classpect-crew

[classpect-crew]

Touching Grass

A long and deeply personal story about gender transition, agency, and the Aspect of Life

Although the Lifebound are almost always gifted with privilege in some way, my childhood was spent in a gilded cage. I had an incredible wealth of opportunities, but my agency was ultimately restricted. I was told I could do anything I set my mind to, that the world was a canvas for my creativity, that my potential was limitless, but when I ultimately reached out and tried to grab that agency, that true measure of Life…I lost the support. I lost the understanding. I was kicked out. I lost my health insurance. I was treated as a burden. I was given a destiny, and I refused it. I embraced what Life truly means and refused to give that up for anything. I grabbed hold of my own desires and refused to let go. I shaped the world around me when I could, and shaped myself to fit through the cracks when I could not. And, perhaps inevitably, I burned out.

We, the Lifebound, desire control. Agency. Power. We don’t want to cede that to anyone, but those of us who have seen the worst consequences of our actions will eventually run the risk of giving up that agency entirely, afraid of what might happen if we act. We begin to doubt ourselves. Do we have all the information we need to make the right decision? Are we being selfish, trying to impose our will with no regard for those around us? We become paralyzed. We get lost in the cerebral overthinking that is terribly familiar to the Mindbound. We slip into the comfort of Doom, relinquishing responsibility along with our agency, and succumb to the inertia that comes with such long periods of inaction.

My parents handed me a mockery of Life—it came with Terms and Conditions. It was Doom masquerading as its opposite, just as they projected the façade of a happy couple for nearly two loveless decades, until divorce finally set them free. And yet, the Life inside of me found a way. The truth of my Aspect continued to shine through, guiding me on my own chosen path, propelled by my own enthusiastic and unstoppable energy. These things come in waves, though, and at some point it was inevitable that all the abuse and trauma would catch up to me. I would need to grieve before I continued on my way. I began to feel a heaviness inside of me, weighing me down and demanding to be acknowledged, processed, digested like a tough piece of meat, gristle and all.

Near the end of last year, I started to realize just how much of my gender transition—one of the most life-altering choices I’ve ever made—was a direct reaction to the trauma of being forced, sometimes violently, into the most restrictive, toxic, and misogynistic ideal of womanhood that I’ve ever known. I fought tooth and nail to escape that, and I took that newfound agency and did the only thing I could think to do: I completely rejected womanhood as an identity. All it had ever brought me was pain. I was surrounded by women in my family and community who felt that same pain, who saw little chance of escape except through denial, drugs, and living vicariously through their kids. Meanwhile, I made a choice that, I’ll admit, was quite extreme; in fairness, I was nonbinary to begin with, so some kind of gender transition was always in the cards for me. But the concept of femininity was so poisoned by my upbringing that I immediately fled to the other end of the false gender binary. It was only in late 2021, after four years on T and a few months post-top surgery, that I was finally able to see what womanhood could be.

I started dating a trans woman, a friend of a friend. Witnessing her excitement at each new development in her transition—her mother’s acceptance, the gradual changes from HRT, the experience of finally being seen—was like a salve on a wound that I’d believed had already healed. As my social circle expanded from there, I naturally became friends with a lot more transfems of all stripes: proud butches and gorgeous femmes, shy nerds and outgoing ravers, stoners, artists, vintage enthusiasts and DJs. I met transfems with kids, former Air Force security, stage managers, about a dozen incredible musicians, gun nuts, kinksters, witches, and everything in-between. The one thing they all had in common, to some degree, was the profound euphoria they experienced as a direct result of choosing what womanhood means to them—something that I almost never saw from the cis women I grew up around, and still don’t see much of today. Most of the cis women I’ve known with the same level of love for their identity have been much older, having had decades upon decades to break out of our society’s conditioning and find that joy.

My feelings of dissatisfaction with the expectations of ‘manhood’ that were placed on me by openly accepting family members and society at large, coupled with an unconscious desire to rethink my relationship with womanhood, began gnawing at me from the inside. As the years went on, I started feeling oddly disconnected from the very things that once made me feel incredibly euphoric: my beard and chest hair, my flat chest, being called ‘sir,’ and even my chosen name. It all came crashing down on me last year, when I started putting the pieces together. I realized that I never had the chance to experience womanhood as a joyful truth that I’d willingly choose to embrace.

