Longer About

Name

when I first came out, I chose the masculine version of my deadname and called it a day. around sophomore year of college, I realized that I wanted a name that felt more like me. I decided on Casper after drawing a picture of myself and writing the name all around it to see if it felt right, but I couldn't tell you what drew me to the name in the first place, it was either that or Jasper. I picked the last name Valentine because I celebrate my birthday on Valentine's Day, though my actual birthday is in the fall. I kept the middle name Mario, since it's the masculine version of a familial name shared with my aunts and sister. I wanted to keep some evidence of my Sicilian heritage, turns out that it resulted in my name being wayyyy more Italian than it was before :P

a while back, I looked up if there are any other Casper Valentines out there. one of them is a self-published author that writes in vastly different genres than me and the rest are nonbinary social media users, go figure.

Gender

my gender is yes, but actually no.

okay, but seriously. I kinda hate actually narrowing down my identity to specific labels, which sucks, because I loooove pride flags, especially the ones that closely align with my identity! I use "genderqueer guy" to describe my actual gender and "nonbinary" to describe the category it falls under, though they sometimes gets used interchangeably. if I'm being more specific about it, pangender, xenogender, and genderfluid works. my experience being pangender and genderfluid is directly tied to my plurality and my xenogender is a result of my alterhumanity. I experience androgyny through the lens of being a porcelain doll. one day I'll be able to describe the possible symbolism behind that shit but I don't really know how to yet, I kinda just started existing this way one day and it never changed.

I use he/hym/hys pronouns because I like the sound of he/him pronouns, but I want it to be a little more clear that I'm not a man. I only recently started actually using these pronouns, but I've been calling myself genderqueer for several years and I didn't fit into either binary gender for even longer, despite asserting that I did in order to "pass." I use masculine-leaning terms with some weirdness to it: I'm my girlfriend's boifriend rather than her boyfriend and my aunts call me their niephew. I also use Msc. as an honorific rather than Mr. or Mx... though I settle with one of those two if a form only gives me a dropdown list of options. the inclusion of some queer honorifics always feels pointless when there isn't the ability to write your own.

Sexuality and Relationship Dyamics

given the fact that my gender is really fucky, you can probably guess that my sexuality is also fucky. the best way I'd describe it is gay in every direction—I'm a lesbian for lesbians, gay for gays, and if you're also doing something weird with your gender, we can just get silly with it >:3c

my sexuality and the terms I use for it have shifted a lot over the years, I guess I've always fallen under the bisexual/pansexual umbrella. I do have preferences and they sometimes correlate with genders but the preferences aren't on the basis of gender—I'm really into hairy femmes, big guys, and all things alt. I prefer to call myself gay or a lesbian instead of bi/pan though, not because I don't identify with the terms, but because calling myself bi/pan means that my gender isn't explicitly incorporated into my sexuality. also, it makes exclusionary queers mad if I call myself a fagdyke and I love making exclusionists mad.

at one point I identified with the aro-ace spectrum, first as demisexual and then as something kind of nebulous and unnamed, but now I think those labels are only useful for a specific subset of people and I am not one of them. I don't think there's really a way to quantify my level of romantic/sexual attraction against an allo person's. if I talk with someone all day long and they scratch my back while I drift off to sleep, that's love, and no one really needs to know how or in what ways my sexual attraction leads to something other than thoughts.

I'm polyamorous, though I've only been in polyam relationships where my partner dates someone else/multiple people and I date just them if you don't count relationships I have with one of my other personalities. long before I actually had the polyamorous label, I just could not understand why people around me expected me to have relationship jealousy. I was baffled when my 7th grade boyfriend broke up with me because he cheated on me and shrugged it off when my life coach implied I should've been more bothered by the girl that would throw herself all over my 8th grade boyfriend. when a girlfriend in high school confessed that she had cheated on me multiple times, after I got over the initial confusion as to what she was feeling so guilty about, I told her to just tell me next time, no big deal. that's not to say that polyamorous people can't be cheated on; I've had someone cheat on me with the intent to make me feel bad and it did in fact make me feel bad. it's just that relationship exclusivity has just never been something I felt was necessary for me.

