Author: phantem421

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Who am I?

Im starting this out by saying this is the hardest post to write because I’m not very good at being vulnerable, But at the same time its a huge part of the reason why i’m struggling so hard with everything right now. I was originally gonna write a light hearted post about the way a video game I was playing could be used as a case study for accessibility but I decided to write this instead.

Basically I’ve been going through a big identity crisis lately and its been hard to find my footing when I don’t even know who I am anymore. I used to be someone who was so sure of who she was, an embodiment of self assurance and confidence not afraid to be different and face the world head on with a smile. Someone who knew everything would be alright in the end because it always had been. Someone who saw her greatest strength was talking to people. Someone who knew what she wanted and had big dreams and aspirations.

But things have changed. for one that girl was 19 the last time she was herself before being told she has to stay inside for a long time. Then out of no where she’s 21 being told she’s a full adult despite feeling like she’s still fresh out of high school. losing two years has also made me lose my grip on time and there are days I have to remind myself that I did actually spend two birthdays in a quarantine and that no I can not call myself a teenager anymore because i’m truly not even though I never fully learned what it means to exist with out the “teen” at the end of my age. Im still grappling with the fact that I’m not in the same position I was in when I entered quarentine. that im closer to the age when my parents got married then I am to when I graduated high School. That im seeing my friends talk about grad school when I still feel frozen in time in my second year of college. I forget that were not the same people we were when this started.

I also lost my Nana this year. I didn’t realize how much her loss would affect me and its really threw me for a loop. I feel like I lost a connection to a large part of my identity when I lost her. She over the years has been the only consistent person of my extended family in my life and also one of the only connections I’ve had to my families history in the past. she was the only one who had the knowledge and was willing to tell me stories about my families heritage and our family in Italy and it has been hard realizing that connection is now gone. Its been weird celebrating holidays with out her, its only been me and my imediate family and it just feels so off.

finally I feel like im stuck in place while everything is moving with out me. It feels like the world is totally different now and I feel differently about it. I feel like im fighting off my apathy with a stick sometimes because everything is moving to fast for me to even try and keep up. I used to see my voice as my biggest strength but recently its been the thing that’s made the most mistakes in my life to the point where I just want to shut up but my brain doesn’t allow it because with out my voice what do I have? I no longer am confident I know what im doing but instead feel myself cracking under the pressure to know what im supposed to do. everything feels like so much I just want it all to stop so I push it all away and sabotage myself. I don’t want to fail but in being too scared to do so I keep myself from succeeding and I dont know what to do.

In this class we’ve talked a lot about embodiment and how we embody our identities in this world but how do you embody something you feel like you’ve lost? even more so how do you embody something you feel like your still trying to find? and most importantly how so you feel like yourself again when you lost so much of who you were?

I miss the person I used to be because right now I feel like a stranger to myself.

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A Diffrent Wavelength

As a kid there was always an internal struggle to operate in a way that others saw as socially acceptable. To be on the same page as everyone else who seemed to have memorized a rule book I never got to read. When I was younger it felt like I was living in someone else’s world, one I couldn’t understand no matter how much they explained it to me. It felt like I was on a different wave length then the rest of the world, like everyone was tuned in to FM radio and I was stuck on AM. We were all on the same channel but I was hearing different music. 

Now that I’m older nothing has changed about the way I see the world but what has changed is the reason why. ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. When I first found out I had it I cried, the word disorder scared me. In my mind if I had a “disorder” and people found out life would be harder, they would look at me different as maybe less or an easy target. As a child I didn’t understand that the way people saw me was already a result of my ADHD and the way it affected every aspect of my life. they called me a crybaby because I felt emotions too strongly and was sensitive to rejection, a key characteristic of rejection sensitive dysphoria a symptom of adhd. I was loud and disruptive because I have trouble with volume regulation. I was lazy because my brain would physically not let me do certain tasks until I did 100 other things first or a deadline was coming up. And I “made everything about me” because relating things to myself was the only way I could understand what was going on in the world around me. But I didn’t know this until I was older.

When I was younger I was told my ADHD was the reason I could not focus and nothing more. I didn’t know it was the reason I could only understand things in school if I related them to TV shows because that’s what I was hyper fixated on, or the reason I would draw in the margins of my papers as a form of fidgeting to help me pay attention. I was told it was just the focusing and I think that’s because that’s what the people telling me this believed because I often got in trouble for these things I couldn’t control. 

People tried so hard to retune my brain to hear the music they heard. To get me on to FM with them and for a while I tried to help them do that. Every time I tried connecting dots in a way I understood I was told “Not everything is about TV try to use real life” even though thinking in references made sense, Every time I got yelled at for drawing on my papers even though I knew if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to focus. But no one believed me and so I started to believe it was my fault . So i so desperately wanted to see the world like they did, to escape the isolation that was a world no one else even tried to understand. No one wanted to try to go to AM so why should I want to stay on it. No one wanted to try and understand me so why I should continue to try to get them too. 

I hated who I was compared to everyone around me, but I didn’t completely hate the way I saw the world. I was always able to look at things with very little judgement because I didn’t understand why I should judge them. When I was happy the feeling was pure euphoria, and that euphoria was easy to get. I was always able to see beauty in things others couldn’t because I didn’t understand why the things were labeled ugly. The way my brain see’s things and the way I exist is truly a gift in my opinion now but a gift that others will never get to understand. When I got older, I started to learn more. Learned that ADHD was a form of neurodivergence, learned that it was more than just focusing issues, learned that all the things about myself that other people deemed socially unacceptable were not my fault and a lot of 

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Fascination with the Disembodied

Faceless content creators Corpsehusband, dream, and Ranboo have gained massive popularity on the internet

disembodied voices have always been something that’s intrigued and maybe  even scared people. One of the earliest examples being the radio show war of the worlds which when first preformed caused panic as they believed that aliens were taking over. From the days of radio to modern day faceless content creators there has always been a particular fascination with the idea of appearance when the connection between voice and body are severed. 

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