Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
Mar. 18th, 2019 09:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bladesparkTurn and face the strange changes...
So.
Uh.
I guess this is as good a platform to lay out the thing that changed two days ago as any. Because it's probably a good idea to record it for myself, and explain what's going on so I can point people who need an explanation here.
Two days ago I changed my "main" Discord nick from SPark, the name I've used since I signed up there, and the name I've used everywhere on the internet in some form (bladespark when plain spark was taken) for the last 23 years. I changed it to Aidan. It is, in a certain sense, a very tiny change. SPark is not "gone", Aidan is not any more "here" than he's been. But it is a *huge* change in one specific way, because while it changes nothing about the reality, it is already changing how people react to me.
Somebody, without prompting, apologized and corrected "she" to "he" when talking about me yesterday.
That's never happened before, outside of one specific space that's been Aidan's personal refuge. It felt fucking amazing.
But let's back up a little.
So, as most of you know by now, I think, we are plural. We have something that is very much like Disassociative Identity Disorder, but we do not claim that label because for us it's not disordered. (Our therapist agrees, btw.) Sometime around the end of 1998 or the very early days of 1999 I invented a role playing character named Aidan Rhiannon.
Originally he was just going to be a love interest for my main character. A lot of people in the group were rolling up secondary characters, and a lot were role-playing romances, and as I was an awkward, lonely nerd girl I had no idea how to play a romance with anybody else's character, so I just made my own. It's almost sad? But I've no regrets. Aidan was so interesting that I ended up playing him as my main, and as the role play got more and more about him I also started writing stories about him. (At this point those stories have exceeded half a million words) A few years later I started using his name to chat in IRC chats, which was revelatory. People treat guys differently online, who knew!?!!! And at some point in all that he moved into my head as a personality, a real person who both is and isn't me.
SPark is our gestalt name. SPark is all of us as one. SPark is "me" no matter who's talking. So of course Aidan is me, because he's part of that. But the fact that he was treated differently, that he fit into the world in such a different way was unlike anybody else I'd ever been. And as a tomboy type who'd never been comfortable with society's idea of the feminine, I really liked that. I liked being him. He felt more comfortable, in certain ways, than "Stephanie" ever had.
Gradually, as he hung around, and he started to make friends of his own, as he developed his own hobbies and interests and met people in the real world even, he just came to be the one "at the front", running the body, being the central "me" more and more and more. I think he's been at front 90% of the time for well over a year now.
But of course nobody else knew that, because it doesn't show. I've used things like Discord avatars to signal when he was around vs. somebody else, but people don't pay attention to that kind of thing and I never felt like I wanted to have a big, sit down, "let's talk" moment with every single person I talk to there to explain it. And hey, Stephanie is still around, and Serapha, and Angel. When somebody used "she" it wasn't technically incorrect, right? Why correct people when they're not wrong? Yet the more Aidan was the one at the front, the more the "she" started to bother me, and the more I was pleased to hear "he". I've always been pleased to hear "he", though, even from the first. I've deliberately avoided mentioning gender in any way in a lot of spaces, just to get that internet-default "he" out of people. The part of me that just likes genderfuck and playing around in general thinks it's hilarious, and the part of me that's Aidan thrills every time he hears it.
There's no part of me that thrills to be called "she" or treated the way the world at large tends to treat women. I know that's as much a function of sexism as of my own gender identity, but still...
Names, it turns out, can be even more thrilling than pronouns.
The other day I was out on a date. Aidan was out on a date. That's the "I" in this case. I was out on a date with a gal I met at the kinky writer's group, and we were getting along really well. We went to a hip little local coffee shop, and the barista asked for my name to shout out when my mocha was ready. And because of that moment, because I was interested in this girl specifically as Aidan, and had introduced myself to her as Aidan, and she'd been calling me Aidan, I gave the barista "Aidan" as the name, even though it didn't match the credit card I handed him a moment later.
