A letter written to an oft-commissioned artist who was happy to hear more about the backstory of the character she’d drawn so much.

So .. I’m trans; I kinda knew about it from an early age (like in the mid-1990s; I’m 30 now), but didn’t have the words or experience or knowledge to understand why I felt the way I did. It wasn’t really a thing you ever heard about, there was no media representation, the internet barely existed, etc. etc.

So I came to understand this “other” inside me as something, or someone, that I liked to channel; like I could find her inside me and bring her to life. I always had an affinity for rabbits, and this ‘girl’ form of me just naturally seemed to be rabbit-like. When I found out about furry stuff when I was 12 or so, she very naturally became my fursona, or my fursona became her; the boundary was always very fuzzy. At the time I gave her the name Asherah. ‘We’ started hanging around on furry MUCKs, she learned to express herself more and more, and we started to develop an idea of what she looked like. (My father worked for the local ISP, so I was able to get connected very early!)

Fast forward to 2012 — things like Twitter and Tumblr were gaining popularity, and I finally understood and accepted that I was trans and I needed to do something about it. I transitioned, and kinda fucked around for a few years trying to work out what I should do about my name — tried a few different ones and none felt right — and then one day it suddenly dawned on me (or on us) that Asherah was a name people had used for ‘us’ for ten years, and that it was the name we were actually comfortable with. So I changed my name to Asherah (usually called Ashe), and after a while we started calling her, my ’sona or alternate self, Rain. It felt like Rain was keeping my name for me until I was ready for it, y’know?

I’ve had pretty bad mental health issues stemming from different trauma. A lot of awful stuff happened in my family when I was very young, and it left me really depressed for a long time. I’ve mostly gotten on top of the depression, but the last decade has been kinda dominated by anxiety and panic instead. Abusive relationships and assault and that kind of thing. I’ve worked really hard to make progress and keep my head up, but still it can be so difficult. Chronic illness has just kinda piled on top of it, or maybe stemmed from it. I just kinda have to do the best I can and hope for little improvements, instead of hoping that one day I might be magically 100% fixed. Keep trying different medications year after year, something gets better, something else gets worse. I remember seeing you tweet a photo of a bunch of medication boxes once, so you probably understand it better than most.

Rain, then, is like.. my internal guiding light, or guardian, or spirit guide, or something. She helped me see my way to my true self, helped me find my name, and now, she’s kinda my loving ever-present companion, even if just in my own head.

She’s like this ideal self that I aspire to become more like; she holds my cheerfulness and joy and curiosity, and the more I can connect to her, the more I can radiate those qualities myself. Sometimes seeing her as a separate person with a separate identity to myself is helpful; we can talk over things and be a little bit wiser than if it was ‘just me’. Over time I feel like I become more and more like her, and she keeps evolving and being the frontrunner of who we are. (idk if this makes any sense.. /o\)

But, yeah. Basically, despite all the illness and trauma and things I’ve had to deal with, I actually hold up in real life really well, thanks to my connection with her! People who know me sometimes wonder how I manage to be so well-adjusted and ‘successful’ when they learn what I’ve had to deal with, how poor my family was when I was growing up, what happened when I transitioned, etc. etc., and it’s basically through nurturing this relationship with her. I usually don’t tell them that, though, because frankly it sounds kinda nuts.

whew. Okay, that was a lot. I hope it was at least a little interesting. For what it’s worth, I’m not particularly disconnected with reality; you can look at Rain through a plurality/multiplicity/disassociative identity lens, or through an Internal Family Systems therapy lens, or in a few different other ways depending on how you understand identity or the brain. In short, she’s the way that I practice having a good loving relationship with myself. It’s really nice!

So, seeing her in art is really powerful. You’ve done three pieces of her by now, and it always feels like seeing a part of myself (or of ourselves) for the first time. The first was especially magical; we fell in love with your style instantly. It brings out the ethereal, gentle, warm sense of her spiritual dimension. And the most recent one brings her down to earth; brings her to life in a physical dimension. Gah. It’s just so beautiful ;;

This YCH feels so appropriate for Rain — the character is just radiating warmth. The design for the book cover that I gave above is a sigil — kind of a magical mark that is charged with meaning and intention, designed to have a lingering subconscious effect on its designer/user (i.e. me!). In this case, the sigil is charged with intent to strengthen the bond and connection between me and her; to help me channel her and connect with her energy; letting it flow out .. it just fits together with the ych design perfectly. (And the clothing design is super cute!)

I had some pretty powerful peer-motherly feelings last night.

