our littlespace!

2022 12 17

content warnings

swear words, stereotypically young children stuff, mention of trauma, caregiving little dyanmic

This is the most excited we've been to write weblog in a long time! Maybe ever.

In mincy's whoami, she puts in it that they are 18, but also sometimes 3! this made us realise, this isn't on our own identity webpage!

We think adding this to our website is really good for us! and we wanted to talk about what our littlepsace is like, and what it is!

writing excitement!

there is a bit of a disconnect from how we write and how we decorate our website; writing is hard and feels like it is a representation of who we are, rather than exactly who we are, as is the case for our images, and styling.

we think this is largely because of how our brain thinks about website, and how we visualise it. we think it is also because our IDE is very coding focused, and not very writing focused! we think we'd probably write a lot more accurate to ourselves if the boilerplate was handled by the IDE and or if we could see our text in a context like it will look like after viewing in a browser!

for now, though, best we can do is try and visualise these things and our words into something concrete, and special, and, right now, it totally feels like we can do that! it's a little hard, and scary, but we can do it!

Visualising our environment is really important to us, and being able to manipulate a visualisation in our head is powerful, and let's us assign exciting and important visualisations to important things! like, our room! when we have high spoons, we can visualise all the things we want to decorate in our room, and when we have low spoons, we cannot imagine a living space, since most of our time is spent on computer, and because real life elysia room isn't exciting at the moment!

part of enjoying writing is also remembering how to write in ways we like :) no intros! no abstractions! just elysia. talking to and reading mincy's page we think is helping us write and think in healthy ways when we aren't talking to people, and helping us be creatively stimulated! good things!

littlespace!

littlespace, for us, is, age regression! age regression is, when we feel younger than our body's physical age! littlespace is when we feel thoroughly like a little, and, in other words, a kid.

what a "kid" means to us is whatever the ages our littles feel like they have. across our entire system, we think the age range for our littles is 3 years old to 16! we've noticed that, most littles are 14 or less, though, just some of them are a slightly older.

some system members in our system are fluidly little, meaning they switch between being regressed and not regressed. most of the time we are in littlespace, though, is when exclusively little system members are fronting, meaning they are only ever little, never big!

littlespace is really special! it's, it is almost always accompanied by not being able to mask, so we don't have the associated suffering from masking when we're little, and can do things that we want!

our emotions feel amplified and far stronger when we are in littlespace (maybe due to not masking!), and, we think depending on age, being little also changes our abilities and interests!

we wanna make it clear, that, at least for us, being little isn't a choice, or something we do intentionally. we think this is not true for some people, and so being little for them may be more similar to roleplay we think. for us, it is absolutely not roleplay, and being little is a very genuine expression of our psychology!

being in littlespace feels healing, and like a neccesary part of our lives, in order to be happy and healthy!

what it's like being little!

entering littlespace is usually triggered by something, like a sentence, feeling, fear, or even being high. some times, we just are little, though!

being little, in addition to not masking, also seems to have really strong trauma blocking! so, if we're hurting, being in littlespace can help us regain spoons without being forced to continue suffering. it is possible for this barrier to break, and, everything feels horrible when that happens, due to having amplified feelings. feeling hurt while little feels so much more intense than when big!

when we are little, not masking lets us focus so much more on our interests, and doing things that feel special to us. we stim a lot more when we are little, for example! and a lot more enthusiastically, too! being little may also give us more executive function than when big, maybe because of more stronger desire to engage with special things and being more focused on that.

we do our best to do self care always! even when not little. we think that being little helps enable us to do self care! that recovery and healing stuff!

how it feels in the moment to be little has, historically, felt euphoric and dysphoric, simultaneously.

we feel euphoria for how much we feel like us, and also because of the happiness that comes from the feedback loop of doing things that make us happy! dysphoria comes from our body not matching our felt age. mainly, our height, thigh size, and breast definition, cause dysphoria for some littles if they're age is before or during puberty (they aren't at all upsetting for adult elysia!).

to try and manage dysphoria, we try to focus on our actions, and to dress up in affirming clothing that helps hide what we feel dysphoric about. big elysia likes to keep track of what clothing hides our boobies so our littles can put them on without needing to suffer through trying on clothes to find out theirselves 😊!

we also do things like draw how we want to look like so we can at least express that tangibly, and that helps us deal with dysphoria too, at least temporarily.

dress up in general is really special to littles, and also big headfriends for us. we don't think all of us share it or not, although maybe we all do share dress up interest. we only acknowledged it is an interest, probably a special interest, a couple weeks ago, so we don't know if it is universal yet!