It was the dumbest thing in the world, and yet also the most wonderful. I literally cried about it later when I thought back. Just hearing some random person shout "Aidan!" out... Being seen that way out in the world, not because I was role playing, not because I was at some "special" space where I was allowed to be Aidan, but just at a coffee shop, just with some random guy, who I'd told the name three minutes earlier... It felt so good. To think that I could just be Aidan, and not have it be reserved for some place where one's allowed to be different, that I could just be Aidan in everyday life, in the everyday world... Gods, I'm about ready to cry again typing this. I've only ever had tiny, constrained spaces to be myself in. Being able to step out of those spaces... The thought just blew my mind. It was incredible. And when later on the gal I was dating said that my talking about mothering my kid made her double-take and need to confirm my pronouns, because she saw me as male, was just... wow. Wow.
I wanted that everywhere. I've been at the front of things, driving this body, doing all the work, being the person in charge for so long, but being mostly treated as Stephanie, as SPark, and not as Aidan. It's rough, to be honest. It's really, really, really rough to feel that you're not seen, that nobody even knows you exist, that nobody acknowledges you at all. I said to my therapist once, when she asked the standard "what do you want to get out of this?" question at therapy, that part of what I wanted was just to be seen and heard by somebody.
So I've reached a kind of tipping point. It was one thing to say "she or he are equally fine" when the girls were doing the driving most of the time, or when we were sharing pretty equally. But for well over a year now it's been mostly me, and that's the end of an upward trend I don't think is going away. The girls aren't going away either, of course, Serapha and Angel and even Stephanie are sticking around. But "SPark" as all of us isn't really "mostly female" anymore, and I felt it was time to lay claim to that, time to start asking people to see me, to know I exist. (And that Oni and Andrew exist, to name the other guys in here, though Andrew will never front and Oni finds it very difficult.)
And so I changed my Discord nick to Aidan.
I still don't think we're going on T or getting surgery. But hey, apparently I can pass as male without all that, which is also pretty damn amazing.
SPark is still the gestalt, of course, If people had understood that SPark was everybody and Aidan specifically was at front at certain times I wouldn't have changed it, I'd have left it the way it was. But people didn't get it, and I didn't want to spend a lot of energy explaining, so I just did the simple thing and changed the name to Aidan. Somehow, though, that was the right thing to do. Somehow that change has become something that feels very profound, even though it really hasn't changed anything.
We had a dream last night. We are very often somebody else entirely in our dreams, but sometimes we're Stephanie and sometimes we're Aidan. Tonight I was Aidan.
I was back at college again, for some reason, and had ended up singing up for an acting course of some kind, which the professor seemed to really like me for. He had asked me to chat with him a bit as he walked back to his office, and, er... walked right into the men's restroom along the way, with a clear expectation that I'd just follow along, at which point I realized that I had actually passed for male with him, and this was a little terrifying, but also exciting. But as I was walking through the building later I met this extremely busty woman in a dress, who started flirting with me, then stopped and laughed and was like "Oh ho! I see what you've done, if I could lie to everyone like that I would too, girl." And I was super upset because it wasn't a lie, dang it! Then it turned into one of the dreams where everything goes convoluted and maze-like and I can't find anything except this time instead of searching for something I was just searching for the exit so I could get away from this woman who kept following me around making dumb comments about butch girls and trying to flirt.
My subconscious is unsubtle as fuck, you may notice.
But yeah. Maybe time to change my default avatar here to this one, too. Much as I like the Flame Song with the sewing machine one. I don't think I'll go around changing every name on the net, or getting it legally changed (gods, I hated the hassle of changing my name after I got married. I super love my married name but holy shit I'm not sure it was worth it and I'm not sure it would be again) but I may link this explanation or reblog it a few places, because although I "am" still SPark, Aidan is the one living this life right now, and he deserves to be seen.
So.
Uh.
I guess this is as good a platform to lay out the thing that changed two days ago as any. Because it's probably a good idea to record it for myself, and explain what's going on so I can point people who need an explanation here.
