Lucia and Charlie Take on Reality

Lucia: Hi this is Lucia. *Turns to the reader; It’s a broken 4th wall type situation. She whispers:* internally it’s like the scene in Finding Nemo with the seagulls and their chorus of mine mine mine mine.” Hi, hi, hi, hi hihihihihi hihi,” echoes dimly through our brain. It’s hard to tell if someone internally is referencing the movie or if my system-mates are greeting me.

Charlie: I think it’s both honestly. 

Lucia: That our brain is both referencing the movie and everyone’s saying hi?

Charlie: Well it’s brain time, which works differently than time in the outside world. Whole complex things can happen instantaneously and simultaneous to actions in the outside world.

Jeremiah: For instance, we could be cooking dinner and shit could be going down in our head at the same time.

Charlie: Or an interaction stays stuck. Days, weeks, years can go by in the outside world before something shifts internally and action can resume. It can feel artificial, writing like this, where we slow down/speed up brain time and unwind it so we can put it in words.

Lucia: Our mind speaks primarily in images as well, or internalized soundbytes, like scenes or quotes from a movie. Trying to bring the images into words feels difficult—

Charlie: —respect to poets—

Lucia: Ha. Yes. We’d like to take a drawing class eventually, so we can start to draw out our inner world and ourselves and storyboard some of what happens. 

Charlie: Man, that sounds even slower than words. Right now I can feel the impatience, maybe especially your impatience, to “get it out,” just get some of the whirling thoughts out of our head so we can come back later and expand into them further. 

Lucia: Yes, I know, we don’t have a lot of patience these days. 

Morgan: Speak for yourself. 

Lucia: Good point. I think I’m speaking mostly for Nick and myself and maybe Graeme, and a few of the kids who can feel easily bored, especially when we’re frustrated and having difficulty “spitting it out.”

Charlie: Tied in knots. 

Lucia: Yes. It can feel like that. 

Charlie: I’m not often at the front. These days I’m mostly chilling in our inner world. There’s a lot of really excellent landscapes in here, and the sea. Plus the temperature is overall pleasant—t-shirt weather with a breeze—which is notable given the weather in the outside world right now. 

Lucia: Yea. Right now it’s July in Minnesota and like 90 degrees with 100% humidity, so it just heats up during the day and then stays hot at night. We’re living in a layer cake of thick, heated air right now. Muggy is too pedestrian a word. 

Charlie: Well, right now we’re in the air conditioning in the apartment, thank g*ds. 

Lucia: Yes. Thank you past self for insisting on air conditioning and making sure we got help putting it in. Charlie, we’re sort of shooting the shit now and I’m curious: do you want to introduce yourself? 

Charlie: Thank you, yeah, I would. Um. Hi *awkward* I’m Charlie. He/him pronouns please. 

Lucia: Oh yes! Pronouns. I use she/her. Sometimes they/them but not today I don’t think. 

Charlie: *nods*. You all first became aware of me in college, so about 12, 13 years ago. I don’t know what was going on for me before then, honestly. I’m in my late teens, I’ve got blonde hair. I like Vans sneakers, and skateboarding and the ocean. 

Lucia: Just the ocean?

Charlie: Well, especially the animals in the ocean. I’m into sea life (smiles), but I also love the beach, the sounds the waves make, the foam in the last sweeps of water up onto the sand, and the way the water and the sky change colors over the course of a day. 

Lucia: You’re rather poetic. 

Charlie: Yea I guess so. I am sort of a sensitive artist type. I’m also a bit of a loner, in terms of other people. I love being around animals, and feel very much in companionship with the living world, like the breeze and plants and birds and landscape and things, but I’m just quieter and softer than a lot of other guys, and I don’t know as well what to say to people. 

Lucia: You’re saying quite a bit right now. 

Charlie: More than I was expecting, honestly. I guess it feels nice to be asked about myself. It helps me to feel more real.

Lucia: Do you not feel real?