we think very young littles generally like poofy and pastel colours in physical presentation, and like round and messy hair. older littles feel more comfortable with large variety! this isn't a perscriptive definition, just from general obersvation! it's okay for elysia littles to try new things and learn more about theirselves, always :)

we really like sharing physical closeness affection and intimacy with people we love and trust when we're little (although also this could be how we would be normally without masking! don't know!). things like being held, biting, cuddling, holding hands; all kinds of things. being taken care of and treated like a little makes us feel really happy and good, too! it makes us really happy. caregivers are extremely special people to us when we are little!

when we're really little we struggle speaking and communicating sometimes, sometimes not. we think that's a good thing :) being non-speaking is good! also! we are very sensitive. we think we're so cute!!!

especially recently, most time we've been littlespace has been very young littles, and we've begun learning about things that they really like! cats are a big one, they love cats so much, maybe as a way to manage trauma and negative stuff. really really love thinking about cats. cats are really big to littles!

room decorating stuff, too. very little system members want soft pretty colours that stimulate our brain surrounding us. this is usually white and pastel pink or other pastels, but we think our littles are also beginning to like royal blue and purple. maybe green and orange too. room decorations are stuff like squishy things that we can play and cuddle with, like bean bag chairs (we call these squishy chairs or soft chairs) and blankies and rugs. They've also been thinking a lot about wall decorations and specially shaped furniture. we really love open, clear floor space, but also feeling enclosed, so maybe we could get furniture that has legs so that the floor under it is still accessible , while still enclosing us! legged furniture would probably also make us feel smaller 🤭

we'd be happy to do this! big elysia would be okay with this, too, although we would definitely want less important furniture to be darker colours! thinking big fluffy pink and white pastel bed sheets and a black or dark purple side table.

soft friends (our stuffies!) are really important to our littles. a little started crying when thinking about the ones they lost, yesterday. they're really important!!!! they help littles, and rest of elysia, feel safe, comfortable, loved, and littles also like playing with them! they're friends, soft friends 💖

broadly, we love cute and soft things when really little. and we think our interests change as what we idenitfy as those change! this isn't, totally accurate, but we think it is at least partially true and it makes sense to us :)

in general, getting down little interests is tough cus, they aren't, entirely consistent, or universal! and that is really okay, and even good! this is a summary, and being little is a very special thing, that, cannot be condensed into a summary cleanly. that's okay!

god, being earnest and autistic is so fucking cute.

recently, our littles have learnt about adult pacifiers, which are different from other pacifiers because they don't hurt big teeth! they also learned about paci decoration a LOT and that makes us really excited :) we wanna get them and ourselves a paci or two and they decorate them in extremely special ways. actually, we wanna decorate all of our things in special ways. just need more stickers and ways to draw and paint! more crafts are awesome

we've been thinking about making a holiday crafts project and it's really exciting! gosh! it's so exciting.

there are so many gorgeous paci things online and it has been incredibly stimulating for us creatively and it's really exciting! wwe love this so much [etsy link]

there are a lot of other things like pacis like stim toys that we're learning about and making us reeally happy but we wanna stop writing :) cat ears are probably included

fluidity

at the beginning of weblog, we said that, little elysia have specific age range and we think we used words that make it sound like it's rigidly and clearly defined! this isn't true! just like interests, those aren't perspective words, and are just to try and help a reader understand what we mean!

entering and exiting littlespace is extremely fluid, and there are no clear lines where one thing starts and another ends, including age, interests, and actions.

mommey elysia!

in addition to having littles, we are also very maternal, and we love the feeling of helping someone intimately and teaching them things and stuff like that. people who are little we think actively make us feel maternal and want to be caregiving, but, the happy feeling that comes from being caregiving can still happen even when taking care of an adult we love. it's just adults do not make us feel as maternal in the first place, so we need to let ourselves be caretaking consciously!

we're writing this weblog with mommey feelings, and so we know who we are and know how and what we want to write! sweet, gentle, and in an accessible and non-stigmatising way. we think partly why we struggle writing for website, is because it's hard to identify who we are! what perspective we are writing from, who is fronting, how we wanna articulate.

sometimes we can feel maternal and little simultaneously! we think that's really cute when that happens.

we should look for other plural personal websites and see what they're like, maybe we can steal some ideas that help us feel more happy and enthusiatic! and healthy.

end

might revisit this later when we have some special little things and when we wanna write more or are little :)

didn't even get to talk about how significant being little is to us!!!! or how often we are little /positive