Two days ago I changed my "main" Discord nick from SPark, the name I've used since I signed up there, and the name I've used everywhere on the internet in some form (bladespark when plain spark was taken) for the last 23 years. I changed it to Aidan. It is, in a certain sense, a very tiny change. SPark is not "gone", Aidan is not any more "here" than he's been. But it is a *huge* change in one specific way, because while it changes nothing about the reality, it is already changing how people react to me.
Somebody, without prompting, apologized and corrected "she" to "he" when talking about me yesterday.
That's never happened before, outside of one specific space that's been Aidan's personal refuge. It felt fucking amazing.
But let's back up a little.
So, as most of you know by now, I think, we are plural. We have something that is very much like Disassociative Identity Disorder, but we do not claim that label because for us it's not disordered. (Our therapist agrees, btw.) Sometime around the end of 1998 or the very early days of 1999 I invented a role playing character named Aidan Rhiannon.
Originally he was just going to be a love interest for my main character. A lot of people in the group were rolling up secondary characters, and a lot were role-playing romances, and as I was an awkward, lonely nerd girl I had no idea how to play a romance with anybody else's character, so I just made my own. It's almost sad? But I've no regrets. Aidan was so interesting that I ended up playing him as my main, and as the role play got more and more about him I also started writing stories about him. (At this point those stories have exceeded half a million words) A few years later I started using his name to chat in IRC chats, which was revelatory. People treat guys differently online, who knew!?!!! And at some point in all that he moved into my head as a personality, a real person who both is and isn't me.
SPark is our gestalt name. SPark is all of us as one. SPark is "me" no matter who's talking. So of course Aidan is me, because he's part of that. But the fact that he was treated differently, that he fit into the world in such a different way was unlike anybody else I'd ever been. And as a tomboy type who'd never been comfortable with society's idea of the feminine, I really liked that. I liked being him. He felt more comfortable, in certain ways, than "Stephanie" ever had.
Gradually, as he hung around, and he started to make friends of his own, as he developed his own hobbies and interests and met people in the real world even, he just came to be the one "at the front", running the body, being the central "me" more and more and more. I think he's been at front 90% of the time for well over a year now.
But of course nobody else knew that, because it doesn't show. I've used things like Discord avatars to signal when he was around vs. somebody else, but people don't pay attention to that kind of thing and I never felt like I wanted to have a big, sit down, "let's talk" moment with every single person I talk to there to explain it. And hey, Stephanie is still around, and Serapha, and Angel. When somebody used "she" it wasn't technically incorrect, right? Why correct people when they're not wrong? Yet the more Aidan was the one at the front, the more the "she" started to bother me, and the more I was pleased to hear "he". I've always been pleased to hear "he", though, even from the first. I've deliberately avoided mentioning gender in any way in a lot of spaces, just to get that internet-default "he" out of people. The part of me that just likes genderfuck and playing around in general thinks it's hilarious, and the part of me that's Aidan thrills every time he hears it.
There's no part of me that thrills to be called "she" or treated the way the world at large tends to treat women. I know that's as much a function of sexism as of my own gender identity, but still...
Names, it turns out, can be even more thrilling than pronouns.
The other day I was out on a date. Aidan was out on a date. That's the "I" in this case. I was out on a date with a gal I met at the kinky writer's group, and we were getting along really well. We went to a hip little local coffee shop, and the barista asked for my name to shout out when my mocha was ready. And because of that moment, because I was interested in this girl specifically as Aidan, and had introduced myself to her as Aidan, and she'd been calling me Aidan, I gave the barista "Aidan" as the name, even though it didn't match the credit card I handed him a moment later.
