Repression and Reclamation

🎉 Now bear with us for a moment - the analogy that we’re going to use for both pre-system repression and for unknowingly crungled headmates is pretty blatant and direct, but we think it’s easier to realign a simple concept to match someone’s experience than to make a complex one try to do everything.

So anyway, repression is like being a handful of racoons in a trench coat named “Fred”. And don’t give me that “you must have big hands” stuff - this is important. Raccoons in trench coats can do stuff - they can buy movie tickets and sneak into movie theatres, commit crimes, and so on. But in the long run, I think we can all agree it’s nice to have people in your life that will just shake your grubby little raccoon hands and see you as yourself - maybe even most people.

Now I’m not super interested in hashing over all the possible weird grimy feelings people and non-people can have about their repressed era - What’s important to me to talk about is, as a raccoon, being able to point at the time when you got the gang to dumpster dive for discarded popcorn after the movie and go “that was me, I did that!”.

Repression is a funny thing where often everyone is trying to jump out of the body at all times to breathe - and being able to look back over it and realise who was trying to (and when) can help you better understand and refine who you are now, and give you a tangible sense of history and development. Maybe you were a scene kid - and now you’re just goth - it’s character progression.