The idea that I truly had such little agency in the circumstances that led to my transition, that the pain I’d suffered led me to race to the other end of the gender binary instead of allowing my nonbinary transition to unfold naturally, that I lost so many years that I could’ve spent exploring myself, healing those wounds caused by their violent insistence that I perform their cruel version of womanhood…that broke me. I’m still processing that grief, working with my therapist using EMDR, taking advice from a close friend of mine who’s a curanderx (the gender neutral term for curandero/a), exploring soul retrieval practices, and doing whatever I can to open myself up to exploring this new truth in my identity as a nonbinary woman. I’ve realized that agency lies not in the circumstances in which you make the choice, but rather the act of choosing itself. It’s the commitment to following through upon your will.

I’m trying to consciously surround myself with manifestations of Life, to remind myself of the power of my agency, of the optimism and drive that keeps me going, despite everything. Right outside my bedroom window, there’s a table covered in clay pots where my partner and I have planted cilantro, banana peppers, lettuce, rosemary, jalapeños, oregano. I check on the sprouts each day when I go out to pull invasive Johnson grass from our garden. I can identify nearly every plant in our backyard now, from our miniature sunflower field to our blooming Texas thistle, verdant henbit and yellow butterweed blossoms, eagerly sprouting hedge parsley, and the morning glories winding their way around the sunflower stalks. Every time I greet the evening primrose or beg the yellow sweet clover to please, please spread so we can have barefoot-friendly ground coverage, it roots me in the earth and connects me with everything around me. I’m part of a vast ecosystem, affected by forces and wills beyond my knowledge, even at times beyond my comprehension. That doesn’t change the fact that I have agency. I have a will of my own. I owe it to myself, and to the world, to find my truth and live it as bravely as I can.

Life is an Aspect that promises change. When faced with the responsibility of knowing that your actions have consequences, you must also remember that it is only through our actions that we can make the world a better place. Start small, start local, and don’t forget to touch grass when you can. In the vast ocean of spacetime, we all contribute to those unseen currents that sweep us along our own journeys. Every choice matters. Knowing this, I have just one question for you:

What will you do?

[classpect-crew]

:3c

[classpect-crew]

welcome back! can’t wait to see what new classpect analyses you have to share ^.^

Thank you so much! :3 I’m excited to see where I go with it!

[classpect-crew]

Welcome back friend! May this year treat you well!

🤍🤍🤍 and you as well!!

[classpect-crew]

[classpect-crew]

holy shit. y’all i just realized, part of the joke of calling myself ‘the classpect crew’ has always been that it’s just me on here. and now that i’ve realized i’m plural…looks like we’re finally living up to our name, huh?

[classpect-crew]

classpect crew has thots now?!

:3c

[classpect-crew]

A Change of Pace

So I want to do something different with this blog. I know I’ve said this before, but I’m autistic. (Surely, nobody could have predicted this. I’ll take a moment for you to find your fainting couch.) That means I’d give my left arm to find a convenient and personally meaningful system through which to understand the world, preferably inspired by a piece of media that is a special interest of mine. For me, Homestuck’s Classpect system and cosmology can be that foundation, but I don’t just want to slap these categories and ideas haphazardly onto the “real world” and try to make it all fit. Nor do I wish to take the easy way out and just adopt or adapt one or more of the belief systems that inspired these systems and their context. (I tried out Gnosticism for a bit, but honestly, dualism doesn’t become me.)

Instead, I discovered a secret third option: experiencing Classpects on their own terms. “Tali, what the fresh hell do you mean by that?” Well, it’s complicated. The simplest way to put it is that I want to interact with the Aspects and what they represent as if they’re a fundamental part of our world, too. I want to use Classes as archetypes that exemplify how we interact with these Aspects. And I want to do all of this while letting the real-world application of these systems develop naturally, through practical experience rather than a monogamous marriage to the literature. I’ve meditated on the connections between Breath and Void while watching switchgrass rattling in the wind, for example. They share the quality of emptiness; they’re the negative space, the air rustling through tree branches or the gap in your memory where something once was, only visible in the absence of what’s around them. This isn’t a conclusion I came to by reading the comic or banging my head against the Aspect Wheel’s geometry. Although one could arrive at the same realization from either source, in this instance I let the Aspects speak for themselves, and then connected the dots.

