It’s been about a month since the last time I’ve posted here. In that time, a friend of mine, the same one who encouraged me to embrace being autistic and to explore plurality, gave me a story that he contributed a lot of ideas to. I won’t say much about what was in it, because it’s not intended for publication, but what I will say is that it brought forward some realities I had been putting aside while I focused on other parts of my life. Those realities had to do with my childhood, my current understanding of spirituality, and my experience of being plural. What I am about to share are the ideas sparked by those new understandings, and many of them will probably be considered controversial, but I want to make it clear that they are in no way intended as a substitute for medical treatment, and not to be taken as such.
Content notice: talk of what is and isn’t real, spiritual experiences, and questioning traditional practices in raising children in ways that may distress some readers.
What if children’s pretend play wasn’t pretend at all? What if they were, instead, accessing worlds beyond our physical one and using objects here to signify what they’re doing elsewhere? What if they not only perceived the environment around them in as much, if not more, detail than we do, but are also able to perceive other ones in their mind, which they then overlay onto this one in what we call pretending? What if we, as adults, tried to meet them in those worlds instead of being so quick to pull them back to ours?
It is my firm belief, based on personal experience, that children are born with a capacity to travel beyond this world and into others. How that traveling is responded to will determine whether or not the child is able to retain it. I’d love to see a world where children are educated about the difference between this world and the ones they visit, but where the words ‘real’ and ‘pretend’ are dropped entirely. Yes, this is possible. No, I did not get to experience it. That’s why I’m writing this article.
Time after time in my childhood, I was told things that smashed my perception of the reality of the worlds I traveled to using my mind. I didn’t start recovering from that until 2016, as a result of a chance encounter on a small social network called Vorial, in which I met someone who retaught me the basics of what he called ‘psychic ability’. These skills were things like energetic protection, which I had picked up during my time with my friend in elementary school, but set aside as it became clear I was not going to be connected to that aspect of myself all that well after they and I were no longer able to play together. It was during this rediscovery that I fully made the connection between my spirituality and my imagination, and I would make it again and again after various circumstances over the next several years caused me to forget its existence. Between these flashes of clarity, I would persistently believe that the two were separate; in these stretches of time, spirituality was something that happened to and for me, but it could only be directed to a degree, where imagination was something that I always controlled. Many people see the two that way, but for me personally, I wanted not to, and reading the story I’ve mentioned above made that possible.
There were several reasons for this. One was the effort put into describing the interactions between the characters, which largely involved no visual detail, because most of them were blind. Another was the fact that the vast majority of these interactions were very positive for everyone involved in them, portraying mental travel to other worlds in the same light and laying out exactly how one could use their own imagination to achieve the same results everyone in the story was getting. For once, I had a clear picture of exactly what it was I had done in elementary school, and later from 2016 to the present, and, to my amazement, the experiences I had had regarding plurality’s spiritual aspects fit into that framework as well. It was like someone led me to a world I didn’t know I’d been taken from, then stayed with me as I took it all in. I cried with a mix of amazement and deep greef – amazement that everything I wanted was, in fact, possible, and greef that for years I had lacked the confirmation I needed to fully believe as much.
I felt myself open up in ways I hadn’t fully been able to, even as a child, and recognized, for the first time in my life, that I had dedicated a large portion of my mental capacity to forcing things to make sense in the context of this world, and this world alone, entirely unnecessarily because I was fearful of what would happen if I didn’t do so. I sobbed deeply with the realization that the time other teenagers spent daydreaming, I spent struggling with an elaborate mental world that hadn’t existed for a month before misguided professionals convinced me that it was something other than what it was, and which then grew into a constent stream of what I refer to as psychic noise that I forced myself to attend to as though it would someday make more sense than it could. But along with the pain came relief, because I saw that, with the sources of that noise taken care of in the ways they needed to be, I had a chance not only to do what I wanted within my own mind and beyond it, but to feel truly protected as I did so, free from the need to worry about what could happen as a result of imagining something disturbing vividly enough. For the first time, I knew, and know, that the way my mind and my spirituality, not to mention my plurality as it intersects with both, doesn’t have to be a source of stress or constent double checking. I could, and can, finally let my imagination literally run away with me and travel in all the ways I’d wanted to, but had been too afraid to in previous years, and I can use said imagination to travel to other worlds just as the people in the story had done, without fear of harm coming to me as I do so. I’ve finally been able to fully embrace being plural, not in the sense of having to accomidate and reach out to unknown headmates, but in the sense of being able to start over again, reconnecting with those I’ve created in the past and having a say about the ones who come in the future.
To be entirely honest, I’m still processing all the things I’ve gained from that story, but I do know for certain that I’m glad I read it. There are other themes that came up and that I had strong responses to, which I’ll save for another article. For now, I’m content with the three areas of my life that, finally, have been allowed by my mind in all aspects to connect as they were meant to. I think more people would also be able to access the same abilities if we talked about different worlds in place of the polarity of real and pretend, and it is my desire that more people have this opportunity. To that end, and in light of my recent breakthroughs, my next fiew posts will not focus on my experiences. Instead, I will be writing stories involving these same themes, and posting them either in part or in whole over time. This will relieve my anxiety about having nothing to discuss that’s strictly plurality related, and also provide another reason to focus on creative projects I’ve been wanting to work on for a while.
Thank you for reading.