The Problems With Decay.
Sometimes, shit from fictionbased identities (or other alterhuman identities involving memories/noemata!) sticks. Memories, noemata, trauma responses, other things ingrained into your being--it's hard to break old habits. Especially if they're rooted in avoiding disastrous outcomes. It might be easier for some to move on, harder for others. There's plenty of people who aren't affected much by things that happened in their memories--other times it really sticks hard, and finding ways to navigate those things can be tricky. Sometimes, because of that, in your current body/brain/life or whatever framework you use, you have to find ways to make accomodations for yourself.
I'm a fableing (a sort of grey-area between fictive and fictionkin in a median system) of Tomura Shigaraki, from My Hero Academia. For people who don't know, in source, Shigaraki has a power that enables him to basically turn anything he touches with all 5 fingers of his hands to dust. Which, yeah, great for getting rid of problems (and people)! Not too great when it's not a thing you can simply turn off. Any thing I would touch, at all, would dissolve out of my control. If I touched it--even accidentally--with all 5 fingers of one hand? Gone. Can't do shit about that once it happens, there's no way to stop it. Many an accident happened.
Ignoring any specific events that happened in source canon... Even back then, there were absolutely things I didn't want to destroy. I had to be careful how I held things, careful how I interacted with people (if I didn't intend to kill them), careful of every movement I made. Hold a burger wrong? Well, lunch is gone now. Accidentally stumble a little and my hand reflexively touches someone to steady myself? They're gone too.
Now that I'm here in this body, I obviously don't need to worry about destroying things accidentally. I don't have my power in the front, my hands are completely safe to touch no matter how you do it. I can't decay things anymore. But that hasn't stopped me from acting like I still have it, and behaving accordingly regardless of that my hands can actually do now.
I'll hold my phone with a finger carefully lifted off the back of it. I'll pet our cat usually with only two or so fingers to be safe. I get worried about letting our birds onto my hands--what if they're perched just right that their feathers touch my other fingers? I'll hold food and drinks with a finger lifted off of them (which kind of looks ridiculous with holding cups because it's so obvious to other people). I'm still so meticulously careful about how I touch things, and yeah, I get really fucking anxious about it when I'm handling things I care a lot for. I know I can grab a glass without it fading away, I know I can pick up our cat without worrying that I'll end him, I know I can hold our birds, I know I can hold someone elses hand. It's something I logically know isn't an issue, it's not how it was in my memories, but living that life left a mark on my brain and it's hard to shake.
But, kind of recently, I learned something. Digital artist gloves. We've wanted some for a while, to make it easier to draw. We'd originally planned to wear them pretty often if we did get them, because we need to wear gloves a lot of the time anyway due to having circulation issues that lend our hands to getting real cold real easy. We normally wear fingerless gloves, as we need our fingertips to use our phone and type. But we thought more on it, and were thinking about how maybe artist gloves wouldn't be enough to keep our hands warm--typically they only cover two fingers, and are joined by a thin strap, overall covering less skin than regular fingerless gloves. But from that line of thinking I realised, they completely cover two fingers, and don't really touch any of the others.
Operating off of the logic my decay used, the gloves wouldn't be turned to dust because they don't cover my whole hand, and neither would anything I touch, because two fingers have a barrier over them, effectively disabling my quirk for as long as I wear them. It was the sort of middleground compromise I needed, between ignoring my anxiety and playing too hard into it by being terrified to touch things. Even if theoretically I could accidentally touch the glove with my whole hand and make it go away, in this body I can't do that, and unless I remove it, I will just keep being able to feel the glove on my hand as reassurance. A safeguard--not from anything literal anymore, but something to give me peace of mind.
I wear them all the time now, both in-system and in the front. They're just a permanent part of my outfit at this point (as you can see below in the art we made of myself), and they've helped me stop thinking about it so constantly. I don't need to worry about decaying things around me because I have protection measures against that.
While me wearing them was spawned out of exotrauma-induced anxiety, they're also really identity affirming the more I think about it. Yes, I'd like to not have to worry about decaying everything I touch--but that's just a trait of me. That's as much of a part of me as my other memories or my other experiences. They make me feel more like source-me, because I know if I thought about this solution before as an easier way to eat, drink and sleep? I absolutely would've done it. I don't see it just as wearing the gloves because I'm anxious or traumatised. I'm taking a positive out of it--I'm wearing them because I'm Tomura Shigaraki. Of course I'd need to have something like that.
So, I guess, the point--aside from me simply just sharing this--is that sometimes, you need to figure out some sort of compromise for yourself. Some way to navigate your own noemata, exomemories or exotrauma that you might have to get a little bit creative for. Is it always going to be foolproof? No. It is maybe a bit silly sometimes? Possibly! But this is something that both saves a lot of anxiety for me, and is in a roundabout sort of way, identity affirming at the same time. You can find positives in the weirdest things.
