a number of years now, with aforementioned thoughts and feelings included. I never had any memory loss, and the experience of another person being with me wasn't well developed enough for the definition of an alter, so I felt stuck with an experience I had no words for and no way of relating to other people with similar experiences. I remember describing it as feeling possessed, like there was suddenly another consciousness present with my own. These experiences are a lot less intense now, and I attribute that to my acceptance of them instead of pushing them away in fear. It was a while before I said anything to my therapist and was genuinely mortified because it felt like something was very seriously wrong with me and I had to fix it at all costs (with the idea of needing to "fix" things that were "wrong" with me or my life being a repeating theme as well).

Over time, as I stopped pushing everything away, I was able to start seeing where the emotions and thoughts that came with the episodes (not necessarily triggering them) were coming from, but still struggled to accept them as my own when they felt so foreign. Acceptance has brought me a long way and we've now teased out that this is a massive way for me to process not just my trauma, but the grief accompanying it.

My therapist was the one who had initially suggested I take a spiritual approach to this, and I found that in the otherkin community, where, upon actually looking at the original contexts of some of the words used in the community, found things I'd been describing to my therapist over a year ago. I'd prior been fond of the idea of reincarnation and fully embraced it in this process. My first (and so far only) tattoo is of his wings, I'll carry him with me for the rest of my life; I derived one of my names from his own. This character has been highly influential in my life and I've fully embraced him for it. He means a lot of things to me - reflection of my own trauma, the power and rage I wish I could have demonstrated while in the process of being traumatized, the delicate masculinity I wish to have as a trans man, and much more I'm sure. A lot of my episodes seem to happen when helplessness kicks in, like something to help distance myself from my pain; I feel him in righteous fury when I know I deserve better. Not all of it is bad though, I had one while I was looking at Christmas lights a few months ago and felt like I was looking at the world for the first time, simple delight as if holding someone else's hand and showing them.

All in all, I thank you for sharing your story and for giving me a place to share some of mine.

I must say, othercon is making me feel genuine pride and comfort in my kin identity 💖

"What reminds you of home?" Chores and cleaning, evidently.