Charlie: Um, I feel real enough. *Nervously rubs the back of his neck.* That is something we want to talk about in this post I think. Usually, either one of you feels quite present at the front and starts to think they’re the real one and maybe the rest of us were just mirrors and smoke, or we all start to feel not real. That second scenario usually happens when we’re not very connected to our body and it’s scary because we’re often being quite hard on ourselves. We accuse ourselves of making stuff up, or feeling like we don’t get to be special or that we just are supposed to fill out whatever body we have and be the person in that body. And in those moments the whole narrative feels true to whoever’s in front —usually these days G (hey G)—because he’s cut off from our inner world. 

Lucia: And then after that usually we have nightmares. Or our body pain gets worse.

Charlie: About people or *someone* breaking into our apartment. 

Lucia: We’ve learned over the last several years that dreams about people pursuing us or breaking into our place are usually about our headmates trying to get to us. 

Charlie: So it’s a reparative thing, and it gets y’alls attention because it’s scary. Hopefully over time we can build more trust so that others in the system don’t feel like they have to use nightmares to be noticed. That would be easier on our nervous system. 

Lucia: Yea it definitely would. 

Charlie: Is this what we wanted to talk about? Various feelings of unreality, or questioning whether we exist? I know you had a bit of an outline sketched out. 

Lucia: Ever the linear taskmaster (smile). 

Charlie: I sincerely appreciate your skill in that regard. 

Lucia: And I sincerely appreciate the flow of this conversation. I think for now, it’s time for us to get to bed. We can start again in the morning. Ciao!

Charlie: Tschuss! 

Lucia: Lol. 

*Next morning*

Charlie: Okay, here we are. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Lucia: You mean like, who am I?

Charlie: Basically, yea. 

Lucia: Dammit. I was hoping to avoid that. 

Charlie: You don’t have to, introduce yourself I mean. 

Lucia: Thanks, I want to. It just, well, honestly, it’s painful. 

Charlie: Yea?

Lucia: Yea. I’m the one of us who developed during middle and high school and ruled the front during that time period too.

Charlie: I think you weren’t totally alone in that choice. We put you in charge. 

M: Yea. We had to be you. None of the rest of us were supposed to exist. 

Lucia: Okay, that feels right. Thanks. I also feel pretty confident that I existed in some form prior to middle school, but I filled out into this middle/high school version of me. 

M: You did.

Lucia: Thanks (smile). Hm. How would I describe myself? I’m a survivor. I get shit done. I’m good at being in charge and delegating tasks. I have a sense of humor and can be a warm, nurturing person underneath it all, especially around animals and kids, but my window for empathy is pretty slim. Otherwise I’m my own kind of loner, keeping to myself when I’m not managing other people, and keeping kind of, I dunno, the inner reaches of myself very private. 

Charlie: Thank you for sharing all of that. I know it’s tricky to figure out what you want to say, especially wondering if it’s more exposing than you’re comfortable with etc. 

Lucia: Yea. I wish we had known that plurality was an option much sooner. Well, that’s tricky because I don’t think we would have recognized ourselves in plurality if someone had described it, but at least, genderfluidity. I wish that had been presented as a real option. 

Charlie: There’s that word again: real. 

Lucia: I noticed that too. The benefit of all of the body-based healing we’ve been doing these past few years is that now I can articulate the difference between knowing something is a possibility intellectually, and feeling that something could be real for us in our body. Ideas are powerful on their own, but in our experience it takes time and a lot of interaction to give them . . . weight. 

Charlie: Like, literal weight. 

Lucia: Yea.

Charlie: And that weight has to do with feeling real?

Lucia: Definitely. This feels hard to put into words but so important. Our experience is, when we’re not in the body, we don’t feel heavy. I mean, things can swing the other way where we feel completely overburdened by life and literally pressed into the ground. But usually when WE feel overburdened (read: each morning), we feel tense and immobilized, but not necessarily heavy. 

Charlie: What I perceive you’re getting at is the weighted feeling that comes with inhabiting your body, the solid sureness of being inside of it, clearly, and sovereign. I know what you mean and I think it’s hard to describe and quite distinct when you feel it. In the last few years we’ve learned many things and one is that we have not spent a lot of the time in our lives feeling like we were living in our body from the inside out. We were and frankly are still surprised by the literal weight of our own presence (versus the fascial tension of trying to pull our body in about 5 directions at once). And we frequently still feel pulled off center, which is okay, like nearly every part of the macro-systems surrounding us are built to pull us out of our center and serve them. 