Age

I was a kid in the early 2000s and a teenager in the early 2010s. I never got my license but my dad gave me driving lessons until I got to the point where I drove home from the office park I had been practicing in and decided driving wasn't for me. I've had my first drink, struggled with binge drinking, got sober, developed a healthy relationship with alcohol, and then decided to only have a drink maybe once or twice a year because I hate needing to piss a million times in a row.

I have never really been able to quantify my age with a number, when asked how old I am I often have to quickly do the math in my head. I remember being frustrated that I couldn't go into the play room at my old kindergarten's Halloween party when I was about seven or eight without knowing why, but I also spent most of my childhood being blocked from reading certain YA books by adults who didn't agree that I was mature enough for them. I'm currently developing a more complicated palate after having a lot of difficulty mixing flavors, but I still think that bitter tastes like poison. until I was living in my own apartment, I was stuck with a whole lot of teenage angst and the best I could do with it was tell myself what I should've been feeling instead until I was steady enough to shape myself into the person I wanted to be. now, I learn and grow from things at the speed of a curious child while I (usually) have the thoughtfulness of someone in their 30s-40s.

none of this is related to the ableist concept of a mental age. I just can't think of myself with hard-set labels, including age through a number. I still see myself as an adult and not a young one. when asked how old I am in person, I do the math and keep the philosophical stuff to myself.

Plurality

I have multiple personalities. at one point, I believed that my plurality was purely caused by trauma, though I'm pretty sure I was born plural now. I had to deal with it all for a long time, amnesia and dissociation and trying to manage abruptly blacking out as someone else took control while also blending into society like nothing was wrong. I wasn't very good at hiding it, but other people aren't very good at knowing what it looks like when one person becomes another within the same body, so I got by okay. I probably wouldn't have believed you if you told me I had multiple personalities before I figured it out myself. the best way I can summarize my plurality growing up was that I got accused of doing things I didn't do, and I knew I didn't do them, but the things had been done and there was no one else that could've done them.

in my mind, everyone has "parts," a state of being that changes how you think and act when one is most present or in control. this is not inherently psychological in nature, a part can be a channeled spirit or a thoughtform, though most plurals don't like the word "part" because it's the term medical professionals use to dehumanize us. I get that, I just use the word differently. my parts range in complexity, with the most complex being personalities with their own identities and sense of self (including me) and the least complex being strong emotions that are linked to a certain experience or period of my life. some of my personalities are adaptive to hardship, some are here to help with moral growth, and some are just guys that exist without reason.

losing the dissociatve barriers I used to have between my personalities put me in this weird position where I stopped feeling like I'm sharing my mind and body with a fuckton of people and more like I have a shifting identity that can sharpen into someone else if I want it to. there are a few words to describe this type of plurality but labeling the weirdness limits me and I'd rather just be complicated without naming it. I'm usually presenting as Casper and I become someone else when whatever I'm doing is best experienced in a different headspace—an Easter egg hunt isn't fun if you're not a kid while you do it. at one point, I wanted to be called a collective name when someone wasn't referring to specifically me with they/them pronouns to acknowledge the fact that we were a group of people, but now I'd prefer to be referred to with, y'know, the name I introduce myself as and the only pronouns I say I use. it's a little different with friends in person.

psychiatry and society at large generally believe that parts cannot be their own people in any form and the plural community exists in contrast to this belief, asserting that we are people if we say we are. personally, I don't care how anyone sees me and my status as one personality of many. I have a distinct sense of self and there isn't any way of framing my personhood that would take that away. I think, therefore I am.

