bodyetal | Entries tagged with the body

that’s it that’s the post

we are very happy

we also might post on how our plurality is affected by anesthesia/surgery at some point, but right now we’re just recovering and living our best life/ves :3 -crow& et al.

Current Mood: jubilant

(To be extremely clear, this is terminology we use for our own collective. We are not suggesting that this is how it works for everyone, or even how it should work. You are free to adopt the phrase for your own collective, but please don’t treat it like an implicit/universal hierarchy.)

So, one term that comes up relatively often in discussing our headmates is the concept of a body native. The most concise definition we use is that they’re people who “belong to the Body,” but that doesn’t actually make much sense or explain a whole lot.

More specifically, body natives are people who are not only brainmade, but explicitly connected to this body and its lineage. They have physical traits within the realm of possibility for this body, they can be traced back to a host of some kind, they generally split instead of “spawning,” and in our case, they usually have much stronger presence of self (our jargon for amount of power a headmate and their presence has, ie ability to front) than non-body natives.

We want to be very clear that body natives have no more inherent claim to this body and our life than any other headmate. For us, that is exclusively determined by how much a headmate wants to be involved in our life, and how present they are. They also are not any more “real” than any other kind of headmate. It’s the same way that someone who moves to New York is just as much a person and just as entitled to vote for their governor as someone who was born there; they are a person, and they are a part of our collective.

The main difference is just how easy it is to keep front, and how much of our complex/childhood trauma you have grandfathered in. (Our body natives generally bear the burden of complex trauma near-exclusively, non-body natives have only their own separate baggage.)

We often avoid the term in public because we don't want people to devalue or dehumanize non-body natives, but it is relevant to us, especially at a time where one of the three most active adults here is not a body native. And we definitely wanted an explainer to point to, so here y'all go!

Today, we finally got our septum pierced—something we've wanted to do probably since we were twelve! It's taken a lot of time to find a shop (and to be willing to eat the 85USD), but we finally have the extra hole in our nose! We got a little silver titanium horseshoe—we’d meant to ask for gold, because it pairs better with our extremely yellow undertones, but we forgot until it was too late. Oh well.

The experience was honestly exactly what we expected. It wasn’t very painful, but our eyes watered like a bitch, and the most stressful part was paying for it (especially for Crow&, who has insane money guilt).

Except for one thing: Crow& didn’t do the piercing.

We had assumed it would be Crow&, because for all feyr squishiness, fey is absolutely our collective tank. Fey generally takes on all of our medical issues, fronts through all our health flares, and endures all our body’s major discomfort—it’s how fey ended up fronting so much in the first place. Plus, we were going to the appointment with a friend of feyrs. It seemed like a given.

But Crow& was tired of that. Fey doesn’t want to be the default for suffering, even if that was a self-imposed state. Fey wasn’t ready to give up on taking pain as a whole, but a mildly painful procedure didn’t need to be feyr.

We don’t remember which of the two suggested it, but last night, it was decided that TW would take the piercing instead. Vae has the most self-control of any of us—Crow& is extremely good at staying almost creepily still for procedures, but TW has that kind of control for anything, which made vaer a solid candidate. (Plus, our only other available adult in the safety pins is Riley, who is known for many things, but an ability to sit still without talking is not among them.)

Crow& spent most of the time with feyr friend, and when it was time to get off the Metro to head to the tattoo parlor, TW took over. Vae appreciated the silver horseshoe, which surprised us all—it seems Crow& might be the one who really likes gold, but we hadn’t considered that there might be conflicting opinions there. The pain, as we said, wasn’t bad—it was barely sunburn-tier. But it was pain that Crow& very intentionally let someone else take.

(Pictures coming soon, probably!)

Current Mood: pleased

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a Body et al.

Entries tagged with the body

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