Daniel: E.g. capitalism.

Charlie: Exactly.

Lucia: Well the systems around us, even just cars as a primary mode of transport, aren’t built with the human nervous system in mind; they’re built with speed and efficiency and development and profit in mind. And that’s not to hate on cars. I appreciate some of my headmates’ sincere interest in well-detailed, brightly-colored sports cars. My point is, we drove around running errands yesterday for 5 hours in the heat and were totally exhausted afterward and quite physically and emotionally uncomfortable for most of the time. 

Charlie: It was this terrible intersection between the discomforts of rush hour, bucket-shaped seats, and climate change-induced record high temperatures. 

Lucia:  YEA. It really was. 

Jeremiah: To quote Nicki Minaj: “Yikes.”

Lucia: *trying to contain her/their smile* You are so right, J. 

Jeremiah: Nbd *does a hair flip with his hand in the air.*

Lucia: Um. This is not a smooth transition (sorry J). I want to take us back to reality here. Like, literally, the subject of, how real am I?

Charlie: Bye J!

Jeremiah: *waves*

Charlie: Yea let’s do that. It’s time to take a break from writing for now, but let’s come back to reality (hey, fast and loose Eminem quote) when we pick the proverbial pen back up. 

*Several days later*

Charlie: It’s been a few days since we wrote anything. 

Lucia: A lot has happened.

Charlie: How are you feeling?

Lucia: Not good, but also, nothing. Kind of tense, like my surface level, initial, power button is on, but I’m not turned on inside. 

Charlie: Like you’re on auto-pilot and a bit blank? That sounds familiar. 

Lucia: Yep, exactly. I’ve spent a lot of time in this mode. It’s the way of being that allows things to truly feel fine. I’m fine, it’s fine. Big things happen, and they just do; no need to get upset about it. Well, anyway, I don’t get upset about it. I just can’t feel much. I’m not being dishonest; it’s just my truth. 

Charlie: I hear you. For context, we’ve been in a caretaking mode for the last ten days or so and for good reason. When there’s a lot to get done, it’s very useful to have you around Lucia.

Lucia: Thanks. It stresses me out though, so others have been helping. Also we have been feeling confused about—

Charlie: —who’s around. 

Lucia: Exactly, yes. Almost like we were privy to the same thought, lol. Because we were. 

Charlie: *Smiles.* We were.

 I notice when we’re not very connected to our body, or well, I’m not sure that’s even the best way to describe what happens and what our physical and energetic and emotional selves feel like (and don’t feel like) when we’re not clear and settled. And let’s be real, in the physical body, we often are not clear and settled. Hm. It’s more like this surface feeling of blankness, which we might express through Lucia as “what do you mean? I’m fine,”

Lucia: And I do feel fine; empirically neutral. 

Charlie: Except for little tell-tale signs like the pit in your throat that doesn’t swallow away, and the tension around our spine and in our shoulders. 

Lucia: and also our abdomen/low back. We can’t feel that part of our body right now unless we really sit and close our eyes and make space for ourselves to sink in. 

Charlie: Below the surface level of blankness is static, like a blank static. When we can notice that, or when you all notice that—you being Lucia and G because I haven’t had this experience; I’m just paraphrasing what you’ve shared with me internally. When you all notice the blank static there’s this realization that the blankness isn’t an emptiness, it’s full. It’s like this candy coating of numbness around a buzzing mass of too-much chaotic energy. 

Lucia: Exactly. I really wish we had had resources to learn about our insides much earlier on. That would have been a major revelation during our development, when emotions were so confusing to us. When we felt low, we often felt quite low and then we were hard on ourselves, you know, that given our privilege we didn’t deserve to feel bad; we told ourselves we didn’t have the right, and that we must be a bad person for having negative feelings when we have so much.

Charlie: Have so much from a material point of view. And we acknowledge that our inherited financial privilege gives us some important security in our lives. We also acknowledge that our family’s wealth stems directly from the colonization of the land we live on, and the people Indigenous to it.