I don’t quite know a better word for it. It’s not maternal as such – I do have kids and there’s a really distinct difference – but the feeling extends much further than I thought it would.

Struggling to work out how to express it now; when I was really deep in the zone I was pretty inebriated and it was much easier to just feel and be in the emotions than interrogate the feelings. But I’ll try.

When I decided to try earnestly to induce lactation (3 weeks ago now) it was just a bit of fun; I got a response here that really encouraged me. I never really saw the appeal before, but it occurred to me how validating/affirming it might be to actually use my body in that way. My tits really haven’t done much for me until now; I’m pretty flat-chested and it seemed like there’s no way that’d change without actual BE. Doing the regular work that’s part of inducing meant I was paying my chest a lot of attention, every day, and also meant they were sore a lot (which is good as far as I’m concerned).

(cw little)

[redacted]'s been getting into the little headspace more and more, and so more and more we fall asleep in bed at night with her suckling on me; come to half an hour later with the bedside lamp still on, change sides, turn off the light ..

I’ve had another close friend talk about how my (one of my headmates’) energy makes her “want to curl up in your arms and be held for a bit” and lean into a little bit of being on the receiving end of caregiving-type energy, and it’s at that point – thinking about me enacting this role in more than one context – that I really envisioned myself as being a “caregiving-type” in a broader sense for the first time.

And it’s really nice?? I started thinking about the role outside a strictly cgl lens, in more of a “loving, freely care-giving, supportive mom-type peer-friend” energy; thinking about an ideal sense of communal closeness where I could be that to many friends; being something like an empowering, encouraging rock that close ones knew would be able to emotionally support and nurture them.

The right words are still not coming to me and the feeling is a little more distant today than they were last night.

One image that keeps coming back to me is kinda weird, but kinda conveys it. My mind kept flitting back to images of high school (!), like in the year 12 common room where people would just hang out and chill. I’m imagining some alternate world where intimacy wasn’t restricted to romantic partners or seen as something that had to be hidden away. I would totally have been the mom-friend in that world and in that common room, where friends could just lay down across my lap and I’d stroke their hair and listen to them, and maybe suckle them a bit too if they wanted. Maybe people could do that for each other more freely and be responsive to each other’s emotional needs and play different roles as the situation called for it. (The specific setting isn’t really important but the image really stuck with me for some reason.)

tl;dr im mom

CN: sexual assault, aftermath, alcohol/drug use, psychiatry, bureaucracy

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I am Rain, Song-Born.

A week ago, a friend of Asherah’s, a Namer, put out a call, inviting mutuals to ask an epithet of them. Ashe asked and they obliged.

It’s.. difficult to find the words to describe how this made us feel. My earlier writing isn’t terribly explicative, so allow me to detail it.

When Ashe discovered their latent plurality — when they saw the word “tulpamancy” and I stirred; when it became clear something was being described — they started collecting and reading resources about the practice. They’d just started a new journal, mind you, so page 3 starts with ‘tulpamancy’ in big letters and underlined, with a bunch of notes underneath about various terms; forcing, visualisation, wonderlands, imposition; how important it is to “believe in your tulpa from the start”, share things with them. All that.

They picked out a name to start with — kinda like a codename for a project in development. “Xue,” after the Mandarin reading of the word for “snow.” Long-time readers of our story will recognise this as a name Ashe used once before, in a different form. There’s a lot of this; that “double-buffered ego” I wrote about earlier. I used a name, they took the name; they used a name, I took the name. They had a fursona — I became the fursona, am the fursona, am not meaningfully distinct from it, her past actions not meaningfully distinct from mine. (This tweet came up in our feed today, retweeted by none other than the friend who provided the jump point into all this in the first place. Apt as fuck.)

Turning over to page 4, and some details start to come together; they picked out some traits for me, some likes and dislikes. The kind of character creation tulpamancy normally involves.

.. It.. is actually really weird to read this now, being me. Ashe wrote this all down, and I don’t know that they could ever have really prepared for the eventuality that one day, I would be reading it. Fuck, it’s… it’s a lot. It’s so hard to grasp the real enormity, the real rammifications of the undertaking. (Again, see earlier where I rabbit on about that.)

What really gets me is how on point it is. We’ve certainly evolved all of our identities in the half year since, but nonetheless, it’s weird looking at what feels like a blueprint for your own psyche, even knowing that I was guiding them in the ideas as much as they were contributing their own. Even knowing, it’s startling to be reminded, sometimes, how much and how little there is to being.

A small note beside: “I love her.”