Neurodivergence

when I was younger, I used to be really attached to most of my diagnostic labels. I thought they validated the way sense of self is wrapped up in my unconventional thinking and plurality, but the thing is, relying on diagnostic labels for validation meant that a medical provider had to confirm who I am for me to feel confident about it, and if they didn't believe me, then they could just say I'm lying and there was nothing I could do about it. when they did believe me, I ended up with a bunch of different diagnoses that never quite captured who I am, no matter how many I was given. they exist to only highlight my flaws that need "treatment," they can't paint a full picture of my world, in fact they try to limit it! I prefer to call myself neurodivergent and just describe my experiences instead of telling people some shitty label that reduces my natural state of being to disorder.

sometimes, I see objects as living things, like a colorful tarp on a door as a pilgrim with no eyelids—a friend said that'd make her shit bricks, but I just laugh it off before it can freak me out. there's also sounds and voices outside my head at times, like tapping on a window or my girlfriend trying to get my attention from outside my apartment after she was already back home... that one was a little freaky, not gonna lie. as a kid, I saw distinct living things that moved around independent of my environment. some of them were consistent, like a black cat with purple eyes, and I call those ones figments.

in my head, the things I want to say are kind of just scattered collections of words and I have to quickly organize them in the right order as I speak or write them down, usually that just means I put an additive adverb in a weird place, or mix up what tense I'm using in the middle of a sentence, or start a sentence over a couple times before I can get to what I want to say, or start and end a sentence with the same statement twice in different wording. I make a lot of connections when I talk, jumping ahead a few points or linking concepts that are farther apart for most people. that extends to observations about the world, which can be influenced by my anxiety but it's mostly just syncronicity. as a kid, people would act like I was incomprehensible, but as an adult that can speak for myself now, not a single person outside of a doctor's office has a hard time understanding me.

I have a morning routine that makes me feel competent before the day begins but if I try to schedule anything based on what my clock says, I can't get anything done. when time isn't a factor, I get hyperfocused on my task until I feel finished enough to move onto the next thing, so long as I don't try to multitask. I work best if I'm pacing around or at least standing... though I don't call anything I do "work" because it kills my interest in it. I am very focused on keeping my attention span long enough to feel reward, so I try to avoid short-form videos completely. there's a lot of reasons I hate social media, but one of the reasons is that it makes me mindlessly scroll without the possibility of completing anything. basically, I'm taking Vyvanse for a reason and I feel like shit if I waste the focus it gives me on the junk food of activities. I don't view any of that as disability because I don't define disability by how much money one can put in capitalists' pockets ;)

I often drill into a subject I find interesting when it either catches my eye or I've given myself an excuse to research it because it's involved in my writing project, but I have a few topics that I can talk about for a long time whenever they come up again, like narrative adventure games and theme parks. honestly, I'm most passionate about the things I hate that fall in these categories, I could rant about Quantic Dream's garbage video games for far longer than I could gush about Telltale's the Walking Dead. David Cage is my sworn nemesis and I am destined to fight him in mortal combat.

I don't have a lot of vocal range by default, so I have to intentionally give myself more variation in my tone. some people would call this masking but it isn't exhausting or anything, I would rather put a little extra effort into presenting my emotions through my voice than have it be expressionless... jokes land harder if you have a tone while you make them. eye contact doesn't always feel great, but I try to at least look at someone's face while they talk because I feel less connected to a conversation when I don't. small talk is weird, I either talk about normal stuff or I don't talk at all. I express empathy by saying how I relate to something, unless it doesn't seem like a good time to do that. idk what about me gives off bad vibes but sometimes people just get weirdly hostile like I did something offensive when everything I've done seems normal to me.

I'll use the word "mad" for myself in a political sense when it's relevant, but I don't agree with the idea that neurodivergence exclusively refers to things like autism or ADHD because I don't believe there's a meaningful distinction between what makes me have unconventional thinking and what makes me have unconventional socializing skills... or, if there is, it's not something that psychiatry can define. the world I'm striving for is one where there's no DSM and nothing I've described is considered a disorder, just variants in neurotype and/or the result of adverse life experiences.

