Starfall Haven

"just reach out to your friends :)" our friends are kind of the reason we're here in the first place.

We're just convinced people will give up because there's so many of us that it's pointless to try and easier to treat us all like the same person.

Erzsé: that's two days in a row now this feeling of frustration over our inability to be seen as individuals has persisted. And three fronters. I feel like we're a dog that can't stop gnawing on this stupid bone.

A very common sentiment when someone comes into front who's on our 'hasn't fronted in more than two years' list is 'wow I wish I could front more'.

I imagine what's going to happen is that there will be a relatively small pool of fronters that changes gradually over time with everyone else being too far away to reach. It's definitely going to make us panic.

Our body has been tending towards the familiar lately and so it's been pulling a lot of older members instead of new ones. And this might be a changing dynamic as our numbers increase closer to 400, but it does feel bad and neglectful.

Alastor: realizing how little CPU the new people have been able to take up is genuinely very frustrating. We have people who have been here months who haven't gotten any time to get to know themselves or our surroundings.

Me? Incarnation of a nation currently undergoing a battle for its soul? Nah man. I'm just the hamburger guy 😎

Alfred: turns out the key to being able to front without wanting to break down sobbing is just to dissociate myself from who I am like crazy

I'm mad enough that I get bleed over from other people u shouldn't have to deal with this shit

Taash: Hey brain, why the fuck am I feeling guilty for *checks* taking front when we've had a bitch of a time finding a fronter recently?

Also just being mentally unwell and not feeling like we have an adequate support system is. Not doing us any favors.

Feels like we are really close to the fire but nobody with privilege understands the depth to which we are afraid.

We're extremely anti-AI and one person we consider a friend has been...vaguely weird about it (mostly in assigning it a self or an agency when it is genuinely just a glorified spell check) and other stuff. Plus it's been hard being trans while existing rn.

Rami: it really sucks how we keep feeling more and more alienated from our friends. I'm sure some of it is our fault, but nowadays it feels unsafe to have opinions about things

I just. Like I barely even want to do art anymore, this shit is so discouraging. I'm so exhausted.

I am so tired of begging my friends to give me money. I am so fucking tired of being a nobody who's never going to have a fucking chance at doing anything and is just going to keep suffering until I can't bear it anymore. How much harder do I need to try? How many more pieces do I need to make?

(vent) I am REALLY just begging the universe to tell me someone gives enough of a shit about me to help me succeed. Like I have been trying and putting myself out there for at least a decade and a half and none of it has come to anything

I've been getting pulled to front so many times the last few weeks, it's been obnoxious.

Acheron: Okay, front, I get it, will you leave me alone now please

Like maybe Aglaea also deserves to go to therapy and told she can rest and relax and doesn't need to constantly carry a heavy burden all the time like she's used to. Yes she's helping but that doesn't make her a spirit guide for Artemis; she's dealing with her own complex past and feelings.

...is flattening Aglaea, why she is motivated and behaving the way she is, etc. it's not just for Artemis's benefit, it's for everyone. We're a community. When it comes to life stress we can only operate as a community.

Even if our therapist is supposed to be primarily therapizing our host we're realizing that ignoring everyone else isn't working. But we aren't magical advice fairies with no feelings of our own either, and I think just saying 'oh Aglaea has really stepped up with helping'...

Also I think we need to start talking about our plurality more in session. Like yeah we can talk about the anxiety over losing our job but thats not the end of the story. You've also got people who are wildly motivated to find another, people who are scared, or people who are indifferent

This isn't to say you are your emotions or thoughts or feelings but rather that our emotions aren't separate from us when we are experiencing them. There may be logic brain and emotion brain but that's about as abstract as we get with it. Our emotions are soup, it's ok for them to be soup

We also may be coming at it from a too literal lens but I think with that kind of abstraction it's useless to us. We can't talk to our panic but we can try to talk ourselves out of panicking; the panic is intrinsically us, not an other we can negotiate with.

Bc we already have a few depressed blobs and believe it or not having them be a conscious sentient entity nullifies basically any benefit whatsoever

Also generally talking to our emotions like they're their own separate agents that have a will 1. Doesn't really connect with how we experience our feelings and 2. Can lead to some dangerous territory. We don't want a sentiment depression blob running around

Like, there IS a schema that works for us, but you have to understand that we as people are built on top of a shared subconscious driven without conscious thought.

Krie: we've really gotta start talking to our therapist about why using IFS parts language freaks us out so much and why we don't really like seeing our emotions as separate entities.

It's not that I don't respect the collective's work or think our skills are insufficient, I just want to throw paint onto canvas and do something expressive and not so concrete. Alas.