Alterpathy: The practice of identifying, categorizing, and identifying with fictional and imagined illnesses due to a disconnect between your external and internal understanding of yourself - while also not intending to appropriate, romanticize, or cause harm to a minority group.
this is going to be a really long post because i want to cover all the basics. future coinings will not be nearly as long.
- identifying, categorizing, and identifying with: making flags, coining terms, and posting about your experience. alterpathic conditions can also be divided into a couple of categories, which are detailed later in the post.
- disconnect between your external and internal understanding of yourself: for some reason, even though you're aware that this isn't how conditions that affect the body work, you experience a reoccurring condition that is serious to you. this can be because of atypical dysphoria, delusions, alternate beliefs, delusions, or anything else similar.
- appropriation, romanticism, causing harm: this doesn't mean that actions you take are automatically excused of harm, but it's a silent agreement and nodding between yourself and others that you're not trying to come from a place of ableism/bigotry.
- ignoring/excusing bigotry: examples of ignoring/excusing bigotry would be implying that someone can "coin" a real mental illness/other condition in the same way you can coin a gender, implying you can "transition" into a congenital condition with subliminal videos or otherwise, and anything else that goes against science's understanding of illness and neurodivergence. there's nuance to this, of course, because the psychology field isn't an absolutely perfect field that can do no wrong - it's up to the person coining/the person identifying to look at the situation and act accordingly.
examples of situations that might bring you to identify this way:
- being a fictive/kin/introject/etc of a character who had a disease or type of injury that was invented for their media, like zombie diseases, cyberbrain cclerosis, the cutie pox, hanahaki disease, etc, and feeling affected by it in any way
- experiencing something in your system's headspace that's like a reoccurring illness
- having limbs like wings, tails, horns, etc in your headspace with some kind of damage to them that causes you phantom discomfort
- feeling anxiety/frustration because you're experiencing something on a metaphysical level which you know your physical body isn't experiencing, but it's still very serious to you and possibly even hurting your quality of life
grammar:
- alterpathy: 1) the practice of naming/making flags/categorizing these, "here's my mogai blog and here's my alterpathy blog"; 2) this kind of condition. "my depression and my alterpathy make it hard for me," "i might have an alterpathy but i'm not sure"
- alterpathic: descriptor that describes these conditions. "it's alterpathic," "how to cope with alterpathic..."
inspiration and some context on why we're coining this
this was largely inspired by the r*dqueer term of x*nomalady, because after the system looked into it, we did see a lot of cases of people who were genuinely experiencing something serious, but didn't seem to think that there was any space other than the rqc that would be accepting of someone identifying with a disease that technically didn't exist. these cases were mixed in with genuinely ableist people who displayed the behaviors i listed above in "ignoring/excusing bigotry," which feels wrong to me, and i think that people who aren't intending to harm anyone deserve their own terminology and space.
crossover
there is some crossover with dissodic, desirdae, intusui, ethix +etc good faith terms related to feeling like you have, internally have, desire, or identify with something you technically don't, and i think that's fine. you can identify with an alterpathic term and the equivalent of it in another term umbrella, that's fine. do whatever fits best to describe your experiences.
so, is this just x*nomalady but Good?
not exactly, i don't want this to be thought of as a 1-to-1 anti rq equivalent, because again, some x*nomalady people are just coining """disorders""" for fun because they think you can do that in the same way you would a gender. this is both an identity/experience, and a silent agreement to be critical of what you're putting out into the world. this is also not focused on "coining" new conditions unless that's really necessary. (not necessary = making up a new illness for funsies. necessary = putting a name to a reoccuring condition you've been experiencing in headspace, etc.)
in the same way that terms like dissomei and intusui aren't 1-to-1 tr*nsid but Good and are separate term umbrellas that have their own nuances and notes, this is a good-faith alternative for people genuinely experiencing this kind of thing.
can i coin my own?
yes, this is open to everyone to coin! though, i will be posting a couple of flags for some alterpathic things in a couple of days, so you might want to wait until those come out so you can see how i format the post.
TDLR: considering yourself to have a condition that's not possible in reality because of some internal identity, but not in a fashion where you ignore/excuse bigotry.
can i post this term on…
- wiki/term definition sites: yes, and you don't have to ask, but i would like to be informed.
- pinterest/other social medias: no, never, i'm not comfortable with someone else posting my term for me.
subtypes:
when a different self began working on this, he set out two subtypes of alterpathic condition. unlike something like the age ratings in nichelink, these are absolutely optional, and you don't have to include these in your term definition if you don't want to/don't find it useful. but i think that if you're like me and like lots of details, these could be appealing, so i will include what he wrote:
Fiction-based.
This is aimed at conditions that are established some way in a work of fiction/media, such as:Hanahaki Disease Slender Sickness Radiation Sickness (as seen in the Fallout series, not the IRL version)
Environment-Based.
Specific conditions that you can recognize are happening because of things already in your environment, like trauma, alterhuman labels, existing neurodivergent symptoms like delusions, and so on.<br>
As an example, I'll mention the specific thing one of the alters in my system has that inspired me to make this subtype. He is a fictive of an angel character, but from my perspective it is vary obvious that his wings don't work and cause him muscle cramps in our headspace as a metaphor for an injury we had when were a child that gave us severe muscle cramps and required extremely painful and traumatizing physical therapy. That's something that was in our environment, so I'd call it environment-based.
Subtypes are an optional category though, and you might not be able to decide/understand if yours fits into one or both, and that's fine.<br>
Also, I acknowledge that just two subtypes might not be enough to cover all the bases, and also there are probably tons of conditions that fall into both or inbetween, and that's fine. I want to "cross that bridge as we come to it", and let people who identify with this tell me their thoughts about what other words need to be coined.
this post was written mostly by nichie.