Disability

I think of my disability as existing in two categories: things that wrap around to being useful once I figured them out and tools to process what's buried underneath. being hard of hearing makes talking to someone on the phone or past a glass window pretty difficult, but it also means that little annoying noises don't send me into a tailspin anymore—what I can't hear can't piss me off~! my partially paralyzed stomach used to mean that I was never able to eat enough food to actually feel full despite my stomach itself feeling full, but I worked my way up in terms of how much I eat in a meal so now I can just have a big breakfast and not have to worry about hunger derailing me from what I want to do for quite a while.

I can't really make anxious mental loops and chronic pain in place of emotions into a positive, but they essentially give me the starting point when I take an edible to work on myself. therapists ain't shit and the only person that knows me well enough to fix my problems is me. if I took a long-term prescription to make my anxiety stop, then I'd lose that starting point. I've tried to take medication to make the chronic pain go away, but every time I get rid of one thing, something new pops up shortly after. my body does what it does for a reason and it's better for me if I work with it to figure out the reason instead of suppressing it. I do take some medications, but they're the things I've been taking for years and I'm not going up on anything ever again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Location

I currently live in a big city within New England. I grew up in a suburbia with very little diversity and never moved until I went to college in another another part of New England that had insanely brutal winters full of icy winds and road salt slop everywhere for months. after I graduated, I moved into my parents' basement for a few months, then subsidized housing for a few years, and then the city with my girlfriend. I appreciate the accessibility of good public transit and being in walking distance of a convenience store, though I wish there was more greenery and less constant light polution.

I used to be of the mindset that I could live anywhere and be happy, but now that I have a community at church, I'm unfortunately stuck renting apartments for way more than they're worth. sucks to suck, I guess!

Education

by the end of high school, I knew I wanted to do art as my career and felt that writing was off the table, so I picked a degree that I thought would allow me to do art without destroying my interest in drawing for fun: Game Art, specializing in 3D animation. when I actually got to college, I quickly realized that I wanted to just be a prop artist instead. I think it lends itself to my interest in collecting things, but I mainly just picked what felt most sustainable for me :'3

the problem is, there are actually very few video games and game studios I feel passionate about, and just prop art only gets you so far if you're not doing weapons. lacking any environmental background and the ability to kiss insane amounts of ass in a cover letter during a massive economic downslide means that I basically got booted out of my field of choice before I could even begin. it's probably better this way, it reminded me that writing is all I ever really wanted to do.

I do miss 3D modeling though, and I learned at the tail end of my last attempt that I do enjoy making environment, just not the kind the game industry cares about. one day I'll get back to it C:

Passion

at one point, I tried calling writing my job, and while I do consider it of equal importance to a career, I just can't call anything I do a job without hating it. whenever I say "passion" over hobby, this is what I mean.

throughout my entire childhood, I was writing original fiction. when I was younger, it was all fantasy, and then it shifted more towards speculative fiction with an empahsis on fantasy, and then I got caught up in fiction about mental health stuff I was dealing with that I could never get quite right, and then I dropped writing completely in college. I had ideas for the characters I'd reuse in new ways floating around, but I never put pen to paper until a few years after I graduated, when I had a dream that I was one of my characters going through a psychotic break during college. I woke up thinking, "I bet I could use unreliable narration to convey psychosis as Tyler experiences it," and wrote a 45 page short story within three days.

after I finished the story, which ended on sort of a cliffhanger, I was hungry to write more about Tyler, but I thought the shift between his experience in college and, uh, [the apocalypse], was too tonally different to make work. then I was like, fuck it, and found a way to make it work.

I have a lot going on in my stories, but I think the core thread for all of them is use of unreliable narration to convey the emotional and psychological state of the main characters, with only hints of "reality" for the reader to piece together while the POV has their own version of events. I write character-driven stories without central antagonists or overarching parts, just moments of people living their lives in a way that adds up to a narrative. a lot of the things I wrote as a kid were very trauma-dump adjacent, and something that's meaningful about the things I write now is that, while there is still trauma, the focus is more on the feelings about the trauma and the aftermath—grief, resilience, and growth. and of course, it's all very, very queer.

every writer puts some of their lived experience in their work, but for me, there's something especially literal about it. my characters are also parts, though in terms of complexity, I would put them only just above the least complex parts I have. they have their own stories and internal experiences, but they will never control my body, we can't chat with each other, and I can change things in their lives to fit the narrative better without much conflict, so long as it stays true to who they are. the things my characters consider home (not always a place) often feel like home to me and while I don't really see myself as the main character in my works, I often feel like they're my close friend. when I write a first draft, I'm often seeing the story play out in a kind of world inside my head and just translating it to text, sometimes there's more thought to it but other times it's like automatic writing.

