Monthly Log October 2023

Oct 2, 2023 | About 4 min reading time

For some reason when I made my first monthly log post I put the name of the current month in the title instead of the past month, I guess I'll just keep going with that.

Anyways, I've been getting more comfortable with identifying as multigender recently. Even though the genders of parts in the system vary wildly and many of us are multigender even on an individual level, I constantly feel like I'm having to pick either "woman" or "man", never both, and if I pick either of those it feels like people automatically ignore my other genders and focus on just that one. Not to mention the difficulty of using multiple pronoun sets and getting people to actually use them all equally... Especially it/its pronouns. People treat those like using them would be just as bad as calling me a slur. I don't know how to explain to people that it's still misgendering when you avoid calling someone by the pronouns you know it wants to be called!

I've made some more free to use Toyhouse and Neocities templates, as well as some pay to use ones for Toyhouse because I am sadly still unemployed. It's pretty fun fiddling around with Bootstrap, I've been learning a lot recently.

I also posted about this in my last post, but a project I've been working on to help support artists, the Art Hive Studio, is now live! I'm really hoping it goes well, and I'm super excited to see the submissions for the first exhibition (those are open from today until October 10th). If you have any art-related resources for that to suggest, please feel free to contact me!

In my last monthly log, I mentioned my stick insects, the Ottolettes (named after their parent, Otto!). They're doing pretty well, and my brother has given me more of Otto's nymphs that he happened to have, so we're up to 11 or 12 of them right now I think. Some of them have gotten quite big, and they're pretty happy walking all over my arms and exploring. I've gotta try and get some good pictures to put on the stick insect shrine page.

Oh, and I tested this out on the Art Hive Studio website so you can see it in action there if you refresh the page, but I wrote code in PHP to automatically randomize the pronoun set that the website uses to refer to me, since I wrote anything referring to me in third person so I could get gender euphoria from the correct pronouns being used. Now I get even more gender euphoria, because they're actually being used equally! Yay!

For this month going forward, I think I'm going to try to relax a little more. I feel like I haven't actually been giving myself much downtime this month. I was forced to today and yesterday at least, but that's because I forgot to get my ADHD meds renewed and I ran out of them, haha. Certainly makes me feel grateful that I was finally prescribed ADHD meds that work last year, and also makes me wonder how the absolute fuck I survived to the age of twenty-one with unmedicated ADHD. Even medicated, it's still an issue, but at least when medicated I don't feel like everything I try to do is so boring I want to literally cry or punch something. Like, I had no clue before these meds that that wasn't a normal experience! They've helped me so much, honestly anyone who fearmongers about them can kiss my ass - and that's considering that the first ADHD meds I was prescribed sent me into a psychotic episode. I am fully aware of the risks of medication, but there needs to be balance when we talk about these things. Just because something was bad for you, does not mean it is bad for everyone else. We need to be able to recognize the diversity of different experiences and not prioritize any one experience over another (that means I fully support people with ADHD who don't want to be medicated, or anyone with any mental health disorder who doesn't want to be medicated for it - and I also support anyone who feels that medication has helped them immensely, or whose feelings on the subject are more complicated). Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

I also want to add some more LGBTQ+ pages to the website this month when I get the chance. Right now I've just got pansexuality and bisexuality, because that's what most of our system identifies as aside from a few parts who are probably lesbians. Honestly, writing those pages up was weird, because there's so much intracommunity discourse between those specific identities in particular and I just... did not want to piss anyone off. I've definitely experienced biphobia and transphobia from pansexual folks, but I don't think that means the word itself is bad, if that makes any sense? I've also received harassment from some bisexual folks who insisted I was too scared to label myself as bisexual even though I literally use both terms and have proudly identified as bisexual for much longer than I've identified as pansexual and usually describe myself as either just bisexual or both bisexual AND pansexual. So I felt like I was trying to do a balancing act not trying to piss off anyone on either side of the discourse, but I think really, no matter what definition I put for either label, someone would get mad - so I tried to put the most common definitions I've seen without seeming like I was too biased toward one or the other.

Anyways, it seems that so far, no discourse has been sparked, thank God! I'm a bit undecided on what identity I want to make a page for next, though, so I've put up a poll on my website so that other people can make the decision for me. Love being able to use polls for stuff like this.

I think that's all for this blog post, at least that's all I can think of for now!