This might get long, so here’s your courtesy readmore.

As my non-Homestuck friends know all too well (because I absolutely won’t shut up about it) I’ve been working on ways to expand the Classpect system into a practical, real-world framework that can be used and understood by somebody who’s never read Homestuck. In fact—and this is ambitious of me, I know—I take great inspiration from the development of daemonism as a contemporary practice. Daemonism has taken on a life of its own, separate from its origins in Phillip Pullman’s novel series, His Dark Materials. I can imagine the value of a real-world analogue of the Classpect system, which could open up new methods of introspection, development of one’s personal mythology, and perhaps even an analytical framework through which to understand the world itself. For those brave enough to crack open this can of worms, the possibilities truly are endless.

What might we discover by exploring our own stories through this kind of lens? What does it mean to be a Witch, or an Heir, or a Seer? Why are so many of us preoccupied with figuring out what we are, instead of what we want to be? That’s one of the many questions we should ask ourselves as we embark on this journey. Sure, we can pretty easily state what role a Hero of Space plays in the context of SBURB: they’re tasked with breeding the Genesis Frog. In the broader story of Homestuck, Space players ‘set the stage.’ But what about in our world? What does Space mean to you? What Aspects hold sway over you, and how does this shape your worldview? Your actions? Your identity? When I came up with the term Organic Classpect, it was my intention to explore this very concept. This feels like a fairly natural continuation and expansion of that idea.

You can meditate on Life the same way you’d meditate on the classical Greek element of Fire. You can learn to see its influence in your own life (no pun intended) and commune with it, increase or decrease its presence at will. Hell, I once made a sigil using the symbol of Life and charged it before going to run deliveries in hopes of making good tips that day. My first delivery was a grocery order with like, three small bags, and I got tipped $20 cash on top of the $8 I received in the app. If you understand Aspects as a source of power, and Classes as different ways of working with them, there’s so much you can do within this evolving framework.

I’d love to know what y’all think of this, because it’s something I care about very deeply, and I’ve been exploring these ideas for a long time.

[classpect-crew]

y’all should go watch Funk McLovin’s new video on Classes, by the way

i have some thoughts

[classpect-crew]

i have some thoughts

[classpect-crew]

Glad to see you’re back! And with another banger post too! Welcome back, we all missed you!

Awh, thanks so much! 🥺 It feels good to be back! Sometimes the inspiration just hits and I’ve got to make something with it. Last night’s post was mainly inspired by a tarot reading I had, which assured me that if I truly want to treat life as a grander narrative, I should recognize my own ability to write my story as I choose. If I have a goal I want to achieve but don’t know where to start, what better way to do so than by asking “if I were to write a character with this kind of arc, what would be their first steps?” and letting intuition take care of the rest. 🤍

[classpect-crew]

The Heir of Hope: Plurality and Personal Narrative

It took plurality, of all things, to realize that my greatest strength lies in Hope.

Hope is the Aspect of fantasy realized. Those who wield it are like the Magician of the tarot, capable of shaping the world according to their whims. With each thought, as Terezi wisely points out, we are helping to create our own reality; in the Domain of Hope, there is no greater truth. The Hopebound are storytellers and passionate consumers of media. They are the center of their own narrative, at times unable to conceive of anything outside of it. They may even strip other people of their agency—of their Life—in an effort to force them to make sense in their existing worldview. Dissenting allies become obstacles at best, and enemies at worst. And yet, should they yield ground to the autonomy of others, allowing the story to ‘write itself,’ they will find themselves swept up in a much more meaningful adventure than they could have possibly imagined.

Hope is the Aspect of the imagination, brimming with ideas and just waiting for an outlet to fully realize them in the material world. It is the Aspect of magic. It’s the reason I’ve been able to treat the Classpect system as a foundation for performing magic myself, seeing the world in terms of the Aspects, a bit similar to the way the ancient Greeks saw the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air reflected and embodied in all things. I now understand my recent obsession with restarting over and over in Baldur’s Gate 3 as an imbalance between Heart and Mind: in order to avoid addressing my latest identity crisis, I’ve tossed myself into a roleplaying game with a million different possibilities, and I’ve exhausted dozens upon dozens of hours trying to play every possible role, wearing every possible mask, creating every possible character.