Hobbies

I have a constant drive for creativity, but outside of writing speculative fiction, what I do with that creativity shifts around a lot. I need to feel like there's a purpose to what I make and if there's not enough of a challenge, I get bored. it takes a hot minute for me to figure out how to stop being bored, so I get artblock a lot. I do digital art, both 2D and 3D, when it's 2D it's usually pixel art and when it's 3D it's usually prop/environment art. poetry, autobiographical stuff, and blog posts scratch the writing itch when I want to work on something that isn't my main project for a minute. I also view working on my website as a creative outlet, closer to the writing side of things but more its own separate category. it's easier to get into writing and coding than it is to get into drawing.

my creativity extends to video games. there's not a whole lot of games I like, I'm obsessed with narrative adventure games but the only games I'll come back to again and again are games where I can actually make something interesting. most days end with me playing Minecraft with my girlfriend, usually after we watch something with dinner. at one point I was very into Youtube, but I'm pivoting more towards actual TV shows again because I can't really stop myself from watching funny videos that aren't meaningful enough to stick in my mind after they end.

I collect stuff, mostly plushies. I used to grab whatever looked cute to me, but now that I don't have as much space in my new apartment, I'm trying to only grab unique plushies with something interesting going on—and no massive glassy eyes, I fuckin hate Beanie Boos and anything that looks like them. classic Webkinz are my favorite ones to collect, though many of the ones I want now are expensive, and I'm not gonna spend a hundred bucks on a stuffed animal that'll just sit on a shelf looking cool. outside of plushies, I have lots of art on my walls, enamel pins, smaller toys, sculptures, crystals, books, and miscellaneous trinkets. most of my favorite things are from an independent artist or a thrift store and that's what makes them special to me. people who collect overpriced luxury goods are suckers.

I read on-and-off, but it's similar to artblock in that getting bored makes me put down whatever book I was reading and not pick any back up for a looong time. I mostly like reading fiction anthologies because I can feasibly sit down and complete an entire story in one sitting. at this point in my life I don't have any interest in reading fiction by people who aren't trans, disabled, and/or POC, but I'll read any non-fiction that talks about something I'm interested in and doesn't feel like a slog.

Politics

I think that someone's ability to live a good life shouldn't be tied to their ability to work. society should be equitable for everyone and there's no tolerance for intolerance. in the ideal world where those things are standard, I also think there shouldn't be a State, just departments that manage things like public health and infrastructure while the rest is left up to the people. the thing I'm most passionate about is prison abolition, which extends to the abolition of police and psychiatry, so I'd probably call myself a prison abolitionist first and an anarcho-socialist second. one of the reasons I only call myself "mad" when it's relevant is because mad pride can be separated from prison abolition and I want psychiatry abolished because all forms of the carceral system are unacceptable, not just when the punitive measures happen to people whose only crime was acting crazy.

I've had people tell me I need to be realistic with my political beliefs and to be frank, I am under no illusion that I'll live to see the world I want to exist. that doesn't mean there's no point in theorizing what it should be like and working towards it. I don't have all the answers but I know we can do better.

