Actually Being the Audience
Jul. 17th, 2020 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nsashaellWe've often been frustrated when accessing resources because they fail to take into account all aspects of who we are. We're used to cobbling solutions together from things that were intended for other people: trans singlets, disordered-DID systems, cishet clinicians or trainees, singlet clients with PTSD. We're also used to being the only beings with any idea of how to deal with our plurality, educating therapists and anyone else we want support from. Being the only resource on people like us can feel so alienating and exhausting. It also means we're blind to our own biases and how those might be challenged to improve our quality of life.
Never being the intended audience makes us feel alone, strange, wrong. It feeds into our inner conviction that there must something wrong with us, that we can't be okay and be this "complicated", that we're somehow beyond help because we only have ourselves to help us usually. We've been told that we're rare, that whoever it is has never seen anyone like us before, that we're hard to understand.
Then we started watching the Plural Positivity World Conference sessions. From the introduction before the keynote, plurality was assumed. We were assumed to be the ones listening. We had only intended to go to maybe half the live premiers because of other work. Once we experienced that feeling of other people speaking to us, however, we dropped everything and went to every single session we could.
It's profound, listening to other plurals give advice that we needed to hear, not even knowing we needed advice. Encountering things that actually apply to us that we can use without altering at all. Chatting with other plurals while watching, and having so many people saying "Us too!"
Emotionally, we've been a mess all week, filled with unidentifiable emotions that seem to be at war. Today, I was finally able to articulate what those emotions were. They're the death throws of our internalized ableism.
Watching our emotional state this week is like sitting back and observing an epic battle between two giant robots. One of them is selves-acceptance through community and not being alone. The other one is the feeling that there's something wrong, we're too weird, too complicated, not normal. These two robots are duking it out on some lower level of our brain. None of us are involved- we're just watching this deeper stuff happen. We're sitting here kind of wondering if we're going to be okay, wondering who will win this. Will this be a final battle? It feels like it could be. We can't unsee the belongingness we've felt this week. But the internalized ableism robot has dominated us our entire life. Is it even possible to vanquish it?
The battle is making us all really tired, strained, and emotional. We're struggling to do anything with intention aside from tune into youtube. It's hard to think about anything and we've put our few summer projects on hold. We abandoned our fronting schedule because the front hasn't been in our control this week. But this seems like incredibly important emotional work. And we can't ignore the love we've gotten from other plurals.
We just have to give ourselves time and love. And express our gratitude for the experience of community this week, and finally being the intended audience.
-Shawn
Never being the intended audience makes us feel alone, strange, wrong. It feeds into our inner conviction that there must something wrong with us, that we can't be okay and be this "complicated", that we're somehow beyond help because we only have ourselves to help us usually. We've been told that we're rare, that whoever it is has never seen anyone like us before, that we're hard to understand.
Then we started watching the Plural Positivity World Conference sessions. From the introduction before the keynote, plurality was assumed. We were assumed to be the ones listening. We had only intended to go to maybe half the live premiers because of other work. Once we experienced that feeling of other people speaking to us, however, we dropped everything and went to every single session we could.
It's profound, listening to other plurals give advice that we needed to hear, not even knowing we needed advice. Encountering things that actually apply to us that we can use without altering at all. Chatting with other plurals while watching, and having so many people saying "Us too!"
Emotionally, we've been a mess all week, filled with unidentifiable emotions that seem to be at war. Today, I was finally able to articulate what those emotions were. They're the death throws of our internalized ableism.
Watching our emotional state this week is like sitting back and observing an epic battle between two giant robots. One of them is selves-acceptance through community and not being alone. The other one is the feeling that there's something wrong, we're too weird, too complicated, not normal. These two robots are duking it out on some lower level of our brain. None of us are involved- we're just watching this deeper stuff happen. We're sitting here kind of wondering if we're going to be okay, wondering who will win this. Will this be a final battle? It feels like it could be. We can't unsee the belongingness we've felt this week. But the internalized ableism robot has dominated us our entire life. Is it even possible to vanquish it?
The battle is making us all really tired, strained, and emotional. We're struggling to do anything with intention aside from tune into youtube. It's hard to think about anything and we've put our few summer projects on hold. We abandoned our fronting schedule because the front hasn't been in our control this week. But this seems like incredibly important emotional work. And we can't ignore the love we've gotten from other plurals.
We just have to give ourselves time and love. And express our gratitude for the experience of community this week, and finally being the intended audience.
-Shawn