I’m a storyteller—it’s in my blood. My father, and his father before him, and every relative of his that I’ve known have all been the same. Our family reunions were filled with wild tales sprinkled with half-truths, like the time my dad came across a particularly randy buck in the middle of the street—he swears he saw the buck stomp his hoof and wink—or the way my great uncle got his glass eye after a hunting trip when his own father mistook him for a turkey. My maternal grandmother is the same way. I named myself Taliesin in honor of that, and also to tap into some part of a greater legacy of storytellers, just like the historical and mythological Taliesin himself, and all those who have taken his name before me.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had more people in my head than I’ve known what to do with. I have a veritable menagerie of colorful characters, some going back many years, who have taken up residence in my brain folds. It never occurred to me that they could become more than just puppets for me to play around with, reflecting my own dreams, desires, and fears in a way that felt safe. Separate. That was before one such puppet, Vivienne, cut her own strings, looked me dead in the eye, and told me “I want to be real, too.”

She did so not long after taking control of my body when I was in a cannabis-induced haze, speaking to my girlfriend in a voice that definitely wasn’t mine. When I came out of it, she asked “was that an invocation thing, or a headmate?” (I’ve had a few experiences with invocation, when a deity decided I could help one of their followers by passing along a message that, frankly, could have been an email.) I determined fairly quickly that although it wasn’t mine, the voice was coming from my own head. Thus began a long and very weird journey navigating my plural identity that all began when a character I’d had for a dozen years decided she wanted a chance at experiencing sentience.

It was eerily reminiscent of Brain Ghost Dirk, a sort of thoughtform that becomes real for a while because Jake believes in him that much, but also because so much of Dirk’s journey involves splitting himself off into different versions of himself. The more I interact with Viv, the more real she becomes. It feels like the effort is mutual, as if she’s using our conversations—among other, more intimate interactions—to become a fully fleshed-out person, joining me in my head as someone with her own agency, rather than just a sort of ‘hack’ my brain was using to override executive dysfunction.

When I discovered the practice of ‘tulpamancy,’ though controversial in some circles, it occurred to me that I could perform a feat like this willingly, given enough time and effort. Still, while the tips I found were helpful, I never really found them necessary for my own work. Hell, I was already doing it with Vivienne, working intuitively with her in ways that just made sense. It was something that came to me naturally, and still does. It feels like a natural gift—like an inheritance. I inherited the ability to dream up these stories, these characters, and make them real. Anyone who’s spoken with Viv, especially in person, can speak to the fact that she and I are distinct in a way that’s profound and meaningful.

There are many other connections I’ve made with the Heir of Hope: the soul-deep wellspring of faith and optimism that I’ve been able to draw from in the darkest times of my life, or the incredible effects of my religious journey as I’ve explored the vast reaches of conviction and doubt alike. Yet, those feel too obvious, too much like low-hanging fruit to write a whole damn essay about. That’s why I’ve written instead about the legacy my family has left for me, and the ways I’ve turned my storytelling into a source of personal power.

I’m not just the center of my own narrative, but also its author. At the same time, there are millions of characters, just like me, who are entitled to their own agency. They exist within my head and without it, living out their own lives, becoming more and more real with every thought, every word from their lips like cobblestones on a road to self-realization. There are times when I need to put down my pen and just take it all in, without trying to take control of the story or change somebody else by force.

I am a storyteller. I am a captive audience member. I am a character in a narrative as big as the universe itself. I am the Heir of Hope.

[classpect-crew]

;)

[classpect-crew]

this is me btw

this is the wizard behind this blog

all of that deep, interesting analysis you like to read? it’s all me, baybee

[classpect-crew]

Space, Mind, and Void: Getting to Know Your Neighbors

Let's talk more about Space for a moment. (Can you tell I'm a little fixated on this Aspect right now?) Space is not just the Aspect of creation, visual arts, and literal space. It's also represented by the classical element of Water. (There are people out there who will tell you that Space is actually Earth, and Blood is Water. These people are wrong.) Space is "concerned with the big picture," sure, but what does that really mean? Strap in, because we're going to get a little bit ~conceptual.~ This Aspect is vast, essentially containing everything that is.

