A History Without Demanded Disclosure
The boundary column also has to be understood through healing pace. My path can heal. It’s not tossing in the towel and saying “I can’t do this anymore.” I even wrote in the aforementioned “Healing from Trauma” paper that I am taking that middle path to recovery: not perseverating on it and making it worse, and not attempting to forget it from my life. However, the big, important takeaway is that I am interacting with it intentionally and at my own pace.
Others bringing up these topics or referring to me as these terms, even if unintentionally, is not respecting my pace of healing. No one would help me by starting a dialog on these subjects because they are listed in my pronoun page. It might be even worse if they did so, because then I know they read to avoid the terms and then purposefully approached me with the same terms that I publicly stated are bad for me. Again, I can heal at my own pace. Someone asking me about them out of the blue is not encouraging that healing.
The yellow and red topics are probably all of the categories named: things I dislike, things that trigger me, things that derail me, things that feel unsafe. Some might lean heavier to any individual category, but others may be mixes of all of them. For example, the terms that refer to polyamory will derail me. I’ll fixate on that term being used, and especially if I was included in that term, even just an avoid term rather than never, since the never ones are the worst, I will spiral mentally. Internally, of course, and I won’t be able to process that emotion for quite some time, usually after the conversation has gone by. And I’ll have intrusive thoughts replay it later in that day, or weeks later, months, who knows.
@katsumi_maki
Words
Group terms
- trio
- triad
- gang
- polycule
- throuple
- threesome
- honey in the middle
Content boundaries
- SA/harassment
- Self-harm
- Kissing
- Assumed consent; no confirmation
- Orgy/Threesomes+
- Gore/Blood
- Pedo
- R34 of any fandom except anime
But it’s something I have coping mechanisms for, and some are more successful than others. Many of them need a certain space or item or whatever to let me use them to get through it. It might be a favorite song, or a cartoon, or not even a distraction but possibly me addressing my emotions by writing thousands of words in a research paper. The “Healing from Trauma” paper was written in a matter of a few days. I jokingly called it an “emergency research paper” because I already had a paper that was ready to go out that month, but this one took priority and I had only started it from some triggering conversation. Writing it was my way of coping, and I’m glad I wrote it because I was able to see how far I’ve come.
I would hope people would assume all items in the final column are serious, and in my best interest I think I’d like to keep my conversations about them as one-way. That I can write about them in a research paper, post it online, quite brave of me, I suppose, and then just have it be left at that. If they were a super good friend, they would get away with a little more, but those are also the relationships that can hurt you the worst, so I’m not sure what I would do about that little gamble.
@katsumi_maki
Words
Content boundaries
- SA/harassment
- Self-harm
- Kissing
- Assumed consent; no confirmation
I have developed redirecting techniques when the conversation takes turns that I don’t want to go down. I am able to respectfully turn it away or mitigate any of the worst effects of that type of conversation. To approach with caution well means asking if I’m okay with talking about something and listening to how deep I want to take the conversation rather than confronting me with issues and demanding answers.
There may be a gentler way to ask about the red/yellow boundary column, but only if the person is close. Even if they are close, I will redirect them to do their research beforehand on my website. I have written about a lot of these issues I’ve had and even begun to heal from, such as the “Healing from Trauma” paper I keep talking about. I will address these topics in my own time, with intent and care. I do not want them dumped on me because someone is curious or wants to get to know me better. Putting that in my face without reading what I’ve already released is asking me to take off a bandaid and reopen a wound because they weren’t there to see me fall and hurt myself in the first place.
If they were there, then I apologize for not being brave enough to send them the research paper I wrote about them years after everything happened. But I was brave enough to write it, so please read that first and if they have any remaining questions, we will cross that bridge when we get to it. If we get to it. I need my time, my space, even if I’m bad at asking for it in the moment.