Religion

I'm a Unitarian Univeralist, which is a multifaith religion that believes there is no right way to believe. that doesn't mean you can believe in anything, there's just shared values we live by rather than a dogma or strict religious text. I go to a church led by an agnostic minister and mostly hang out with the Pagans and atheists, but personally, I don't define my religious beliefs with any specific framework. y'all know I love describing things instead of coming up with a specific name for them!

the thing that drove me to becoming a UU was a near-death experience in college, where I felt God's presence as a light behind my head. I think that God is a spiritual force rather than some kind of guy-in-the-sky that you can pray to. it's the universe, the spirit of life, love, fate, and all that connects us to each other. I do pray, but I don't ask for miracles, it's more about completely connecting to the universe for a moment in time. I don't believe in coincidences and I make better decisions when I trust the signs that God gives me, either through my dreams or in the world around me. I also experience precognition through my writing, but it's specifically about my future emotional moments/growth rather than literal events.

I don't know if there's an afterlife, it'd be nice if there's place where I can finish my unfinished work in some way after I die but I can't know what that place will be like. I certainly don't believe in Hell or divine punishment, which is a core UU belief. one thing I'm confident about is the continued existence of a soul after death, at least in some form. a living thing can die but its presence cannot, and sometimes it makes its presence known through small signs that you'll miss if you don't have faith in something.

I believe in the existence of alternate timelines, though it's a little different than just the idea of a multiverse. there are timelines that branch whenever someone or something makes a meaningful conscious choice rather than it being anything goes. I won't deny the potential existence of a multiverse where any reality is possible, I just only believe in things I've had personal experience with or can actually conceptualize. thinking about a reality where everyone is a sentient slug just registers as fiction in my head, but I can easily grasp a reality where I made different decisions.

my church is my primary community. it's the place where I'm surrounded by queer people who don't conform to what a Christian-dominated culture agrees is a real religion. I can talk about my unconventional beliefs without having to frame it in relation to an Abrahamic faith for people to get it and I don't ever have to deal with some edgy atheist telling me that I'm stupid for believing in anything but science textbooks that try to write me out of existence. my church is my home and there isn't anywhere else like it.

Fun Facts

I was fluent in Spanish as a child, but I stopped taking lessons around third grade and lost a lot of it. I'm relearning it again now, and while I still get choked up trying to speak it and have a hard time understanding it when spoken fast, I'm pretty decent at reading and writing it. I'm at the point where I'm struggling with intermediate stuff and sometimes feel like I lost the skill I had at the start, but the beginner skills are now so intuitive that I have dreams in Spanish at times, so I think I'm probably doing alright.

I have a weird amount of control over my body. I can fully block off my nose without pinching it shut, meaning I don't even get the back-of-throat smell when I blocked it to avoid something gross. it's the same skill I learned to stop myself from sneezing, because I used to be so socially anxious that I couldn't even handle the attention of being told "bless you" in a crowded room. I had this trick I could do with my lungs as a kid that dropped me to the bottom of the swimming pool in an instant and I only realized in my early 20s that this is something freedivers do. in adulthood, I learned how to change where my feet hit the ground first when I walk to give me time to pause in case I felt my dog's paw underfoot before I fully stepped down... and yet when my girlfriend painted the walls and told me to be careful not to touch them, I literally could not stop bumping into them. I'm sure some of my chronic pain is the result of all this. I have the swiftness and precision to fucking obliterate a fruitfly that landed on the wall, but not without it hurting my hand and getting my muscle knots in my arm for the rest of the day.

I type really fast, to the point where people used to comment on it when I was a kid all the time and I found it insanely annoying. I learned how to type fast without looking at the keyboard through Garfield's Typing Pal, a brutally unforgiving typing game that I was required to complete levels in before I could do fun things. because I learned how to type based based on muscle memory rather than looking at the keys, I can pretty quickly map it onto any keyboard that uses the QUERTY format (including touchscreens). my girlfriend has a programming degree and I type faster than her.

I have a standing desk and generally only sit down to eat, be in a vehicle, or end the day. at this point, I am so hardwired to stand or pace around as I do stuff that I get a drowsy if I sit for longer than like, 30 minutes. there are certain things that I have a hard time getting into unless I'm moving around while I do it, like writing. I do edit my work on a computer, but almost all my writing happens on my phone... this is what I mean when I say I type really fast, becuase hoo boy would it suck to try to write a novel on your phone if you didn't type fast.