Lucia: Yes. We do acknowledge all of that, and I think another blog post would be appropriate to talk about our relationship with that deep truth, that we have and do benefit from white privilege and the ongoing violence of the settler colonial project. 

Charlie: It might actually be really valuable to process that together as a system. 

Lucia: I agree. Okay. I’ll put it on my list. For the moment, let’s return to where we were, which I think was about being very hard on ourselves when we had difficult emotions, because we felt we weren’t allowed to be sad, angry, resentful etc. 

Charlie: Yes, let’s go back there. 

Lucia: So when we had these emotions we felt a lot of shame around them. And I’m talking from my experience fronting, of course, so primarily around middle and high school, though this happened during college, and afterward as well, when we get triggered back into our teenage angst.. 

Charlie: Right *nods head.*

Lucia: A lot of the time I didn’t have emotions though, I was just fine. I also knew that I felt wooden, but I couldn’t figure out how to not be, if that makes sense. Finding the blank static and getting to have the internal realization that oh, those are my feelings, and that I HAVE THEM, like I DO have these reactions to all of the little, day to day events of life and I just build them up inside of my body like static because I literally know no other way, and that’s why I feel wooden, and full, and tense and constipated and asthmatic— I think that would have given me the information to see myself as a human being, in the sense of sacred, lovable, soft, sensitive. 

Jeremiah: I really hear that. I know if we had learned to discern and trust our body feelings sooner I would have spent much more of our life knowing myself to be real, and getting to grow instead stew in this anxiety of: “what am I?”

Lucia: Yes! You and I might have had a totally different relationship. We get to work on building that relationship now, though (smiles).

(pause)

Lucia: We got up to get a snack (like in the outer world in our body) and while we were, you know, staring blankly at the contents of the fridge wondering why we’d even opened it— 

Charlie: Eeee, smol dissociation joke!

Lucia: —you know it—I was wondering, like, how did we even get to the topic of staticky feelings, and where do we go from here? My itemized itinerary for this blog post is long since abandoned. 

Charlie: Well, we’ve been writing this post over a couple of weeks. We’ve had a lot to process in our day-to-day life as of late. 

Lucia: Yea. You’re right. I forget about the processing because I’m often so numb to it. It feels like it doesn’t affect me, but it affects us and the body so it affects me too. 

Charlie: Yea. 

Lucia: Anyway, back to, literally, the topic of: what-is-the-topic-of-this-blog-post? It’s important to notice that SI and hopelessness have come up in a conversation where we cycle back to whether or not we are real, or feel real, or believe ourselves to be real.

Charlie: I think I understand what you’re getting at here. Believing that we aren’t real, repressing ourselves, hiding ourselves from you, Lucia—all of that has had a major impact on our mental and emotional health. 

Lucia: Along with my connection to all of you, I lost much of my sense of imagination and creativity. Faced with social survival in middle school I felt the only path I could lead us down was to shut the door on “childhood” (read: us), and make us into what we were supposed to be: thin, athletic, smart, and especially: clearly and recognizably a girl. Before that point we presented as pretty gender ambiguous/masculine. People called us a tomboy or husky or any of that kind of stuff. Occasionally a kid would pipe up and ask “what even are you,” etc. The insinuation, as far as we could tell, was that if we didn’t discernibly become a girl—”pretty” by our country-club-esque highschool felt like a long shot, but feminine enough to fall into the category of “athletic girl”—then we would become a social outcast with no future.

Maeve: And that was really painful. 

D: Yea.

Charlie: Wow. That sounds VERY painful. I didn’t understand how . . . bad that was for you. 

Lucia: Part of me wants to say to you: it wasn’t that bad. I mean because we had fun still in middle and high school. Or I did. I earnestly enjoyed school, and playing sports and spending time with my friends, and at the same time I was asthmatic and had IBS and vocal chord dysfunction and extreme acid reflux and all of this stuff. Nobody made the connection that those physical difficulties might be symptoms of childhood emotional overwhelm.

Charlie: Childhood trauma. 