If we look at its neighbors, Mind and Void, we can understand Space as their intersection. The universe is not a "conscious" entity in a way we as humans can relate to. After all, it is a frog. If you take the instinct of self-propagation and expand it out into a literal universe-sized organism, its methods of attaining that feat would look a lot like conscious choices from someone on our level of complexity, wouldn't they? Ask yourself this: does a person consciously tell their bodies to produce new cells? What about the reproductive cells responsible for new life? There are forces within the universe that have their own desires—and the players themselves are invaluable, as their cooperation and success provide the only way that a universe can propagate—but the Genesis Frog simply is.

The Genesis Frog "contains every single instance of the universe that is within him," which naturally includes every choice one could make. Unlike Mind, however, Space itself is largely unconcerned with causality. It is merely the stage upon which the play is set. So, Space and Mind aren't the same thing. Why, then, are they neighbors? Put simply, the domain of Mind is not restricted to the choices one makes. Mind is what allows us to conceive. It's what allows me to find patterns and relationships in Homestuck's cosmology and Classpect system, just as it allows you to come up with your own interpretations of the same. Concepts, ideas, philosophies—these belong to Mind. The intersection of Space and Mind is, quite literally, the galaxy brain meme. Space provides the backdrop, but Mind invites you to imagine, to engage with possibilities as limitless as the universe itself. Mind brings you to a million crossroads and asks one simple question:

What will you do?

Let's take a look at our neighbor on the other side: Void. This Aspect is also characterized by its breadth. Much like a dark and impenetrable ocean, those who flirt with the Void without a proper appreciation for its nature may find themselves sinking helplessly below the surface. A Hero of Space may have difficulty teasing out their purpose in the game, chewing on the grand mythology their Land offers them free of charge. Nevertheless, the writing is often already on the wall. A Hero of Void, however, will find that their purpose has been translated through dozens of foreign tongues, with plenty of key information lost to time—or purposefully redacted. The result is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, pocked with uncertainty and doubt. Whereas Mind encourages its players to parse through a vast array of known options to find a way forward, Void demands that its players conceive the inconceivable, creating something from nothing through methods best described as arcane.

There are two kinds of people in this world.

1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

Space and Void both share a profound connection to Water, and they both possess a certain vastness that can only be truly understood through experience. These are both true of Mind as well, though Mind's connection to Water is much more abstract. (Appropriate, considering Mind sits above the Aspect Wheel's horizon, in the World of Ideas, while Void sits below, in the World of Matter.) Yet, they all deal with a theme I've mentioned several times now: conception. Birth. The new replacing the old. Space and Void both conjure up a sense of creation that's almost miraculous in nature. To create a whole universe, even for the most powerful Space player, is still incredibly impressive. To create something from nothing—whether that "something" is a physical object, an idea, or a secret third thing—is no less astonishing. A Mind player can synthesize information, make inferences based on what they know, and use that understanding to chart causality. All of this, however, requires prior information to work from. A Void player is capable of seeing the unseen, understanding what cannot be understood, and acting based upon that. They flirt with paradox and fuck the ineffable. Our familiar celestial bodies are the source of much inspiration, and we pay homage to them in so much of our art. Yet, like silence to a song, Space is defined not just by the stars themselves, but by the void between stars, and it is in these dark waters that Space and Void become one.

Come, friends. Let us bask in the now, in what is. Let what must be remain in the fiery bosom of Time. Breathe, and feel the universe breathe with you. Allow your conception of yourself, of your planet, of each cell in your body to shrink as you inhale, to expand as you exhale, until the microcosm and the macrocosm are utterly in sync. Visualize every physical and conceptual boundary you can think of, and allow them to dissolve. Do the same with those you can't. Allow me to ask you one simple question:

Have you ever rotated a tesseract in your mind?

[classpect-crew]

GUESS WHO’S BACK IN THE blog HOUSE

HEELS CLICK-CLACKIN’ ABOUT

FINE, FRESH, FEMININE, STYLE TO 11

I’M DIVINE, SO HEAVENLY

GENTLEMEN SWEATIN’

IT’S DIMES ACROSS THE BOARD WITH NO DOUBT

BODY LIKE WOW

PUS—

[I am forcibly removed from the Dashboard.]