Prudence Vorhees wrote:Eh, worlds tough and cruel. Have to settle and not change early in that enviroment type, I'd like to imagine. I mean, three or four time's I've had my heart ripped out, stomped, chewed up, and shoved in my face like so much mystery meat.
So me and Giddy settled early, like marble, I'd suppose. Magma. Igneous rock.
Heh, Gideon and I love shouting at eacher, " 'Mr. Williams, you're dying!' 'I already know that!'"
Gideon DIED when my science teacher said that when we were talking about lab safety. XD
I had a pretty crappy early teenagehood (I don't consider it too melodramatically crappy, but I have a tendency to play down my Things and other people might play up theirs, so who knows how they relate), but I don't think it settled me so much as narrowed my field of possible forms. Being squashed into a situation forces you to quickly adapt and adopt particular ways of dealing with things and compensating for others, but I'd be very surprised if they narrowed people down to a conclusive form. There are people on the forum who have suffered really severe life issues and have claimed settledom on the premise that they had been locked into a form only to continue to shift after a little while. Maybe trauma holds us still for a bit, rather than settles us (as permanently as settling ever is).
I had some pretty canine tendencies in my early teens (I needed a social group to rely on (though I was usually unmotivated to socialise because I am the eternal socially ambivalent introvert), I was desperately loyal and I was lost and terribly unhealthy without my friends, I was hierarchical and fit nicely into a pecking order, all of that), but my social woes meant that I spent a good while without any sort of social structure, and because it was during my formative years I forgot how to work neatly in a social hierarchy and lost that need for people to lean on. Going into high school I was terrified because I wouldn't be able to deal with not having close friends to rely on, going into uni I was perfectly happy and prepared to spend five years by myself, interacting politely with others when I had to.
I would say that my teenage drama narrowed forms down to ones that were:
-detached and aloof in social situations
-able to recognise hierarchies but not innately able to work within them (case in point: my relationship with my boss at work is unbelievably casual because I instinctively treat everyone as an equal. When I remember that she's my boss this horrifies me, but she finds my obnoxious know-it-all behaviour endearing)
-socially awkward and vague (because I missed a lot of that time when teenagers learn how to interact with other teenagers)
-confident enough in my abilities that I can be quite thick-skinned
-able to fall back on myself if things go pearshaped with my social groups without it being detrimental to my health
Those things could be loads of forms. The whole thing probably also strengthened my conflict avoidance and manipulative-for-the-greater-good qualities, which narrows forms down even more, but even if we pretend that all of that only fits semi-social solitary carnivores there's still a lot of scope there. I can tell you that going off that I could've been any viverrid in my adolescence, and probably most mustalids and a million other things. At that point I probably would've declared myself settled though (and I actually did use the word in a tear-streaked argument with my grandmother about why I couldn't make friends when I was thirteen or something).
Just my perspective *shrugs*
(marble is metamorphic)