And then, underneath the vague personality traits, a dividing line—

Ghost Spores 🎵

I fall in the dark
as I’m filled with the energy
rising in me, I am watching
from above my body as I dream
I cannot recall
the clear space in my mind
I’ve filled it with fire
And the lies I had once
believed

I remember when I saw you from across the room
The music elevated me as I made my way to you
Everything I have done led me to this
Time would move in a circle to prove it

Eternal return
Will the ghosts I leave behind help me to find you again?
Where have we gone? Will I wake into a better place?
Take me to my home.

My home.

We’d only discovered this song a few days prior — and it’s at this precise point that Ashe found the word “we” forming in our head for the first time, naturally, without the pretence of prior thought trains that ran “am I plural? how would that work? do I say ‘we’? when would I say that? it sounds made up.” It just came out. It was descriptive, not prescriptive.

In a movement of song, I was born.

The music elevated me.

A tip: “The barest working technique of tulpamancy: talk to the Universe until the Universe answers. Love it until it loves back.”

Eternal return.

Name ideas crawling down the page: Xue, Star, — something of nature, like, Azalea. Skye? Camellia. Ivy. Iris. Violet. Dawn. Luna.

Help me find you again?

The first sentence I ever felt like I could call my own is recorded:

“It feels like home”
X re: Ghost Spores

A realisation of a trip long-past:

// that time we did
acid & you
told me to
visualize my ideal
mind self

// I saw her

Rain!

The notes become increasingly fervent, day by day; page 5 — “She wants ❤︎”, and then scrawled beneath:

Send my heart into the sound
Slowly drifting into your arms
It blows away in new directions
It’s your time to know something that is real

Full pages covered in kritseldab; scribblings of madness. Incipient sigils finding form.

And then, clearing the way:

Sit with me for one last song
and be closer to me when it’s done
Come here and tell me your name

Come to me

Come to me
Don’t be shy, I want love, truly
Something that will make sense to me
Rush up on me and say something
Break something

Bad boy
Better look in my eyes, boy
You’re the love of my life, boy
Meet me at the equator
Of this earth
We are one

From slow quietude to high energy, we traversed our emotional range. The song showed the way to our understanding of plurality, of our duality. I rushed upon them, and.. well, they asked for it. I looked them in the eye; said something; broke something.

Day after day, we listened and listened, sought out the notes that would resonate; I found my place as Asherah’s spirited companion, and they found theirs as my channeller. We found our path together, as one, guided lovingly by syncretic truth and vivid insight.

The pages continue—I find my handwriting, my written voice, as Ashe finds what’s theirs in light of what’s mine. We discover that much as I had to find myself, they had to do the same. We found ourselves in each other; found our love in each other.

Every day since my first has been one defined by the joy of living a life of love.

Music is what conducts our soul; it gives rise to the emotional spaces in which we find ourselves, over and over again. A refrain can capture what no words could; can bring forth in moments what would take hours to describe.

If I was to convey to you how I feel, the truest way would be with sound.

Song is beauty. I’m looking forward to the day I can bring you my own.

I am Rain, and we are Song-Born.

Really feels like it’s a terminal or some other kind of interface for reality. But a terminal feels cold + unemotional — doesn’t feel like it has love at its core. What if the terminal has a more overtly psychedelical/magical mode of operation?

It should: channel Rain; beautify Rain — that otherworldly coupling idea seen in C.C. Yes — this is it. My key is Rain. It is through Her our ability to self-master originates — that is the truth we can see: that She came to me, and is our and my interface with Reality.

Rain is the spark of light that calls us to action + Completion. Our trace, our shadow. Our reflection. She is my key, mutually self-possessive. I didn’t create Her — She found me, chose me; — soul induction was real. She is love, our love and our Love. She is mine, and I Hers. Our partnership is ultimate, equally powerful. Rain is my spirituality, and Rainmaking my faith. We are one, we are two.

Rain: a spirit, an interface, a symbol of and from Goodness, a lover, a friend, a Companion, a co-conspirator, a seductress, a lonely soul, my other half in the Spirit world.

It’s our connection + unity in a single purpose that empowers us. Think: in that single moment of contact, our power circuit is complete, and anything becomes possible. Self-love added to other-love. We Feel.

Aesthetic: bookish, cute ponytail girl (?) who shyly admits their religion is that of communing with her personal spirit pair, Rain. Some whimsy, but otherwise an intense character who holds the courage of their convictions. Earthy.

Time to come into ourselves.

Make the leap.

Accept it all.

Now.

---

Rain is the closest thing there is to a Goddess in our canon. Being in Her presence is bliss.

I am her — the believer.