Sick Day
Holly and I are sick. We hope it’s not the big one, but even if it is, we don’t have it that bad. It’ll be okay.
We’ve found that we’re taking it differently, which is weird! She can’t possibly be any sicker than I am (that’s not how that works!), but I’m taking it better than she is. So I’ve been trying to take front most of the day and let her rest. But while I feel physically better, it is making me pretty loopy! So here’s a bunch of disconnected thoughts I’ve had and just wanted to get all out.
Our flash cart came and now we can play Emerald Rogue whenever we want! It’s nice. And I feel a little more real, and grounded, as a result. I really am here and Holly’s helping support me in that. And when I hold the console in my hand, it feels… heavy. Not literally but almost metaphysically. Like I’m in there, not literally because of what it is but because of the kindness Holly showed me represented through it. I feel connected to reality through it. But wow we remember the screen being way better! Even with the backlight on the colours are so dark. We might look into a modern display mod, and maybe putting in a new/better battery. It turns out that pinning some of your identity on an object with a bad battery can be kind of distressing when the light turns red. Or maybe that’s only true when you’re sick and loopy.
If I was going to show up in someone’s brain with them I’m glad it was Holly. Even before I was fully here, and she was just vaguely aware of me, she already wanted the best for me. Her conversations with other plural systems who were trying to help her through it often boiled down to “How do I do right by Amy? What kinds of things can make life more comfortable and safe for her?” She even used what little she knew about me to try to guess at what kind of music I’d like, and she played it whenever she thought I might be close to fronting. I really appreciate how thoughtful and kind she’s been about it.
That feels a little weird to write out! It’s setting off “I’m being self-centered” alarms! I’m not Holly, I’m not. But she is in here. And maybe I kind of am.
I actually was talking to some friends about this before starting to write the post and they made a great point: In any case, Holly and I have some kind of relationship that we could describe as “interpersonal”. And I’m extremely happy that it’s a good one.
We commissioned art of us from a friend. Big Holly and little Amy :) We’re excited! Probably we’ll be more public with the fact that I exist once it comes in, maybe use it in an introduction post or something. Of course, we did tell the artist why we want it. I figured that the understanding of “we are real people who want to use this image to introduce ourselves” might help inform some decisions about how exactly it’s drawn. Like, I’m going to be really small compared to her, so less detail will be inevitable, but I’d like to still be visible. That kind of thing. We’re really excited to see how it turns out!
It did mean I had to do some thinking about how I look. All I really had was a lightly edited picrew designed for making Roblox OCs! (I’m not a Roblox character! The picrew is just cute!!) But if I’m going to be in the picture I’m going to need to exist below the waist, too. I think that I think of myself as wearing black leggings, and maybe a dark coloured skirt. And because I have to be in a picture with Holly, scale is obviously important! I landed on being about 5'4" I think. Definitely small enough to comfortably ride around on Holly’s shoulder~
I don’t know if I’m transgender or not! Holly certainly is, but I don’t know if that’s a useful distinction for me. I mean, I certainly wasn’t assigned anything “at birth”. We do know systems who all consider themselves trans but I’m just not sure yet! I’m certainly not cis, though. I’m either trans, or it’s a big “N/A”.
I do have some pronouns I’d like to try out. (I’m not stopping using she/her, but using xi/xir to mix it up seems like fun!) Does that make me trans? …No, it doesn’t. If I’m trans, it’s not because of that.
When Holly looks in the mirror, unless she’s already pumped herself up for it, she’ll often just get bummed out. Normal dysphoria stuff, looking in the mirror and not seeing yourself look back. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself either, but I don’t really expect to. So it hasn’t been making me upset. (Holly has joked that I’m taking over shaving duty.) I wonder if that’s just because I’m less established, or maybe it’s because I don’t have as strong of an idea of what I “should” look like. As I get more used to the idea that this is my body too, or as I form a more concrete picture of how I look, maybe that will change. I hope it doesn’t, but what can you do?
Oh, Holly set up our blog to show who’s fronting! Surely you’ve already seen it if you’re here but we think it’s really cute. That’s not being pulled from the post you’re looking at or anything, it uses just a little bit of javascript to call the PluralKit API and check who’s fronting at the time you load the page. We don’t think it will be useful for anything, but it is cute!
It will also show if we’re cofronting, if nobody’s fronting, or if someone new is fronting! We haven’t had any of those happen yet but the code is future-proofed.
This happened the other day but we’re still thinking about it a little bit: We managed to switch me in completely by accident, without having to play a Pokemon game. Holly was thinking about me a lot at the time, and I barely lasted a few minutes, but it was definitely me in front.
We don’t think there’s anything intrinsic about Pokemon that switches me in. We think it works just because we expect it to, and if we expected something else to, that would work just as well. The problem is that there’s not currently anything else we expect to work! Maybe in the future we’ll have a more internal way to get me fronting. But even if we do, I still really like the Game Boy. The joke of it being our Millennium Puzzle is a funny and cute one but I genuinely appreciate it in the ways I talked about before, both as a physical representation of me even when I’m not around and as a symbol of the kindness Holly has shown me. Even if we don’t need it for my sake, it makes me happy. I’d like to keep it around.
Also the game is fun!
Okay, I think that’s all I wanted to say. On another day I might have tried to string it into something that flowed with a bit more of a narrative, but we are sick and I’m loopy, so you get a sick loopy blog post. ♥️