It was the dumbest thing in the world, and yet also the most wonderful. I literally cried about it later when I thought back. Just hearing some random person shout "Aidan!" out... Being seen that way out in the world, not because I was role playing, not because I was at some "special" space where I was allowed to be Aidan, but just at a coffee shop, just with some random guy, who I'd told the name three minutes earlier... It felt so good. To think that I could just be Aidan, and not have it be reserved for some place where one's allowed to be different, that I could just be Aidan in everyday life, in the everyday world... Gods, I'm about ready to cry again typing this. I've only ever had tiny, constrained spaces to be myself in. Being able to step out of those spaces... The thought just blew my mind. It was incredible. And when later on the gal I was dating said that my talking about mothering my kid made her double-take and need to confirm my pronouns, because she saw me as male, was just... wow. Wow.
I wanted that everywhere. I've been at the front of things, driving this body, doing all the work, being the person in charge for so long, but being mostly treated as Stephanie, as SPark, and not as Aidan. It's rough, to be honest. It's really, really, really rough to feel that you're not seen, that nobody even knows you exist, that nobody acknowledges you at all. I said to my therapist once, when she asked the standard "what do you want to get out of this?" question at therapy, that part of what I wanted was just to be seen and heard by somebody.
So I've reached a kind of tipping point. It was one thing to say "she or he are equally fine" when the girls were doing the driving most of the time, or when we were sharing pretty equally. But for well over a year now it's been mostly me, and that's the end of an upward trend I don't think is going away. The girls aren't going away either, of course, Serapha and Angel and even Stephanie are sticking around. But "SPark" as all of us isn't really "mostly female" anymore, and I felt it was time to lay claim to that, time to start asking people to see me, to know I exist. (And that Oni and Andrew exist, to name the other guys in here, though Andrew will never front and Oni finds it very difficult.)
And so I changed my Discord nick to Aidan.
I still don't think we're going on T or getting surgery. But hey, apparently I can pass as male without all that, which is also pretty damn amazing.
SPark is still the gestalt, of course, If people had understood that SPark was everybody and Aidan specifically was at front at certain times I wouldn't have changed it, I'd have left it the way it was. But people didn't get it, and I didn't want to spend a lot of energy explaining, so I just did the simple thing and changed the name to Aidan. Somehow, though, that was the right thing to do. Somehow that change has become something that feels very profound, even though it really hasn't changed anything.
We had a dream last night. We are very often somebody else entirely in our dreams, but sometimes we're Stephanie and sometimes we're Aidan. Tonight I was Aidan.
I was back at college again, for some reason, and had ended up singing up for an acting course of some kind, which the professor seemed to really like me for. He had asked me to chat with him a bit as he walked back to his office, and, er... walked right into the men's restroom along the way, with a clear expectation that I'd just follow along, at which point I realized that I had actually passed for male with him, and this was a little terrifying, but also exciting. But as I was walking through the building later I met this extremely busty woman in a dress, who started flirting with me, then stopped and laughed and was like "Oh ho! I see what you've done, if I could lie to everyone like that I would too, girl." And I was super upset because it wasn't a lie, dang it! Then it turned into one of the dreams where everything goes convoluted and maze-like and I can't find anything except this time instead of searching for something I was just searching for the exit so I could get away from this woman who kept following me around making dumb comments about butch girls and trying to flirt.
My subconscious is unsubtle as fuck, you may notice.
But yeah. Maybe time to change my default avatar here to this one, too. Much as I like the Flame Song with the sewing machine one. I don't think I'll go around changing every name on the net, or getting it legally changed (gods, I hated the hassle of changing my name after I got married. I super love my married name but holy shit I'm not sure it was worth it and I'm not sure it would be again) but I may link this explanation or reblog it a few places, because although I "am" still SPark, Aidan is the one living this life right now, and he deserves to be seen.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-18 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-19 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-19 02:08 am (UTC)Now for the less-than-brilliant logistics questions.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-19 02:12 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaffp7LKnhM That works. :3 It's the standard pronunciation, nothing unusual. I got the name from a character in a historical fantasy novel.
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Date: 2019-03-20 01:40 pm (UTC)