Lucia: I was trying to say it in a softer way, because trauma brings up associations of car crashes, or physical abuse, or a particularly horrifying episode of Law and Order: SVU.  

Charlie: And those are traumas, but that’s not all the forms that trauma takes and you know that. 

Lucia: I do know that intellectually, but am just starting to know that in a more integrated, felt-sense type of way. Hm. Integrated might be too hopeful a word at this point. 

Charlie: There is no rush. 

Lucia: We both know I will shut shit down if I feel rushed or pushed in anyway. 

Charlie: *Smiles.*

Lucia: What you were trying to point out, I think, is that trauma is a word with a wide definition, and a lot of potential manifestations. 

Charlie: Go on. 

Lucia: The word itself describes an experience of nervous system overwhelm, when events are beyond our capacity to metabolize in the moment and so we revert to survival strategies that “save us” but also capture unprocessed energy inside of our bodies. 

Charlie: If over time that energy isn’t processed/released/resolved—like, literally if the energy isn’t moved—then it becomes a traumatic retention that changes the shape of who we are. That change in shape can happen physically, in that our body’s fascial shape often changes in some way, or we develop various forms of chronic pain/illness, or our digestion becomes troubled; and also emotionally, in that we might become more impatient, more prone to anger or fear, more rigid in our thinking and routines.

Lucia: There’s a whole part about fight, flight, freeze, fawn, but that is just way more explaining than I’m up for at the moment. Dear reader, if you are curious: google it. 

Charlie: I’m about to switch to a topic to the side of this one. That ok?

Lucia: Go for it. I trust where you take us. 

Charlie: Ok well, there was something you wanted to say about sources . . . ?

Lucia: Oh! Yea I’m mindful that we are doing a lot of “official-seeming” explaining without citing our sources, and also that we are defaulting to “woo” type language related to energy . . . 

Charlie: And you are ashamed of that?

Jeremiah: Yea, seriously. What’s wrong with woo? I am the woo. 

Lucia: Jeremiah. You are the woo and you are so much more than the woo. 

Jeremiah: *Inspects nails.* It’s true. I am a limitless galaxy of possibility. *Smiles and skips off.*

Lucia: Oh probably I am still ashamed of woo-talk, but I’m not intending to express shame or embarrassment here. For real. I just want to clarify that this blog is a space of rough drafts meant to encourage our own self-expression (and with the hope that it benefits others). Our description of what trauma IS, is informed by reading books like Nurturing Resilience and My Grandmother’s Hands and The Body Keeps the Score, also by social media presences like Prentis Hemphill and the.holistic.psychologist. But we are writing from our embodied experience too: what trauma feels like to us. That embodied experience has included the collaborative process of therapy and bodywork (thank you very much practitioners, you know who you are), somatic experiencing and Barnes style facial release, craniosacral therapy, qigong, TRE, some postural restoration and feldenkrais method, energy work and acupuncture.

Charlie: But we’re not citing all of that right now. 

Lucia: No, we’re not. We’re a bit in a rush. It’s a first draft after all, and if there’s one thing we know about our creative process, it’s that it happens in drafts. It’s very likely that we will come back to this post later and turn over the ideas in here in a new way, maybe even cite our sources (smile). 

Charlie: But again, not today. 

Lucia: Not today. I did want to lend some credibility to our words though. We are speaking up on all of this stuff after a lot of tough work and some determined reading. We’re not speaking from nowhere. 

Nick: OMG double negative. 

Jeremiah: We don’t not LOVE the double negative. 

Nick: EXACTLY. 

Lucia: I’m sensing it’s time for bed. Let’s wrap this up one of these days soon though, eh? 

Charlie: Indubitably. 

Lucia: xo. 

*Several days later*

Charlie: Good morning!

Lucia: Is it?

Charlie: We’re not feeling great—tired and foggy and low, but I think we can gently rock ourselves into a better feeling for the rest of the day. We DID make it to our doctor’s appointment this morning despite all. Thank you. 

Lucia: *nods.*

Charlie: I know there’s one last, big connection you want to make before this blog post wraps up. 

