written by Astor on

Author's Note: This post was originally written as a Tumblr post, though I decided to post it here instead. More on that in the post itself.

I really wish we could post and speak online more... brazenly. As it stands, we tend to mask quite heavily, avoid anything too controversial outside of what we've specifically allowed ourselves, and save the vast majority of our posts to drafts because the idea of posting them makes us feel ill.

Every time we've stepped out of this uncomfortable-comfort zone, as it were, our fears are heavily reaffirmed. People react negatively to us not having a shiny, non-controversial presence. We get banned from Discord servers for not being against something enough, anonymous hate asks for posting a notice that we'll be enforcing a boundary, etcetera. It makes us think—are we truly this unlikeable? We don't believe ourselves to be bad people, as far as opinions go, so that has to be it. Doesn't it? I don't necessarily think so, at least not to the same extent as the others do.

Of course, some things would likely be safe to unmask, even if we assume that every time we let our walls down significantly something bad will happen. Speech masking, for one, is something I personally do not do in text¹. I type differently from the others; while they look back and get rather nervous ("we seem like idiots", "people are going to read this and they're going to cringe", etcetera), I just think... well, it's not fair that we feel we have to try so hard to act like a singlet. We're quite plural, after all.

Most of the people who would ever see our posts are, as well—if they aren't okay with something as simple as speech variation, do we even want them here?

Though I suppose that isn't necessarily the problem. It's the exposure, the potential to be made wholly unsafe because if even one person decides they don't like what they've seen, it'll break us. Just a bit, and only for a few hours, but it hurts all the same. It also reinforces what proves not to be a false belief: self expression is dangerous, and gets us hurt. As I'm typing this, I can feel the anxiety bleeding off of Obsidian. This is upsetting to me. Obsidian should not be someone who is this anxious—she's rather source attached, as most of our introjects are, and we both know that this isn't her. It's a mask. The mask we all wear, to some extent, forced onto us by our social anxiety. It's a mask that makes us all speak and act nearly the same, makes us curl up inside of ourselves begging to come out. We must be palatable to the unpalatable, walking the tightrope of the acceptable level of "freak" we're allowed to be in the spaces we've put ourselves in.

Shedding this mask will likely take years. Accepting that yes, sometimes expressing yourself makes people react harshly, and that's something we just need to cope with, will be exceedingly difficult. It's not impossible, though. Every day, we try. Every day, we get just a bit better.

Someday, Obsidian will be able to speak about her life as a permafused diamond authority, and Ian and I on our experiences having lived in Thetogene².

[1] While I don't in text, I do in person. It's unfortunate and quite upsetting. Our fiancé is extremely supportive, so we likely could around her, but the fear is... daunting, to say the least.

[2] I wrote more examples here that I was, believe it or not, asked to remove for our safety.