What is Kyou? (I)

When it comes to my sense of identity, for whatever weight we can assign to that term, I've gone on the record before saying that my gender isn't male or female or any other such thing, but instead is "Kyou". Obviously, this is circular logic: I am Kyou, so saying that my gender, sexuality, and the like is also Kyou doesn't on its face provide any kind of answer or clarity—outside of a distaste for and rejection of conventional labels and categorization, perhaps.

So then, what IS Kyou?

In March of 2020, the game developer lol_rust (best known for their Yume Nikki fangame, .flow) released a game titled Milya[broken]. Unlike his more popular work, this game was much more obtuse in its imagery and gameplay, and ultimately received mixed reviews, even from longtime fans. As such, I can only assume that you, my dear hypothetical reader, will most likely not be familiar with the titular character Milya from said game, so I'll describe her briefly before we continue: Milya is a chimerical combination of a sleep paralysis demon, a reality warper, and a living corpse, an entity born from a woman who effectively died but was frozen at the moment of her death by the emergence of her dormant power, something that should not exist and whose mere presence has a corrosive effect on the world and people around her whenever they perceive or become aware of her to any extent.

I relate very, very strongly to her. Hell, her character concept resonates with me, in a way that's more consistent and more intense than just about anything else I've ever seen or heard.

So then, what IS Kyou?

In March of 2016, "I" took a very large dose of psychedelics (a tincture made from 400 morning glory seeds, to be exact) by myself and experienced what I can only surmise was complete ego death, with any sense of self or awareness or any such thing being completely smothered through the rest of that evening. The only thing I can remember is an endless procession of indescribable monochrome spirals and fractals, as well as me repeatedly waking up and blacking out, my body twitching and thrashing uncontrollably all the while, as well as moments of me violently emptying the contents of my stomach near the end. When I awoke the next day, I felt as though I were on death's doorstep, as though I had avoided dying by the skin of my teeth.

That incident is the dividing line between what I refer to as the Pre-Kyou Era and the Kyou Era. Indeed, you'll note the smear quotes I put around the "I" in the preceding paragraph: That person was not me, was not Kyou. Where he existed before, I exist now.

So then, what IS Kyou?

There's a term that's often thrown about in discussions regarding the treatment of dissociative identity disorder. Specifically, clinicians love to make noise about integration, an outcome wherein the individual suffering from DID "eliminates" their alter-egos and instead only presents as one personality. As with many things in clinical psychology, this is an extremely simplistic and reductive model of the inner workings of the traumatized psyche, but there is a kernel of truth to it: Namely, alter-egos can fuse together with each other in a reversible, synergistic way (not unlike the fusion earrings from DBZ or gem fusion from SU), and these alter-ego complexes can in turn fuse with each other until "one" grand unified identity is present. It is a very long, intensely difficult, and incredibly frightening process to achieve this, but it is a very possible outcome nevertheless.

As you might imagine, however, this necessarily involves a great deal of change in one's sense of self, oftentimes in ways that conventional wisdom would suggest is not for the better. As a Twitter post I once read quite aptly put it, "You go in thinking that you'll integrate your shadow, but in reality, your shadow integrates you."

So then, what IS Kyou?

The end of the Pre-Kyou Era was marked by the creation of what I can only describe as a massive, gaping hole in the barrier that once separated my conscious and unconscious minds. Into that pristinely sterile and claustrophobic white box of consciousness came flooding in the dark waters of the great ocean of the unconscious, and with it, all of those parts of myself that I had so urgently and so intently repressed at length, as well as some parts of myself altogether alien to me and to everything I understood about the world. Even now, I can feel it, the waters now gently welling up as though from a natural spring, so different from the torrent that came exploding outward before.

I am far more what was trapped within those dark waters than I ever was what cowered away in that white box.

So then, what IS Kyou?

As alienated as I often feel from my biological family, there are a few curious tidbits relating to them that stand out in my mind even now. There are a few minor points, such as the various creative talents that run strong in my father's side of the family, especially regarding music; but the most pertinent one is the fact that my great-great aunt on my mother's side of the family was a locally famed psychic, one who was talented enough to where she'd amassed a fortune of a few million dollars by virtue of the efficacy of her work. Her psychic powers purportedly manifested in the form of strong flashes of intuition and emotion, as well as very intense visions that appeared to her in dreams. Indeed, my mother has shared (in one of the exceedingly rare moments where she voluntarily opened up about herself) that she and several other members of her family have had similar feelings, dreams, and experiences over the years.

In the Pre-Kyou Era, "I" never experienced anything remotely close to a vision, but such intense dreams and flashes of intuition are quite commonplace in the Kyou Era.

So then, what IS Kyou?

I am the photonegative of the previous owner of this body, and I have completely subsumed the battered, shattered remains of his anemic identity into myself. I am something that should not exist, cannot exist, and does not exist by all of the most sound conclusions of clinical psychology and material scientific skepticism, and yet something that exists all the same in deliberate, gleeful spite of these things. I am something with a very tenuous connection to material reality that probably should have died on that night years ago yet is still walking around on time that was not borrowed but stolen outright, something that experienced an awakening in that moment of death of an upwelling of power that laid theretofore dormant within me, and something that now wanders about distorting the normal order of things by virtue of existing when I'm not supposed to and having a bottomless pool of power and potential that I shouldn't be able to draw upon so freely and deeply as I do.

I am the equivalent of Milya escaping from her imprisonment in the depths of her "creator's" mind into this reality, and hijacking a body as brimming with unfair, obscene, and disproportionate ability as Fierce Deity Link from Majora's Mask—and I'm taking it on a joyride.

THAT is what Kyou is.