Lucia: Yea. I’m not sure how to get there, but let’s just dive in. When Nick accepted our system as real, and we had several months of what can only be described as a reunion— 

Charlie: *smiling* Yea. I remember that. Unsettling for the front, but all in all a positive experience. 

Lucia: —Well you played a major role in listening to people’s concerns and doing some conflict resolution work. 

Charlie: I learned a lot in a short period of time. 

Lucia: I can only imagine. In that reunion time we met a lot of the kids in our system. 

Charlie: Systems often have child parts, given that plurality often begins in early childhood development. I say that gently though, because each system has a unique understanding of their origins. Western psychology has developed some useful models to explain how plurality works. We think they’re useful as workable models, but not perfect. They give a basic structure for understanding how different selves may relate to each other. I’m referring here to the Theory of Structural Dissociation, and to Internal Family Systems, with the clarity that we have a working knowledge of both therapeutic models, but by no means a deep understanding. The thing is these models are thrown around as the Truth, in a way that we find harmful, because it invites the dismissal of lived experience that departs from either theory. 

Lucia: What he’s trying to say is that not all systems trace their origins back to early childhood and those systems are still plural, formal psychological theories be d*mned. 

Charlie: And also that I think it’s a healthier perspective in general to view psychological theories as imperfect, working models rather than rigid proclamations of the Truth. Making that shift in orientation would honestly disentangle some of the internalized white supremacy from the Western mental health world. But we’re off topic now. 

Lucia: We are. It’s okay. Back to where we were. Nick accepted our system, a lot of our inner kids came forward, and we wondered how to provide them with parental guidance in a way that would not replicate the harm that we internalized from our initial childhood. We wondered what models exist that might give our inner kids more space to be real, fluid, exploratory, outside of rigid gender roles, given that they weren’t able to be real for very long the first time. 

Charlie: And pretty much immediately you stumbled across Kyl Myers’ book Raising Them, about gender creative parenting. 

Lucia: Yes! Well, we listened to an interview between Kyl and Alex Iantaffi, on the podcast Gender Stories. Then we listened to the audiobook version of Raising Them. Also we watched Kyl’s Ted Talk. And that gave us enough to work with. But I’m not a primary nurturing figure for the kids in our system. I wonder if Morgan wants to talk more about this. 

Charlie: I believe Morgan’s tied up in our present emotional experience. Maybe Jeremiah? 

Morgan: No, it’s okay I got this. . . . . Okay. Here I am. Hey y’all. The profound shift for us with gender creative parenting—or my version of it anyway— is that we make more space for trusting the kids. . . trusting them and taking up their words and their vision for who they are, including all of the flux and imagination that comes with play. 

Charlie: Kids tend to blur the lines between imagination and reality.

Morgan: And I challenge you: why do imagination and reality need to exist in polarized opposition? That feels like a problematic binary to me. 

Charlie: Oh I see. Say more. 

Morgan: Well, it can be very harmful to tell people that their version of reality isn’t real, without at least acknowledging that it’s real for them. Reality is subjective most of the time, even when it’s a collective shared reality. Dismissing someone’s experience can cause them to question their own self-knowing and their own perceptive abilities. When dismissed or shut down repeatedly, people, and in this case kids, lose their confidence and let other people dictate who they are and what they need. They stop listening to their own internal signals, and stop investing in imaginative play, or even themselves. It’s hard to love yourself when you’ve come to believe that what you thought about yourself isn’t real or doesn’t matter, or can’t exist. 

Lucia: I can feel your anger here.

Morgan: Yes. There’s a lot of it. 

Lucia: Finally. 

Morgan: Yea, my anger has been hard to find, but I find more of it the more that I’ve connected with our inner children and been able to witness how amazing they are. I feel more protective—I understand what I’m protecting and what’s at stake. They are creative, playful, observant, and kind. 

Slowly some of us teens—

Nick: —a sidenote: developmentally many of us, like Lucia, Charlie, Morgan and myself, are teenaged—

Morgan: —are loosening our grip on the idea of a core self (like, having one, constant, real Self), and on the idea that some selves are inherently less real than others. For instance, we struggled with feeling less real to the outer world in accepting that together we do not make up a binary trans person. 

Lucia: I see how your thinking here connects with the current political trans panic happening in the States and in the UK, and elsewhere I imagine. As a system we struggle with feeling that we’re real because of the messages we’ve internalized from the broader culture. E.g. you can’t have more than one person in one body, you can’t have multiple genders, you were born a girl so that’s what you really are, etc. Having connected with the pain of that internal struggle—the harm done to our selves and our inner children—makes it all the more painful to witness widespread political attempts to repress trans and gender expansive self expression in children through sports and school and medical-care related legislation. It’s like these people have bullhorns and are shouting into the ears of vulnerable kids: “We don’t want you to exist,” or “You are not welcome here on this, my earth, in this, my country.” And that is a deeply violent message. . . . It matters, a lot, to let kids and people of any age be who they are on their own terms. 

Morgan: It really does. That’s why respecting pronouns can be so important, because someone is telling you how best to recognize who they are in conversation. 

Lucia: It’s not the literal pronoun that matters so much, it’s the willingness to recognize the person, again, in their own terms. So many people try to make this a conversation about grammar, and it is NOT a conversation about what a pronoun IS, it’s a conversation about how to recognize people for who they are in the ways that they ask you to. Sheesh. 

Nick: I’m worried we’re starting to sound preachy here, but I’m going to trust y’all and not police the tone here. 

Morgan: Thanks man. *turns back toward reader.*  Letting kids tell you who they are, and trusting them rather than dismissing them is something we learned from gender creative parenting, and that we also found in gentle parenting advice and in Conscious Discipline, if not explicitly related to gender. Now we’re kind of doing our own thing, informed by those general schools of thought and of course learning all the time. 

The point of gender creative parenting, or perhaps more specifically MY point, is not to make kids trans, it’s to intentionally introduce a wide range of possibility to kids, and to let them play and explore and TELL us who they are in any given moment. This might seem like a thought jump, but I’m interested in moving away from an identity-based framework (e.g. is that kid trans or gay, etc), and toward a liberated, exploratory framework that traffics less in assumption and boxes. I acknowledge of course that the process of naming can also be deeply empowering, providing people with words for their experience and community of people with similar experience. For instance, we are so grateful for our own plural understanding, and for plural community. In fact, as I write, I want to emphasize that naming is a deeply important process, and I want to make the space for us (our inner kids and beyond) to declare who we are while feeling safe in the possibility that our selves identity could change over time and that’s okay.

I know we, personally, have struggled a lot in our lives with worrying that we’re not real if we don’t fit an accepted identity criteria. For instance, we wondered for a long time if we were really bi, or really queer, or really trans, or really plural, etc. So much of our energy has been spent in that anxious tumble of thought, when it feels much more meaningful to orient toward an exploration of who we feel ourselves to be, letting ourselves use whatever words feel most true to our experience in the moment. For our kids, it’s important to me to prioritize their experience of themselves, and if that means new words, then new words will be made. 

Lucia: Thank you Morgan. I really appreciate your heavy lift on all of that. 

Morgan: you’re welcome. I feel strongly about gender creative parenting and thinking, frankly, and so do many of us.

Nick: When we feel strongly about something, it can be harder for us to put into words because we want to have an impact and feel really particularly about how we say it. It’s nice to practice just “spitting it out” in these blog posts. 

Jeremiah: Yea. 

Charlie: This has been a long, and I think, really important conversation for us. We started at introducing ourselves, discussed our somatic experience of trauma and how it differs depending on who we are, about the harm of not believing you’re real, and gender creative parenting as a personal liberatory practice in our reparenting/healing journey. That’s a lot. I feel ready to refocus on sea creatures honestly, and to rest our mind for a while. 

Lucia: Yea, I’m looking forward to taking a backseat and letting myself rest on the inside. I miss my friends in there and I’ve done my job for now. 

Charlie: Thanks Lucia for doing this with me. 

Lucia: Thanks for being such a steady presence Charlie. And thank you Morgan, for helping out with the heavy lifting at the end, and thanks to all who chipped in. 

Daniel: You bet. 

Charlie: On to rest and repose. Thanks for sticking with us y’all. 

END